Cobb

Lure of the Guild

There is something retro deep inside me, and I think in all of us, when it comes to dealing with alienation of modern, global life. I think the proper thing to do is to work your way through modern, global life and supplant its alienation with a whiff of the tribal and a considered portion of the guild. You know the guild, the moose lodge, the order of buffalo, the brotherhood of the otter - something like Fred Flintstone had. You see, George Jetson had no running buddies. 

I am reading Gene Wolfe's tales in the Book of the New Sun.

What impresses me now the second time around literarily, since Stephenson's OMVI, is the concept of a small group of men who are self-sustaining in their ways. They could be monks in their monastary, perhaps a royal family in their castle, maybe a group of makers in their hackerspace. Organized around an arcane competence. Prepared to initiate noobs into apprenticeship and grow them into journeymen. Dedicated to sentence fragments with implicit subjects, but descriptive nonetheless. 

From Wolfe comes the Seekers of Truth and Penitence. Aah but maybe it's just little old me finally tasting a good portion of sword and sorcery. As I've read on, I can see how this story goes down the tunnel of a single quest and how different it is from more of what I'd call an 'open world / sandbox' adventure, of which Iain Banks is the master. And I've also gotten most of the way through Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, and see some of the same interesting, but limiting first person-ality. 

This morning I heard the first whiff of the conspiracy theory behind some elaborate and scary intra-agency rivalries that verge on warfare. According to this particular Lt. Colonel, there are some sneaky agencies that run training operations in public and have patsies in place just in case something goes wrong. But I will deal with that at length on its own because that subject would overwhelm this, which is simply the following. 

Since 9/11, I sorta kinda predicted then end of the nation state. Of course I don't know what I'm talking about, because some time later, Colin Powell convinced me that state sovereignty is too powerful for anyone to let go. So state sponsored terrorism remains to me, an evil to be taken quite seriously, and more seriously than any other kind. But that doesn't change the fact that many states have many elements with many agendas, many of which come into and out of power. Today's African National Congress is in much better shape than yesterday's. Today's KKK is pathetic. Today's OWS gets no news. So the nation state continues, but watch for the movements below that level. 

Here in the US, we've gone diversity happy. I am convinced that just about anyone who flies diversity flags is eating their own dog food, much of which they didn't grow themselves. Which is to say that out of 1000 diversity programs, 990 are funded by non-diverse sources. In other words, we have a lot of cliques on the inside that aren't really on the inside. A lot of guilds have politicked their way into permanence, but a dependent permanence. Kind of like the class of people with driver's licenses and gas station credit cards as compared to auto mechanics and petroleum engineers. As long as there are auto mechanics and petroleum engineers willing to work for the public, driver's licenses and gast station credit cards are meanningful, but the guild of diversity is like the guild of driver's license holders. You can call it important. That doesn't make it important.

So all of this depends upon how well the rule of law and open society functions, leveraging the standing of the American general public. But at some point, I have decided to prepare myself for what might come next, which is the degredation of all that. How shall I say it? When it's time to cross the desert, the entire value of your cool low rider is nullified. Time to buy a Jeep.

So I'm interested in, as I said, my own martial education - but in the context of a reasonable guild. Not survivalists, but people whose value transcends the relative luxuries our open society provide today, but are not promised for tomorrow. That means that I need to make real tribal links. 

A 32 Minute Lesson On Integrity

This is the new criticism. You need to understand it.

Obligatory Seriousness on the Harlem Shake

This type of shit happens every century.

The False Majority

It's better to be the king of a small hill, than a prince at a higher elevation.
-- Cobb's Rule #9. 

The last book I just finished reading is Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers. It is a very interesting and good book which goes into some detail about security, trust, society and all things related to rule following and rule breaking. It's very thorough, not very technical and so truthful that it almost sounds obvious. What's extraordinary about it in retropsect is that Schneier told almost no stories from his personal experience. Good on that security.

Schneier is in my T50 - the list of thinkers that I am limiting myself to hearing out for the rest of my life. It's interesting how he sounds a little bit like a boring Gladwell. Gladwell is such a good writer that he makes everything sound exciting and profound. Schneier quotes almost as much as Gladwell, but not quite - still he mentions other folks in my T50, including Nassim Taleb and Clay Shirky, and even though he didn't mention John Boyd by name, I hear a lot of OODA thinking in his talk about the 'Red Queen Effect'.  

At any rate, there are bigger takeaways from this common sense sounding book that I now recongize in my own evolution. And so I remark about it here. 

F1 racing has been my metaphor for the kind of work I want to do and am now doing, 15 years later than when I first really wanted to. What it took me a long time to learn is the cost of largeness. What Schneier described very well in his closing chapters is how the cost of communication in large organizations rises with a factor of each incremental person added and there comes a point at which the technologies and processes are unable to sustain any single-minded agenda. This is precisely a characteristic of what I call information thermodynamics, but what I never quite envisioned was the negative aspect. I understood that within a large organization that it costs money to keep the brass informed about how the business is actually operating, and Schneier did make use of the Dunbar Number. But what I thought was the know-have-nots would simply be dragged along with the know-haves. I didn't think that there might be a point at which it drags down the ability of the organization to accomplish *anything*.

In other words, organizations don't get 'too big to fail', there is literally a point at which they get so big that they *must* fail. The nature of that failure is primarily in what I would call an 'open agenda', but not necessarily the failure of the entity. Xerox, for example, once owned American Express. Hard to believe, but true. While I was working there, ostensibly for the workstation business, Xerox' most profitable division was VanKampen Merritt Investments. They were playing money games on Wall Street but failing to be Xerox, the innovative product company. Soon, small companies like the PC printer division of HP and a company called Adobe kicked Xerox' in what used to be some of their core competencies. 

So, as certain people predicted several years ago, my disinterest in politics has left me to be a Libertarian. But I suppose as I have been called a RINO, then I may be a LINO as well. Except that there's no such thing as a LINO because libertarians seem to have the good sense to know they won't rule, and since they won't - the don't have pretenses to ideological fidelity - or at least they don't bother enforcing a party line. 

It occurred to me this week that you probably could run America with half a million people. That if we were really connected on Facebook Next, and you paid us 600 times our annual salaries, we could take care of 600 people each and we would all do just fine. 

Combine all this and what do you get? Well I get an idea that The System is permanently broken and that when it really comes down to it, there is no such thing as a nation of 300 million. Somewhere around whatever we were in the 1950s in breaks and there is the active nation and there is the passive nation. America keeps struggling to have all of us in the active nation with a real nationalism, but in the next 20 years that's going to break dramatically and we will split into the active nation and the passive nation. We will be more of a civilization than a society and the fakery of all patriotism will be exposed. Not that patriotism is false but patriotism that scales will break. Of course the great news is that we won't amend the Constitution, because that's too difficult. Put another way, democracy > 200 million is a Wicked Problem.

I expect that significant liberal and libertarian subgroups of the American population will have money enough to support the Elon Musks of the world and that they will come to build their cars for our markets. So long as personality and dynamism wants to be rich as in American rich, the active patriots will win the day. And we need fewer of them than we think, I think. I'm fairly confident of this rather in the same way that Vannavar Bush was confident that we wouldn't blow ourselves up with nukes. 

Conservatives aren't who they think they are, by the way. If they think the country is going to hell, it's simply because they think we're all in the same handbasket. As they discover that virtue will out, they will relax. This young generation has had its fair share of douchebags and they won't put up with it despite of all their other wimpy sensitivities. The free love to remain free and they will put down their celery sticks and fight when it comes down to it.

All of this is to say that the Fifty States are in for some real big fun and the Feds are going to have their asses handed to them. I am confident of this - because the states will fail and get right first. Experts will have their way again in the future and bullshit will walk. This is my optimism for the future of everything. We have too many cultural memories to forget how free we have been. That which is too big will fail, the small, smart and agile will perservere, there will be no Idiocracy, because the majority simply will not be clued in, and they will not be able to chain the minds of those who know. 

 

Dreams, Schemes, Prayers, Players & Man's Plans

I don't know what life was like before MLK. I don't know what life was like before Malcolm. I was too young to have experienced either. I know what life was like in my own household - with parents whose minds didn't need much prodding to know what they wanted for me. You see, I cannot imagine that either of those men's minds were full of ideas that never existed before - that their's was an era of great ideas and ours is not. That before them there was nothing and after them only wakes. There is right and wrong. There is stasis and chage. There is grey and hesitation. But there is not progress and there is not regression. 

Some minds are easy to change when they are wrong, such are the minds that bear up our civilization. Some minds refuse to change when they are wrong. Do the combinatorics and calculate the percentages on every subject and you might know the state of the world, but I think the Buddhists and Stoics are right to eschew such global scheming and live in the moment.

A field of red white and blue shivers on the Mall listening to poetry. I heard the iams from the television stumbling my way to the refrigerator this King Day morning. As foolish as I find the very idea of consecrational poems coming from minds younger than those to be consecrated, I heard two words from that fresh face in the January air: 'many prayers'. Many prayers. Many prayers.

Prayer is contemplation of the ultimate in deep meditation. A prayer must take effort because if it can be anything, it is a reckoning with what we know to be true. A prayer must be at long last an acknowledgement and submission to profoundest truth - the truth that serves no man but upon which man's survival depends. In the manner of Christian ethics we submit to God's Grace which flows eternally and we neither earn nor deserve. It is what it is and in prayer it is up to us to recognize. That requires effort and discipline. 

A prayer is not a request. That is a wish. Time spent in preparation for the fulfillment of or arguments in defense of a wish is not prayer, but wishful thinking. Imagining the circumstances under which case the wish comes true is dreaming. It is a fancy, a phancy, a fantasy and the conjures up the fantastic. 

It is often difficult to bridge the space, or quite literally to explain the materiality of change between what has been dreamt and what has been prayed for. We say that dreams come true. We say that prayers are answered. These are passive voice sentences which the human mind attributes any actor in range. God gets most of the blame and praise because a studied God makes more sense than aggregated superstitions and chances. But the instruments of fate are still illusive to us; many claim to be God's hands in action, but we are wise to cast suspicion on such bold pronouncements. Who among us is God's prophet? I dare you. 

Men can scheme. Men can plan and discipline themselves to the tasks of a plan, and make manipulations suitable to the aims of any scheme. We can do so in sunlight or in shadow, but our consequences are real no matter how. We succeed and fail by measurable degrees. We can gauge men's plans and schemes and know who did what according to which plan and under what scheme which tasks were done and which left undone. This is in great contrast to Acts of God, which is nothing more or less than the unfolding of the truth of the Universe, the forces on every boson that ever was, whose materiality is an uncalculable mystery shrowded in infinite distance and unparsably minute fragments of time. But the dramas that guide men's lives and fortunes - we process them swiftly. We inutit it in the arch of an eyebrow. We interpret it in the slouch of a walk. We smell it in desparate breath. We see it written in blood. We know when a family is broken and we know who to blame. We know when a business is collapsed and we know who blew the cash. We know when a building is crumbled or erected, a baby born or a body buried. We know the fathers and mothers of mankinds deeds. We know them because we are them and we know the truth of ourselves whether or not we are apt to admit it. 

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One of Cobb's Rules is to never underestimate the intelligence of people in power, and over the past few years, since I have abandoned the ebb and flow of politics itself, I have come to understand more about the mind and of psychology. I have come to a clearer undstanding of those deceptions that are planned and those that are products of indiscipline or our mere ability to be fooled. And I pay attention to how we backtrack to explain what appears to be. 

One of the great deceptions is that dreams and prayers are as powerful as scheme and plans. They are not, nor will they ever be, because power is always in the hands of men, and never in the hands of chance. Not even in orbit above the planet are tons of equipment held aloft by chance. Don't imagine that your earthly fate is either, my friend. 

Whomever is speaking, however close or distant from the truth, they will offer dreams or schemes. They will present players or prayers. Plans are the affairs of man from which we can annex action to actor - the rest is the working of wishful thinking, fantasy and the dreams of romantic poets, the seductions of youthful lips whispering wanted whims. And this is now as it has ever been. 

Why do minds change, how do we see the world anew? Is it from a review of our plans, assessment of our tasks, calculation of forcasts versus actuals? Or is it a estimation of dreams come true, fantasies realized, prayers answered? 

I have presented this on a day set aside from work to celebrate a dream, but now that it's done, I am going back to work. 

The (Old) Guide to Cobb - Concepts & Terms

Cobbian Terms

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Who is Cobb? What is Cobb?
 Cobb is my second middle name. I am Michael David Cobb Bowen. Most people don't have two middle names. But it is a conservative thing and a tradition in my family to have middle names. To have two, I suppose is double, and Cobb is definitely the most conservative part of my name. So when I decided to blog from an Old School Conservative point of view and yet keep it more personal than ideological I went with Cobb.

Lots of people call me Cobb, and that's OK. It is my name.

Cobb is the name of the blog. I don't speak of myself in the third person as Cobb, I only speak of Cobb, the blog. 

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The Black Political Context  Not only has the black monolith been broken, so has the political solidarity of 'the' black community. I see it this way. Those who have sought to inherit the mantle of the black political vanguard, ostensibly the 'Talented Tenth' have split into three camps.

The majority camp is the Liberal Left. They are aligned with Democrats and Greens. They are about 60%. The majority of blacks vote with them. The second camp is the Progressive Independent camp. They tend to be unaligned. They are about 25% The third camp is the Conservative camp who are aligned with Republicans and Libertarians. They are about 15%.

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What was the original purpose of Cobb? The purpose of Cobb is threefold. First and foremost it is to satisfy my craving to write and engage with everybody far beyond the contexts that everyday life provides. I am a writer and I love to write.

Secondly, it is to address a political agenda.

Thirdly Cobb addresses a cultural agenda.

I try to exemplify in a personal and analytical fashion, the orientation of black Conservative thinking in my generation. While I am a bit unusual as a writer, I think of my situation within America as fairly representative of a typical upper middle class black American suburban family. I think that the distance between mainstream conservatism and black conservatism is short.

In this personal mode of expression, I seek to break down stereotypes about who Conservatives are and how they come to support their ideological positions and I discuss in a Socratic dialog the issues of the day.

Additionally, I do so with particular care and respect for black Progressive politics. I seek to make the differences clear and to talk about the mistakes of Progressivism. As for the black Left, I attempt to keep my disdain from making me tell lies about them, but much of the respect is gone.

With regard to black politics, Cobb is something of a Talented Tenth / Old School project. I think of my audience as all folks who are particularly interested in the intersection of culture and politics and particularly the evolution of black politics in the post-Jim Crow era of American history. I am doing my share to advocate towards an organic black conservative politics in American life.

What is Cobb about now? (2010 & beyond)
Cobb stands as a factotum tracking where I’ve been and my intellectual interests over time. At the current time it serves as a testbed for thought experiments and expository essays about:
Global Economy
Political Philosophy

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Cobb is Not 

Cobb is not about changing or improving race relations. If you can't get along with other ethnics that's your problem. Cobb is not 'for blacks only' it is open source black thought straight from this horse's mouth. If you can't read English, you will find yourself severely handicapped. Cobb is not sponsored by any ideological group. It's syndicated by blog aggregators. Cobb does not coddle. Cobb is not everything about Michael Bowen, it's a project. It had a beginning and it will end. Cobb is not afraid to use profanity. Cobb is not for kids. And Cobb is not Boohab.

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The Old School  

The Old School is a somewhat mythical orientation of conservative black culture and politics. You know it when you see it. The Old School is Christian, it is family oriented, it is unapologetic and bold, it is organic and self-sufficient. It takes little for granted and is ready to go down swinging. It is deeply American and deeply black. It is strong and proud, stubborn and graceful. I think of it engrained in the values and person of my grandparents who beat polio and got optimistically married during the Great Depression. The Old School includes but is not limited
to the Talented Tenth. Whereas the Tenth is on a noble mission, the Old School tends to mind it's own business.

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African Americans  

Black is to African American as Catholic is to Christian. Black is a flavor. African American is a demographic description. Black has meaning, subtlety and context. African American is just a huge bunch of undifferentiated people of African descent.

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Blackfolks & Whitefolks  

Blackfolks are folks who call themselves black. Whitefolks are folks who call themselves white. I am not trying to be demographically accurate or politically correct. I'm just speaking about average Americans with an average amount of racial consciousness who know they fit into one or the other bucket.

