Cobb

The Longhair Speaks of Beer

It has been such a long time since I have been at Michel and Jimi's Barbershop that I'm starting to feel guilty about having their icon on my page. I have been tied up in the business of making ducats for myself and my feudal masters at a Fortune 50 corporation (and I still say that with pride). Consequently, I have had to reluctantly decline kind offers to appear on the radio. But I'm feeling like I want to mix it up with my partners, so mebbe I will. Starting today.

Speaking of Obama's Beer Summit.
The definition of a blockbuster is any event that has people lined up around the block and then some. But in Russia and Poland they were called breadlines. Try to get into a Neil Diamond concert. Go ahead, I dare ya. Anytime people really want something badly, they'll line up for it. But that doesn't mean what they get at the front of the line is all that valuable. Sometimes it's just rare, and people think they ought to have it with more frequency. Then you get it, and look at all the suckers still in line behind you and you laugh derisively. Suckers!

So it, this is one of those occasions where people are lined up in droves to hear any scrap of racial wisdom, reconciliation, fisticuffs whatever. I find it difficult not to piss on the entire situation as really beneath the three of them, none of whom serve the situation well. You see America has yet to find its 24/7 raceman, its Dr. Phil of race relations. And it's always some fool like Rodney King or George Allen who gets put in the spotlight, has their moment and then disappears. And still people line up because they're not satisfied.

Remember Ice Cube? Three years ago he convinced the guys at Fox, yeah Fox, to air a show he produced called Black White. This show did a riff off an old Eddie Murphy joke which was to put a black man in whiteface and a white man in blackface - actually whole families, and engage them in an extended game of bait and switch. Prime sociological experimentation, like post-modern performance poetry. You will note that this program was canceled due to a lack of ratings.

Why?

Because once you get your bread at the head of the line, you're not hungry any more. And in the end, most Americans are not hungry for race. They just want to rage a little bit, have somebody say, yeah right on, and then get on with their lives.

--

Anyway I'm much more inclined to consider the comic ramifications of the beers deployed at the summit. According to my sources, the menu had:

Biden: non-alcoholic Buckler beer
Crowley: Blue Moon
Gates: Sam Adams Light
Obama: Bud Light

Not surprisingly, the only man there with a nickel's worth of taste was Gates himself. But that Gates has some taste in beer at all is a bit surprising. I'm going to have to ask my man if this is Gates' regular brew or if he did a little research before ordering. Quite frankly, it's probably the ideal beer to order at the White House, if you must have a light beer. I am a personal fan of Sam Adams Light and I say that without question it is the best America light beer, period. Big thumbs up for Skip.

Blue Moon? What the heck is that?  A new beer out of the Coors factory that I've never heard of. Their marketing makes it sound, well, way more sophisticated than Coors. But since I haven't tasted it, I really can't say. I give Crowley a 'meh'. I should have expected a Rolling Rock, a righteous East Coast blue collar cop beer.

Biden does more to poison whatever scrap of dignity he has at every opportunity. I find it difficult to subvert the impression that he's a recovering alcoholic and has made this point to drink the near beer to squelch any idea that he's backsliding. But my information tells me that he's a somewhat moralistic teetotaller. He had drunks in the family and swore off the stuff completely. Either way, when invited to a beer summit you drink beer, you ballless wonder. 

Obama is doing what Obama does. Meticulously crafting his image. I'm sure that he polled his staff to figure out what beer to drink, and they told him it should be Bud Light. When he went on the trail last year he drank Pabst Blue Ribbon. Pure political craft.

--

Wait. This just in. As I look around there is conflicting reports about Skip's regular beer. I'm hearing Red Stripe and I'm thinking yep, that sounds more like the Skip Gates I think I know.

--

As for me I've changed my brands over time. When I first started drinking beer in my late 20s, I basically drank Bud in a Bottle and Coronas. Then I tried to get sophisticated with my beers, first going Mexican to Tecate and Dos Equis, and then going European with Becks and Grolsch. By the time I was 30, I was pretty much only ordering Grolsch and Red Stripe, beers for BAPs and Bohos the world over. When I moved to Brooklyn I started in with the Rolling Rock and Ginger Beer and Heineken, doing that bohemian culture vulture thing. Then when I moved to Boston I was all about Sam Adams and Bass Ale. By the time I was 35 and living in Atlanta, I was pretty much back to Coronas. But I also did Mike's Hard Lemonade and Red Dog. But I did spend some time in the UK and developed a taste for Tetley bitters and Hooch. I couldn't find either in the South so I did Mike's instead.  People couldn't believe I liked Red Dog, but I did. It was a good beer. When I moved back to Cali in my late 30s, I picked up on Tequiza for a hot minute, kept up with the Mike's. But Corona was the mainstay. These days when I find myself at a bar that has Newcastle, I always get it. Other than that it's Sam Adams Light.

Now. to put all of this in perspective, I buy probably one six pack a month. I prefer bourbon and y'all should know that. But I find myself having a lot more Bombay these days.  Tonight I'm hanging out in Redondo Beach at Kinkaid's. I'm going to have a bourbon summit there at 7:30pm. Now that will be worth checking out.

Feudalism in a Global Economy

This morning for the first time in a while, I rejoined my tradition of listening to the Bloomberg on the Economy series with Tom Keene. I've been putting in some head reorientation so that I can work on my new project and get in the proper groove for that, and it's put a few things aside. But here's the thing.

This morning the news was that both the UK and American journalists tend to make the mistake of thinking that their local economic screwups are the problem, when in fact the problem is truly global. There is no way of decoupling, in economic terms, and all the economists who thought so were chastened. But the problem is indeed global and China's current account deficit and buying of of US Treasuries is not an exacerbation the the crisis, it is part and parcel of the crisis.

So things may be going back to a refomation of the ideas before Bretton Woods II and an overturning of the kind of macroeconomic theories that helped us get to the place we are today. Which is to say, one of the operating theories of the 20th C was that the market is always at equilibrium - that everything operates at as efficient a clip as possible. People maximizing their enlightened self-interest and all that, may turn out to be rot. Now some people will think that takes us back from Friedman to somebody closer to Marx, but that's wrong too. So if capitalism is the worst, except for everything else, what happens when we have to rethink capitalism - on a global scale?

My inclination is to think of regimes of truth. I know this sounds Foucaultian and I'm not trying to entertain any relativism, but it does make sense that the Anglo American form of capitalism is different from the emerging Chinese form which is different from that driven by the values of India. Even though we are on a global capitalist planet, local economies count very much the way languages count, or so it seems to me. You cannot decouple education in India from education in America because labor will compete in global markets, but you also cannot simply teach what counts for education in America over in India, all colonial irony aside.

--

Now on the other side of this coin, which is on the question of liberty, I got the following aphorism stuck in my head. The only freedom you deserve is the freedom you pay for.

I think about that when I think about who cares about Chinese human rights and civil rights in a global economy. On the one hand, there is a certain amount of literacy necessary and there is a lot of basic skills necessary to reach a certain baseline of social freedom. Call it basic self-sufficiency in a modern society. But as you ascend a financial ladder, more freedoms are available to you, whether or not you attain those finances through meritocratic means. Nobody stops Biggie Smalls from sipping champagne and nobody really stops to recognize the soveriengty of the homeless man. There's a continuum here. 

--

According to the Bloomberg reports, construction, automobiles and financial services industries are all going to be crawling on their knees through some downsizing for a good while. It doesn't matter how enlightened your self-interest is. If you're working in the economy of automobiles, you've got limits. It doesn't matter how much you are brilliant in designing automobiles - the meritocratic rug has been pulled from under your feet. Nobody's going to be designing a lot of new autos for a long time, and you can't just jump out and start designing computer systems. You are stuck in a feudal domain.

Now I'm probably saying something in too many words that are obvious to people who study economics and political economy. Sorry, but I didn't. But as I try to make sense of things, these connections are pretty interesting to me.  What I think I've explained is how you can have a theory of market equilibrium that fails to account for inefficiencies that are baked into such feudal arrangements. There's nothing you can do to make the market for X serve in the same way as the market for Y even though they are connected and linked in a global economy. One king doesn't trade his knights to another. When the shogun gets defeated, ronin are on a rampage.

Or take my intellectual hero David P. Goldman. He has no reason to work for a hedge fund. Hedge funds are over, and now he's editing First Things. No money in that. No conversion of the acquired intellectual capital to work in the economy. He's working for a different king, one that doesn't pay anywhere near as much as his old king. And yet is he fulfilling some enlightened self-interest? I think so.

So there's a cultural component, as real as language, I think. That breaks us down into isolated regimes and the economic flows don't flow as smoothly as we would think, and yet we are all connected through a combination of dependencies that is dynamic and permanent. 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, but...

A [B]Lack of Ambition

This afternoon I considered my own ambition. It occurred to me that I've always been about self-sufficiency and skill improvement. 

• I never thought - what do I have to do to get a million dollars?  
• I never thought - what do I have to do to get that girl?
• I never thought - what do I have to do to impress those people?

I always thought. I know how good I am. How do I get better? The ambit of my ambition was self-centered. I never assumed that I would inherit anything, that I would be granted leave to lead something, or that I could get what I needed by asking the right person at the right time with the right attitude. In other words, I've always been all about me, because it was all I ever assumed that I would have control of. I don't gamble. I don't hustle. I plot and I plan, I scour and I scheme.

Today I'm thinking of that as a black thang. But also as a Puritan thing, an indigenous thing. It's some kind of cultural focus that was deterministic of my ambition.

Part of this has to do with an expectation of meritocracy. I took it for granted in what I now see as somewhat shallowly liberal, that the world is full of problems and it is inevitable that people who can solve those problems would be more valuable than those who are 'part of the problem'. I never gave into the tempting idea that life was a total unsolvable mystery and that I should focus on whatever path worked for me to get happy. No. No. Life was logical and its mysteries could be probed and worked out. That suffering has an origin and that it could be alleviated, we were not victims of cruel arbitrary fate.

This is the moment where I pause, and you say, Oh now he's going to say 'now I'm not so sure'. But you would be wrong.

I remain a gearhead. I gather all of my pocket stuff before I head out the door. I do a little chant in my head to make sure I haven't forgotten anything. I augment myself and I head out to explore and conquer logical chunks of the known universe with which Einstein himself says God does not play dice. But I recognize that it puts me in a very uptight and peculiar position.

Scientists are liberal in that way. Engineers are liberal in that way. We say that knowledge advances. We fight the battle against entropy. And so there are classes of problems at which we suck pathetically, not only because we lack the desire to address them, but because we have atrophied in our ability to attempt with any reasonable chance of success.

Make do. Don't worry, be happy.

I wonder, do you wonder? Is my lack of ambition congenital? EC posed the question brilliantly a few months ago. He said people who pretend like they don't want a million bucks are disingenuous. The reality is they don't want to compete with the likes of the talented and ambitious people who are all about it. Like the kid who won't stop playing basketball until he has dunked on you and said 'In your face' until you quit because playing him is not fun any longer. You finally admit that if it's going to make you an asshole like that, you'd rather just sit on the bench. But this is not about that sort of talent, it's about leveraged talent.

This is the willingness to be the guy who pretends he knows everything and starts ordering people around. Not because he's trying to actually know everything, but because he wants order. Sometimes the best way of getting things done the right way is ordering people around until they bark back and tell you that you don't know what you're talking about. Then you deftly say 'then what would you have me do?'. And they tell you in no uncertain terms. You scratch your head for a moment then say, 'OK you be in charge of that, and get back to me when you're done.'  You delegate your dissenters, give them a piece of credit and remain in control.

There is nothing in my culture growing up that suggested that I might be able to do this with.. oh say an office full of white men with six figure salaries. But Obama's doing that every day, and getting away with it. Every day somebody is getting away with it, and the rest of the lowly and lazy millions are following.

Except I'm something of an obstinate rebel. I want to be self-possessed. I don't want to be a leveraged success.

I think of this a great deal when I think about the programmers and geeks in the elevator at the San Jose Marriott last week in town for Oscon. When I think about the parallels between my socratic dialog and multiyear writing projects here as Mellow Mike then as Boohab and then as Cobb, and the enterprise of open source development it gives me great pause. As a writer, I try to let the work speak for itself. I insist on my egotistical right to spew and create, but I kept arguing interactively, building and building. And I resent authoritative writers like academics who mustn't dialog.

(cliche sound of record scratch)

Nietzsche!

I think I'm going to be able to figure this out with his help. Except he's saying things I haven't heard myself say in a very long time. Scary. Real scary.

Six Pounds of Racism

My final point on Professor Gates. Zero tolerance doesn't work, nor does the standard of discomfort that Gates is trying to establish for himself. I would also clarify what I meant by suggesting the examples of 50 Cent and Jay Z, which is their use of the N Word in their 'art'. Which is to say if arguments for zero tolerance were to be taken seriously with regard to the things offensive to someone like a black Harvard snob, you would destroy most of that which goes by the label of 'black entertainment', or is it Urban Contemporary? Who has hurt and disrespected black people more, Officer Crowley or R. Kelly?

Glenn Loury points to the direction which I imagine a proper jumping off point should go, which is that it is the existence of a failed working class culture in America whose result is the Prison Industrial Complex, that generates the institutional and operational context of conflict between large numbers of young black men and the Justice System. Loury, I think, mistakes the Complex as the cause rather than the effect. But the failed working class culture of America affects all people. The difficulty is that the would-be working class blacks in particular are hypersegregated. They are where the cops are.

My contention is that if these black unemployed were dispersed geographically, as they were prior to the Great Migration, then the PIC would have no concentrated feedstock and would cease to exist. So my nickel bets that before blacks moved en masse from the South to major urban centers after the turn of the century, they were certainly more viciously discriminated against but did not comprise such a large proportion of the inmate population. And so if blacks were to step off the ghetto grid, they wouldn't funnel so easily into the ghetto jails. Loury must surely account for California where a large percentage of our incarcerated come straight out of Mexico into our large urban centers and then off to the pokey. 

People Who Talk More Than Me

People who talk more than me annoy me because they remind me of the extent to which my personality is comfortable doing this; writing at my heart's content where there is nobody to interrupt or contradict my train of thought.

Lawrence is one such person, but I didn't realize it until yesterday. Steve is one as well and I always knew it. These are two men, as I am discovering with Lawrence and I been done known about Steve whose roots go back with mine. Deeply. Darkly. They are the black men of Los Angeles, with serious social skills, like running circles around Obama skills, educated by the Archdiocese. We sat and talked and talked yesterday up in View Park at our reunion, among the places and people that gave me the experience of understanding how large a black man could live. I grew up around such men who never stared at their feet, not even when they were in mid stride over high hurdles.

I give them this on me, which they have. But I don't know how much they know or appreciate it. When I needed to go beyond myself and admit somebody is superior in some way, there were these black young men. Some clearly better looking, clearly smarter, clearly more courageous, clearly cooler. So I could grow myself, I needed them to put me to shame, because MLK on a poster and sometimes even Jesus Christ on a cross, was simply too far away.

Lawrence has an MFA and an intolerance for half-stepping. As far as I know, this is a rare combination. So he is involved in putting together the first national association of said certified creatives. He streams out narrative, not like firehose, but not like garden sprinkler either. It's like an unnozzled fat flow that comes out smooth but then hits the sidewalk in fat juicy plops. He wears blue steel prescription glasses and his dreads are ropey slim, like braids of extension cord thickness, round and to mid-back length. They fall from roots on his scalp that seem never to be stressed as if they are single threads of licorice growing directly and singularly up from his brown skull with no chance, none, of every fraying or becoming tangled. He doesn't even need to talk with his hands, and sits back at ease as if he's told the tale a dozen times, and yet it remains full of urgency or humor. He is direct and spare of irony. He doesn't complain, he explains how he saw the problem and how he went about making it known, asking the question on everybody's mind but only coming out of his mouth. He doesn't curse, or malaprop, or stutter, or dissemble, or pepper with allusions. After he has spoken, you know that you've heard something. And it don't stop. Until and unless you pipe up, and a simple witty rejoinder has only a marginal realm of resounding. He drinks it up, it deflects him properly, and he's on to the next point. This is a man worth listening to, he's got the gift.

We talked about the fact that hiphop only really existed between 1988 and 1995 and what the hell is the stanky leg? We talked about funding for private school education, Catholic vs charter and the ramifications of choice and KIPP. We talked about outre residential architecture and the real estate market in California. We talked about Spike TV and how middle aged black men are only on Viagra commercials. We talked about black rambunction and the practical jokery of us as potential wealthy philanthropists. We talked about the middle aged athleticism, not. We talked about the potential rescue from marketing infamy of the personnas of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. But actually most of the seven of us around the umbrellad picnic table listened and disappeared into captivation, munching on the last bits of Golden Bird and black cherry soda.

Lawrence has recharged my batteries. But I had to shutup first. Of course nobody can shut me up. I have to be steamrolled. My boss can do this. It's an admirable quality to be able to take over a room, to literally hijack any conversation and redirect it through oneself. It is the quality of poets, priests and politicians. Lawrence can do this and I didn't realize it until yesterday, whereas I should have known it for a long time.

What I learned last year at this reunion was that several of these were the men who had taken all the women out of my face and put them in my dreams. So basically if I wanted to get with them, 'in your dreams' was their response. There was, in my imagination of highschool history, a network of sisters and cousins and neighbors that I never knew. For one because I wasn't Catholic except as a pupil, for another because I wasn't tall or old enough as a teen. And so I am reminded of my social distance again in their company. They speak, I write. They do, I think. At least I think they do. 

My social distance is a sword. It allows me to be perceptive and articulate, to subsume myself to the moment and savor its analysis. I always try to have a fair hand on that sword, because no matter my unwillingness or inability to break through my social bubble, at bottom I like people. I hate crowds, but I love individuals.

In the back of my mind, all that Lawrence and Juan and AC and the gang were talking about brought me back to my recent sense of peace. (This is where my narrative takes over). Mine comes from a growing appreciation for the limits of middle class life. I'm trying to see which of our efforts are doomed to failure because of our failure to recognize the shape of the world as it truly is. And I'm trying to cling tightly to the divine spark in such a way as to abandon without care the vessel that is my body, the junkpile that are possessions, the petty drama that comprises my social relations. I think the key to life can be found, but not from the 650 channels on the flat screen with its Viagra and Uncle Ben commercials. And I know that we men from back in the day's black Catholic Los Angeles family know that to be true. Just exactly where from?

People who talk more than me are engaged with people. And perhaps it is possible, it certainly must be given prodigies like Steve and Lawrence who continue to amaze me, to figure it out all of life's mysteries working through people. Or at the very least to make enough dough to buy up a couple southern towns, knock over their Confederate memorials and put up a statue or two of Nat Turner. Me, I'm stuck with theory, philosophy, logic, decision analysis and all that introspective crap I do. Not that I don't enjoy it. I do. It's me. But it's awfully pleasant to see that some of the people I know, aside from my boss, can talk the talk and have got my back. And better still to know, unlike my boss, these brothers are drenched in the idiom of my upbringing. I hear them. I get it. I appreciate it a lot. Even though it annoys me.

He Looked Just Like You - Redux

(from the archives, September 2003)
Six years ago, I had been out of work for several months and had been preparing an application at Prosper.com to borrow money and keep from being evicted. I was an unemployed black man depositing a check of charity bucks in the bank. Ten minutes later I was detained as a suspect in a bank robbery. Here's the story.

Today has been one of those weird days of harmonic convergence. Every once in a while I have those days, and sometimes it goes on for a few days, in which I am the center of a lot of attention.

Last night, when I finally checked the mailbox, I found an unexpected gift. In fact, since I have humbled myself totally to a select group of folks, appropos my pathetic economic situation, I have been very very fortunate to have found people who have helped. It may not sound like much, but the fact that I can pay my October rent now has been the answer to the prayers of my family. I will be crafting thank you letters (as well as shareholder notices) this weekend. At any rate, I now have enough money to afford a $2 luxury and I tell you in all seriousness that I am taking my wife to McDonald's today. It will be a real celebration.

So I clean up and head over to deposit this check in the bank. As I am driving I get a phone call from my wife. One of my headhunters called. She's trying to get me a gig in Bethesda, MD. Well, that's good news. I spoke to her yesterday and she's already back with more information. Five minutes later I get another call. Sarah from the consulting firm I'm applying to called back, hopefully with news about my last interview. That's wild. Two calls in 10 minutes. So I make my deposit and am on my way from the teller window and the phone rings yet again. I answer my wife's special ringtone with 'You're kidding me.' A third guy is getting back to me about a resume I posted yesterday.

So I drive away with a little cash in my pocket and try to navigate my way back through the maze of parking structures that are Del Amo, formerly known as the world's largest shopping mall. There's a cop behind me. I make a left. There's a cop behind me. I turn into the parking structure. There's a cop behind me with lights on. I make a right turn down an aisle; the cop is out of the door before I can stop. Hey what's going on? I say. He needs me to turn off the motor and step out of the car. Did I turn incorrectly? No, there is no traffic violation here, he says. It turns out that there is a bank robber in the vicinity who looks just like me. Let me guess, black male five foot eleven, 199 pounds (yess!), bald head, cool goatee. Yeah everybody looks like me, but I make it work. Nevertheless, I am calm and relieved. I sure as hell didn't rob a bank, although the thought had literally crossed my mind last week.

After he finishes patting me down and I unlock my fingers from behind my head, I am able to survey the area. An older black man 15 feet away has got my back. He is looking intently at the scene and probably sweating bullets on my behalf. The thought calms me further. No shit is going down here. Nevertheless, by the time the cop tells his partner that I am clean, there are four squad cars in the immediate area. The officer is about my height, pale blue eyes, short cropped blondish hair. Easy smile, stout but fit. He's with the Torrance PD. I'd say he's about 32 years old. He's calm and persistent with the questions. His partner is about 6 foot 3 dark longer hair, slim face rather resembling the Daily Show's Jon Stewart. Also young. I think I can take him, but not both of them, certainly not all of them.

The guy looks exactly like me, he says again except no glasses.  And since I'm driving a car with out of state plates, he decided to pull me over, he says. I tell him that the car is new, I really don't know where the registration is because my wife drives it. When I opened the glove box, in the gloom of the parking structure, all I could see was a blue package of baby wipes. That's strange because we don't have a baby. We got a deal and bought it from Detroit and drove it here. It's smogged for 50 states, but I don't know where the registration is. Is there a gun in the car? No there's no gun in the car. He asks that about 3 more times.

The Fletcher Foundation

I found them. Those old Africans.

Now I know. So I'm writing my stuff about Skip Gates, and I find the dude I was looking for all these years. The man I probably would have become if I wasn't so lazy and disconnected. His name is Alphonse Fletcher Jr. My nickel says that I know him very well - that we have lived in parallel lives for a long time, never touching.

When I was living and writing in Brooklyn, finding my way, as I've mentioned here countless times, amongst the New World Afrikan literary diaspora, Fletcher was two degrees away. A party at the Hamptons that I missed. A man that the two most well connected black men I met in NY forgot to introduce me to. Another face in the crowd at Gina Dent's book party at the Studio Museum. Fletcher and Omar Wasau. Just missed you dudes, aw snap.

Fletcher has collected the black minds of the generation with whom I've shared a vision. They're all listed here. There's Hinton and Val and Kimberle and Stanley Crouch. I wonder if Stanley Crouch reads my blog. That would be so cool. There's Anna and of course Roland and Randall. Randall who I wanted to speak to in LA at Zocalo but he had to be in DC for the Coronation Inauguration.

Ach!

But I really like that he's got Glenn Ligon, because of the 50,000 people who know of his work, I used it to signify The Boohab, my own online existential creation. So all props are due to Glenn whom I haven't thought of in a while. A moment of silence for that great, early web, post-modern work of art which has never been fully appreciated - Boohab's Factotum.

(pours libation)

Skip Gates - Keepin' It Bourgie

I Don't Understand How People Don't Understand

A logical view.

Police in America only arrest innocent people. Why? Because you are innocent until proven guilty. Where? In a court of law by a jury of your peers, or for a misdemeanor like disorderly conduct, by a judge. When you are arrested, you have the right to remain silent. When your arrest is reported, you are called a suspect. You are charged with a crime, and the office of the District Attorney, who is elected by the people, determines whether or not charges will be pressed. If so you are arraigned at a hearing at which you may plead guilty, plea bargain or demand a trial. In this case, the DA dropped the charges. Therefore it is impossible, under our system of justice to determine whether or not Gates was guilty as charged.

It is therefore impossible to determine, given this outcome, whether or not the arresting officer's actions had merit, and thusly illogical to argue that Gates was arrested for a crime he didn't commit. Everyone is always arrested for a crime they are alleged to have committed. The proof is in the process. The process for determining whether or not Gates committed misdemeanor disorderly conduct was short circuited. What remains is his presumption of innocence.