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Aggregation
 Aggregation is the black dream of the beloved community in the upper and upper middle classes. It is the purposeful establishment of a pro-black old money Establshishment in the tradition of American money, philanthropy and social exclusivity. It is definitely a Talented Tenth dream.

The 'Aggregate Community' is the next evolution of the Talented Tenth. They will be those who, for better or worse, take control of the legacy of African American history and life. I think the maintenance of this aspect of black history is at risk because of the failure of many African Americans to accurately represent the Old School.

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Statistical Morality
Americans tend to speak about the status of groups of people in statistical terms in order to introduce themselves to subjects concerning them. This is troublesome for two reasons. On the one hand it traffics in stereotypes and reverse-stereotypes about in-groups and out-groups, but does not deal with causality or individuals. It therefore cheapens the quality of discussion and sets up litmus tests and glass ceilings and false dichotomies. Secondly it does not begin to approach with respect to which the dynamic in question is transient. It goes against the principle of discovery.

For these reasons I find sociology to be a discipline that warrants suspicion, the same kind of suspicion economics warrants. However I find that economists tend to be a bit less dogmatic and more self-deprecating in their predictions than sociologists. That is because I believe economists have a great deal more accurate and detailed data than sociologists and thus realize how contingent their models are on complexities beyond reckoning.

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Sherwood Forest
 Sherwood Forest is a metaphor for the less than civilized parts of the black diaspora and of the world in general. It is a place where untoward behavior is the norm and where. as Slick Rick would say "This type of shit happens every day."

The proper attitude to have towards Sherwood Forest and its denizens is benign contempt, for just beyond the edge of the woods is civilization and everyone from the woods are welcome to join. That means, however, that they must live by rules they didn't create in order to benefit from the civilization they didn't create. This also means that those who live outside of Sherwood Forest, be they master or serf, has little business worrying themselves about the dastardly and pathetic deeds which go down there.

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Scientific Animism
 Scientific Animism is the hightened and superstitious belief in information that is presented by scientists or any expert by people unwilling and/or unable to determine the truth value of that information. 'A recent university study shows that...' is an example of a type of story that is taken as an indisputable fact by people who never show an interest in critical thinking. Scientific Animism is a class of logical fallacy of the appeal to authority but is unique that it makes a fetish of scientific discovery without using the scientific method. It takes theory as fact, and finding as universal.

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Eclexia  Eclexia is a sin.

"A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing."

-- Cobb's Rule #1

There is probably no such word as 'eclexia', I just made it up, but the sin is real. It is the fatal attraction to novelty and change. It is the mindless sacrifice of tradition at the alter of the new. It is the inability to find satisfaction in the settled.

Eclexia is characterized by a restless antipathy to the established and an overweening desire to get away from it. The eclexic is eclectic to a fault. Their fatal flaw is that once the novelty of the thing has worn off, once it becomes established, their interest and respect fades rapidly.

Eclexia is a sin because it is fundamentally disrespectful of the efforts made by people who bother to study something specific. It acts against collaboration in solving standing problems. It refuses to focus. Thus the eclexic requires some outre personality which allows him to eschew the 'mundane' tasks that are faced by all of us. In that regard, eclexics are dependent on an established alternative subculture - something that allows them to easily be understood as 'cutting edge' or 'radical' even if they are not talented or committed in any way.

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Cobb's Operating Theories

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The Civil Rights Movement Won 

And there is no going back. The Jim Crow era of America is over. But yeah we have stragglers. They are a distraction, and all such reporting on that distraction is overkill.

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Black Culture is Transparent  

There is essentially nothing about black culture that isn't in the public sphere. There is no 'dirty laundry', it's all public domain. Blackfolks have no secrets worth hiding. There are no 'black things' that other people can't understand, there are only contexts that other people (and black people) are too lazy to understand.

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The Black Monolith is Broken  

There is no single class of blackfolks. There is no single religion for blackfolks. There is no single 'Black Community'. There is no single political orientation, no single mode of cultural expression, no single dialect and no single region of the country for blackfolks. If you see one, then you are thinking in stereotypes.

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Economics Beats Politics
 There is no political agenda for black empowerment that will ever have any more force than that of the economy.

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Racists Are a Minority  

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not want to be racist or be considered racist. There's no money in it, no social benefit in it, and considerable risk.

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Integration Wins  

There is no separated destiny for African America. As America goes, so goes those with the round nose.

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Cobb's Enduring Themes

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Support Your Local Police  

There is no such thing as 'black on black crime'. There are good guys and there are bad guys. There is no reason to try to invent new social experiments.

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Marches are for Illiterates  

If you don't have a pitchfork, torch or billy club, stay off the streets. There is no such thing as a 'political' street. America is a republic, not a township. Write a blog, write your congressmen, get on public access.

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American Metaphors

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Try Strawberry  

America is like McDonald's. Everybody knows the menu is big, but their selections generally don't change. In a lifetime of drinking chocolate shakes, how many times do you select strawberry? People like to complain about America, just as they claim McDonald's is bad for you. What is more accurate is that among a wide variety of choices, they are responsible for poor ones, and after all haven't cooked for themselves.

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The Mercedes Birthright  

Every American inherits a Mercedes Benz at birth. It is the infrastructure of the American system. However, it is up on blocks, the wheels are off, and there is no gas in the tank. You can sit behind the wheel in comfort and pretend that you are driving. You can fall asleep in the back seat, roll up the windows and ignore the world. But you have no idea about the real experience of America until you figure out how to get some wheels and mount them, get that car off the blocks and figure out how to get some gas into that engine. If you figure that out, you'll be able to drive 100 miles per hour. But if you don't bother, you walk like everyone else.

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The Elephant's Right of Way

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Cobbian Personnae

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Them Bowens
The Spousal Unit is my wife.
Boy is my son.
Scholar is my elder daughter.
Sprite is my younger daughter.

Doc is my brother, the LAPD officer
Deet is my brother, the Obama fanatic
Pops, my father, the retired urban studies professor and God fearing Lefty
Moms, my mother, the in-home caregiver and evangelical actress.
Dutz, my dear dreadlocked sister, married to
Mr. T, my piecred college professor brother in law

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Cobbian Associates, Partners & Antagonists
The Existential Partners: These are men I might very well be had my life taken a different turn or God given me real talent.
    Nulan = Craig Nulan, mad genius, hermetic mystic & ethical scold
    Spence = Lester Spence,  superdad, dance floor dervish & brilliant academic
    EC = E.C. Hopkins, perfect gentleman, philosopher king & citizen soldier
    Iz = Jimi Izrael, urban griot, fearless mensch & starchild personified
    Lee =  ubergeek, industrious ai researcher & black felix unger
    Playa = man's man, lady's man & world class unix hacker
    George = George Kelly, aesthetic adept, perfect host & genuine philanthropist

Fish = Michael Fisher, first order black capitalist & machiavel
FN = Wayne, the Field Negro, the last angry black man
P6 = Himself
DS = Darkstar, destroyer of wishful thinking
BB = Brotherbrown, old friend from the neighborhood

Stretch = drinking buddy, frat brother & firefighter
Mr Jones = family friend, civic patriarch & private banker

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Cobb's Rules

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cobb

1. A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing.
2. There is Marriage, and there is everything else.
3. Talk what you know.
4. Civilization is where you put it.
5. Don't second guess people.
6. Always have stretch goals.
7. Never trust anyone whose shoes cost more than your whole day's pay.
8. An enemy is someone who doesn't mind if you fail.
9. It's better to be the King of a small hill, than a Prince at a higher elevation.
10. An early start beats fast running.
11. Perfect is the enemy of good.
12. The Planet is fine.
13. None of your ideas are any good until somebody else can take advantage of them without your permission.
14. People don't have weakenesses so much as they overuse their strengths.
15. If the poor and oppressed knew how to work the system, they wouldn't be poor and oppressed.
16. It is never a good idea to underestimate the intelligence of people in power.

Corollary Wisdom

What do you give a man who has everything? An irresistable opportunity to throw it all away.

The Devil's Advocate only argues because he is disgusted and contemptuous.

No matter where you park your car, the birds will always find it.

How to Handle Black People: A Beginner's Manual

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Cobb's Bitter Enemies

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 Mr. Stupid
 I am the enemy of empowered ignorance.

The Coalition of the Damned  

People who spend all of their time jumping on anti-establishment bandwagons are a drag on politics and reason.

The Dainty Dillitantes  

I'm sick and tired of so-called adults who are shocked at the barbarity of human beings. Beware of the phrase "I would like to think that.." It is by definition, wishful thinking. Also watch for "I can't believe that in (insert year hear) we still have..."

The Eclexic Relativists  

The first thing you will notice about these folks is that they will go anywhere in the planet (but mostly to Sherwood Forest) to come up with a counterexample which satisfies their arguments. You can't drive your SUV because the Bambuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest don't need them. Their multicultured murals may be nice to look at, but their ideas are about as thin as the paint.

The Eternal Barbarians  

Also known as 'The Element'. Thugs, gangsters, pimps, whores, perverts, derelicts, haters, liars, crooks, con men and their hangers-on and wannabees.

The Tribalists 

People who believe that race, ethnicity, country of origin, or sexual preference are a permanent feature of the human soul and should be recognized as such in law and standing are the bitter enemies of humanity itself.

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Coalition of the Damned

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Cobb: The Coalition of the Damned
The Coalition of the Damned. People in Lebanon are attending the funeral of their former prime minister. He was assassinated by a suicide bomber with a car ...

 

Cobb: Humiliation & Fortitude

So things hang in the balance for the parties directly invovled and activism on either side ratchets up the attention given. Depending on which way this thing goes, I may have to worry about my niece making a bad name for herself among the cop fraternities of Providence. Sounds like 1966.

If I had my way, I'd just call the whole thing off. Cop families wouldn't have to worry about whether dad has a job, student families wouldn't have to worry about whether son has an education. Everybody gets chewed out and humiliated and all parties recognize how much they need mutual respect. Humiliation this time, fortitude next time.

Cobb: Devin's Advocates

There is a difference between criticizing the system and dogging the system, and those who might bother to read the DA's report might notice that there are better ways to address the problem than to fire a scapegoated symbolic officer. In fact, Bratton has done so in retraining the force with regards to the standard felony stop. In one scenario, officers will park their cruiser within 10 feet of the back bumper of the suspect's vehicle in such a way that the car will not have enough space to pick up enough speed to be deadly. I know this because my brother's a cop and has been retrained. But I wonder if those who dog the system know that reform has already taken place. I imagine that if they were constructively engaged with the LAPD, they would know such things, but that is not the aim of Tony Muhammad, nor any other unelected mouthpiece of the Coalition.

It must be sad not to know how wrong you are, how politically ineffective are the desires you have been exhorted to champion. It must be frustrating to be in such a state of mind that you only feel you can gain if the police lose. But no matter how sad and frustrating things get for the Coalition of the Damned, they're simply wrong. They have picked a poor set of spokesmen and a poor set {Stanley Miller, Devin Brown, Tookie} of symbolic victims. I hope, for their sake, sooner or later they'll determine that they're on the wrong te

Cobb: Make Me!

Doc's patience is being tried by knucklehead members of the Coalition of the Damned. Mine too.

Their new prophet of rage, Tony Muhammad, blasted cops for not raising the dead. Well actually, that's not the whole truth, he blasted firemen for not raising the dead. Well, that's not the whole truth either, because Tony Muhammad wanted to raise a ruckus at the funeral of the dead homie in question as an opportunity to get in cops' faces. That's more like it. And so when he and his bodyguards (why do you bring bodyguards to a funeral? ) didn't disperse at the order of the police the conversation went south.

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Cobb's Terminology

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Classes of Racism

The reasoning behind it has to do with the notion that all racist acts are not equal either in intent or effect. The state does have a compelling interest in insuring that society does not exclude groups but I don't see that it is useful in policing all instances of racist discriminations. For this reason I have come up with three classes of racist offense. These of course are informal and don't stand up to legalistic definitions but you should get the picture:

Class Three - Background Noise

This will include all such insults, slights and disrespect as is generally expected to be found everywhere in this nation. Examples include but are not limited to being ignored by cabbies, flying confederate flags, nazi propaganda, being mistaken for the help, being shown costume jewelry, being asked one's opinion of, or to account for the opinions of the Fungibles, and most nigger calls.

Class Two - Political Intransigence

Class Two racism involves denials of public accomodation or private standing which are not criminal, yet grossly unfair and unjust. Such acts would include imposition of glass cielings, racial profiling, white flight, medical misdiagnosis, educational tracking, false arrest, false imprisonment, racist vois dire, racist jury nullification, denials of service with plausible deniability, any institutional individual or institutional racism which must be tried in civil courts and all such active bigotry one associates with hate groups which fall short of incitement.

Class One - Crime

Theft, criminal defamation, cross burnings (now), hate crimes, murder, rape & all that stuff for which America has never made any extraordinary effort to repair.

 

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Cobb: Effective Resonance

Colorblindness cripples. How much it does so becomes apparent when its principles are applied without nuance. The plaintiffs who argued their case before the Supreme Court this week sounded to me to be of the persuasion that there should absolutely be no regard to color. This is a problem.

I'm not close enough to the law to understand what the Constitution directs historically with regard to its ability to percieve race but I do have a principle I think which ought to be applied. I call the idea 'effective resonance'.

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Cobb: The Old School Core Values

The Old School Core Values

Pride

We are African Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities. We are proud of our heritage, and respect the lives, triumphs and tribulations of our forebears in this country and beyond. We aim to represent their greatest hopes for us and honor their memory.

Patriotism

The United States of America is our home, not simply by default but by choice. We take our duty to our home seriously and we defend it. We seek to improve it by our work and values and leave it better than we found it.

Family

We are extended families and we put family first. It is the primary organization to which our lives are dedicated. We fight for the proper upbringing of our children. We demand respect and consideration of our elders. We love and support our brothers and sisters.

Industry

We work twice as hard and sometimes get half as far, but we work with dignity and we expect and enjoy our rewards. We are not materialistic but we know the value of a dollar. We seek self-improvement through creativity, dedication and effort in our jobs, businesses and partnerships.

Piety

We have abiding faith in God and the principles of righteousness. We strive to be true to transcendent values and take the long view of our purpose on Earth. We conduct ourselves as vessels of spirit and we guard our own souls and the souls of others from corruption.

Liberty

We believe in the rule of law and rights of people to be free and to determine their own fate. We fight tyranny and oppression of all kinds keeping in mind the battles of those who struggled and died that we might be free.

Pluralism

We believe in a tolerant and open society, and we welcome all people to enjoy its benefits and responsibilities.

I've been thinking about a simpler way to express that perplexing thing that is my Conservatism. Yesterday somebody asked me about why I'm a Republican, suggesting that I'm a minority within a minority. I quickly replied that, no in fact I'm in the majority party whose president was re-elected, and then we (actually) went down that path of whether the President is legitimately the President. But then I got to the point of her question and headed back towards my epiphanies of 2003 which include references to Stalinism and respect for the middle class. Nothing I could explain without appearing to be an egghead, which I am, but every brilliant idea needs an elevator pitch.

For now, I'll stick to the core values, but I'm working on the pitch.

The Gamma Male Theory

Was it Chris Rock who gave us a guide for newly married men to respond to their wives' endless tirades about their day? "Uh huh. No kidding? I don't believe it. I told you that bitch was crazy." These are the proper grunts, stretched into phrases of support and understanding. But the last one is key, because there's always a crazy bitch. It's as true as 'follow the money', cherchez la femme.

But some machos don't have time to reflect on the need some women have to have their daily behavior analyzed, commented upon and put into proper persepctive. And into that gap deftly leaps the gamma male. You know who I'm talking about. First seat at the fern bar, just waiting to share stories about how all men are dogs, especially his man. And what woman can resist a male sob sister, given that Chris Rock must surely be another typical sexist brute?

It occurs to me that in Hollywood, there are never stories of infidelity between homosexual men, and in this I find a great deal of intrigue. Everybody in the English speaking world will know by the end of this week that Kevin Clash, millionaire friend of Oprah and superstar voice of Elmo will have resigned from Sesame Street because of allegations of sexual impropriety. What kind of sexual impropriety? Apparently he liked teenaged boys. Well, teenaged boys under the magic number of 18. 18 year olds and 19 year old boys are just peachy if perhaps slightly unfashionable, but what do I know? I know that the Liberaces of the world never lose their fortunes and possibilities for employment through the putrid public scandals attached to infidelity.