Now I realize that I can be demanding, but I’m going to ask you to think logically and mathematically. Understand that the principle of innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt is a bias in the court system that is put there specifically so that it is most unlikely that an innocent individual will be punished. So logically and mathematically, the police in a concentric circle of justice will detain more people than will be arrested and arrest more people than who will be actually arraigned. Only a fraction of who are arraigned will go to trial and only a fraction of those will be proven guilty.

By the very structure of the justice system, it will touch the lives of many many more innocent people than guilty people. So if Gates is innocent until proven guilty, then why isn’t Officer Crowley? It is specifically illogical to defy a system that preserves the presumption of innocence on the basis of an unproven charge that Crowley is guilty of wrongdoing.

In the same way it cannot be proven that Gates committed a crime, it cannot be proven that Crowley acted improperly unless and until some internal affairs investigation is complete and he is found to be in violation of his sworn duty as an officer of the law. I've heard nothing to suggest that any such investigation is under way, and the collaborative involvement of the Harvard Campus Police in the arrest of Gates, augurs against that investigation ever happening. Furthermore, a charge of false arrest is easy enough to file. It hasn't happened. 

So what we are left with is an overheated situation which is now outside of the jurisdiction and purview of justice and injustice. It qualifies as neither. As such the best thing that could possibly happen is that some third party report that Gates and Crowley have decided to be big men about the whole thing. However, I feel obliged to say that we are bordering on MJ obsession territory and I think the Shadow Professor has got Gates' number.

"He isn’t outraged because he feels he was the victim of racial profiling by the police (that dubious honor goes to his foolish neighbor) [in fact, the woman who called the police is not a neighbor, but works nearby]. He’s outraged because he was the victim of class profiling. He didn’t resent being identified as black; he resented being identified as that kind of black, the kind of black that can be hassled and pushed around by simpleton cops. How dare you hassle me? I’m Skip Gates: Harvard professor!

But I've already done that psychological thing, and at The Root, Gates already admitted that he felt threatened. So... Whatever.

A Brief Psychological Defense of Gates

I'm afraid of deep clear water.

When I was five or six years old, my parents took me to the Hoover Dam. I was hot and I wanted to swim. I stood near the rail and prepared to jump, sure in my tiny mind that it would be great fun to fall several hundred feet and splash. I knew it would be wrong, but I was sure that my parents would come and get me and ultimately forgive me. I decided not to jump but told my parents of my intentions.

I was shocked my father's response. You would have been dead, and I would not have jumped in after you. I stared over the rail again. I would have been dead, and nobody, not even my own father would have come to get me. And so I have this great fear. I can swim in the ocean because the water is opaque, and I try not to think about how deep it is. But I have seen the clear still water of the San Luis Rey Reservoir from just behind the bouys keeping fishing boats away from the spillway. I have seen the deeply sunk concrete pylons of the Golden Gate bridge appear in a moment of clarity from deck of the touring boat. I have seen the kelp rise in fifty feet of clear water off the coast of Catalina. So I have been petrified with fear. I have been turned into child facing death and parental abandonment. Nonexistence and unlove. Drowning is, without question, my biggest fear.

As a black man in America, my biggest fear is supposed to be, so far as I can read the news, the fate of Rodney King. Or Ron Settles. Or Amadou Diallo. A police beatdown or worse. As they say, every myth relies on a grain of truth. I'm sure that somewhere in America there are men who happen to be black and happen to have a great fear of police. I'm pretty sure one of them is famous and lives in Cambridge, MA.

So the longer the introduction I read of Professor Gates' distinction, like this:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

The more I think, all that goes out the window two ways. One way in the mind of the man who cannot see, and another in the mind of the man who cannot be.

The old joke goes:

Q: What do you call a black man with a [insert distinguishing characterization here]?
A: Nigger.

The new joke goes:

Q: What do you call a black man with a [insert distinguishing characterization here]?
A: Uncle Tom.

Does it work? Does it reduce the black man to sniveling? Depends on the nigger. Ha ha. Where's the nugget of identity? Where is the man? Where is the soul?  Where is that thing that is the spark of the divine residing? Because if 'black' is the noun and 'man' is the adjective, then what we've got here is a realized hegemonic, psychologically inescapable phenomenon.

If you scare the pants off of me with your deep water torture, I become a traumatized six year old boy. Maybe if you scare the pants off of Skip Gates, he becomes a stereotypical black man. Maybe deep down, that's what he is and all that other stuff is meaningless. Maybe when Gates suggests such things could not happen to a white professor it's because the white man becoming the professor disappears into the professor, but the black man never does. It begs the question of essentialism, and all my fellow race scholars know what I'm talking about. So either Gates was actually scared and reduced and has not overcome the little white supremacist in his head, or he was being purposefully black, purposefully hostile and completely consistent with his wits about him.

What do I believe? I believe that Gates was getting as uppity as he possibly could be, and somewhere in his mind he wanted to take a swing. That given his deep understanding of the history of black political protest, he was jumping at a chance to have his Mumia moment. Except all that he could do was talk about somebody's mama and complain that the handcuffs were too tight.

But it's possible that he was actually reduced to sniveling and fear. 

I cut Gates all the slack that I expect a Harvard snob to get. I love Harvard snobs, and snobs of all sorts. And I expect black people to be at all times as uppity and resourceful and independent of generic authority as possible. But being upper middle class myself, I never confuse that sort of attitude with heroism.

So I really hope in the back of my mind, that Gates was not proven to be existentially Negro in that moment of discomfort and shame. But at the same time I don't give him any props for standing up to a garden variety police officer for no other cause than his own, and if he were to take my advice, he'd shut the hell up and realize the Mumia moment is over. Why? Because in one week, as Gates gathers funding for his next PBS documentary, Pookie is going to get shot in the head.

Professor Gates & The Racial Purpose Driven Life

People are people so why should it be
that you and I should get along so awfully?
 -- A Perfect Circle
 
 Everybody remembers the lyrics from this 80s song. Nobody remembers the group.
 As I begin to write this essay I am in a break between meetings at work. I am surrounded by men and women who appear to me to be from all over the world. I could most certainly say at least four nations amongst the 12 people. We all speak English, in varying accents to be sure, but we understand. We are 'diverse' but we are here for a purpose. It is not to get along with each other, it is to complete a task. It is an obscure task which involves computing and accounting that gets extraordinarily complex, tedious and nerve-wracking. We get along as a function of our purpose and we naturally subordinate our differences to the ends of that purpose.
 
I am a consultant. When I leave this place, six months from now, chances are that I will never see these people again. I will forget their faces, names, voices, attitudes, styles of dress, favorite foods, number of children and favorite topics of conversation. For the moment however, I will enter all such notions into my iPhone. Five years from now the records will still be there but all the meaning and immediacy will be lost. All I will care about is whether the project succeeded or failed.

Here at Cobb, I don't do race relations. I have a simple, standing moral repulsion to racism, that I don't think is particularly outsized. But I really don't care if people get along on matters of race. The reasons are simple, but it takes a long time to explain them. When it comes to questions about race relations, especially as they are in the news today, you always hear people echoing the sentiment of the Perfect Circle. The answer should be obvious, which is that we lack common purpose.

Except when it comes to race, the liberals of America have pretty much hijacked the conversation. Here's why. Many Americans strongly believe that positive discrimination works, and that it is, always and everywhere the best policy. And therefore when you boil it down there are two camps.

Ideological Tribe A
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained without regard to race, creed, color.

Ideological Tribe B
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained with special regard to race, creed, color.

If you are an anti-racist activist, as I once was, then you almost certainly belong to the second tribe. You could not logically support Affirmative Action if you didn't belong to the second tribe. And you firmly believe that you can define, control and certify that special regard, keeping it in perfect moral balance. This is why such folks, as I used to be, could recite the terms of court cases involving racial discrimination Bakke, Hopwood, Grutter, Aderand, Brown and most recently Parents vs Seattle. We were meticulously monitoring, for our moral purposes, exactly how much you can take race into account and under what circumstances. It is a regime of ideological control that has failed America miserably. 

But giant populations of people, especially Professor Gates himself and those of his current staunch defenders take it as axiomatic that special regard is the way to go. For example, white people should be sensitive to black people, because they are black. To them, race relations is a purpose and an end to itself. Whenever you hear the tell-tale words 'we still have a long way to go' it is an expression of their  ethics. Their purpose is not to destroy race, but to create a fixed and permanent indemnification whose implications are stamped into law but whose weights and measures are under ideological control. That is why every year and after every significant racial excressence they desire and demand to have yet another national debate on the subject of race. Just so they get their words and priorities into the court of public opinion where they have had the upper hand since the passage of Brown.

The difficulty is that proposition flies in the face of equality, and everybody knows it, which is why Tribe B uses terms like 'social justice' and 'diversity'. They bridle at the suggestion that a black cop was involved in Gates' arrest and so have to go to extreme lengths to prove that the black cop mitigated the offense of the circumstance. They can't stand the idea that white suspects are arrested by black cops and diminish the significance of that testimony all over the web. They resent the very interchangability of race and assert the necessity of difference.

For what?

I come from a generation of black Americans whose parents were, by and large, born at home - not in hospitals. I highly value the level of courage and strength they grew because they faced adversity and grew muscle and character overcoming it aimed at the purposes of self-determination. I look at Americans today and I see too many weak people, test tube babies, who can't even seem to survive the sort of Brownian motion of ordinary misunderstanding. Skip Gates is my new milktoast symbol who has become the perfect Harvard snob and disgraces his raw Piedmont roots. In fact he is the perfect symbol of the sort of black American who disturbs all of our peace because his peace has been disturbed, and tries to leverage a dead conversation of morals where he's in over his head, and wrong anyway.

You want special regard Professor? You got it.

Equality before the law, is finally what is at stake, and our regard of it. Gates will try to wordsmith his day's discomfort, which probably rocked his feeble world, into some jeremiad of oppression. I cannot imagine that any foreign language news service would dedicate a day's attention to his words. That only goes to show how self-obsessed Americans have become over such trivial offenses and how haunted we are by the ghosts of yesteryear. Equality before the law is a serious matter deserving of the best of humanity's efforts, so we have to question whether or not Gates qua #gates, now twittered interminably, presumeably some credentialed student of history is giving us humans any useful lessons. Except that he remains dedicated to the purpose of extending the depth of the American race-relations rabbit hole, I think not.

Nobody remembers The Perfect Circle. Maybe they were on to something. Try singing the song by saying white people are white people or black people are black people. Doesn't work. Why? Because I'm a black man in America?

A Public Apology

Thank you ladies and gentlemen of the press. Thank you for coming out today.

My name is Ward Smith and I am the Communications Director for the Office of Public Affairs, Community Relations, Consumer Advocacy and Viral Marketing at Giant Corp. It is my duty to process all official communications to the mainstream media, grass roots organizations, networked social media and significant influencers in the entertainment industry. It is in this official capacity that I have been directed by the Board of Governors for Giant Corp to stand before you today and deliver a public apology persuant to the events of July 17th 2009.

It is the policy of Giant Corp to be responsive in every way to unfortunate events that present a significant risk to GC's ability to maintain its good relations with our shareholders, partners, customers, employees, former employees, and the general public here and abroad. We therefore establish and maintain protocols in keeping with longstanding traditions, international law and certain well-known tribal customs of non-hostile indigenous peoples that have proven themselves effective over the years. In keeping with this protocol it has been determined by the Board of Governors that the events of July 17th 2009 heretofore known as 'The Incident' does indeed warrant a Public Apology.

As part of this protocol I must first inform you that the parties offended by The Incident have demanded this Public Apology on behalf of Giant Corp which will of course be broadcast, simulcast, podcast, emailed, twittered, translated into several languages and archived in perpetuity. The Public Apology is, according to this protocol offered in lieu of a Private Apology. The parties offended by The Incident are therefore granted according to this protocol the official status as Victims of Giant Corp. Only parties who have demanded and received status as Victims of Giant Corp are thus eligible to be referred to as such and are therefore exclusively eligible to certain privileges and immunities with regard to our communications policy. These privileges are not extended to those accepting a Private Apology.

I am also required to inform you as part of this agreement that the official Victims of Giant Corp have signed agreements with Giant Corp which entail certain rights and obligations that are not fully public. However we are allowed to say that they involve first rights of refusal for inclusion in any Giant Corp public service announcements which we fund or are funded with our knowledge with regard to consumer education about Giant Corp products or services. These obligations are in no way excluding Victims of Giant Corp from enjoining in any legal proceedings against Giant Corp regarding The Incident or any subsequent offenses, but it does exclude them from participating in any established legal actions prior to the date of The Incident, in this case July 17th 2009.

Giant Corp is pleased to announce that the following individuals, Mark Anthony Brown, Jagdish R. Shah, LaTondra Wilkinson, Trish Samuels, Mabel Thomas, Carla Lopez, Wayne Chin, L. Stuart English, Mario Piplonetti, Tran Te Nguyen, and Lamont Fish have accepted Victim status with Giant Corp over The Incident. You will find their information in the press kits to be distributed after this conference. We will be providing them with much needed financial support, psychological counseling, massage therapy and luxury accomodations during the length of the press cycle as their lives have been obviously upended. The three individuals who have accepted the Private Apology will remain anonymous and no such information or assistance will be provided.

As you can see, as I have introduced the Victims, they can be viewed on the screen to your right. They are currently at the retreat and have already received a version of the Public Apology and have accepted that apology contingent upon the follow through of this release. Feel free to contact them through my office at any time after 10pm EST this evening.

Therefore, without further ado, I will present the official Giant Corp Public Apology to The Victims of Giant Corp pursuant to The Incident of July 17th 2009, with the following reminder. It will be the last thing said at this press conference. If you want any further details about The Incident itself, you will find them at GiantCorp.com/TalkToOurLawyersBitch

We at Giant Corp recognize that while you were just minding your own business that we totally screwed up your life. Our thoughtlessness has made your life a living hell, and it's not your fault. It's our fault. You were right and we were wrong. You are completely innocent, and you are victims. Yes victims. We should have known better and should have dealt with you like a human being and not a number or a statistic. We admit that we didn't take your feelings into consideration and we acted like a jerk. In fact, Giant Corp totally sucks for doing this to you and we admit it. We were too proud to admit our mistake but now we want to say in front of the whole world in every way, we were wrong and you were right. And we're never going to take it back. We're not kidding. Our fingers are not crossed and we are completely and totally as sincere as it is possible for an evil corporation to be. We have come to our senses and so we are going to totally make it up to you, starting here, starting now. And so help us, we really mean it. 

The Dilittante's Dilemma

Henry Louis Gates Jr, has been arrested in Cambridge, MA. How do I know?  Because he's a world famous academic, and because he's black, and because people have been pinging me about it. 

After waxing poetic on the matter of Permission Granted, I'm now in the mood of keeping it short and to the point, especially considering the 200 comments over at Ta-Nehisi Coates. Jeez. 

The simple facts are just simple facts, and everybody who is blowing smoke at length is forgetting one particular salient. Gates is the guy with the power here, which is to say more power than OJ. So my sentiment is to say that if Gates steamrolls over these cops, he's only playing to a vicious crowd. He ought to have more class than to put those two guys out of work in order to prove a point to the peasantry. I give him the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn't put it past Gates to milk this ridiculous matter in the court of public opinion.

Gates can sue, because he can afford to get the kind of lawyering pro-bono that makes all the 'significance' of the racial aspect of his arrest garner headlines. But everybody knows the resolution to Gates vs Whomever has jack to do with the problems of the average black American. I'm interested to see how Randall Kennedy weighs in on the matter as well as BLSA and the redoubtable Charles Ogletree. Derrick Bell and Cornel West are likely to weigh in, but is it really worth their while? Is this really what they have been reduced to? A short time will tell. 

I'm inclined to spit in Gates direction if, for the sake of racial symbolism, he caves into the temptation to ruin these cops on principle. It's difficult for me to see how he could possibly be found guilty of B&E in to his own flat, so he's clearly in Cynthia McKinney territory with the 'do you have any idea who I am' style of outrage. That means he can press his case, take shortcuts and invoke privileges not available to you and me, bust a black power move and paint himself in the loud but false colors of a moral crusader against the lingering legacy of slavery. But it doesn't matter who the F he is. Like the rest of us, he is bound to the social contract of not being above the law. That means not having any right or privilege to be an intransigent asshole when under the aegis of lawful police action. It all comes down to a day in court and all the rest is BS. 

So how does Gates play it? Like King or like X? My opinion of him hangs on this.

ADDENDA:

1. Police arrest innocent people all the time. Your guilt or innocence is not proven in the streets, but in a court of law. The distinguished professor is not so distinguished if he's trying to keep it real out in the streets.

2. Posted at The Root:

I used to wonder how it is that so many people get put in jail in America for stealing, say 100 measly bucks from a 7-11. Then I thought about the places where they don't, places where you could break into somebody's house and steal everything and nobody does nothing - where 911 is a joke. And then I realized I was talking about the ghetto, you know, that place where black life is cheap because of drugs, and gangs, and unemployment - where nobody with any backbone stands up and stops the bad guys, and puts things in order.

Then I thought about why white racists would want to keep blacks out of the police department.

At some point, black Americans are going to have to determine that they are and have something of value and that the law of the land is there for their own benefit. I suspect that on that day, they will recognize the job that police actually do every day, rather than flood the internet when certain rich and famous individuals are inconvenienced.

Doubtless, professor Gates feels entitled to put himself up as the model for all black men in America, a tragic victim of racist circumstance. And evidently a million suckers are buying that bodewash. I don't buy it, and I think he's being a petulant ass. I think some jail time for disturbing the peace would do him some good. He's obviously pretty good at it, considering all of the phony outrage he's generating. Let people really think about the fact that this man cussed out a cop and thought he was too big and important to be arrested.

Let him go to jail. Let him write a letter from a Cambridge jail. Let's see what kind of symbol he really is.

Nuclear Lighthouses

From the 'It Sounded Like A Good Idea At The Time" department.

Everything is subject to political collapse. These are the abandoned nuclear powered lighthouses of the Soviet Era.

Permission Granted

Whoa, I like to greet the sun each mornin'
And walk amongst the stars at night
I'd like to know the taste of honey in my life
In my life

Well, I've shared so many pains
And I played so many games
Ah, but everyone finds the right way
Somehow, some way, some day
-- Lionel Richie

I'm lazy. I'm happy.

I've been working my ass off all week, but on the weekend I'm completely lazy and happy. My favorite thing to do is to take my kids off to Pinkberry or Cold Stone or chill with one of my brothers or homies at the Hermosa Beach Pier and drink beers in the sun.

Since I have decommissioned my political agenda, I am close to the point at which I am feeling no pain or guilt about it. And now all of my creative energy comes not from following political current affairs, but reading of big books and a philosophical and spiritual agenda. And I use the first person pronoun a lot. That still bothers me a little. But overall, I am noting at this particular moment, as I attend more closely to the business of running my job and my family, that I am in every way successful, lazy and happy.

I'm waiting for it all to collapse. But it hasn't.

Just yesterday, after chilling with Playa at the above mentioned pier.. hold on. First off while we were on our first beers, we made the acquaintance of a dude from Long Island. I forget the town. He sold his chip business for 50 million (or he had a $50 million revenue chip company, I forget which), and was telling us the glories of cruising on the QE2. Dude's wife was sweet and perky and reminded me that I didn't stand up when introduced. But she understood that while we were all wearing sunglasses in an indoor pub, manners were more or less in park. We therefore removed ours, eyeballed each other and gave smiles of delight. And the conversation reverted to how many bars, restaurants and swimming pools this ocean liner has.

After chilling with Playa, we went to Fry's, and even after 30 minutes of browsing, I realized that there wasn't a thing in the entire store I wanted or needed to buy. And I reflected upon that fact as I stood in the checkout line with a completely unnecessary copy of The Sims 3, for my kids. What's The Sims 3 about, it's about building a house and filling it with stuff and trying to keep your sim happy and fulfilled. I've got about 6 more years of playing house myself, and then I'm done. It will be empty nest time, which means incrementally more time to chill with the Spousal Unit, be lazy and happy. The middle class game is pretty much over for me. I mastered it. Been there, done that. It's temptations no longer tempt me. It's pitfalls have become ordinary. Mastering it is a bit overstated. What's more accurate is that I've developed the habits so that living through it is second nature. I'm easily, lazily middle class, and since I work in a hot industry, I sit on the upper end. Playa and I were trying to remember back the last time we had to live on 60k a year, and it seemed like another era. Neither of us could imagine, without some difficulty, raising a family on what is currently the median income for Americans. We did this from the upper deck of Hennessy's Pub in Hermosa Beach, overlooking the summer sprawl of thousands in bikinis, shorts, leather flip flops and expensive sunglasses. Lazily. Happily.

--

I wise man once said that the only way a white man can insult a black man is if the black man gives him permission. So this lazy, happy Sunday morning as I jumped on my other PC I found a bunch of that sort of permission at Jack & Jill Politics. The last time I was on this machine, I must have surfed there. And so looking at the newer stories, I found this. It was basically a diatribe against the purported shamelessness of black Republicans with your standard two dollar guilt-by-association, self-hatred argument about this or that racism in the Right Wing of America. Naturally there was controversy around the topic and this blogger responded. For a moment I thought about jumping into the argument, and in fact I thought about joining Jack & Jill as a group blogger. But actually, I don't care that much. My identity is not that vested. I don't even much pay attention to race outside of the basic notion that people are fundamentally tribal and that it takes skill and incentive to overcome that. But I do know what I know, and I know that the Boxer-Alford fight was a TKO. But, whatever. That was and is obvious. Alford, for what it's worth, did a nice bit of grandstanding himself and outboxed Boxer who clearly can't box her way out of a racial paper bag. She thought all Alford could possibly represent was racial interest politics. (note public commentary here).Hmm. Now that I think about it, I may have met Alford or at least some of his associates from the BCC at a Republican event a couple years ago.

That's essentially the sort of pointless skirmishing that goes on, and yes people get huffy, often for good reason. But never forget that there is a conscious volunteering that goes on. You've got to be ready to play the game. I don't think Alford has to make any excuses for his choice to found the National Black Chamber of Commerce, but it puts him in the odd position of dealing with the Tibbs Threshold. Most people don't know that such a thing as the NBCC exists, and surely more would stumble as Boxer did given just the name. The Tibbs Threshold is named after Mr. Tibbs, the film character portrayed by Sidney Poitier - a man whose dignity and respectability was much higher than people thought it might be. And so they figured they could insult the lesser man, when in fact they just made asses of themselves. Tibbs showed, if I remember correctly, very little anger at the insult, but with its feeble use as a stalling tactic in a more important battle. He was, after all a detective trying to solve a murder. Alford was about the business of mythbusting green jobs, and I imagine that many black Republicans are about the business of the conservative agenda. So getting tripped up and distracted from that business in defending one's personal honor is the risk of being black and giving permission to idiots and racists to insult you from the large catalog of pre-fab racial insults. If you expect to turn your outrage into ammo, then you are playing the game.

Beware.

There's nothing to be gained except for some perverse pride in correcting somebody who is obviously making an error. It might be true that they are an idiot. It may be true that they are an actual racist bigot. It may be true that they are actually culturally retarded. All are opportunities for schooling, but it's not a schooling I for one relish delivering. Nor am I particularly partial to Mr. Tibb's ultradignified approach. Sometimes a can of whoopass is just what needs to be ripped open. 

--

On the other side of middle class money, where I've been hanging out for a while, the streets are actually safer. I don't harbor any illusions that Harry Alford is going to go home and cry himself to sleep. Nor are black Republicans likely to bang their heads against any walls because of x, y or z racist. Then again, I can't speak for any of those folks even though I occasionally identify with them and think I know where they're coming from.

This is the No Excuses Era. Permission to speak freely? Permission granted. Permission to insult me? Uh.. Zoom, you need to fly far away from here until your mind can see fresh and clear.

Walter Cronkite: Dead

I watched Huntley-Brinkley.

Except for his Vietnam body counts, I watched very little of Walter Cronkite and have not had the experience of perceiving him to be anything more than an icon of a distant time and place where men were men and the truth was lassooed like a bulldogged calf, wrestled to the ground and branded with the CBS eye. He was just another old white man who spoke good English to me.

My inspiration came from the likes of Fred Friendly whose aim was ". . . not to make up anybody's mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can escape only by thinking."

Quite frankly I can't imagine at all, that Cronkite made anybody think. Which is I think entirely the point of his celebrity. You opened your craw and swallowed down whatever fish that the grave and erudite Mr Cronkite tossed you. So now he's dead and people are wondering why when we swallow today's fish it stinks and gives us bellyaches. Well what the hell was he doing in 1968? Forming a news hegemony? I think it didn't work.

The presumption that we can trust news organizations to present expositorily through one talking head, a narrative that will leave us intellectually satisfied, and satisfactorily intelligent is one that is appropriate to the peasantry of any society. So another Cronkite can and will be manufactured and the peasants will settle down. In the meantime, enjoy the New Media while we still have liberty.