That's because when it comes to such matters for gay promiscuity, as they say in the PC dictionary, 'not that there's anything wrong with that'. 

I'm not being fair of course. I'm one of those individuals for whom the prospect of gay marriage seems downright oxymoronic. But we don't need to get into that. Surely single hetero men are legendarily promiscuous and nobody dings them for that. Surely they should be celebrated, and aren't they? If gay men were allowed to marry, surely their transgressions would be as serious and Hollywood would scandalize them equally. Do you believe that? I don't.

What I believe is this.

In the wild and wolfish world that is Hollywood, it is generally accepted that a certain quota of degenerate sexuality is natural. Hollywood, according to this theory, is just chock full of beautiful people that every human on the planet wants to bed. That is just human nature, and human nature abhors a vaccuum of libertine booty snatching. If everybody were as hot as Hollywood hot, then they'd be screwing like bunnies all the time. So of course uninhibited beautiful people are always on the boink, that is how it's supposed to be. Of course this makes for a dog eat dog world of youth and beauty - they go hand in hand. The ordinary people in flyover country, who are by Hollywood standards, unfuckable, have to settle for monogamy, and they dress it up with fake solemnity and call that tedious condition Marriage. But all people who are married are really hypocrites because they really don't love each other, they're just locking in a contract on the best they can do. Proof? Divorce rate. And we would have learned this sooner if we weren't a nation of regressive homophobic prudes. 

SO

The more we can prove that all of America's monogamous prudery is hypocritical, the more we can accept the real truth of human sexuality that is the truth of Hollywood's beautiful people. Movie stars, rock stars, TV stars. Everybody wants to be one. Right?

In the news business, which is owned by the entertainment business, we know that scandal sells. It monetizes the Hollywood theory of human sexuality, youth and beauty. And there is nothing so deliciously juicy as the gamma male nailing the married man. Because all men are dogs, and it takes one to know one, except the gamma male is different, because he is not a hypocrite.

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Boy Scouts & Pedophilia

The worst thing about the Boy Scouts is that they're awfully serious about their programs. And if you are a traveling consultant like I am, there is no amount of assuaging you can do which is up the level of guilt you must bear by half-doing it. You can't just let your kid be a Scout. They pull you in. Nevertheless, I wanted to participate a bit, got certified in Youth Protection, and helped out with my local troop. 

Boy Scout Youth Protection certification is onerous. I will say that without question it is more difficult than traffic school which I've done twice. About 40% of the matters and situations you study are somewhat reasonable common sense.  The rest gives you an indication of how little, in our everyday lives, we think about the implications of being around child molesters. I can tell you that's what the Scouts are today and have been since I've been involved for about 7 years as a parent.

Clay Shirky snarked a remark today that rubbed me all backwards. But who am I to take tweets seriously? But the upshot of his remark was that one can expect that pedophiles can get away with more in organizations that are homophobic. My retort was that it is amazing how much slander you can get into one tweet. So obviously I take issue with the charge of homophobia. I also disagree with the counter-intuitive argument. But most of all I resent the attitude.

There's not much I can do about my resentment towards anyone's attitude. It unnerves me when intelligent people who are otherwise deserving of respectful consideration have their mental and ethical transmissions pop into neutral and drift into oncoming traffic. So I'm unnerved; I'll get over it.

What to think about the Scouts? Well, an accusation of homophobia is like an accusation of racism. How much is six pounds of homophobia? That's a matter for you and your neighbors to discuss. Despite the fact that we are chockablock with meddlesome people whose mental wellbeing seems to cry out for their every social desire to be legislated, we still haven't turned over the country to such fashion police. I can't say that I'm sanguine about the longer term prospects, but at least we know political correctness when we hear it. Is New Hampshire more homophobic than South Dakota? If you had to scratch your head more than you might about Michigan vs Mississippi then there might be hope for your objectivity yet. That doesn't change the fact that we're already aware of the stereotypes which affect our judgment. My point here is that people generally live in communities where their social expectations are in the median. So if six pounds is enough to cause you outrage, chances are that your neighbors are outraged too. But what does your outrage matter on the national stage?

That should be a matter of objective measurement. 

So I would like to know, as a matter of objective measurement, what can be inferred by the number of pedophiles in the general population and their rate of apprehension, vs that in Scouting. I quite clearly recall that when the matter was dealt with in the Catholic Church that the numbers told the tale that the organization fared better in identifying the perpetrators. After which all of the noise became moot, despite the controversy. 

I must say in this and in many matters that I have the advantage of indifference which is quite apart from disinterest. I have a Randian distaste for disinterest.  I never say it doesn't matter one way or another. It does. But from my point of view, I'd much prefer that we seek an objective standard. Let it be six pounds without question, how you react is your business.

I've twice taken the USADA to task (up to a point of indifference) for what I percieve to be a radical standard of evidence in its dogged persuit of Lance Armstrong. Considering the amount of power they seem to hold over such matters of the fate of cyclists who break the rules of that sport - to me they seem as much as a civil court - they certainly don't operate in ways that would be acceptable in an actual court of law. The same can be said about the Boy Scouts. The amount of scrutiny we give adults around Scouts at our events is Orwellian. OK let's say six pounds of Big Brother. The fact of the matter is, that it is a clear violation of Scout policy for there to be less than two adults present at any pickup or dropoff point, for example. If an event is over and a parent is late, and there's just one kid left, there had better be two adults present. Think about your kids and how you pick them up and drop them off for school or over a friend's house. I'm sure most families are not up to the Scouting standard, one that is necessary in light of what we know about child predators. I've seen the grated nerves of Scout leaders, personally.

What little I've heard about the news on NPR this evening which might be behind Shirky's reasoning is that the Scouting standard has been responsible for booting suspected gay leaders and suspected pedophiles with a ridiculously tendentious evidentiary standard. Yes, well that's the problem with zero tolerance. We all have that same problem. It is the same problem as zero tolerance of homophobia.  The good news is that the Boy Scouts recognize the ambit of their influence and don't go trawling for other people's misdeeds under some inflammatory non-standard. The bad news is others do and so we get unnerved. We'll get over it. The Boy Scouts have defined their six pound weight limits, and you don't get to be a Boy Scout in any way unless you are certified against that standard.

Of course that wasn't always the case. To get fired from the Boy Scouts of America as a suspect of pedophilia is a rather serious indictment and the process is well understood in the here and now. I don't know which other organizations might have publicly disclosed their history, rules and actions to a similar degree aside from the Catholic diocese of various major cities in the US.  The stories in the news that I read today gave their egregious examples from the 70s - you remember the 70s don't you? Some standards of those days wouldn't fly today, for that there's no doubt or controversy. But today's Boy Scouts are a strong and proud organization which I defend against flippant charges. 

Yes, they are ahead of the law, and when it comes to pedophilia, I think that's a good thing, and so do the people in my neighborhood.

Associated Stuff:

• Rude Questions About the Catholic Priesthood
• The Depravity Scale 

The One True Religion

I would like to serve myself
And in all ways preserve my health
And in all things my conscience be
In all its force designed by Thee
The One True God of all there is
i.e. e.g. to wit and viz
The unity of pen and sword
Of mind and might
Of deed and word
Of Heaven's light in mankind's soul
And virtue's everlasting role. 

Harold Bloom has put forth one of the few genuinely new ideas I've heard. It is this, he centers our ideas about humanity in the Western Canon, in Shakespeare primarily. That is not too surprising. What is truly surprising and new is that he compares the authors of the Bible to Shakespeare. In other words, he implies without insistance that the Bible, as a canonical work of literature has its merits as any other work of literature. 

Absorbing this implies that everything about the best ideas human beings are able to absorb can be found expressed in the best literature. Therefore the Bible should be read as literature and that the ideas presented therein should be judged on their literary merit and in the ineffible way that critics like Bloom and all readers must deal with the text. Bloom warns not to read too much into the author by way of the text but to read everything the text says and implies about its subjects, especially how it makes us think as it directs our thoughts. I take this to mean that reading is a sort of possession, it is ours to consider the nature of the possession itself, not the nature of the spellcaster.

This aligns with my early polytheisms and the meme of religion as mankind's first education. It therefore transmutes in every way the roles of the religious and those institutions built around them. There is no difference between that moral instruction of any human author, and thus no lesser greatness in those who identify our spirit in their writing work. Writing literature, teaching literature is ministry. The secular professor of English, professes his faith in the literature he teaches to liberate the souls of the readers. 

I say this just having finished Charles Stross' fourth in the Laundry Series - the Apocalypse Codex. And so a new circle is complete for me (wow), linking literature, science fiction and religious texts all in the business of creating in humanity its own humanity. And in so doing, the framework for all of the humanities has become clear. I have Voltaire's realization confirmed again. There is one true religion. 

God,  it takes a lot of time to program a proper mind.

Left vs Right & Why Parties Lie

I have moved through a number of levels of political engagement over the past decade and I have come to know that without my own personal determination to get to the bottom of things, it would be very difficult to escape the useless drama. But I can offer some fundamental insights which I find to be useful in understanding why there is permanent irreconcilability in the mainstream. In other words I'd like to share some big picture basics, even though I don't really 'do politics' any longer. 

You cannot get close to understanding American politics unless you have about six large buckets for the general ideologies in play with the knowledge that these are in motion. Most folks merely consider their own foils rather than what actually exists. It took me a year merely to find my own place in the broad American Right. My categories work something like this. There is the Marxist Left, the Progressive Left, and the Social Liberal. The Social Liberal can be broken out into those casually vs seriously engaged. I think Obama's majority is the casual Social Liberal - those Clinton Democrats who simply could see no compelling reasons to consider a Republican candidate at the national level. Independents come in two flavors as far I can see and they are both generally skeptical, but I think they are mostly issue driven and largely disengaged from ideology. On the Right, there are Social Conservatives, Neocons, Right Libertarians and Paleocons. The main difference between neocons and paleocons comes down to foreign policy and matters of international law. 

All that said, I firmly believe there is fundamental and permanent difference between the Right and Left over the role and scope of government and I explain it in terms of the following two axioms.

The Right seeks to defend the rights of 'the family' from the dysfunctions of government. The Left seeks to use the power of government to protect from the dysfunctions of 'the family'.

By 'the family' I basically mean all non-government private associations, meaning business, religion, community and family. It boils down to a question of the legitimacy of agreements between people. In other words, which 'law' is best. This is all about a contest of governance. What should be the authority and what scope should that authority take? It is the relationship between people and this sort of question that determines the shape of their politics.

The second axiom is less binding but I find it quite illuminating. 

The typical person on the Left loves everyone in general and nobody in particular. The typical person on the Right dislikes everyone in general but loves particular individuals. 

This is a general observation that quickly demonstrates where ones tendencies fall on questions of rights and liberties. People on the Left will argue about broadly enforced standards from which nobody should be immune, and people on the Right will argue about what some particular people ought to be able to do, no matter what, and the rest of the world be damned.

 The American Congress goes to work every day as do the bureaucrats of every agency in every district, municipality, county and state. They all go to sleep at night. So whatever lies they live with -- well, human beings are very adaptable. In other words, it doesn't kill Ds or Rs to do their job, nor do they kill each other. There is an ideological scrim (and script) the floats above the business of government that the press samples and serves up hot. So what? 

The job of politics is to convince people who don't know what's going on that their interests are being served. Public relations is a lie. Every party line is a lie. The details of life simply cannot be represented in the space of what we Americans call political debate. Every press release is an abstraction. All there is, is the LAW and the POLICY. The law is the agree-upon rule, the policy is how much attention the law gets, and then there's REALITY. It is impossible for elected officials to represent reality, because reality doesn't fit within the scope of policy, and policy doesn't reflect the law. 

The ideological difference between my kind of folks on the Right and Progressives, is that we're not trying to get policy to cover every aspect of reality and thus lead the crafting of more and more law. Because the more you try to get policy in line with reality, the more you need some agency to police and reconcile policy with reality, the more you need to convince constituents that you are doing a good job, the more you need their ascent to justify your attempts to add more law and policy. It's a never ending circle that always contradicts itself in the end. Now remember what I said about the first Axiom. Who wants to expand government policy and law and who wants to reduce it? 

Democrats have to lie about what government is capable of doing because their intent and direction is to lay down standards from which nobody is immune, using government power to protect against the dysfunctions of private action. 

Republicans have to lie about what government is doing wrong because their intent and direction is to protect extraordinary individuals who really matter, leveraging private interest to protect against the abuses of government power.

Now let me talk about the Tea Party. Firstly by saying that they are American citizens who can say whatever the hell they like. All they're trying to do is elect people who think the way they do. But they are also not mainstream Republicans and are disorganized and spontaneous on purpose. That's right, on purpose. The Tea Party is less successful and will be less successful than Newt Gingrich's Contract With American candidates. There are a lot of reasons for this I won't go into. The Tea Party is a single issue movement whose basic gripe is against taxation. That's nothing really new. They simply want to defund government, it is a simple and simplistic distilled essence of what the broad American Right wants out of government. LESS. The GOP establishment cannot govern, nor win elections on such a narrow single issue platform. So it's their job to co-opt the message of the Tea Party, capitalize on its energy,etc, etc. 

The reason the Tea Party touches a nerve is because its principle contradicts a fundamental myth about the Republican Party - that it is the party of the rich businessman, and the TP crowd, which is mostly rabble, are neither rich, nor businessmen. They are populist, grass roots, with no central authority and 57 different flavors. And pesky. I guess. I live in luxuriant Southern California, we have Chai Spice and Oolong, but not much generic tea activity. 

I believe that the fundamental principle of the Tea Party is correct and proper, that our government is too large, too intrusive, and has too many laws and regulations that restrict my liberties and take too much money out of my pocket. Unlike the rabble, I understand that there are ways to reduce the size, scope and regulatory excess of government that have nothing to do with taxation. In other words, I don't live in a fantasy world in which I actually expect to defund government and thus lower my taxes. I know very well that tax breaks are leveraged through sophisticated and expensive lobbying.

Other than that, I pay no attention to the Tea Party and their antics, whatever they may be, have nothing to do with the way I view the six buckets. They're not a permanent bucket, and as I said, will be less successful than Newt's Contract. Like Ross Perot, nobody with think about them in 4 years. Why? Because they're street people, and street people don't change politics in the most powerful nation on the planet. Who are we kidding?

Here is what a 20 year veteran political operator told me. 17% of the electorate does their own research, is actually informed and votes accordingly. The other 83% can and will be swayed by campaigns. The business of politics is to get the 83%. Whatever works, works. It's not democracy, it's marketing. This is what the professionals who run the business of campaigns understand implicitly. I learned this about 5 years ago. As a business intelligence & IT professional, I understand what it takes to keep precise, accurate & timely data available for the use of organizations - so I have some good ideas as to how the energies of information provision are organized. In the general electorate, they are not organized - it would be too expensive, and after all, only 17% care.

After writing this morning, I considered the question of electronic voting. I want you to think of what Jeff Bezos has done in creating Amazon.com, what has been done to create Pay Pal (Elon Musk) and what has been done to create the iTunes Store. All created within the last decade or so. I've worked with credit card companies as well. So now it's my turn to ask a question. Why do you think that voting has not been done on the internet, even though banking has. The answer is because it would completely subvert the way government, press and the political parties operate their control of what the public is thinking relevant to elections and policy. The excuse made is about 'voter fraud'..

Again these are subjects that have to do with the mechanisms of voter registration, fundraising, and the contact points between party operations and the public at large. I have been inside of that process and neither party wants it changed. The information revolution has already bypassed the American electoral process, because that's the way the parties want it. 

The Democrats say what their bosses want them to say. The Republicans say what their bosses want them to say. That is how the sausage is made. There are only X number of issues in the news cycle, and it's a top down process. The opinion makers decide how to frame the issue according to POLICY and you consume their vetted responses and arguments.

Right now, today, you can't tell me jack about what's going on in the Horn of Africa, because that's not in play. That's not what's on the primetime political menu. Listen, I've been nationally broadcast on NPR in case you forgot. You talk about what the market wants to hear, and the parties are the market makers. Period. 

Blades & Books

I know why I didn't read Wuthering Heights when I was in the 7th grade. It's because it was the best book my teacher said she had ever read for her personally, and I didn't want to be like her, personally. The President of the United States was pretending not to be a crook and I didn't believe him. I wanted to be an astrogator, like Starman Jones. I had no need for the past or the present. Only the future. Only the future.