Seven Pounds

Will Smith has managed to become someone completely other than he has ever been on film. Except that he is still a superman and thusly asking us to suspend disbelief once again. Seven Pounds is a tale of awkward dimensions that is poignant, poignant, poignant. It's the next morning and I'm still all worn out from seeing it.

It is the tale of no exit. Of a man determined to sacrifice himself in the wake of a tragedy that destroys his will to live except to pay a blood debt. It is a supremely arrogant presumption of a world in which no faith brings succor, where only acts of human charity are the acceptable currency, a world devoid of the grace of God. It makes it compelling as hell, and it makes Will Smith christlike. It works in astonishing ways but here I sit the day after unable to comprehend whether I love that or hate it.

I have no use for tearjerker films although I have no problem crying at films. I do so more than ever in my life at this stage. And the pace of this movie is so unpredictably delicious that I could not outthink the manipulations and second-guess the mood swings of the audio cues. The solo piano never stood for tragedy, the canny lyric never lingered in the mind too long. Seven Pounds is extraordinary drama delivered expressly for film with expert screenwriting and direction. This takes a powerful and simple story through interwoven and cascading vignettes and brings it into narrative focus through a love affair. And it isn't until the final minutes of the film that you realize that the love was entirely accidental tangential to the intent of the protagonist. The acting is very good, superb even, given the necessity of slow revelation. Nobody is allowed much room to be at cross-purposes or have their own dissonance interfere with the focus on Smith, but he delivers in a hugely successful understated manner. This is a film about a man with an all-consuming purpose, it just happens to be one that smashes us to bits as we realize the personal dimensions of it and the reason for it.

What makes it work so devastatingly well, is that Smith finally finds hope, and a possible escape from his fate. That escape is the love affair that becomes the center of the film's gravity. It is the most heartbreaking feint I have ever seen in any movie.

The dimension of human tragedy is always a compelling subject. As Will Smith's career matures it is becoming ever more clear that he is drawn to play uniquely heroic characters. He continually faces tragedy in a way that is transcendent. I compare him to three other actors who play heroic roles and he stands out among them for the quality of his choice. Bruce Willis exemplifies a hang-dog determination, an unstoppable ability to go the extra, if obvious, mile.  Denzel Washington stands up to face evil head on with the moral resolve and discipline that is unwavering. Tom Hanks, when he plays a hero, employs an emotional intelligence that makes his path clear, zenlike. Smith now through Seven Pounds after Hancock and I Am Legend and harkening back to I Robot is the purpose-driven hero. A man with a hidden yet undefeatable capacity who must wrestle with the fact that he must walk in human shoes. It is a tangent that his film career could make extraordinary use of, because it is a new kind of hero amidst a sort we may have become immune to.

Will Smith doesn't bother to get the girl. Instead he goes for the gut. He is an actor who has had quite enough fun as a person, and I get the feeling that he's living right offstage and that directs his willingness to be the beginning character in Seven Pounds. When we meet Ben Thomas, there are several flashes where I can't help but be reminded that Smith's own humble origins would bring him to deal with charitable excess. I easily imagine him to be the Kung Fu Santa Claus of my own personal dreams - a successful figure who can afford to spend his life tracking down people and delivering personal philanthropy, or an ass-kicking, one. Imposing justice man to man - that's the business of a hero. Smith never plays a little man, he plays a big man in little shoes who knows that eventually he's going to have to stop tiptoeing and throw down. The difference between him now and in the Independence Day and Men in Black days, was that he was being outwardly brash. Now he is inwardly brash, but the heroic ends are just as large.

How many times can it be done? That's hard to say, and it depends on Smith's willingness to tackle some contemporary madness American audiences are hyped about. He has been a cop, how about a small town mayor? How about a bishop? Why not an aid worker?

I keep thinking of M. Night Shyamalan's style of film when I think of Smith. The mix of natural and supernatural are unsettled in his his world. The ability to surprise is there, but MNS stays in the realm of storytelling for its own sake. Smith is not satisfied with that. That is why he is just a couple roles from being a great American actor.

Still Awestruck

Stalin and Hitler were two, enormously gifted and powerful men who led their people to absolute ruin. It's difficult for me to say how wrong they were, but I know that Benedict XVI would have an answer that would satisfy my exacting curiosity.

I am still awestruck by the degree of calamity that was heaped upon humanity in the disaster that was WW2. I remain in its wake, and I cannot imagine not learning great moral lessons from it until the end of my life.

Mostly these days, I stand and wonder how much of our economy is real - how much of it would survive the energy and fission another such charismatic could thrust upon our world. We seem to be lacking anyone as large and so we are weak for such a man.

I spent the afternoon with my brother Doc. We ogled muscle cars in Santa Monica reminding ourselves of our good fortune to have been raised in a time when we looked up and saw astronauts. Today, youth look up and see posters of Bruno. There is a store on the Promenade called Zara, and none of the clothes are made for men our size. The hat vendor's wares fit too tightly on our heads, and people are schlepping around in Smart cars..

I told my father today at lunch that if every American in the entire bourgeois used flushless toilents and drove hybrid vehicles for the rest of our lives, we'd never stop the climate change initiated by China burning coal for electricity.

People go to war to protect their children, not to protect the CETA job program. People go to war for blood revenge, not for affordable healthcare or senior centers. People don't go to war for the sake of green vehicles. There aren't any fatheaded Irish brogues playing police sergeants in any of our movies any longer, but there are still similar roughnecks out in the country. They are men who are not handsome or particularly brainy or charming, but they take pride in their ability with a wrench or a shovel. Like the Muslims so many disturbed Americans believe in at bottom in Iraq, they are illiterate, religious, hard working and complete human beings that don't like being pushed around. They will not conform to your idea of a perfectable world, and when you try to take things from them, they will push back. 

How many of these economies of thought are for real?

You have got to have 2.1 children to grow. If you fall below 1.6 you never come back. So the DINKs are all fleeting. Marry all the metros and other-sexuals you like. It's a false economy. It's unsustainable. It will get overrun, because ultimately, when it comes down to it, people fight. People go to war. 

How much can you destroy in a war when you have the fundamentally wrong idea? How many people can you motivate with a bad philosophy? When it comes to understanding that children are our wealth - we're behind curve of common sense.

Two young cute women in matching light blue t-shirts beseeched me to feed hungry children someplace in the big old dirty world. I was told that through my donations to their program, I could raise a child for the price of a Pinkberry. This from women who haven't the faintest notion of what labor pains feel like. I wonder if the sponsored villages would go to war for their donations, if the men would take up arms keep those cards and letters coming. I'm not convinced this charitable economy is real. It depends upon mall strollers who feel guilty about eating frozen yogurt.

Just before I picked up Doc at Fifth and Wall, a slim man stopped in the crosswalk and demanded money from a woman in minivan. I watched how he jutted his head and pointed his fingers. At first I thought he knew the woman, the way he flagged her down. Then I knew better; she handed over two handfulls. I saw him ten minutes later angrily shouting to himself walking parallel to the police station just off Skid Row. You and I know that there are signs on the outdoor malls reminding us that we are under no obligation to pay panhandlers. That's how stupid we have become. And whatever their angle, the charity cases are demanding, and treat us like sheep. 

Most of the time all they need is a dirty face and a cardboard sign, but why not get aggressive?

The homeless, jobless, faithless don't drag kids around. They're unsustainable too. But the calamity hasn't hit yet. Oh maybe we need two more points on top of the current unemployment figures for the spillover. It might take more. Doc says he knows 40 year old men signing up for military service. You don't get to play around with your so-called rights in the Army, the sergeants don't let you get away with it.

The best people I have worked with in the computer industry, yes the computer industry, grew up having either served in the Armed Forces, or worked on a farm. There's still a real IT revolution going on - we're learning how to communicate and collaborate and stretch economies into different shapes. But yeah maybe we could live without it. I'm expecting to be in the proper sector. My customer is using my skills to help them save money and work smarter, not upload pictures of their in-laws or send 140 character messages. So maybe we could live without 40% of the business, just like we're all learning to live with 9 million new cars sold per year, down from 16 million. You just don't upgrade so quickly.

So what happens when people save money and the economy just doesn't grow? The unsustainable sectors disappear. Like Enron. Like Hitler's Sixth Army under Paulus at Stalingrad. Like other large ideas with bad philosophies underneath them. 

I'm at the end of The Hitler Book. Just for the description of how he died in Berlin with his world unraveling, it was well worth the effort. Hitler's ultimate failure was long and slow and agonizing. I'm still awestruck by how many millions can die in vain. I still can't get over the fact that so many of us think we're immune.

It's Official: The No Excuses Era

Barack Obama is nothing if not predictable. What's interesting is that he carries all of the baggage with him up front. You can smell it coming and watch all the people who were destined to be stunned, be stunned. And of course all the people who were destined to be offended, etc. Obama has proven to be, in my opinion, a great litmus test for American credulity. 

Several months ago, I predicted the dawn of the No Excuses Era. I suppose it required a trip to the NAACP for people to take notice of the truth, and so it is more obvious than ever. Let's see who grasps the implications:

The problem with this and all black role modeling. Only people with racial hangups need black role models. And only people who want to affect people with racial hangups want to be black role models. It is one of the great temptations of my class of folks, those formerly known as the Talented Tenth.

See if you were Talented Tenth, then you already know about a litany of black role models, because you study prior role models with a bit of envy and a bit of spite. If you buy into what I call the role monkey circus, then you already know that somehow you have to overcome the same demons you intend to chase out of your followers. So you might start during Black History Month with Carter G. Woodson and get enough inspiration from him for you to be a beacon to others. And basically you need enough self-esteem to assume the task, that plus the initiative taken on Woodson, and an opportunity to play show and tell. Bam, instant role model. Do it enough times for enough media and you become a 'black leader'.  Do it in a calculatedly brilliant way in front of all America in the political arena and you might even become Barack Obama. But the underlying premise never changes, you're a show off in front of people who don't have the courage and demon-shields to do for self.

In life, success has many faces and is hard to define, failure is easy to define. It whatever successful people have power to 'empower' and decide you ain't got it. Rights are the gift of the strong, and sometimes the strong aren't generous.

So this is pure role monkey circus and Obama is saying what the Talented Tenth has been itching to say for a while. No Excuses. Obama thinks he has nothing to prove to anybody, and to the NAACP crowd he's exactly right. He's not beholden to the Civil Rights Establishment or the Grass Roots. Something that was made very clear when he dissed Uncle Smiley and a host of other wannabe black leaders, including his own minister. Now he's demonstrating that once again big time with some rhetoric from the hip which illustrates exactly how much he has learned since being a community organizer. That stuff is only good for getting votes, but that's just a mediocre hustle.

The Big Time is where Obama has a lot to prove - when he deals with the ass end of a standing trillion dollar deficit, and on that scale the struggles of little black boys and little black girls don't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

When I get some free time, I'm going to compare Obama's address to GW Bush's. That should be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. In the meantime, read all of Obama's "you're on your own" rhetoric like you should: The well is empty and that fiction y'all call black politics ain't going to deliver squat.

Thursday Fragments

Despising the Sensible
Well, boy howdy was I wrong. Then again I was just speculating while giving the benefit of the doubt to Congressional Democrats complaining about last week's attempt to jumpstart Bush Derangement Syndrome. My bad.

It turns out that the big old secret program the CIA supposedly was operating was based on a Presidential finding. And of course all Presidential Findings find their way to Congress and so the appropriate committees were briefed. Not only that, the program never actually did anything. Watch the video about it all here.

Carlin Explains It All For You (Through David Brooks)
Dan Carlin has just expounded on David Brooks and explained to his large audience the basic principle of skepticism that is at the heart of the kind of Republicanism I subscribe to. Don't trust the government to solve your problems. He explains it all here.

Paragraph 56

56. The Christian religion and other religions can offer their contribution to development only if God has a place in the public realm, specifically in regard to its cultural, social, economic, and particularly its political dimensions. The Church's social doctrine came into being in order to claim “citizenship status” for the Christian religion. Denying the right to profess one's religion in public and the right to bring the truths of faith to bear upon public life has negative consequences for true development. The exclusion of religion from the public square — and, at the other extreme, religious fundamentalism — hinders an encounter between persons and their collaboration for the progress of humanity. Public life is sapped of its motivation and politics takes on a domineering and aggressive character. Human rights risk being ignored either because they are robbed of their transcendent foundation or because personal freedom is not acknowledged. Secularism and fundamentalism exclude the possibility of fruitful dialogue and effective cooperation between reason and religious faith. Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself omnipotent. For its part, religion always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face. Any breach in this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development.

-- Benedict XVI

This is why I am Catholic. The Church speaks to me and offers me the whole of its knowledge, embracing all of human experience, directed by the unifying voice of the Pope. It works to unite me with God recognizing that as a full human being I require more than blind acceptance and unconsidered submission. The Church intrinsically defends my freedom by recognizing all of my capacities and needs and points my way to human self-realization on it's only path - towards God.

Despising the Unknowable

Down this way in Miller's Alley, we don't get bent out of shape over things we cannot control. So it goes without saying that it's not bloody likely that we're going to make a big deal over something we can't even see. Yet the firestorm heading this way over the fact that Dick Cheney is involved with a still secret CIA anti-terrorist program has got people freaking out left and right.

It's all a matter of trust.

I trust Dick Cheney because I read his biography, and I determined that I found his character admirable. I understand very well that the man lost much sleep over concern for American safety from terror. It's true that the government has had a heavy hand in much we might have handled for ourselves. In the same way we tend to discount the effectiveness of color-coded warnings at the airports, we Americans are ready to look after our own safety. We know that we have our own back, but does Cheney have it? For all of us, he did, but only half of us believed him. Those of us that did would still have been fine, for the most part, if he said we were primarily responsible.

I suspect that the secret CIA program is domestic spying above and beyond the whole FISA envelope. My guess is that the CIA took over or co-opted the infamous Carnivore and ran botnets. But that's just wild speculation. My other guess is that it might have something to do with other secret sites that were built after the first set of secret sites were closed and as such were involved in reditions. But whatever it was that the CIA did, domestically or otherwise, one cannot prove much right now. It means that the Left and Democrats will have to jumpstart an entirely new sort of diatribe. Civil liberties can't be the subtext, nor can international relations. Whatever it is, coming out on Obama's watch, it is fundamentally unproductive to drag Cheney or Congressional oversight through the mud.

It seems to me that the only way to win is on one extreme or another. Squelch the entire matter, or expose it 100% Of course that would be logical. So long as there is some way to squeeze an emotion out of the American public, there will be an illogical political win inherent in this matter. This undermines the confidence that logical Americans have in their own politics.

The terrorists win

Only the Lonely

This morning I'm doing a blackness tour in my online reading. Same old stuff. Feeling a pinch odd that I could be hanging with Jimi at The Root if I tried and cared enough. Kind of pissed that I may have become perennially difficult to understand and thus always something of an outsider. Wondering how long I can do it all without becoming a caricature of myself. I mean, I don't have to make any excuses about sleeping with little boys or hitting the crack pipe, but then again I'm not Michael Jackson or Marion Barry. If I were to hype up the Cobb personna I could get away with being perverse. The thing is, I'm not perverse, I'm actually just achieving knowledge and some wisdom at an accellerated pace. It makes me move on.

So the subject at P6 is Martha's Vineyard and which section the Obamas might find most comfy for their summer vacation. The same-old is the same, 'it doesn't matter how rich you get...' observation that their likely choice will be Oak Bluffs, the ink-welliest spot on the isle.

My favorite parts of the Vineyard are Menemsha Bight, West Chop and the Katama beaches south of Edgartown. I hadn't made it out to Gay Head, but would prefer that because I don't see what the point of living on the water is if you can't see the sunset. To read the NYMagazine article that spurred all this talk, there is a distinct racial geography to the joint and social and psychological incentives not to buck the trend.

The Only Ones deal with glass ceilings at work, unfortunate misunderstandings in their neighborhoods, condescension from blacks who think their education or class makes them inauthentic, and identity crises in their kids. When they get to their Vineyard vacation homes, they want to escape that casual, institutional, and intra-black racism and be around people who help them feel less anomalous. Trey Ellis, who wrote the script for The Inkwell, the notoriously bad film about the black Vineyard experience (Ellis himself called it terrible), says, “The black part of the Vineyard is like, I would imagine, being gay and going to the Castro. It’s this mecca where you can be yourself and be with people who have so much in common with you. No one has to feign some street cred when they’re playing tennis.” It’s a source of communion and of pride. “When you see a beautiful black family with their kids, it makes you feel really good about being black,” says Chrisette Hudlin, wife of Reggie and a lifelong Vineyarder who travels there every summer from L.A. “As a person who’s high-achieving and striving for the best for their family, you’re looking at these other black people who have the same goals, and it makes you feel good as a black person. You don’t feel out of place.” Several Only Ones say there’s nowhere in America that makes them more proud of black people.

This is particularly true among parents, who talk about the importance of introducing their children to other black upper-class families so they can know they’re not as peculiar as they might feel. “Black kids need to be around successful black families, because other blacks from humble beginnings want you to apologize for being successful,” says psychiatrist Carlotta Miles. “On the Vineyard, you don’t need excuses or self-consciousness or defensiveness.” Drew Dixon Williams grew up in Washington, D.C., where her mother, Sharon Pratt, served as mayor, and she spent summers on the island. “It’s sort of embarrassing to say this, coming from Washington,” she says, “but I used to say with a straight face—because I was too young to know better—that I would get my black experience on Martha’s Vineyard. I didn’t have to be defensive about not being black enough or being black in the first place. We were all from The Cosby Show.”

Only Ones. I'm not sure that I don't like that. There have got to be more OOs like me, who tend not to break a sweat over our OO factor. But I hear what Drew Dixon Williams is saying. The thing is that I don't particularly care a great deal about my kids' black experience. I'm not trying to psychologically prepare a racial Maginot Line in their consciousness in defense of The Insult. There is no Black Experience(tm). There used to be one, but an old man died with the recipe, and now everybody thinks they have it right - like the drama over the recipe for the perfect hamburger. Sometimes it's better to just have a hot dog and call it a day.

But there was a time when I thought I was a Big Mac in my odd situation of being in the black upper middle class all by my lonesome, which was to say 30 and single and trying to pull the perfect babe. The rarefied atmosphere of Oak Bluffs was exactly what I was looking for - a bunch of Cosby kids looking for another bunch. And yet I still needed to play volleyball, because that's what I did. And so when I did that, I ended up at Katama among kids who didn't work. I mean to say white kids who shuttled between the Vineyard and Palm Beach depending on the season. Trust funders, social specimens to us in the real world, or at least that was my assumption at the time. But back in Oak Bluffs, the more urban setting, last whites night (as in post Labor Day dress codes) resulted in more dancing in suits, the same phenomenon I had grown ill of years before.

The irony was that when I came to the East Coast originally, having broke up with my progressive girlfriend, there was a great expectation in me that I would find in New York the very equivalent of a dense, upscale black community on whose margins I could dance my New World Afrikan dance. In the advanced bohemian brashness I considered my pose to be, I could speak to the artistic expression doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers and sportos could not approach without being so crass as the lot of entertainers we suffered in the degrading state of hiphop. I wanted the audience of the new black progressive novel, the people who went to BAM and who dug Wynton. I wanted the people who were looking for the creative blacks now unleashed parallel to Spike Lee who would inherit the mantel of August Wilson without caving into what eventually became the Black WB. It was a narrow ledge that needed broad support, and it turned out that there was little such concentration in the Big Apple. Deciding against all that after a couple frustrating years in recognition that ex-gangsta drug dealers and their coteries were bankrolling all the new black cultural production, I was too through with it all. By the time I got to the Vineyard, it John Singleton and Terry McMillan were the king and queen of black highbrow which was all actually just middlebrow, and the likes of George C. Wolfe belonged to... well the same people who made The Blue Man Group rich. What we got was Diddy, Dre & Jay Z. Three new Barry Gordys living three times as large. What we didn't get was one theatre on Broadway or playwrites to replace Jones or Hansberry, no new Paul Robeson or Leontyne Price.

That little black community simply wasn't wealthy enough, and I think today it probably still is not. And so I predict that it never will be because none of us will survive the inflation of the post-Obama world who aren't already wealthy today. The hamburger will stay hamburger and never move to the black cultural filet mignon of my dreams. Not a raisin in the sun, but a jerky beef that produces hard little turds of frustration no matter how much water you drink it down with. Mine is all shat out, but it took years to comprehend both the size and cost of this failure. In the end I have to live with our history, of having Michael Jackson's death celebrated as if he were our new black shining prince.

The fool's errand is pumping the old fighter of blackness full of steroids and painkillers to fight another round of the Culture Wars. And you wonder why a people who should have found quite enough in their humanity or even Christianity generations ago are still tied to minding the color line and carving out discursive space around Obama, the Great Black Avatar. As if he could be.

This morning I read that the NSA is building a new data center just south of Salt Lake City. I think I could retire there in 15 and do some consulting until my fingers become too arthritic, white as that joint might be. Still, I'd prefer Boise, where at least they drink vodka openly. Nevertheless I pause to think of all the undiscovered countries too non-black for the OO taste not to mention that of the average middle class black Americans. I understand the desire to perfect a black aesthetic which stands above the dysfunctional fray of the multifarious legacies of slavery, and racial brownian motion of American society. I understand my generation's deep desire to accomplish the Beloved Community, to have an unassailable elite black vanguard with the social clout of the voice of Thurgood Marshall in the wake of the Brown decision - all black Americans backing him no matter their class status. But nothing is so monolithic and sure. Rather we are black mothers and fathers to Benjamin Buttons whose adventures lie in foreign lands beyond our experience. It's good enough to make home right, a home right with God.

The Only Ones, those who deign to be that and stay that, would be a lonely bunch. As Steven Pressfield says, a tribe has no law so much as it has a code of honor.  America and the West are not tribal, but black Americans are perhaps the last tribe here, still trying to get it all together. Looking for unity in all the wrong places, as victims, as leaders, in the meritocracy, in the rarified moral arena of our stentorian politics. Everywhere we are reminded that our code of honor stands for jack in the social marketplace. It's only the head bob on the street, the appropriated high five, pound and now fist bump all forever lost to the leveling heat sink of transparent American culture. Nobody cares enough to learn Swahili and so the heat death of black American culture is inevitable. It can only be sustained by physical proximity and along the same lines of fear and distrust as Jim Crow ever established.

The distinction of being from the best and brightest of these, the least of my brothers, is being played out now, five steps over my head in Obama's house. His election was the last leverage our black social capital will ever aggregate. We'll go down finally, like the Irish after Kennedy. And no fat headed, thick accented brothers of our sort will remain stock characters in our popular entertainments and consciousness. There will be no future Charlie Rangels just as there are no future Tip ONeils. There will only be the same-old, the dialog that becomes a lonely monologue.

Some Unstated Thoughts About Achievement

One of the themes I have been considering is the necessity for war. But more importantly is the very accomplishment of war. It has been a while since I began entertaining the idea. At this point I trace it back to the days when I first started thinking about Patton.

It is a popular idea, which may or may not be owned by the Left, that war is essentially stupidity writ large. That the act of war represents a failure of intellect - an inability to think through problems. Note the use of the term 'resort to violence' as a way of achieving one's ends. The kneejerk ethos would suggest that 'violence as a last resort' is the thoughtful way forward. But none of that really scales to war. Making war is an enterprise that requires a great deal of thought.

As one of those permanent institutions in the history of civilized mankind, the standing army is the beneficiary of generation upon generation of wisdom. And as such it is appropriate to think of those generals and military officers as the beneficiaries of said wisdom. They may or may not learn well, but as a class of men who are expected to lead tens of thousands of men during the regular course of their careers, sometimes to death, quite a bit depends on them. Most certainly central to the authority vested in military officers is the fact that civilization turns on their actions. The ability to wage war is the greatest fortune a people possess, for it is the manner in which they preserve their very lives, when their lives themselves are threatened.

I am studying the means of war because at this moment in American history the study of economics is fruitless. Nobody knows what to do with a surfeit of unemployed, educated, literate people but make them EGBOK promises. So what if that fails and we depose the promisers? We might very well suffer a coup of the sort Iran has suffered and what would all those angry people do? Who knows, but even if they were to 'resort to violence' that would be a trifle compared to the the business of waging war. You cannot spontaneously generate a fighting army. You cannot transform rage into battlefield victory.

If one is to take Machiavelli seriously in taking politics for non-violent war, then business is perhaps, some fraction of politics. Surely the power of law outweighs the power of money in this world. An economy is a well-managed game and those who cheat or lose are rarely shot. The stakes simply aren't so high. And so all those who might think that the global corporation is some new sort of superpower really don't understand power. When it comes to ultimate sacrifices, rich and powerful people always end up paying for soliders. Nobody can match the organizations that print money, and even the narcotraffickers who printed cocaine were ultimately no match. Surely soldiers will fight and die for money, but more will fight and die for the honor that politics bestows.

Equally there is much to be said for religion, but I am coming to think of religion as a hedge with regard to its conspiracy in national governance. The Catholic Church does not demand that Christians defy the laws of men. Men fear jail more than excommunication. That is the way of the world today, except obviously in areas that are unpoliced.