The future was unlimited to my fragile mind and seemed to be the only place I could be free.

Inverting the mantra
I spitefully said
Live for tomorrow, today we are dead

Today lingered on in the grip of the past
To hurry the future
Required the Blast

I looked all around and there was nothing there for me. Lady or Tiger was a game for those who politely asked for doors to be ope'd.

Enduring the grind and braving the narrows
I sharpened my mind amongst the straight arrows.
Scythwise I bent escaping my ghetto
Palms open, nose clean, secreted stilleto.

Every day out here on the nets I suffer the pangs and longings of those who want to inherit video codecs. They want a million luxuriant lines of code for free so they can be smart shoppers. They loathe the laws that bind them and hate the masters of the privy universe. Oh prithee demolish copyright so we might take videos of ourselves and our pain without tithing the lords. Do this for our hordes, please hordes. 

Blades & Books
There are guns and movies and movies about guns and movies, but swords and books are better. How are they going to ban them? There is a silent minority of self-improvement to exemplify all that is human and worthy. They don't require such institutions as do we. They would rather self-sustain than be a part of the movement. I don't know where they live, and that's not important - it's probably part of the plan. 

How is it that we in our lives do not have time to learn the bones of our own bodies? How do we become sensitive to the manipulations of councils who never send a man after us, but would only condescend to sell an inferior product at an inflated prices? Is this our oppression, the poverty of 3G in a 4G future? Today you are dead.

I am to become a man in the now. Appreciative of gifts of the past. I have realized my mortality and I am not friends with it.

I have exhausted my patience with the culture of resentment as they whine about the dimensions of their cultural and socio-political Gordian knots. I will have my swords, and my tomes. The rest is noise. 

The Strategic Air Command Parent

I'm not a helicopter parent, I'm a Strategic Air Command Parent. I basically have five levels of engagment which are roughly equivalent to DEFCON. I have never had to go to DEFCON 1, and have only been once to DEFCON 2.

As a reminder, DEFCON stands for defense condition, and I think it is appropriate to consider parenting to be an exercise in defense readiness. We understand that as parents we are firstly successful and civilized adults. Our children are not. We defend our sanity in the same way we defend our civilization, by removing from our society those who defy it. In the case of our children this means restraining their free reign in our home and their free will in our lives. But it also implies that at some point they would need to be kicked out of the house in those situations in which their activity brings unpardonable shame or legal action upon it. That would represent a state of war between parents and children, in which the children must lose that thing they've only earned through love and trust, which is the dedicated protection of their parents. I will not protect a criminal or psychopath in my home.  

Defense condition	Exercise term	Description	Readiness	Color
DEFCON 5	RELAXED	Come and go as you please, but let us know what's up.	Normal readiness	Blue
DEFCON 4	EYEBALLED	Give us a plan and an outline of the day.	Above normal readiness	Green
DEFCON 3	RESTRAINED	Checking hourly on what you are required to be doing. Extensive questions and answers.	Medium readiness	Yellow
DEFCON 2	GROUNDED	You ask permission to do everything. You eat and poop on our schedule.	War readiness	Red
DEFCON 1	EXPELLED	Authorities are involved.	Maximum readiness	White

My kids are not the coolest people I know, but they are some of the best people I know. I tell them this on the occasions that it becomes obvious. They each have done rather well and have given me a great deal of pride, but my starting and basic underlying principle remains. You are uncivilized and you need to grow up. My job is to provide the right environment, to make myself available and to be the man that I am while giving them a special window into my opinions, thoughts and feelings. I do not run a democracy, I run a workshop. This is how we are civilized. These are our values, our ideas, our morality. This is what inspires us, this is what is fun, this is what we find offensive. Clean your room. Do your chores. Finish your homework. Do I have to tell you everything? The usual.

The Spousal Unit and I generally run on two different levels. This has evolved from our temperament and our schedule. I enjoy my solitude and in my career I have often been on the road. So I am rarely at Defcon 3. I stay at 5 and regularly weigh in at Defcon 4. When I go to Defcon 3, everybody notices. It is the kind of attention that makes them uncomfortable. I may have some outsized notions, but my scrutiny can be of the exasperatingly whithering sort. Don't disappoint Dad. My wife, on the other hand, starts and remains on 3, pretty much all of the time, or perhaps it seems that way to me. I am the one who looks at them in the eye and calls them a slob. My wife provides the verbose hectoring. Clean your room x 5. I'm not going to tell you again. Did you clean it? OK you're grounded. 

Everybody asks Mom if it's OK to go to place X or Y. She handles all of the logistics, details and trivia that I cannot be bothered with - like the names of the parents, the friends. I am the one who whispers in the ear of my daughter on the way to the prom. "Make memories you will always fondly remember, and none you will regret". In short, I am strategic and the wife is tactical. 

For about 80% of the things involving money, and all of the things in which several factors must be considered, the Unit comes up to the room, sits on the bed and waits for me to clear my head and swivel around in my desk chair. She gives me her look of exasperation or weariness and explains the situation. I am the calmly rational who consideres, weighs and voices all of the implications. Occasionally we need a spreadsheet and a calandar, sometimes a letter needs to be written. These are my strengths. They don't cheer her up, but she can move again. My wife is a shark of home economics. She is relentless. I am the great and powerful Oz. 

There is something about being SAC parents that we notice, which is that we don't have hostility. My daughter recently went with her scout troop to Orlando and did talk to us once that week. But she was the one who mentioned to us how odd it was that some other girls wanted to do anything *but* talk to their parents. They do actually like and admire us as we do them. We *do* provide strategic airlift, and our kids know that if they sound the alarm we are going on full alert to get them whatever it is they need. And ther are times when they will tell us that we spoil them. We are comfortable enough so that their contribution to the running of the house is only chores - they don't have to pitch in. The money they earn on odd jobs or from saving their allowance lets them buy those special shoes. What we've been trying to get them to do is exercise judgment. That said, some are better than others. But the point is that our aim is to establish the family relationship in such a way that they will realize how outside in life, nobody has necessarily got your back, or is necessarily interested that you are civilized. 

Of all the things we stress, these are the most important things, and we're confident that they know that they have souls and are working to protect them from the skullduggery and vulgarity of our society. We do not shelter them so much as express our revulsion at that which is revolting. We have enough evidence to suggest that their tastes are not naive nor pornographic. And so Netflix and Rdio are open without monitoring as is Facebook and everything else. I'm not sure we could have done that on an entirely secular basis. So we've insisted that they get their Christian education although without any restraints on picking a denomination. I think that choice was lucky although in retrospect it is precisely the course that I took in my youth - though a series of different Christian churches only one of which I found adequate. They've always had VBS and youth group friends. 

Now that Christopher is off at college, but just a long commute away, I've promised to have a monthly lunch with him. It has only been a week and the balance of things has already dramatically changed. I am spending more time with my daughters already, and nobody has vacuumed. We'll see how else my role will change. Three years from now, I'll have three kids in college. That's going to be.... wow. But even now, transititioning from being a parent to being an investor is how I'm looking at it. They're already promising to put me in a good home when the time comes. Hoo boy.

Nice Notes from a Neo-Victorian

Ever since I read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, I have considered myself something of a Neo-Victorian. That means I am a person who likes a hierarchical society with long standing traditions, fiscal prudence,  a consolidated cause & effect worldview, a firm utilitarianism, an unwavering appreciation for natural materials and the natural world, the submission of the personal to the principled, emotional restraint & modesty, dedication to the life of the mind and discipline in all things. Stephenson illustrates these values at length, and I believe that he holds them as well as I witness them in his more admirable protagonists. 

As we come into a finalization of the first epoch of the Information Age it occurs to me that American society has its share of Neo-Victorians and their adversaries. Let's call them Pagans for a moment and leave it at that.

Now I just consumed the entirety of Downton Abbey this year, and something struck me this morning about the way the regal family spent their days with regard to the information that they sent and received. Obviously since they were upper class, they did not receive a great number of people into their home. But they did get the news of the world from that channel, on most pressing matters, and then through personal correspondance for matters of a personal nature, and then impersonal stuff was gotten through the newspapers and various rumor mills associated with the lower class gossip and intrigues. In the TV series a great number of scenes began with the head butler or one of the daughters receiving a note. And this too reminded me of the film Dangerous Liasons. The content of these letters often drove the plot and suspense as they were slowly revealed to the audience who would know in advance of the various characters what news was what.

American Pagans are reminding us all to get away from our computers, texting phones, gaming consoles and television sets and go outdoors and Do Something (physical). Presumeably because there is nothing of value in our personal notes.  Whereas the Cult of the Tanning Booth and the People of the Tramp Stamp are always eager to exercise their bodies in multiplicative ways, we Neo-Victorians, also known derisively as Geeks, Nerds and Bookworms tend to stay close to our information portals. As the pagans take umbrage to our love handles, spindly arms, blotchy skin, pale faces, long whiskers and/or bed heads as deterministic markers of unfitness, we look askance at the vacuity of their social media. I can't think of anyone who has a habit of actually reading good literature who stoops to hand gestures in self-portrature other than in mockery of those for whom various combination of fingers signals real meaning. 

Simply because it's written doesn't make it virtuous, but one cannot deny that literacy leads to law. What does physicality lead to? More importantly, where does it lead today and do we really need that? 

Anyway, I'm very pleased with the ability for our emails to communicate in our personal correspondance great volumes, and I tend to subjugate the medium for the meaning and the message - never conflating the two. I cannot discount what I get from the web, et al, any more than one might dismiss one's university education. It just moves in a different time and space. 

The Octopus Conundrum

This picture is hilarious. It illustrates an interesting problem that political activists have. As part of my ongoing development of the Peasant Theory, I am interested in a kind of bottom line question which is 'Who is your Leviathan'? That question brings to the front, the issue of loyalty to the validity of an idea. But even before an idea is propagated, people have to perceive a problem. And so the Octopus Conundrum asks 'Do you have a leg to stand on?"

I mean everybody has an alternative, and that generally involves breaking one of the rules of the institutional they seek to destroy or reform. In the parlance of the OC, the problem is the octopus and the resources of the institution in question are the legs. It's easy to tear off a leg, because that's how political problems are presented. Our democratic political process comes ready made with legs ready to tear off. Just Vote No.

It's not very often somebody brings their own octopus leg.

Chinese vs British Ceremony

I'm one of the few people I know who found the opening ceremonies to be thoroughly enjoyable. Some of that owes to the fact that I am something of a Neo-Victorian. There's a lot to that but I'll leave it for another day. 

The Chinese on the one hand orchestrated a mass of performers to master a single skill and aggregate them into synchopated rhythm. The British on the other hand put together a series of vignettes chronicling history which involved a wide variety of characters performing different roles to create. To watch the Chinese ceremony is to witness 1000 drummers drumming & dancing in uniform. To watch the British ceremony is to witness 1000 people in 50 different groups with 50 improvisations off 50 drummers in 50 different costumes. I admire the British complexity, and I am put off by the Chinese uniformity.

Consider the possibility of something going wrong. Imagine that one of the parade of Chinese drummers gets violently ill in the middle of the ceremony. Your eye would immediately pick him out of the crowd as his spot on the grid went awry. And you would know deep in your heart that his failure would mar the entire act, and that he would face endless shame, humiliation and even punishment for being the puzzle piece that fell out. 

Now consider that same violent illness attacking one of the Mary Poppins clones, or one of the factory workers in the British illustrations. The entire affair would procede without most people noticing at all. It is that kind of robust and multivariate performance that allowed the British to even choreography sheep into the ceremony. 

In short, the British allowed people to be people and sheep to be sheep. 

 

I'm No Joker

There is little difference between disarming people by taking away their guns, their bullets or their right to vote. If what you want is a citizenry that becomes physically incapable of causing a ruckus, then the instrumentality of disarmament is of no consequence. It is the presumption that people need to be pacified which is of utmost concern.

Liberals, and those people who were most upset about W's declaration of war on the Axis of Evil, as well as those people who aim for nuclear disarmament ought to understand this presumption quite well. If you go out romping and stomping about some entire country of people who need to be stopped NOW, then it should not be surprising that people will be alarmed at the inherent arrogance. So when I hear people proclaiming loudly that they understand human nature and what ought to be done because of that, it makes me blink and think. How about you? There is almost no argument I have ever heard in defense of gun control that doesn't first begin with the argument and presumption that there is something wrong with America, they understand that, and the way to stop it NOW is romping and stomping all over the right to bear arms. No difference. 

So when it came to war, wasn't it surprising that the biggest POW camp we ever saw in Iraq was Abu Graibh? Something must be wrong with a program of pacification that doesn't fill a nation the size of Iraq with dead men, given what we know American shock and awe can do and did on some tiny island like Iwo Jima. No, what we did was counter-insurgency. We even let Iraqi men keep their own weapons. Perhaps we weren't at war really, but just out to get the bad guys. Afghanistan has no mass graves. That ain't war. Nothing happened to North Korea - we even let them come to the Olympics. Or, in the same way that the War on Drugs is quite far from my mind here in sunny, pleasant, affluent Redondo Beach, perhaps the 'war' is very targeted, and very specifically lethal.

I don't bother worrying my tuchus about mass murder in the US. That's part and parcel of my understanding of the facts. The facts are that 30,000 Americans kill themselves every year. Suicide. 40,000 is the number for automobile deaths. The number for murder? Want to guess? 17,000. 

When it comes to mass murder, by the way, I tend to remember that it wasn't too long ago when America had the popular nuttery to enact the 18th Amendment. And because of that the FBI got a good workout in homeland security against moonshiners and their gangster patrons who were armed to the teeth. I don't remember that much of my high school history, but even that domestic terror was eventually handled. Yeah we changed the law back, which was a good idea for those same pacification reasons I stated earlier, but we sure did grow the FBI. So there has never been a time in the past 80 years or so when we really couldn't handle the 'fire next time'. David Koresh is about as bad as it gets. Oh yeah, and the Mexican drug gangs. But that's not really my problem. So yeah. I shrug mass murder off, but I do everything to maintain my inner peace and I always buckle my seatbelt. 

People talk all the time about how we're losing civil liberties all of the time. I'm wary, but I just don't see it. I have a feeling we're more losing civility, and that's because odious people keep taking liberties with their perversions, one of which is the kind of hate-baiting that wants to make it a crime to each Christian fried chicken. But that's just more noise, and people do have a right to get out of hand and make loud, uncivil noise. 

I have a constitutional right to get out of hand, by bullet or by ballot, so I defend those rights, and I stand to mock those who think they know enough about me to pacify and disarm me. I'm no joker and I won't be disarmed without a fight. 

Junkman's Paradise

What if you lived in a country where people threw away perfectly serviceable technology? What if, with the mind of a 23 year old, you could build everything you needed to survive? What if, with information freely available on the internet, you could learn everything you needed to take care of yourself?

I thought about this when I was driving a BMW and the economy turned south. Why am I invested in this luxury, I thought to myself. I gotta make it simple. Doomsday scenario simple. Industrial strength, low maintenance simple. And that is what I've striven to do. It may be the only way to survive the next economic crunch. 

BTW. I make my living expecting that the entire industry I grew up in decides to be cheap.

An Intricate Question for Martin Amis

The good folks over at Goodreads have invited me to pose a question for Martin Amis. It's an honor I will do the dubious thanks of writing in longhand over here at Cobb. The opportunity to be drawn to the attention of the man I find to be one of the last and greatest of this generation is.. an invitation to which I will oversubscribe.

My interest in Amis is not coincidently related to my writing skeptically about the pursuit of religion here in the West in the Sun God Theory which is inspired in part by a story he wrote called The Janitor on Mars. I began reading Amis and other British writers somewhere back around 1990 when I got a little tired of T. Boyle and happened upon a journal called Granta. Or that's what I recall at the moment. Additionally of course, I was long tired of those more or lesss flat characters which were to be the role-monkeys for a man such as me, black and I wondered what there was worth conserving in all of Western Civilization. Reading Borges can do that. Since I was accustomed to reading out of school and out on a limb, picking up Amis wasn't difficult and was greatly rewarded. London Fields, Time's Arrow, Dead Babies, Money, Einstein's Monsters, Heavy Water and finally the book that broke my life in two Koba the Dread. 