My point is that the greatest projects of mankind still do inevitably involved armed conflict, and when people starve that is what results. Feeding an army will always be possible and humans will not 'civilize' themselves past that. All the greatest mistakes end in war, it is how we solve ultimate problems. We will fight until we are exhausted of fighting, and the man who leads the most and smartest of his tribe to victory at war is by definition the greatest man.

The difficulty in understanding this fundamental principle I place at the feet of a sort of false ethics. It is literally the power of a hegemonic understanding which is the same thing as mass hysteria or a successful grand conspiracy. Only people leveraged by a system whose roughneck roots they are completely isolated from can develop a worldview that defies the acknowledgment of war as the ultimate solution. Only people who circumscribed or extremely disciplined to live in a fraction of their humanity do not know.

So I measure things in terms of cost of life. I measure things in terms of loyalty unto death. I judge achievements by the willingness of those who oppose it to die trying. Whatever can be gotten can be gotten for a price. Every ethos that doesn't extend that to the ultimate price can and will be sold out, betrayed, undermined and refuted. When I came understand this in terms of politics, it was a revelation. It was then I wrote 'The Cost of Not' and came to recognize racial equilibrium in America. 

I live in the belly of the economy of America in its upper middle class. What I have isn't really much. It was hard won for me as an individual but the slightest war wipes me away. So I am reconciled to my spoiled and recondite existence, all relativism aside. I play by the rules of the inner circle privileges, but I never forget the outer boundaries - the human ultimate that lies outside.

Never forget that you can be punched in the nose. So don't be so proud of things you have that you didn't have to punch for.

Shotgun Method Stalled

My theory is this. You never really know what's going to succeed, so you do as much as possible with as much energy and brains as you can muster. You might be inconsistent, but that's life. Run all hedges all the time. Opportunity is fickle.

I've been working in a new gig incrementally assimilating a hodload of information from 12 people simultaneously for three weeks now. And in addition to all that firehose diet, I've been up late socializing with real people instead of here at my comfortable garret scribbling into cyberspace. It's an odd combination that has me exhausted. I'm going to work 8 hours today, but that's a virtual today because it's going to be spread over the weekend.

There are some excellent dynamics of communication that I'm finding out, and things I am learning about myself as well. I really prefer to listen than to speak. When I speak, I present. I want to make sure that everyone is in a perfect position to understand all of the implications to everything I say and I want it to be clear that I'm the dude in charge. All eyes on me. When I'm not presenting, I make witty rejoinders off tangents which tend to be unproductive. And yet I am essentially, at bottom, unquestionably a team player. I want everyone to be, as much as possible, on board, up to speed, in the loop, aware and engaged. Everybody should know the deal, be aware of the factors, know the direction. Specialization comes from direction in both a division of labor (top down) and volunteer to action (bottom up). Let it all shake out, ease off on the attribution of credit except when you are acknowledging other people's good work. Make frustration your own problem. And speak about it when you are prepared to call yourself the weak link - preface it by 'Help me understand something here..', or 'Can I ask a really stupid question..'.

What I don't do is sell when I'm responsible for building. So long as I don't know THE answer, I use guarded language. And THE answer is not really THE answer, it is a plausible solution that has buy-in. It's the thing that everybody explains similarly like...'well, what we were thinking at the time was... and we decided to... because ...'. And that can always lead to 'now that we know... we can ... and all that requires is that we...' and you write a new solution updating the old instead of saying 'we all know that ... didn't have a clue when he insisted that we ...'. Still that doesn't change the fact that most of the time, only a few people know anything close to the answers that will open up the door to a honest solution.

I'm reading Steven Weber's book on Open Source and have finally come to understand that the typical freetard at Slashdot is pehaps not representative of what all that movement has been about. I should have known better, and now I think I will have come to decypher a very important slice of my industry. I have never worked in open source and have always asserted that a software engineering team (small) directed Germanically with an ample feedback loop from paying customers would always build a better product. I might still be right, but sometimes it's not about product, but technology. Which means I have to learn this parallel dynamic. I'm not going to unlearn what I know about product sales, marketing etc, but... I'm coming to understand and make sense of what I've intuited about the craft of programming as it relates to ideas about productivity, property, collaboration and a bunch of other things.

Significantly, I am feeling a bit less pressure in writing that which is architected in my mind and giving away the code for redistribution. It makes me think about Lightship Server Internals, a class I and my peers were screaming for when we knew that the code was in escrow someplace in New Hampshire. (It's a long story).

So my motto right now is 'soldiering on'. It's a new quarter and I've changed my passwords and bought new underwear and socks. I am focused on making my team a success. That means that I cut down on the hedging and overbroad goalset and focus on what's directly on my plate.

A Scary Thought

Driving through California's Central Valley gives one a lot of time to think. But only when I was smelling something thickly agricultural did I think last week of the valley itself. It wasn't until I was on my way back home and crossing the road to Bakersfield did I really ponder all those fruits and vegetables and livestock en masse.

The thing I was thinking was a dirty bomb, and I scared the piss out of myself.

From Wikipedia:

The Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation’s agricultural output by value: 17 billion USD in 2002. Its agricultural productivity relies on irrigation from both surface water diversions and groundwater pumping from wells. About one-sixth of the irrigated land in the U.S. is in the Central Valley.^[4]

Virtually all non-tropical crops are grown in the Central Valley, which is the primary source for a number of food products throughout the United States, including tomatoes, almonds^[5][6], grapes, cotton, apricots, and asparagus.

Four of the top five counties in agricultural sales in the U.S. are in the Central Valley (2002 Data). They are Fresno County (#1 with $2.759 billion in sales), Tulare County (#2 with $2.338 billion), Kern County (#4 with $2.058), and Merced County (#5 with $2.058 billion). 2002 Data Sets

Now I could probably do some smarter thinking about it, but I just figured that the right dirty bomb in the Central Valley would just kill all the agriculture and basically Los Angeles would starve.

It's Crow Eatin' Season

A couple of things are staring me right in the face and I know that it's because I'm not inclined to write a great deal about current affairs that I'm not flailing at my keyboards. A couple neat crows served hot will suffice.

Palin Derangement Revealed
The first piece is here, in which a reasonable sort of feminist has revealed the vituperation of those who share the label if not the principles. Now as then, I continue to be astonished by the level of hatred directed towards Palin that she never deserved, nor anyone for following her. The day she was nominated I said that she represented good politics, but not revolutionary theatre. I obviously underestimated many Americans deep seated desire for revolutionary theatre.

Iranian Muslims Learn From Iraq
Who is the top cleric in Iraq, and what does he say about the legitimacy of elections in Iran? Then again, what would he know? These are the questions that any number of dissenters from the necessity of America's military and nation-building mission in Iraq are going to have to ask themselves right about now. Hitchens asks and answers these questions with alacrity. He usefully goes into explicit detail about relations between groups of Muslim clerics in the region.

It has entered my periphery that some Obama flacks are suggesting that there has been some great dynamic shift in 'sovereignty' over the past week in Iraq, which is thinner tripe than on my weekend BBQ. What they can't really speak to is the old Obama promise of a 1 division per month draw down when he gained office. The force deployment in Iraq hasn't changed direction of size. We're still on the old plan from September.

Kim Jong Il Spits Fire
Seven missiles. Count 'em seven. What part of Axis of Evil does this Administration not understand. Well, clearly the Korean part. According to this report, none of this is dangerous from a state on state warfare perspective, rather the Norks are simply improving rapidly. In other words, the DPRK is going from minor threat to considerable threat, except that there's no clear signal from the White House that we much care, and as far as I can see no change in the standing orders to the US Navy which has already demonstrated its ability to pluck missiles from the sky.

Others Knew Too

Sony went wrong a long time ago. All it has is God of War, and more PSPs.

The Virtue of the Essential Human

The experiment of America, as an aristocracy of merit, challenges us all. To take the idea of citizenship seriously is to approach the best understanding of individuality and the rights of man. I think that requires of us a great deal. There is only so far the offices of government should go in recognizing us as we necessarily think ourselves to be.

Many years ago, I held the somewhat common notion that the Declaration of Independence might have listed complaints against the deprivations of racial offense and become the basis of an anti-racist Constitution. The fact that it didn't suggested to me some original flaw in the founding of the nation, which a proper evolution of thought would correct. But I did all that for the purposes of the anti-racist promise, without much regard for the substance of the original complaint.

So I believe this is a common error of any class of people who regard themselves as so separate as to not identify in common with the pains suffered by those with more to lose. Or more plainly said, what would I care about the King quartering his troops on my property if I have no property? Shouldn't the Declaration talk about *my* peeves?

It is this kind of error that I believe is at fault in the mischaracterization of contemporary political complaints as matters of rights. And the popularity of this sort of overproduction ultimately dilutes the polity's ability to preserve and defend those self-evident rights the Founders had in mind. And so we have lost focus as a nation and wasted our political energies on frivolous matters thinking them to be literally righteous.

How can we come to believe that America is incapable of defending the dignity of a 13 year old girl from improper search and seizure? It must be because we believe people like Ginsburg must strident instruct people unlike Ginsburg in such basic matters of human dignity.

How can we come to believe that some certain people must in their struggles to achieve freedom act from a playbook of radical reinterpretations of human history? It must be because we believe people like Fanon must stridently instruct people unlike Fanon in such basic matters of human freedom.

And so each group has their unique message to the world and each must find, independently, their own separate path to dignity and freedom. Well, whats' the difference between that idea and any of Hitler's ideas? Nothing.

I find it difficult to presume to lead some fraction of the people or to defend some fraction of humanity as a worthy political aim. I am greatly convinced that the human animal does not vary so much that he can be served well by a wide variety of principles. There are a simple few and the paths towards attaining and defending them are few. But having found those paths, we must find our human center of gravity, each individual conforming at their core, and place that center on those paths. Instead we have put our sex lives and skin colors as our cores and we have made mountains of the discomforts such fetishes have brought us. And in our every personality trait, thinking moderation and conformity itself a sin, we have expanded our appetite for taking our every difference as deep and fundamental. We have monetized the long tail of arcane whim and now ply it as political currency. We passionately attend the details of vegetarianism as if they were matters of war and peace and we run our state treasuries into ruin for the sake of propping up a million subsidies of such trivial import. All such foolishness is done at the peril of our common good because we have determined that our diversity is the most important feature we possess.

This is the evidence of a crisis in confidence in our underlying principle. We Americans are invested in a globalist, multicultural hedge against the sort of common sense Thomas Paine had. We pretend that we are of a different strain than he and that our expanse and our eclectic humanity, our advanced sensitivities to the great variety of human experience makes us wiser. The great variety of human experience can all be cruelly ended with a pike through the heart, and the heart in every human lies in the same place. It doesn't matter how much we value what our tongues have tasted or where our feet have trod, our heart remains our core.

So we must resolve to understand and hue to what is essential to our individual humanity and to reassert its common core. We must recognize the minimal yet essential role of government's defense of simple liberty and not attempt to gainsay it by attempting to guarantee too much. We can only be a nation with liberty and justice for all if all are for the nation correctly focused on its principles and not our own differences. When we seek to be too many things as a people we lose sight of the common purpose of nationhood, and we belabor our citizenship with freight it cannot bear; we turn our politics into a fleamarket and dilute society with a million complaints.

The most important things in life are as they ever were, and no greater ideas will be invented than liberty. So let that be our focus on this day.

The Declaration

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Loyal To Powell

If there was ever any doubt to whom Colin Powell is loyal, consider his latest grumble.

Colin Powell, one of President Obama's most prominent Republican supporters, expressed concern Friday that the president's ambitious blitz of costly initiatives may be enlarging the size of government and the federal debt too much.

No shit, Sherlock.

And Sara Palin is quitting her job. Guess she's loyal to Palin.

Cat Circle

  Yeah I did it. Can you?

Try here.

Sense of Freaking Humor

It occurs to me that I have been something of an ass. This occurrence doesn't occur very often, but that it happens at all shows what a super cool dude I am. I mean, like... you know?

I stumbled onto some really extraordinary YouTubery this morning that made me LOL. And although I LOL from time to time, I realize that I haven't carried that attitude forward in the blog since having made the dramatic decision to mash the mute button. What a self-important jackhole I am. Now I'm like totally my blog is all signal and no noise. Yeah right. I'm going to get a million hits this way, yeah like 2012. (Actually I'm at about 750000 right now).