Amis has the great advantage of good company, something you rarely get without the right tackle in your box. And who would know what bait to use without hearing a sea story or two from the keepers of all that? It's not much fun reading directly out of the Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature. That advantage I percieve manifest in the company of men of wit and taste who actually try to be, unpretentiously, men of wit and taste. We over here have Woody Allen. I don't mean to complain much but Amis has had his headstart, the kind which obviates the heedless sensing and searching for a young man who wants to be something other than a rebel, a dropout, a sports hero, a billionaire or a gawdawful professional. We're connected by the language to the imaginations of millions, except the millions all watch TV and movies circumscribed by the vocabulary of an eighth grader; an American eight grader. I suppose that's why most of the time I'm listening to histories narrated by Simon Prebble. Somewhere in time, men were more than this.

So it falls to men of imagination who haven't had to hack through too many literary jungles to remind us of our possible virtues and our present failures. CYPHER: Gee-zus! What a mindjob. You're here to save the world. You gotta be shitting me. What do you say to something like that?

The rest of us, meaning me, are tired. After 4000 orgasms and 600 books. Meh, I'd rather compute. The adrenaline is not coming from those worldly pursuits. In fact, I think I was sold a bill of goods on adrenaline. It turns out that gin is just as good. So we read a bit of Martin and a precious few others narrowing in on something ineffable. But it's all too private and for me that's all it ever was. All the celebrity and community has been doled out to narcissistic sociopaths whose vices remind us to play it close to the vest and be happy that we're not actually James Bond, the last man. It's hard to be free. It's hard to be free when men of imagination stand in the margins society, when virtue seems idiosyncratic, when we need writers like Martin Amis more than they are able to save the world. 

It's YouTube that can remind us that the spark lies in odd places. Some kid plays the guitar, or stacks cups, or does the robot and you gasp. There are supposed to be writers like there are piano virtuosos, and we're supposed to mob them or at least wave a lighter. But I guess most people want to just dance and not read, and I suppose that's what has gone wrong. I would be more declarative but I'm not so sure as a man like Amis must be.

And yet I could not, for the life of me, find anything to do with The Pregnant Widow but fall asleep. Can it be that the days of men are numbered? Maybe it was just a bad book, maybe I've already exhausted my disgust for those enticements that were supposed to be so spicy to the Boomers and so have no use for it said in more righteous English than my own.

So after all that, my question is simple. Are we not men? What will it take to move us off our asses? ls David Petraeus the last among us all that both think and act? Is there room in our world for men, or has our imagination on the whole, failed us? Are we unpledged ronin to a dead daimyo whose legacy is lost to the wind? I have lived my entire life in an era whose greatest hero is a man who made us to stare at perfect metal and glass boxes - the titan who built the wealthiest company on the planet by making us all look at i- stuff. A kingdom of introversion. A black hole of short attention spans spewing Hawking radiation of bucks to the Martyr of Silicon Valley. 

But the question is more particular. It is about a Europe about to crumble. It is about an America, that like a nuclear gas turbine, can run on anything that burns. Neither seems to serve any principle well and the unprincipled way of life seems to dominate. We all play act at manly virtue fearing we can never really afford it.  Except.

Except in our reading. In our listening for inspiration. In hearing the moment in a sweaty apartment on Houston summer night of the echoes of 20 million dead told true in the wake of the madness that inverts society and is born in the bearing of the man who must finally face death unafraid. Oh yeah, there's that. But how to make it public. How to make what we know to be true be the living way that rules the day? 

I suppose we gather our courage inches by inches, word by word and action by action.

Is that a question? 

Martin Amis is coming to America. Or perhaps he is here, I don't read the New Yorker or watch Charlie Rose enough to know. Is this the last refuge for a man who knows what freedom should be like? Here's the hard question. Can we rely with much certainty that we will rescue from mediocrity that which ought to support the best in us, or should we hack it out in the sticks? Does the Western city still work? Is it a metropolis or an aggregation of oddity? This seems to be a conversation I can only have here at midnight from my desk. Do you see my problem?

 

 

 

The Snobs Do Not Retreat

There is an idea that youth culture holds some meaning, or that it is even compelling. I know that this is an illusion but there are times when I forget. And so I have picked some difficult hobbies to remind me that the snobs do not retreat. One of these hobbies is history and historical fiction. And since I have given up my public spiritedness for the time being, I am trying to put what may be the illusion of democracy at arms distance as well. 

I spent some time with my daughter yesterday, reminded that she very much enjoyed that fraction of 'Man on Fire' that she was able to stay awake for the other night. She told me that the film reminded her of how much most movies 'try to baby me'. My little girl remains mine, but not so little is she. 

History is the story of power. We tend to forget that and behave as if people are as nice as they appear. American political partisanship is clear-eyed distrust of the other guy and projection. I have a little to do with that as possible, retaining the bad rightward habit. We pretend that nobody today is as bad a Gengis Khan. We pretend that smrgols don't do man in the middle attacks. We forget about the sewers beneath our suburbs, that shit does indeed roll downhill. We forget these things so that we can enjoy the little that we do understand, giving ourselves the comfort that our perceptions of the various melodramas presented for our amusement are true intellectual gifts. 

What are we to make of the society that allows us such conceits? 

I told my daughter that the British of Empire seem to know everything merely because they were connected to those who knew quite enough. When a first class berth on the P&O was what it was, perhaps they did know. Some of us pretend that we know of liberty better, but that may be the fool's luxury afforded to us by snobs who simply don't desire to mix it up with us. 

And so is born a new rule. Snobs do not retreat. They are only beaten down and retire from the field with some honor. 

When you know what you know, you have no reason to retreat. You have to manage your knowledge and your face. This is the lesson I will be teaching my daughter, because she admitted that she, like I, doesn't like to take anyone's word for it. She wants to know everything, and she hates the idea that she doesn't. Except she acts nice around people who don't. I'll try to teach her how not to - how to insist on what she knows to be true no matter what - how to survive the ostracism of the peasant class. How not to look too good nor talk too wise while being both. 

I think that it is a private enterprise - like knowing your own and daily improving, yet hiding your kung fu. Once you know. Know that you know and do not retreat. 

Why I Hate The Prius

"If you don't make electric cars that are better than gasoline cars, what's the point?"
-- Elon Musk 

The Prius is a remarkable success as a product vehicle for very cool technology. I was well aware of the risk that Toyota took when it decided to put its Hybrid Synergy techology together into a production car. And while other manufacturers took risks in other directions, notably Nissan decided to go big with its Titan and Armada trucks, the Prius has been the most popular and successful of all of the hybrid vehicles.

It has done so, I think, because of its styling and marketing as an anti-car. In other words, the Prius is a success precisely for those people who have no love for automobiles, but find them a mere device to get them from point A to point B. And as Hitchens often said of religion, once you buy into the truth of a fundamental lie (in this case that the best car is an anti-car) then every illogic follows. 

What I want to make fundamentally clear is that the Prius, like any car, is not the only way to package a technology. The Prius as an energy saving transportation device is better or worse by design. Not by category. I don't hate efficient automobiles, hybrids, pure electrics or fuel cell cars because they are environmentally friendly - even though I hate most environmentalists and their ridiculous demands upon the auto industry. No, I hate the Prius not for what it originally stood for, but for what it became and now what it is in the marketplace and what it stands for now. It is the anti-car.

Still, I have my prejudices, and it would be sufficient for me to hate the Prius for being the darling of the Greens. Interestingly enough, when the likes of that lamer Ed Begley Jr, had his airhead thralls climbing fences and picketing the termination of GM's EV-1, I didn't necessarily hate the EV-1. I didn't hate the EV-1 any more than I hate CNG powered city buses, of which LA has hundreds. The EV-1 was weird in the same way that Saturn was weird, admirably weird.

First of all, the Prius has a stupid name.

Secondly, it's ugly. It is ugly in the very same way that the Pontiac Aztec was ugly, and the Aztec was probably one of the all time ugliest vehicles. It is ugly like the Citroen BX and the Chevette Hatchback. It has this butt ugly, large butt with no hips. It's shaped like a bad wedge, not an aggressive sporty wedge like the Fiat X1/9 or a techy boxy wedge like the MR-2, but a weenie roundy wedge, blunt-nosed porpoisey wedge.

Thirdly, the interior tries too hard to be other-worldy. The ergonomics were specifically designed to take you out of your comfort zone and prove to you that you are in no ordinary automobile. Even Toyota had to acknowledge that they were doing it all wrong. The newer models are alien, but still spacey.

Obviously, the car doesn't perform. The market that emerged doesn't want performance from the Prius. The price/performance ratio was all skewed from the beginning. Well, at least in the market that Toyota has ended up cultivating through the cult of Prius. You see the expansion the great technology of the Hybrid Synergy drive that improved in about every way over the years was spread to other products in the Toyota and Lexus brands. Some offered high performance instead of mileage. Others put higher mileage in old familiar cars. But the price never made it worth it; in fact it had never been economical to purchase the Prius or other hybrids based on the improvement in gas mileage. There have been plenty of other cars that get the same mileage for 10 - 12 thousand dollars less - a difference that would never be made up by fuel economy. But that wasn't the point for Prius owners, it was to be seen as green, not economical that drove the purchases. So Toyota has had to eat its inventory of hybrid SUVs, Camrys and Lexuses. In the future, only the Prius will get the hybrid engine, and so it will be expanded to a number of vehicles, one of which might even be sporty.

Here in California, Priuses managed to get some semi-exclusive access to carpool lanes by being low emission vehicles, but they were not as low emission as a real car pool. Not much of a point against the car as against the shallow attraction to the vehicle as a planet saviour. 

Most people I talk about are aware of the green contradiction inherent in the manufacture of the advanced batteries that the Hybrid Synergy system requires. Again, not so much a knock on the car, but on the premises enabling its sale. It turns out that the battery pollution story was overblown but then again we've all seen Prius commercials in which flowers bloom as the Prius drives by. Which is a bigger lie? 

That doesn't much matter because I'm a car lover, and the Prius is an anti-car. The Tesla is the car for a man like me, and that's about all there to say about that. 

The Whitney Analogy

The saddest woman in the world is Cissy Houston. 

If you have to ask Wikipedia who Cissy is, then I forgive you. But really, that's all I really had to say to a small group of wonderful but unimportant people, whom I love dearly but hardly ever see any longer. They are my snobby black brothers and sisters who know who they are. There's an old cliche, borrowed of course but the bon mot nonetheless that you can always tell an Alpha man, but you cannot tell him much. I'm an Alpha, a member of the same fraternity as MLK, WEB and Eugene Kinckle Jones. If you have to look them up, I understand and forgive.

You see, I found something out about myself the past weekend, which was that I was expecting entirely too much of my people. And because they never satisfied my expectations, I dismissed their dreams. My people are certainly not a nation of millions, nor an ethnic minority within that nation. My people are a very certain selection of a very few who tend to know a lot about a few things and not much else. I can go to my cousin and she can tell me who Whitney used to hang out with, and we could also trade stories about Don Conrnelius as well. And although I hope he's not the third, I could tell you about some other famous black entertainer whose name is not important right now. What's important is that I'm the kind of guy who could hang out for a while with Greg Tate or with Elvis Mitchell because I have. And just last week I was hanging out with some folks who work on Wall Street but come from that same small exclusive village that I do. It was easy. I knew where to go, and I wanted to and I reconnected just like that. But most of the time I don't bother. 

I'm sad that Whitney died before her time, but in the way I'm connected to my little village, I knew it was coming. We all did, I mean, common sense and TMZ could tell you that. But she was trying to be more than she could be and succeeded. That makes you paranoid, especially when you realize how close you are to your little village. Hard to explain, that. But when all the people seem like little people, especially the ones you are supposed to love and respect - the ones you are supposed to keep in mutual check, power, wealth and fame are deadly. It's hard to resist doing the unthinkable when your success is singular. When everybody buys the package, you become immune to their thinking. And that is what has happened to my people. We got away with it. From Denzel on down. Well, I don't really mean Denzel, I mean Skip Gates. I mean the caretakers of The Positive Black Image.

You see, it happened. Everybody wanted it to happen. Everybody wanted Whitney to be what she wasn't - she wasn't Dionne Warwick. Whitney wasn't a complete pig; the lipstick worked. The Positive Black Image was credible, not just for Whitney but for a generation who saw Bill Cosby as Dad. It went from Sidney Poitier to Bill Cosby with Eddie Murphy in the middle. Eddie didn't have to care, and so he didn't try so much to keep up appearances - which was why his Dr Doolittle was so brilliant and good. But maintainers of the Positive Black Image needed Whitney, in the same desparate way they now need the Obamas even more.

But there's a loose and somewhat disaffected cadre out there in fine clothing and smooth diction who slip in and out of the dialect without straining. And I hope, as long as I've ignored them, that they are robust in their ability not to take themselves too seriously, but love what they have. Whenever I post a picture of my family here or on Facebook, I'm indulging that Old School select village privilege. I used to talk of aggregation and thought as most of us did, that we would all hang out by Nisky Lake in the ATL and swap Boule stories like some blackified Bohemian Club. Yes, my brother what are we taking over this year? It's happening, and it's not. 

My boy (well, he used to be my boy) was just at the White House the other day. I caught the photo on Flipbook. My other boy (well, one degree of separation) is running for DA of LA. We're not actually running things according to any plan, but we're running things. It's a fragile network. It's a good word. It can easily be broken, like speaking out of school - a school that almost exists. Yes I've always called it the Old School, and like balls, strikes, racism and gay marriage, it's all socially constructed. Real but not real. It's just a conventional understanding of things that you shouldn't really take too seriously, nor should you ignore it for too long. 

They said, back in 1968, that all I have to do is be black, pay taxes and die. But it turns out that two those things can actually be ignored, and Jesus has a promise about the third. The conventions we attach to them are ephemera, but we're always curious to know how are you going to live in spite of them? What's going to be your image, and how seriously are you going to play the role? As Cobb readers know, I tend to be about *do* rather than *be*, but in this matter the Stoic takes over. After all, with those inevitables you are going to do them one way or another. So attitude matters. How do you feel about all this? Are you going to be alright? 

The Old School. The maintainers of the Positive Black Image, the exclusive village of the Talented Tenth origins and keepers of all things dignified and uplifting suffered a catastrophic symbolic earthquake with the death of Whitney Houston. But we knew it was coming, and we know it will come again when the manipulations of our social capital are revealed again as they will be in the future. But it's OK, because we really never needed to change the whole world. We just aimed for it. We will be revealed to be frail, damaged and all of the glory about us that people wanted to believe beyond the limits of our gifts and ability to perform, well that glory will fade. And we'll all be a little bit more sad, and a little more real, and then we can finally be only but always what our true talents fated us to be. There will be only ordinary drama and normal tragedy, simple success and standard victories. That's what equality will feel like.

So I am recovering the ordinary dreams of ordinary successful black Americans with a cold eye but a warm heart. There's always something good to appreciate about talent, but we can all do without the symbolism. Whitney Houston is dead. Dead like Elvis.  May their estates continue to sell records, but not sociology. Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. What's wrong with that?

American Meritocracy: Bunny Slopes & Black Diamonds

What could be more ambitious, I was asked, than democratization of access and genuine objective meritocracy?

It must be the ambition of any rational people to establish and maintain such institutions that guarantee these goals for their citizens. But I want to overemphasize the necessity for leagues and limit the attention spent on the ideal of equality. I say you don't want one level playing field, but several. And those several level playing fields are classes. 

When I brought this up with The Brothers the other night, Doc made it crystal in one phrase: That's what neighborhoods are for. 

• You don't want to get into the ring with Mike Tyson.
• You don't want to try to hit fastballs from Randy Johnson
• You don't want to get into an argument with a lawyer who gets paid 2 million a year.

 

The Fungibles

Edited by M.D.C.Bowen last updated January, 2003

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The following is a list of the only black people that count in America. You know it, I know it, so let's just get over it and admit it. You want details of why? Check out the Isbell Theory below. You want it more scholarly like? Try Bell's Rules.

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OJ Simpson	Johnnie Cochran	Colin Powell	Thomas Sowell	Shelby Steele	Michael Jordan	John McWhorter	Bill Cosby	Condi Rice	JC Watts
Alan Keyes	Maxine Waters	Louis Farrakhan	Jesse Jackson	Al Sharpton	Khalid Muhammed	Cynthia McKinney	Spike Lee	Charles Barkely	Denzel Washington
Halle Berry	Barry Bonds	Willie Horton	Will Smith	Puff Daddy	Tupac Shakur	Cornel West	Skip Gates	Oprah Winfrey	Tiger Woods
Ward Connerly	Chris Rock

Each of these individuals represent some opinion, character flaw or character strength against which all African Americans are judged.

The Isbell Theory
Charles Isbell October 1995 
There is a Black Leadership vaccuum... but it's not for Black folks, it's for White folks. The leader and messiah being sought is *not* being sought by Black people, but by White people. The mainstream wants a national Black leader--a spokesperson really--so they can have someone to point to, someone to reason with, be angry at, hold onto, respect, hate or whatever, but make no mistake, it is a leader for *their* sakes, not for the sakes of Black people. By contrast, Black America is happy to go on being the non-monolithic people we've always been and to address our issues locally, individually and internally. I don't think we have a messiah fixation or a particular desire for a national leader.

Sure, Jackson is respected for having done something and some folks will follow him, but that does not a Black National Leader(tm) make, as should be obvious. Farrakhan is respected as the head of an organization that has shown some concern for the community and has actually made some inroads in addressing a particular set of problems and some folks will follow him, but so what?, that still does not a Black National Leader(tm) make. Colin Powell? Oh, please. Cochran? Oh, he won one for the gipper, but a spokesperson? Sorry, I don't want one, I gave at the office.

Having said that, I should point out that what Blacks do seem to searching for is a symbol--not a person--that makes our oppression clear. The Rodney King beating is a symbol that says "SEE! We told you about the cops!" but nothing more. Mark Furhman serves the same purpose. It is important to realize that this is a search for an event so powerful that White folks cannot ignore what we know is true; it is *not* a search for a leader, a Moses, a Messiah.

Now, to the extent that an individual can articulate our frustration, our fears and make the event clearer, we are grateful, but I don't think we're really searching for a person to do that because, well, there's no leadership vaccuum we need filled.

Why is all this important? Well, it says something about the way the nation views its Black population. We are, essentially, aliens, a group whose experiences, culture and world is so foreign--and monolithically so--that the rest of the country needs some person to bridge the perceived gap.

Sadly, there is a gap of perception, but there isn't a person who is going to articuate it for America and make it plain (especially since this isn't even what the country wants; the country wants a Black leader who will make Black people understand the country, not the other way around). The only way to fill this gap is to listen to the masses and what they are saying in common and in discord to you everyday, not to look for one voice to provide you with a soundbite. The only way to deal with this gap is accept your own responsibility in bridging it.

As to the MMM, its center role in all this is ironic. For Farrakhan, this may have been about White America--I don't know and I don't care, really--but for the rest of the folks there, this wasn't about White folks at all. It was about Black folks. I don't think we were sending a message to White America, though there is one there for White America, we were just talking amongst ourselves. America, we were just talking amongst ourselves.

 

American Spring (October Edition) & OWS Update

I have been thinking about how awful I would be to the hippies of OWS. But then I would only be throwing rotten tomatoes. They like vegetables, right?

Of course everybody who is 'occupied' is not a hippy. But I cannot seem to get out of a particular bubble. I think my G+ account has been spammed to that crowd. I know, unsubscribe. But I need to know what everybody thinks. Nevertheless, I've been thinking about the nature of this protest and comparing it to the LA Riots, where people were ready to burn down buildings. Well, actually they did burn down buildings. That's the level of street action that gets results. Militancy. 

So now the Kadaffi is dead, it's probably a good time to take inventory and compare America to the Middle East. 

Iraq: Saddam: Dead
Libya: Kadaffi: Dead
Egypt: Mubarak: Deposed
Yemen: Saleh: On the ropes.
Pakistan: lots of dead ex-leaders

In good old Washington DC, Barney Frank is still chilling, and journalists like Wolf Blitzer are looking mighty fine in their silk suits.

The Tea Party has been shown up a little bit. But their ruckus has been a bit more long in the tooth than the new OWS peasants. My favorite stories from OWS ground zeroes reveals that my cynicism has gotten the better of my skepticism. In one, some dude with felony warrants was hanging out in a tent at Z. Park because he knew he could score drugs and get free food. In another, some poor fool woman who thought she could just go out and sleep in the same tent with a stranger was sexually assaulted. 

Tangentially, there's a big CNN story about how many Americans end up behind bars in the Prison Industrial Complex. There's a reason for that: we have lower tolerance for people who have felony warrants and sexual assault. In other countries, those people are free to roam the streets. 

So I continue to compare OWS to football. Football is still producing more concussions and injuries. Football is still getting more people to yell and shout in a community. Football is still producing more concrete winners and losers that people can objectively track on a weekly basis. 

I hear that the movement is planning a bank run on BAC. That is really interesting. I wanna see how well they do. I heard from Rick Santelli recently because I was on East Coast time. But I don't have time for his pith. That's a long show - too long to record and watch.

Never Learned to Swim

I do not know if my late grandfather knew how to swim. But perhaps if I researched my family history I might learn a lesson of oppression. I doubt it however. That's because my grandfather was orphaned by the flu epidemic of 1918, and no matter what is said about the conditions of blacks in Connecticut in the 20s, it was certainly worse for foster children. Not that I would take any such stories of oppression to heart. It's not like me, and it surely would not be what Chico would have wanted me to consider at length. 

But since I've been talking about the lack of the Southern Negro and in parallel never shy to criticize any lack, weakness or dysfunction calling itself 'black', I thought I would update and exemplify a lack that doesn't require a degree in comparative anthropology to comprehend. It is a story that might be familiar published in the wake of the Olympic victory of the now forgotten Cullen Jones.

Nearly 60 percent of African-American children cannot swim, almost twice the figure for white children, according to a first-of-its-kind survey which USA Swimming hopes will strengthen its efforts to lower minority drowning rates and draw more blacks into the sport.

Stark statistics underlie the initiative by the national governing body for swimming. Black children drown at a rate almost three times the overall rate. And less than 2 percent of USA Swimming's nearly 252,000 members who swim competitively year-round are black.

USA Swimming is teaming with an array of partners — local governments, corporations, youth and ethnic organizations — to expand learn-to-swim programs across the United States, many of them targeted at inner-city minorities. One of the key participants is black freestyle star Cullen Jones, who hopes to boost his role-model status by winning a medal this summer at the Beijing Olympics.

I introduce this as a family matter as a typical tactic of the political Right. You remember the old axiom - the Right uses the strenghts of the family as a defense against the dysfunctions of government, the Left uses the strengths of the goverment to overcome the dysfunctions of the family. While I suppose we could always meet in the middle in the form of institutions and charities and those old 1000 points of light, I must say that I'm always biased in favor of self-determination. 

Like any other gripe of the emergent, it is easy to cite statistics and point fingers and come up with a perfectly logical activist agenda. It's not so easy to accept the equilibrium as it stands. But I think this simple case illustrates the differences in approach. Clearly there is something amis that can be corrected, but how? Now let's see how deep a fight we can get into over this.

Azn

I grew up in Crenshaw, which was everybody knew, a black and Japanese neighborhood.

Freddie and Keith were my first Asian buddies. Keith was Hawaiian and Freddie was Japanese. I knew Keith in the first grade and Freddie somewhat after. Keith was all smiles and full of energy and popular. Freddie was chubby, shy and laconic. Freddie and I lived on the same street, his was a single mom, and he rode a tricycle a little bit longer than anybody else our age. I never knew where Keith lived, and never saw him after school, but Freddie and I were closer friends. I don't know why and I don't know how long into our friendship, I hit Freddie. He ran home, told his mom, and I never saw him again after school. Well, maybe once or twice, but that was basically the end of it. 

There are probably more short stories like this I could tell end on end, but maybe they have that same theme. The friendship between blacks and Asians in LA is as varied as the number of different types of Asians, and yes everybody hates Koreans. At least, they used to. But on the whole the relationship is genuine and fragile. Whenever you try, you really can't make anything of it. 

I think there is a kind of social capital that black Americans have gained in a completely different way than whatever Asians have gained. When I think of Asian Americans, I almost never think of them as multicultural compatriots in a shared struggle for social capital. That has worked and can continue to work with Latinos, especially those who called themselves Chicano. But there has never been an Asian Chicano. Well, there's Margaret Cho, and that's about it. It's something I have variously found frustratingly disappointing and oddly attractive. But one thing I have long understood is that worse than blacks and worse than browns, Asians have never managed to be the authors of their own social acceptance. Asian culture was and remains all in the eye of the beholder, not in the aim of the creator. It all gets swallowed up in perception.

Here in SoCal, there are so many Asian groups that every place else seems freakily devoid. The idea that I might turn on a radio station and never hear Mandarin, Japanese or Korean on the AM dial seems uncivilized, as does any person who can't tell those languages apart. But let's face it. All us gringos care much more about the food than the people, that is except for the dudes with jungle fever, be they our dudes or their dudes. 

Almost all Asians I have known have attempted to compensate for a lack of social capital via ultra competence. I have never been able to determine, not that I care much, whether this is a personal matter, something that bespeaks a particular tradition, or was merely a reaction to racial stereotypes. It is not an intimation which I have been privy. I have known Keiths and Freddies. They either make it, or they don't, but either way, the intimacy has been lacking. 

I have known Asian men to get riled about banana chicks in their midst. I have known Asian women to find their roles stultifyingly austere. But I cannot know if I get that particular flavor of complaint straight, or through a black man filter.  And of course I have gotten my share of discussion about the 'model minority' role - whether real or imagined. What I haven't gotten much is a sense of Asian Americans to their native countries, if they have anything more than a passing familiarity with them. I notice this much more for the yellow Asians than for the brown Asians. Indians, are a completely different sort with which my experiences are more extensive. I know what Indians act like around Indians. So let me speak in broad general useless terms about that for a moment.

Once upon a time in Las Colinas, I was working for one of the most successful Indian companies in America. It was chock full of Indian nuts, and had some informal claim as the highest per capita PhD in Texas, if not the Fortune 500. So one day we were having a big meeting and one of the project managers was late, and we were sitting around waiting. Somebody asked who was he? And the answer was "oh. some white guy named Bob". It was funny, because that description suddenly made it easy, in this company, to identify him. But what was even more striking to me at this company was the extent to which the Indian social hierarchy, heretofore invisible to me, made itself visible. And since that day, although I have not given it more specific attention in a pattern-matching way, I have noticed how quickly such hierarchies are established stateside. It is my estimation that Indians here in America on work permits, are quite appreciative of the extent to which they are accepted into our creaky meritocracies. But really, I'm not talking about them here and I don't consider them Azn.

The Azn I wish I knew better are my associates from highschool, most of whom tread a fine line between conspicuous invisibility and innoffensiveness. Every once in a while I'll find an Asian dude my age driving a fabulous car, and I get this feeling that he's a cool, competent fellow I might knock back a few drinks with. But he's just on his way somewhere. These men have not become the sports announcer on TV, the over solicitous real estate agent, the friendly guy at the end of the bar. One of them, however is my General Practitioner, a Felix Unger type who wears his gloves and washes his hands a bit too often. But this fete manque doesn't bother me much - it's an empty spot like that trip to Berlin I never made. I was just going to be a tourist anyway, but it would have been nice to know I was welcome to learn the language and make friends. 

The problem with Asian Studies is the same problem as with using multiculturalism to solve the Race Problem - fighting fire with fire. There's always some esstialism involved. You always have to invoke some ancient Chinese secret to overcome the 'gaze'. There's always some black magic the Negro must use, some Judo for the Japanese. And for what? To get in the White door, as if it led someplace. There are always a hundred doors and a hundred keys. The problem is the fixation. Well, actually the problem is that the fixation is over-productive. You see Asian Studies, and American Studies and multiculturalism all work. They all work like that pill in the recent movie "Limitless". They work like Robert DiNiro playing a confident, powerful guy with the capacity to get in your face and make you suffer. They work like hammers and nails. 

One of the things you never hear about when these discussions come up is what to make of Asians who are Christian. I have never set foot inside a Korean or Philippino Christian church. But I know they are around. In Gardena, two towns west of where I live, I'm sure I could easily find a dozen Christian churches with Asian congregations. Where is the exchange? What does it mean to all of these racial and cultural signifiers we are trying to make sense of if and when there is that fundamental sameness? One of the favorite project managers I have worked with was a Taiwanese army seargant (boy you could tell) who sent his son to the same private Catholic highschool I attended. I remember so many times he would be shouting at the kid over the phone in Chinese. I felt sorry for the kid, rather the same way I feel sorry for any kid whose parents *and* teachers are Catholic. Where is the forgiveness? Where is the Christian fellowship? I suspect with some conviction that these might as well be different sects, as wholly other as Mennonties and Mormons. Yet I also suspect that there is a great story waiting to be told that will come from Thomas Sowell before it comes from Bill Moyers.

At bottom there will have to be a kind of studied indifference by the keepers of the culture that will inform our best sensibilities. I have found that kind of attitude works best when people get bent about American identity. Until then, we will have to stock our mental inventory with Dat Phans and Margaret Chos and Amy Chuas and a half dozen other riffs to satisfy the idiot level of stereotypes. We have to let all of the seminars take place, and try to reconcile Connie Chung and Tiger Woods. We'll have to have that conversation with the guy at the end of the bar, or commiserate/brag about our idiot/brilliant kids with the dad at the Friday night game.  It will become American, whatever that means, and then we'll talk about the bad old days when it was so difficult to watch the remake of the Green Hornet. And in the end it will all mean exactly what it's supposed to mean, nothing. Until we go to war with China. 

Speaking of which, I am reminded of the bottom line of Dr. Frayser, my dad's old friend. He is one of the kindest individuals I know, a real old school gentleman - the kind of man you expect to meet on a sunny day on Martha's Vineyard with his walking stick, straw hat and dog, knowing he as retired from fixing hundreds of human babies in his hospital. And because he was so absolutely gentle, his dictum was striking in its finality. He said, you know the reason why we respect Japanese and buy all of their products? Because we know they will fight us to the death. In the end, the only way to accept another human is to know that they can and will do anything you think you can and will do. The implications are simple and clear, and reiterate my indictment of Asian Studies. 

If the purpose of any study is to cultivate respect, admiration, acceptance and to break whatever is holding up that glass ceiling, then you enter a particular room with a particular shape and use particular tools to get a particular result. The problem is with the definition. You and I know what an Azn is. But that man is actually nobody in particular. 

 

 

 

 

The Next Investigation - Beyond the Gordian Knot

I have determined the necessity of war. Next I will start studying Napoleon. This is because I want to understand what it takes to wipe the slate clean and establish a new and clear set of laws in the wake of an overturning of the old and sclerotic. I seek to find out the prospects of a new sort of revolution and then will assess the possibilities of these coming from the post-hacked and assymetrically destabilized West. 

Where to start? 

Black Class Revisited

Starting back in the late 80s when I decided to allow my intellectual curiosity rule my life rather than settle into the square pegs of upscale, buppie, Talented Tenth modalities, I had already formed some reckoning of the class differences between African Americans. I was quite comfortable back in the day dealing with five classes. It was solidified by my recognition of Oliver & Shapiro and Massey & Denton. 

I was fascinated with the 'geography is destiny' theory of American Apartheid, and I must say that it still holds significant sway on both the positive and negative side. You are where you live, goes the wit. And so since I had begun to consider myself a traveler of some experience in my early 30s, I considered at length where I would ultimately want to live and where, not coincidently were the best places for black Americans to live. According to my simple theories, convinced that there was not one 'black community', I split African America into five classes: projects, ghetto, hood, burb and hill. With data from the 2000 census, I started slicing and dicing the population and came up with my own ranking.

It had always been important to me to be able to say something credible about black Americans that I felt had not been said, or said loudly or properly enough. But I have not been disabused of that concern, and it is because I have recognized over many years of dabbling among the chatting classes, that nobody is disciplining the troops. So splitting matters even further, there are those who believe in race and those who don't. Among the believers there are politically correct and incorrect factions, afrocentrics, race traitors, multiculturalists and racial realists to name a few who are compelled to always color their moral pronouncements, if for not their own justifications than to explain to those they say must be properly schooled. And split mostly on the side of the believers are those who explain race in terms of culture. I say split to give some benefit of a doubt, but I've never heard of anyone who give credence to 'black culture' whose explanations don't center around the very same stereotypes as the most vulgar understanding of black race. IE, blacks run fast because ______. Insert 'cultural' explanation. Nobody cares a whit to explain the black cultural proclivities toward either side of the Bacon vs Shakespeare controversy, but there's always someone making apologies for Basketball. In other words, black cultural commentary rarely goes beyond the immediate concerns of race. 