So, EC over on Facebook was talking about how spoiled we are, we Americans and I was going to say something deep about it that went a little something like this. Oh yeah it was an anti-victim thing for black Americans about electrical current or something - like being a historical beneficiary of Western Civilization and having indoor plumbing and just sitting on the couch eating Cheetos and watching Ricki Lake, or maybe Keith Olbermann and what he's saying is making you feel self-righteous and a victim at the same time and then you're all talking back at Rush Limbaugh and at the snack bar at the gym after work you're all like talking about the controversy but what really has you upset is Jacko is dead and nobody really understands what he meant to us...

And it's so absurd, the whole conversation is surreally dramatically silly. We don't split hairs, we split atoms of difference.

So anyway, Boy was at the beach and school's out and he used the term 'Asian invasion' and I'm thinking that he's becoming a douche because he's complaining about the number of non-locals in the path of his boogie board. So I'm thinking, hey. Is he getting his recommended daily allowance of cool Asianity? And the answer is, not really because the fact is he's racially confused. I think I would be genuinely surprised if he could make sense of multiculturalism - he didn't realize that he was the other black kid in school back when he was in elementary school. It's not worth it to set any records straight - there are no straight records.

But I got started on my LOL track almost by accident because Unk in Florida sent me a heavy dose of 'black people should' this morning. And I can't remember the last time I heard the expressions, Miss Ann and Mister Charlie, but woot there it is. And it gets excruciating, but I...understand.

So things are all good, really. I'm back on the job with a big fat client who desperately needs what I can provide. And it's still in California, and this weekend for the first time in about four months, I am feeling perfectly happy with my own personal economic prospects. And yeah I've been reading about Hitler and obsessing over leapfrogging technology in my competitive environment but this weekend it's really time to chill and laugh at the absurdity.

It's time to remember a sense of freaking humor. Why on earth did I forget?

American Independent Radio

If you had a ground floor opportunity to redo BET from scratch, what would you do? Guess what?

Every once in a while an opportunity comes around where there are only a few people who know what's up and they're not well enough connected to take advantage of something right in front of their face. I perceive this to be the case right now in minority radio.

If I were to get the opportunity to have a radio program, it would be called The Vector and it would be very much like Cobb in many respects. I would direct it to the internal Third World and point the way to the Second. To me, the best of the Second World would be well represented by the man who owns a small, multimillion dollar business. It's where I'm trying to go. In some respects, I'm not perfectly qualified to host such a show, but in other ways I'm the perfect man for the job. But that's not the point of this post, rather it is to draw attention to what's going on at Sirius & XM with regard to what appears to be a minority set-aside for satellite radio spectrum.

A cat I met last month, Malik Shakur is in the thick of following the FCC machinations and has an application in process for some of this spectrum. He's determined and his website is getting little traffic. I notice these things and I hope that to the extent people notice me, I can direct some attention his way. It's very difficult to be a one man crusade, especially when there are so many people who very desperately want to achieve the same goal. We're just not all networked.

So as I said, I'm going to get folks I know, whom I have confidence would be excellent in the radio business to get aware of Malik's efforts. Something important can happen here.

The Happer Report on Climate Change

Tells Al Gore and the IPCC where to put their hockey stick.
Download ClimateChangeNot

Obama Gonna What? - Taxes

Sounds like the press corps has grown some teeny ones. But of course the fudgy answer to the direct question comes as no surprise.

On Transcending Multiculturalism: A Sotomayor Addendum

I think that the experience of living as a free man is precious and quite frankly more rare than it should be. And I think that in large societies the (peasant) masses are not free, and so learn to operate with a certain lack of respect. Ultimately it is a weakness. In our society the unfree have traditionally been marked by race and so I look at the extent to which blacks have navigated well without standing to full height and maintained a subculture of doing so. Because my aim is to break out of that subculture whose very existence is the result of suppression.  

So for the lack of a better term, I would expect a man of means and property to bear himself in the same way anywhere around the world and I think there are ways that such a man indicates that level of power which responds to its equal. The same thing could be said of soldiers in uniform, or frocked priests, or medical doctors. There is a universal understanding.  

I'm not certain that the same thing applies to middle classes. I think middle class people are very much products of their environments by default and must strive to become free men, shedding the conventions of peasantry and the peculiarities of their upbringing. There is a gap they must cross. Many may reach prominence but not all cross the gap. It's the difference between Bobby Short and Bobby Brown.
--  

For Sotomayor to be the great leader she aspires to be, I think that whatever she might do to appeal to peasant, ethnic, middle class, sensibilities degrades her. I think her first loyalty should be to higher, more rigorous principles. I cannot tell the extent to which her speech to La Raza and the Aztlan movement unbalances her from that higher loyalty, but I think that the American ideal is to be transcendent. It is what we expected of Bobby Kennedy and it is what his critics played upon vis a vis his qualifications to be President.  

To 'be' a minority is, to my reckoning, a concession to a prior state of oppression, a perverse badge of pride and a reason to never transcend, to never cross the gap. In the end, I believe it will always end in appeals to tribalism. It is a character flaw to be scrutinized.

The keyword for future reference is 'cosmopolitan', although it does not properly imply an intellect of rural propriety which of course must exist. I speak of this in the context of black politics and identity formation here:

Part and parcel of tossing one's hat into political philosophy's ring of fire of is the sheer weight of un-learning and assigning alternate values to the accumulation of ideas that shape one from youth. In my father's house were shelves and shelves of books - the natural direction of my intellectual curiosity went there. As a matter of pride I have often considered my inheritance of this library, the province of my black cultural nationalist father and upbringing. Further, it has often been my naive assumption that anyone not responding to the term 'negro' was at least partially invested in understanding the intellectual connotations of the Black revolution. These days, I become more convinced that blackness *is* a simple herrenvolk term. We are the tribal people of us, created very simply, in native alienation and considered impervious to intellectual distinction. The very idea of debating Booker T. Washington vs WEB DuBois itself seems parochial and out of touch, if not childish.

In that regard, there is no black intellectual future. Black intellect serves at the foot of an old master, whose imperative was 'race raising' which in the end is a futile if not tyrannical exercise for any man. Alas we must deal with greater struggles.

Hitler, Finally

I never thought I would reach a point in my life where I would try to imagine myself as Hitler. But I am getting inside his head and thinking about what it means to have absolute power. I drove six hours on the road yesterday and listened to The Hitler Book. So I came to appreciate an interesting set of ideas.

The first was that if I knew that I would be supreme leader and likely to send thousands of men to their death that I would want to toughen myself up. And so I would have my enemies delivered to me after their arrest and I would learn to execute them myself. I would do this enough times so that the habit of killing men seemed ordinary. I would do so in private however, and I would not kill women and children.

The second idea was that I would be faced with the nature of my being as a supreme leader, and I was inspired to imagine myself addressing my top military leader with the following words.

You are a man, and as my instrument you may very well be a great man. But I am beyond humanity and this is what you cannot forget. Obey me, be my instrument and you can remain a man. Disobey me and you will be a ghost. You have only to please me in this world and this world will be yours. Displease me and you will lose the world. All you have is the honor of serving me. I will only accept one defiance from you and that will be when you come to tell me that to obey me is to disobey your god, and so I will send you promptly to him.

Apparently, Hitler could not avoid the fact that he believed what he was doing was for the great benefit of Germany. The winner of an election cannot be dissuaded from that belief until he is deposed.

Hitler himself is not so interesting as is the ways in which he represents the ambitions of the 20th century. I wonder how different he is from any other such leader, and how different the German people are from us. Yeah, now I do actually wonder.

Like most other folks who have studied Hitler's Germany, I scratch my head wondering how London, Washington, Paris and Moscow could have been so blind.

The Cult of Beer

They say that The Hangover was based on a true story. It doesn't surprise me that the sort of dissolute flyboy who gets to tell stories in Hollywood would have something like that experience in their past.

I keep noticing that a lot of people who love Michael Jackson get mad when you tell the ugly truth about him, and so I notice the parallel. Stay with me I'm going to dig a little bit deep here, but first understand about me that I never got drunk until I was 26 years old. I always resisted the cult of beer. I really never had what I thought was a good reason to step into oblivion. I don't know how much of a survivor's mentality I have, but I feel like I have it.

If you ask me what it is that keeps me from a great deal of sin, it would be that my temptation has a very specific address. And what seemed like a infinite plain of beautiful black women in my youth has shrunk to a small dot on the map. At some point in my young adulthood I began to notice how many black women from the 'hood who looked so delicious at age 19 did not look so hot at age 29. It was not simply age, but aging poorly. My rationalization was that I was simply comparing them to the sort of women who did have ample access to dermatology and orthodontics, not to mention gyms, leisure sports and healthy food. Let me be clear about it, I was a spoiled young man, and developed a rather discriminating taste, but the backside of that is that I behaved with the prejudice that a lot of black women simply didn't know how to live well.

Such a stigma is not well deserved for the legions of good upstanding women who simply don't obsess over their appearance for the likes of Lotharios like me. But when it came to vice, well, I don't apologized for my dismissals. Yes that includes smoking herb, cursing, baby-mamaship and fingernails that are way too long for working hands.

The Cult of Beer includes mostly white boys who wear polo shirts, but for the sake of argument I extend that soul-killing vice to the 'round the way girls with bad skin and poor taste in men. It obviously includes the likes who find Las Vegas attractive for just about any reason. And now that I think about it, I do have to amend my story.

The first time I got drunk, I must have been about 22, having taken a bus trip with my friends to Las Vegas after they dragged me into it. I was sitting somewhere towards the rear of the Oriental Palace, the big purple casino, drinking my second drink. The first was a Singapore Sling and the second was similar. Oh yeah, a Navy Grog. Not knowing what kind of drunk I would be, I quickly discovered that I was a happy, aggressive drunk. Still am. And so to the first such person that passed my sight, I said 'Yo whassap Rabbi'. Except that he was Arab with two very large bodyguards. He asked me again what did I say, and I repeated myself, unembarrassable. The two large bodyguards grabbed me by the shoulders and told me the Arab's long name, and I made it stutteringly known that I meant no offense. The Arab recognized my stupor and forgave me, but I'm sure the two dudes were going to squeeze an apology out of me one way or another. And so it was like the 16 year old girl who gets pregnant the first time. I was just doing the alcohol because nobody could see why I wouldn't - I didn't need it to behave as stupidly as they seemed to want to do, and with it, my stupidity took me straight to the danger zone. So I sobered up the rest of the evening thinking what a stupid place Las Vegas is, since all anybody wants to do is work themselves up into a state that they lack the courage to approach without the influence. It's still the way I think about getting high, although I expect that when I retire, I  might actually enjoy experimenting with drugs simply for the sake of experimentation.

In the meantime, I don't work for beer, much less live for it and I find all of the cultists appropriately flawed. Which brings me back to Michael Jackson, and Mike Tyson, and Bobby Brown, and Michael Vick, and you get the picture.

In my family I have cancer survivors still alive over the age of 70. So why does Michael Jackson, who has managed to give away over 300 million dollars in a lifetime of charitable giving, die weighing 110 pounds? And the simple unavoidable answer is that he didn't know how to live. He joined the Cult of Beer.

There are people whose character flaws disable them. And somehow we've managed to produce so many apologies for such flaws that there is an industry of rotgut entertainment that puts them at ease. The Hangover is one such film, although it's the best of its kind which makes it slightly transcendent. I could go into the tripartite character of the three amigos who search for their missing friend as three heads of today's contemporary American dude, but that's beside the point. The point is that Vegas invites such flawed characters, and as the popular wisdom says, wealth amplifies character and accelerates desire. All of those dudes were headed for a brick wall of some sort, but instead of giving them the safety zone it would give a normally righteous individual, it gave gasoline to their dysfunctional fires.

The Cult of Beer is a wish for dissolution. It's a perverse pride in self-destruction, a flirting with doom. Like Bill Clinton wanting to get caught. What do you give the man who has everything? An irresistible opportunity to throw it all away. Sometimes they provide it for themselves.

I'm interested in character and in the judgment of character. I want to live in a society that is not afraid of judgment, a civil society. A civil society is self-correcting. An out of control society does what Van Der Luen says, it gives up hope, determines itself to be on the wrong track and accelerates on the bad vector hoping to jump the rails. I understand the perversity of hopelessness. And sometimes I am callous enough to encourage it. It's how I felt about Nationalist South Africa. I said forget the Anti-Apartheid Movement, just let the evil spin out of control until the people couldn't take it any longer. But I don't play that game any longer. I want judgment, daily. I want people to say out loud what they know to be true. Michael Jackson was a freak and he died like a freak because he didn't want to live right. And he had every, every, every opportunity and no excuse.

This is the Era of No Excuses. Beware of the Cult of Beer.