This is a sad state of affairs that I think owes a great deal to the pretenses of hiphop and the commercial success of the New Jacks, ever in opposition to the great orations of Bill Cosby on the one hand, and the prating of that unctuous class of post-modern academics and their vertiginous phrases. All of them going after the singular prize of 'the' black voice which must ever respond to the ironic and idiotic call: "What do you people want?" It comes as no surprise that nobody knows, because those involved in this cultural production like to keep matters open. Accordingly there is the eternal internal question "Who are we as a people?" and its corrolary "What should we be demanding, as a people?"  That is the core existential dilemma, neatly wrapped around a DuBoisian duality, hidden inside a Woodsonian re-education , expressed quixotically in an MLK oration. The best answer, of course is to question the question. But that only works for perhaps the smallest fraction of all, those who put no stake in race whatsoever. 

It is perhaps ironic that my energy spent in pursuit of being such a vessel of the proper black American cultural voice has so disabused me of having any stake in race. On the one hand, to believe in culture, or to believe in religion, or to believe in any such thing people have reduced their worldviews to over history should squeeze racial reasoning out. One can only conclude that, for all of this cultural babble, that the subject remains racial is the enduring testament to racism in America. Americans are always inventing neologisms for the same tired dynamic while claiming to be beyond race, while admiting that most everyone else is more racist than they. Even this essay falls into that category, technically if not spiritually speaking. But if one truly does find racial reasoning being squeezed out, (which I don't care to claim, having really nothing to try to prove there) one finds a curious lack of attention. In other words, the solution to race has always been to abandon it without any effort to remap it. Americans however, want the impossible which is to redefine race and then somehow claim a racial victory over racism. In the end some race is always on the hook. 

There should always be some fraction of all of us Americans, by the mere fact of any understanding of race that we are bound to it. But for me, to look at class is the simplest solution. Naturally this position betrays my interpretation of the predations of racism. What I would loathe the most of racism would be its ability to eliminate all class distinction between myself and those I would be associated with by race. Or put simply that any class distinction I aspire to in the larger society would always be qualified by my race. Yet this is the same bucket I volunteered into and projected onto black America with my five layer cake of projects, ghetto, hood, burb and hill. I should say that there is a Talented Tenth prerogative buried in that which elevates in class among blacks that is not considered significant to class in the larger society, ie the distictions between black fraternities or black undergraduate schools. What difference does it make to be called King of the Jews in the eyes of crucifying Romans? It matters if you really care to be King of the Jews, and enforce that standing with Jews. So it matters what kind of black American you are if you intend to stand tall as one projecting such status over the rest, as I said - a Talented Tenth prerogative. 

I can recall back in the days when Ron Brown was considered by all to be the most likely first black American President. I went to a conference of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation where he was the keynote. Around that time, circa 1992, the CBC itself was under attack as not worthy of receiving Congressional funding because of its special interest. Percy Sutton was in attendance among notables, as were personal friends of mine from LA's Black Women's Forum including the recently departed and greatly loved Lilian Mobley - the woman Maxine Waters could have been were she not... well..that's another story. All of those important people were important to black America in that special sense of their figuring in the poltiical calculations that were the vanguard of 'what we as a people should be demanding'. But in the end, the CBC was defunded and all of the politics of the 'digital divide' fell by the wayside. Nobody was disciplining the troops. There might have been true black strategies, but they never materialized.

I happen to believe that is a permanent pattern because sooner or later, black American individuate. The black shroud fails to cover the toes or the nose, and theories fall apart. Race loses its power to corral and define, despite so many hopes and ideas and theories and wishful thoughts. The prerogatives of American class take over. There are the Americans who get it, and those who don't. 

Today is the end of Julyteenth, my attempt at sustaining some conversation about Cobb and race. There hasn't been a headline in The Root that resonated with me quite yet. The writers write and make sure they put 'black' in the headline - the black of self-selection, the black of the audience that becomes something just by being there. Black as the flash mob of something pronounced black, a black ad-hocracy, which becomes self-sustaining merely by repeating the existential questions and never coming up with a satisfying answer.

Anything is black enough. Anything.

So my conclusion is that it all gets diluted, all that blackness. What black people wanted, some black people got - and so satisfied ran out of questions to ask, leaving some ever-diminishing fraction behind.

The Meaning of A Punch In The Nose

For a long time, I have had the category 'A Punch in the Nose'. I use this blog category to virtually slap around some idea or activity that I find distasteful, immoral or stupid. But it has deeper associations for me. 

I happen to be one of those people who firmly believes that a certain amount of chivalry is necessary. By chivalry, I mean a code of honor among free men that allows them to adjudicate matters of dispute independently of institutions of law. The aim is not to counter the law, but to uphold its spirit without enduring its tedium and expense. 

Americans remain fascinated by television shows that dramatize small claims courts. I've watched a few episodes of Judge Judy and Judge Joe Black and I sense that the intended audiences are to bring their own judgments into sharper relief. Watching is an ethical exercise. We all judge. Do we judge well?

If a society is to have liberty then there must be balance between the freedom of the individual and the oversight of the republic. I sometimes question whether American society is sufficiently grounded, on the whole, with the proper amount of good sense to uphold a reasonable common law in the breach of official enforcement. It is not that I think we are essentially too barbarian. On the contrary, I think we have accepted too much policing and lawyering, and having done so atrophied our native civil abilities. Because of this long held belief on my part, I have always been of the opnion that a punch in the nose is better than a lawsuit. If I would have my way, the blood in the streets of America would come more from fists than from billy clubs. 

I readily admit that it is a complicated matter. Between the extremes of Hobbes and Rousseau, I can be a bit confused. Let me go back... 

For your edification, I grew up in what I would call a 'knuckle-up' neighborhood. One in which bicycles were abused in the manner that give birth to what we now call 'extreme sports'. There was a certain amount of violent action in several dimensions of life that we no longer find socially acceptable, for one simple example, roller derby. My theory is that the suppression of this acceptable level of violence and action has changed our patterns of dealing with risk. IE people who feel safe because they wear helmets might drive faster, or having eliminated risk in one area of activity balance it out with a completely new risky activity. My own one-off experience says that people who grew up with Tom Sawyer's expectation of and experience with fistfights doesn't generally need to go rock-climbing for adventure. And my own slightly biased opinion is that people trade sex for violence  - which is to say we have traded away a society where arguments could be settled with a chivalric punch in the nose instead have one in which the most childish disputes engage attorneys.

If it can be said that I prefer a masculine society, then I must agree.  

 

 

 

The Answers

(from the archives)

 

Today Means

Today means small things in practice, and great ideas in theory. Great ideas that a large number of us do not fully understand. We pursue without really grasping the ideal of happiness. But we are happy enough.

I used to spend a great deal of time puzzling over what America is, how it operates, what it means. But it was only when I started to read more philosophy and history that I came to a reasonable conclusion. That conclusion is that we are a people more wed to our history than we know, and that history is of a more elevated character than we say. So we complain. We are people who have time to complain, meaning we are not defeated and we expect better for ourselves. 

This morning I picked out a paragraph from The Root, a publication of constant complaint. In The Root's consistency, they have re-published an article from one year ago today saying that it is just as relevant:

What, to a black American in the age of Barack Obama, is the Fourth of July? I answer: the day that reveals to him, more than any other, how much America owes to blacks and their struggle for freedom. If it hadn't been for people like Frederick Douglass, this would not be a country worth living in. The lofty ideals of the Founding Fathers would have been no more than stirring but empty rhetoric.

What I understand about this is the rigor with which my generation of black Americans view the world through the lens of inherited Struggle. We have aggregated every pain and triumph into an existential philosophy of lure and loathing. America. What does it mean for *us*? That is the question we love to endlessly turn in our heads. To settle for an answer that does not result in some strain of complaint is to admit a false comfort. We have in America, a permanent home as symbols of man's inhumanity to man, and it is such a powerful symbol that it is unlikely to ever be eclipsed. Except of course that our Spartacus has become Ceasar. 

We might have spent an eternity, were it not for Obama, speaking of Martin Luther King, Louis Armstrong, and Sojourner Truth. We might have spent 10 political seasons, were it not for Obama, speaking of Michael Steele, Colin Powell and Ward Connerly. All these proxies of fate, will in time, fade from significance, because of what America actually is, and who we actually are in it. Americans are only believers in the creed of liberty. That is all we ever were and it is all we ever will be. We are devotees, no matter where our location, to a set of clear ideas that we uphold like a flag in the wind only pointed with fleeting accuracy at its North Star. Whenever we tire, someone else picks it up, and the march continues. 

It has been a long time since I've listened to Premature Autopsies. But I never forget its observation that nobility can come from anywhere. 

Some people might ask, "What is this man doing talking about nobility? Doesn’t he know that this is a dragon-spawned and blood-encrusted century? Doesn’t he know that the dragon breath of our time is breathing down the neck of the year 2000? Doesn’t he know that this is the era of flash and cash?" I will say to them that the interwoven labyrinths of greed and manipulation are as old as the FIRST lie, When you lie you are trying to manipulate; and when you try to manipulate for false profit, you reveal your greed; and when you swallow that dragon dust cooperatively you reveal yourself as a chump, a sucker, one of those folks Barnum said was born every minute. But I will answer them also by saying that nobility is always born somewhere out there in the world, and when you live in a democratic nation you have to face the mysterious fact that nobility has no permanent address, you hove to face the fact that nobody has nobility’s private phone number. Nobility is not listed in the phone book. Nobility is not listed in the society column, nobility shows up where it feels like showing up, and where it feels like showing up might be just about anywhere. If it could rise like a mighty light from among the human livestock of the plantation, you know it can come from anywhere it wants to. You see, nobility is listed though. Yes, it is listed. Nobility lists itself in the human spirit, and its purpose is to enlist the ears of the listeners in the bittersweet song of spiritual concerns.

That doesn't sound like a complaint when you read it, but when you hear it played to the accompanyment of the New Orleans dirge in the cadence and accents of the black minister then you know - it is the bittersweet song of spiritual concerns. 

I am constantly reminded of the irony of those backhanded compliments such as the Root constantly replays when speaking of the Founders. You don't often hear many such complaining African Americans speak of their duties to lead with love the ever benighted white boys. The word 'us' is not often enough broadly employed. What does today mean to all of us? That is the question that should be turning constantly in our heads. If we were to forget all of the foolish self-serving rhetoric of identity, then we might recognize how many of the world's people believe in the creed of liberty.

I have brought my family to reside at the coast of the Pacific. When I was climbing my mountain, my throat was dry. When I reached the peak and saw the promised land, the waters of justice were still frozen in the snow. I recognized them for what they were and did not resent their color. Soon I saw the trickle, the stream, the mighty river, and I joined with all to find the mighty sea. I remember when I was parched and climbing, but I was destined as are all men, to rest here.  We are not truly Americans until we believe in liberty and justice for all. 

Sex vs Violence

The news is that some supreme court, perhaps even the Supreme Court wrote an opinion that generally stays regulating and censorious hands from videogame production. In general, and in keeping with my political orientation, that's the sort of opinion I like and live comfortably with. If you don't like the sex and violence in videogames, learn how to fish, you moron. Which is rather like me saying if you don't like Alabama, move to Kentucky - understanding that the argument augers poorly for the government role (or the elite's role) in keeping pornographers in their place, and tough beans if you can't afford a bus ticket to Louisville.

Here's the thing. Have you ever seen real people shooting at each other? How about a compound fracture? Have you ever videotaped ugly people having sex? These are all distasteful matters that serve no narrative purpose. They would be like War TV. The portrayal of sexual or violent acts for the purposes of entertainment are very different from the real thing. We could probably air several seasons worth of Mythbusters on porno alone. While the research is still out for establishing some Clockwork Orange standard of human revulsion, there is something that I know to be true. There are things that we might watch that will give us the creeps and by them we will know immediately what is off limits. 

Let us call that moment disgust. 

In fact there is research on the human emotion of disgust, and if I've read that small bit I've encountered correctly, we associate disgust with either anger or fear. Both of these emotions, according to that research are correlated with harsher moral judgment. When we are angry or afraid, we tend to be more harsh judges - like the intimidated poor woman in the nice shop who more harshly hushes her child.  

So does the offensive portrayal of sex make you angry or fearful? Do you want to go in and slap that person or do you shudder and screw up your face? Eww! That's disgusting. Does looking at it make you want to vomit? Interesting how morality is informed by your physical reaction. 

Every true gamer will remember the first time playing the legendary Call of Duty recreation of the Normandie invasion. You get killed so many times over such a short period that it breaks your expectation of the powers you are expected to have in a videogame entertainment. The same is true of Silent Hill, a horror title that was perfectly uneventful for a good 15 minutes of gameplay, lulling you into a false sense of security but keeping you tingly all the while. In San Andreas, I resented that the game kept rewarding me for being evil - the only way to win is to do bad, in a purely unsentimental badass fashion. These are variations of extremes that push the envelope. But how often was the experience disgusting?

Well, that depends. Comedian Louis CK cracks wise on 'white people complaining'. The man who whines that the Starbucks barista has got his coffee order wrong. The situation in which people can gain sympathy for having their airplane flights delayed. I too am very much aggravated by the whining of the dainty. In fact they disgust me more often than not.

I say we are obligated to criminalize that which is immoral to the extent that it is reasonable to police society. In our history of common law, I think we have a fair handle on what kind of sexual or violent behavior requires us to call the cops. Beyond that, I'm afraid that other social institutions and individuals have fallen down on their jobs. And it is a right and a good thing to bemoan that failure, but that doesn't make it appropriate to add a greater burden on policing. 

Getting Truth's Pants On

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
- Winston Churchill

I was explaining to Jake the other evening. Explaining to Jake is one of the world's great pleasures. Why? Because Jake gets it. If I have any claim to intelligence, it is only that I am recognized by other people that I find intelligent, and I don't have to wear my sociable skin. That counts for Brinkman and it counts for Ro when I'm talking about systems. It counts for Jimi and it counts for Courtney when I'm talking about people and character. It counts for Benzon and Yllona when I'm talking about music. It counts for my man in Florida when it comes to power and the evil that men do. And it counts for Gerard most of the time when I'm talking Epicurean. But I never get to talk to all of these people enough. I'm spindrift without an institution to gather me mateys and so I drift towards that 20th century sulk, the mind it its garrett.

These days I get weary. But I was explaining to Jake that I don't have an elevator pitch for my Peasant Theory, and I'm not sure I've ever required myself to make it more clear. So tonight's essay is to explain all that and update where I am.

I quit The Barbershop because I kept feeling 2007, and I still do. 2007 was when gas prices went ballistic and I was commuting over 100 miles a day but not really caring because I made that much money. 2007 was when I seriously considered buying a Hummer because it was just that audacious. But then I suddenly stopped wanting to be audacious and actually become sensitive to how much I exhibited various forms of lifestyle bling. It occured to me that it is a sensible thing for a rich man to drive a pickup truck when times are hard for the working man. It is a lesson I learned from observing the Christianity of a man who orders Budweiser in a French restaurant. Even though I prefer to remain a lot cooler than he, I took the lesson to heart. And so when it came to the Barbershop, I realized after a bit, that there were people who needed to advance their career in media more than I needed a cool high profile second life. I didn't really want to half-ass a media spotlight and so I couldn't see myself arguing just for the sake of argument - at least not in the format I was afforded.

But I also realized that I didn't quite care as much, and I had to get back to my own basics.

Peasant Theory came about primarily from the realization that war is always with us. And when you realize that, then you come to appreciate that you ultimately will have to choose sides. Whom do you expect to defend your life, and that of your family in wartime? In lesser degrees we all have that problem. Who cares what you know? So who will defend all the truth you possess? Do you even have a purpose and a reason to get to the truth? Does anybody even care if you know the truth? These are the fundamental questions I think most Americans do not ask themselves because we are cozy enough in a nation without starvation or slavery. But then there was 2007, and I had to start thinking about good reasons to do without. 

So Peasant Theory is about the difference between the free man who knows enough truth to recognize those fragile things upon which his freedom depends and the other man who doesn't think enough about the truth to realize his position in society is completely leveraged. The first man understands the conditions under which his flexibility is compromise, the second man beleives that flexibility is a skill. The second man is a peasant because he is always at someone's service.

Let me get into that for a moment. If you've read much of the writing of people who lived under monarchs, you recognize how obeisance to the feudal hierarchies establish one's station in the lives of yore. You had to believe, of course, that your leige served Truth and God. So to bend one's ways to one's lord was, hopefully to bend toward The Lord of Lords, etc. And this is all the honor afforable. All honor came from living the truth of one's masters. And before the Reformation and the Revolution this was all most of humanity knew. Feudal. 

Today we are largely feudal, because we have a slimy layer of corruption in the Baby Boom Generation and they haven't loosened their grip. So it is no surprise that all American journalists want to be Woodward & Bernstein because all American politicians want to be Nixon and Kennedy and as David Brooks so astutely noted, they're all bush league observers of the Wealthy who get away with everything. So the pols and journos establish the narrative of American life, bullshitting the masses who still tend to believe, unlike more wary Europeans, that their betters are actually running a meritocracy or anything actually resembling an ethical McMansion. 

You can take this as a roundabout way of saying that there is some fraction of Obama's aims that make sense. On the other hand he shouldn't have won because he really had no idea... more on that another time. Having gotten into it for the moment, this is what you should take away. All who follow do not follow truth. Your station in life, borrowing from Neil Simon, isn't all you think it is, American. And that is because you're not as American as you believe yourself to be. That is precisely because you are a follower. You are an urban dweller, skill seller and you buy your clothes off the rack and your food in a box.

--

It wasn't a great disappointment to find that the American Right is full of half-assed reactionaries. It took me only two years to find, love, tolerate and get sick of Hugh Hewitt. But Dennis Prager is as wise as he has ever been, and Dennis Miller is still the man. So when I consider the fact that I probably will not read Mamet nor Breitbart's books, there was a point some time ago when I knew the moment would arrive. I would understand the American Left and the American Right and become disgusted with both, but not in the way that Dawkins' Dorks are self-righteously disgusted with all religions. They can only be that way because they are peasants following Dawkins. Peasants follow and they mark their progress ll the time. Peasants must always have something to prove, which is why they are only half fully human, and why they pay attention to the Kardashians and the Hiltons. The Wealthy get away with everything - they represent our understanding of the power of Will, something peasants do not possess. Peasants possess the power of Want. 

Peasants Want to be like Mike. Peasants Want to get into Harvard. Peasants Want world peace. Peasants Want meritocracy. 

'Power to the people' should hereby be pronounced. Markets to the Peasants. Peasants never get any real power; they wouldn't know what to do with it. Peasants only know how to get what it is they want, such as they are allowed and or encouraged to do so by their superiors. If you are unclear about how this operates, then just stop and listen to the Narrative of American pols and journos. The 'answer' is out there somewhere. And somebody clever will tell you what it is for a small fee, and then you will Want it and you'll find a way to get some small fraction of it (or the designer version if you are an affluent peasant). 

Aside from all that, Peasants don't want any real power anyhow, because that would necessitate killing people. When you understand this, you recognize that you are a peasant because you want your Lord to do your killing for you. Remember what I said? War is always with us. All you get to do is choose sides, or by degrees, choose who will defend all you have come to be with your flexible version of the truth. 

--

So it has been a couple years since I was on the air discovering the hard way how much attaches to the various Peasant cults of Wanting. Nothing seems quite so lame today as Will I Am's "Yes We Can" video. Go ahead. Watch it. I dare you. It's not about what anybody can do, it's all about what peasants want. That's the bottom line.. you have to wait and listen to it, after all the poofy phrases. Hope for change that the peasants will actually get more of what they Want. Peasants always can get what they want, but it's never enough. What never changes is that true power requires that you kill your enemies and frighten your rivals into submission. It's a lesson that peasants stubbornly refuse to learn and that is why all they ever have is hope. Hope that they can get enough so that the wanting goes away. 

 

Can you smell the paradox? I mean all humans desire something. But only peasants organize their Wants and pile them all into one giant Grinchbag of narrative. Or policy, or manifesto or declaration or some other whereas filled gripe with fancy dropcaps. The Wealthy get away with everything and they don't bother to write it down for posterity. 

There are in America, Republican and Democrat cults of Wanting and they keep offering us miniature Lords and Ladies for us to idolize and subsequently serve. They're not doing us any favors. They're all just trying various methods of Acting Presidential without getting caught up in a Gate of some slimy sort. But really that's all peasants want is that endless churn. A peasant cannot stand to be reminded that there are free men out there... so watch your back.

--

So there it is, basically.  It takes a bit of precarious hopping around on one foot to get truth's pants on, because a peasant will run out of the house in a New York minute with the latest new song on their lips. It's a catchy tune not because it is, but because you want it to be. 

No Pledge of Allegiance

In the news are a couple items which remind me of the issue of loyalty. 

The first is the news that I have had my resume picked out of a pile to do some of the grunt work for a very large and popular company. Let's call it Bazillion.com. At the first news I was quite impressed with myself for having done nothing whatsoever to deserve their attention. But I guessed that somewhere in there was somebody who needed my skills and was reaching out. So I had a temporary high that has lasted about a week, and I took a moment to consider what I might do at such a place. It turns out, however, that it was something of a cattle call and they are likely to be singing that famous Flava Flav song to me after the formal process is complete. I can't do nothing for you man.

Still, given the operation of Chris Rock's Rule, a man is as decietful as his opportunities permit, I did give the alternatives some consideration. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that all I want to do is the exact same thing. For me it's all a question of funding and time. Can I get the time and money to build those things I want to build? Can I get the space and opportunity to create those things I wish to create? 

Such are the fundaments of loyalty. 

I stumbled across an interesting definition today. It's the idea of legal positivism. The Wiki says:

Legal positivism is a school of thought in philosophy of law and jurisprudence. The principal claims of modern legal positivism are that:

• There is no inherent or necessary connection between the validity conditions of law and ethics or morality.
• Laws are rules made, whether deliberately or unintentionally, by human beings

I don't quite understand why the second bullet point needs to be said, but that's aside. The very idea that there need be no necessary connection between the validity of a law and ethics or morality is a striking statement, especially given the number of lawyers in this country. They must have learned the term within the first semester of law school, and there must be no equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for the likes of the JDs. What a setup. Such knowledge makes me want to exploit my own skills in amoral fashion, just to get ahead of the grip of law before the legal crew can understand what they are suing me for. 

That might lead me to cracking beyond mere hacking. But Anonymous has an object lesson of dying by the sword as their realm of anarchy descends into chaos. 

War rages between competing factions within the hacker collective Anonymous after this weekend's drama-filled takeover of the main Anonymous IRC server network. That network, used by Anons to plan and conduct attacks, was taken over by one of its own, an IRC moderator known as "Ryan."

His attack has sparked a debate over the "leadership" of Anonymous.

Hacking the hackers

The main Internet chat servers used by Anonymous have been run by a group called "AnonOps," which provides communications platforms for the group. Pointing IRC clients at anonops.ru or anonops.net would connect anyone to the servers, where they could then join channels like "#OpSony" and participate in various Anon activities.

Though Anonymous is often described as leaderless, factions like AnonOps by necessity have a loose structure; servers must be paid for, domain names must be registered, chat channels must have at least some moderation. Ryan was one of those IRC mods, and this weekend he proceeded with an attack that seized control of the AnonOps servers away from the small cabal of leaders who ran it.

As I said not long ago, the problem with Wikileaks and all such ultra-libertarian organizations is that everybody thinks they are equal and submit to no authority. And so without the rule of a moral law, people come to the daft conclusions that everyone can be equally right which is not only a logical fiction but the beginings of every political nightmare. 

Where are your allegiances, and how often do you renew your pledges?

Trombone Shorty

Saw him yesterday. One of the best live performances I've ever been to. He straight rocked it out, funked it up, and blew the crowd away.

Two Harvards

I don't know that I ever wrote about a particular day that I can still remember clearly. It was the day that I went to the Harvard Business School orientation seminar at the Airport Hilton some time back around 1985. I had become something of a star at Cal State, making Dean's list, holding 18 units, having gotten my third internship at Xerox, being the chapter secretary for my frat, national officer for NSBE and the Engineering School's rep to the Student Finance Committee. And my girlfriend was bangin' too. I saw the future with perfect clarity, and I knew my path.

Now this HBS seminar happened to be given by one of the black Harvard organizations, and it was led by a young woman who was in the Public Health specialty. And I learned some very important lessons that day. The first was that there was a (light skinned) black woman who felt her duty to tell all of us perspective masters candidates that racism was alive and well in Boston and at Harvard. She told the tale of unendurable pain of being questioned all of time about whether or not she was an actual Harvard student. 'They take one look at me and assume that I'm from Northeastern'.

I was sitting in the front row and I turned around to see the reactions of the others in the room. I caught two reactions and that was all I cared about. My own impression, as you might guess, was to do all I could to suppress a verbal slap. Here she was at Harvard and she had the nerve to complain. WTF! 

The first reaction was something I didn't expect at all, but man was I happy about it. There was a super cute girl who was from Spain in the room. If you can imagine Rosie Perez with firey red hair done up 80s style, that would be close. She was like an Almodovar bombshell and she was giving me the eye. Holy smokes. We exchanged big grins. Man was I going to enjoy Harvard. 

The second reaction was from a black man who looked to be soemwhere between 28 and 32. He was wearing a suit, although I seem to remember him in a vest and tie with his jacket over the back of his chair. Or maybe he was wearing braces, like many MBA types did in the mid 80s. Either way, he was shaking his head slightly. At the end of the seminar I spoke to him. He intimated to me that he was running something on the order of a $400 million budget at Ford Aerospace. I was tremendously impressed, and although he had other reasonable things to say I heard all I needed to hear. 

I knew that at my school, there were seven year students who were officers in the Black Survival Union who had no compunction in telling anyone who would listen how corrupt the system was. I just never expected to hear the same kind of noise out of Harvard. It reinforced something I realized. Sometimes people are their own worst enemies, and Joni Mitchell never lied. 

Sometime later, I fell off my own fast track and never made it to Harvard. It wasn't until six or seven years that I got a chance to actually live in Boston, and I spent some time poking around Cambridge. By that time I had the twin experiences of having someone with an MBA report to me, and having had Microsoft recruit me, both being rather dual-edged. Watching 'The Social Network' last week reminded me of running through the streets of Cambridge and making social connections from a different perspective. Remind me to tell you some Boston stories...

To that dude and that babe. Thank you. You reminded me that I always have me.

A Review of the Cobbian Litmus Tests

Somewhere around 2003, seven years ago when all of the cells now inhabiting most of my body had yet to exist, I wrote a set of litmus test answers. Let's see if I still believe the same fundamental things. I'll only comment on those things which I think I'd tweak today. Today's addenda will be in italics.

abortion
i am principly against abortion, but it's one of those very ugly things that are part of civilization, like armies. just like a nation has to have armies to protect the freedoms that we all deserve (and we hope we never have to go to war), a society which values the freedom of women has to have abortion to protect them. i am also strongly against politicians or religious evangelists telling doctors what medical procedures to do. human beings have every right to make life and death decisions.

I'm generally in favor of allowing states to decide. I think I would like to see a state take a stand and make it illegal. It goes against my prejudice and better judgment against social engineering, but it's how I feel. 

affirmative action
is never going to cure the problems of racism or equality in society. substitute zip codes for race, and you have the same thing. it's integration, it works. don't ask don't tell. don't get all bent out of shape about it. but most importantly, don't try to reinvent the civil rights movement with your weenie opposition. you only make yourself look stupid.

animal rights
animals have no rights a human being is bound to respect. humans have no rights animals are bound to respect. bacteria will win in the end.

america
is the world in microcosm. it has a million times as many people in it as you have in your little black book, so stop pretending you understand it.

art
that doesn't make you laugh or cringe is just creativity.

black republicans
will triple in number over the next decade, if i have anything to do with it.

class warfare
there is nothing wrong with a little class warfare. the rich and powerful should retain nobless oblige. the poor and desparate should periodically get militant.

civil rights movement
is over and did a good job. vigilance on the back burner is appropriate.

conservatism
conservatives are the brakes on the engine of society. when society is moving backwards, they are useful and necessary. when society is moving forwards, they are annoying and counter-productive. when society is stable and peaceful, they look for trouble and invent reasons to stop thought. when society is wreckless and nihilistic, they are the saving grace of reason.

Too many changes to cite here. That's basically lower case conservatism which is almost meaningless. Conservatism without an ideological pedigree is worthless. 

corporations
are more civilized than armies in that they are less capable of direct, concerted action. they therefore, by their nature, allow their membership greater freedom and autonomy. they are amoral and capable of doing anything people will do for money.

Corporations are less civilized than armies in that they are incapable of disciplining people to transcendent moral standards involving matters of life and death.  Armies are cruel and desperate organizations whose existence is both regrettable and permanent. 

death
american culture loves violence. american culture hates death.

death penalty
human beings have every right to make life and death decisions, including the right to punt off that responsibility to the state. but a state which is irresponsible and sloppy revokes its responsibility, as do human beings who are irresponsible and sloppy. the death penalty in america is administered in an irresponsible and sloppy way. find a gulag until the system is reformed.

decentralization
will be the greatest force of change in the 21st century. human organizations will become smaller, smarter and more mobile.

This is, by the way, the way towards war. Economic decoupling in Europe might just be the seed.

deportation
it is a privilege to live in a nation as advanced, beautiful and comfortable as the united states. those who would destroy our civilization do not deserve to live here. we should work out an arrangement with more anarchic nations by which we send certain convicts.

Now more than ever.

economics
awaits an information revolution. theory will yield to empiricism.

empire
the united states of america is an empire. it is possibly both the greatest empire in world history, and the most capricious and irresponsible empire in world history. i don't expect to find out in my lifetime, but i do hope that it works out.

It ain't working out. Depends on the dollar.

fate of the negro
nobody in any other nation cares about the fate of the american negro any longer, so you had better buy yourself a senator, because that's as good as it gets.

feudalism
this is where the uppper middle class is heading iff it is heading in the right direction. the alternative is the world of devolution and hollywood morality - at least here in the states.

fox news
i don't watch any television news.

god
exists wherever you find human souls.

golf
(see humility)

globalization
is inevitable so long as information about free market economics is not strictly controlled. the only way you can keep every human in the world from competing is to destroy every copy of 'the wealth of nations'. oops, too late.

That's overly simplistic. Information about free markets is too vast, deep and complex for the masses to comprehend and most governments to be responsible to. A new class of global economic rules must emerge.

gun control
is futile, but worth the effort.

Gun control, like any kind of control, is all too often done in bad faith.

health food
is one of the great re-discoveries of the 20th century.

But it ain't what you think, peasant.

humility
is the single most necessary condition for the attainment of wisdom.

immigration
i am sympathetic to good people everywhere who wish to live and work in the united states, and having driven many times across the great southwest, there is no question in my mind but that we have room for them. our greatest hedge against the infidel is crossover.

information technology
democratizes literacy, decentralizes power, enables panoptic oppression.

.and is kludgy as all get out. 

internal third world
america must determine if its empire will be inclusive or exclusive. an inclusive empire means that we will need to accept the necessity of poor states within which poor people will constitute majorities. our laws and communities must accomodate them and defend their every freedom. an exclusive empire means that americans must be smarter, stronger, faster than everyone else. despite what most people believe, inclusive is easier than exclusive.

iraq
the people of iraq are on the the long slog to independence as a second world democratic republic. our involvement has shown the cost of conversion. it is slightly less expensive than traditional war and uses many of the same tactics. given what chechnya has been to russia, the decision to pre-empt has been wise.

Things fall apart.

israel
the people of israel are behaving like abused children, replicating the abuses of their parents. since the deposing of rabin, i have had very little confidence in their governments. there is no excuse for the abuse they heap on palestinians, nor for their ever expanding property grabs and housing developments. there should be a second, pacifist jewish state in the middle east.

The people of Israel remain governed by a reasonable if siege mentality government. The stateless Palestinians have embraced radical and unproductive politics and subversive puppet political parties. 

law
law is a labyrinth of words made real. the walls of the maze are plastic.

libertarianism
is impossible in today's world, and is largely irresponsible.

liberalism
is the fundamental philosophy of modernism. if you believe in anything but predestination, you are a liberal. see how useless that is?

literature
is the currency of civilization.

love
love is overrated and underpracticed.

management theorists
zuboff, drucker & deming rock; hammer sucks.

Who cares?

marriage
"The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God's will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God."

middle east 
i am sick to death of hearing the unending news of every body and bomb that falls in that excreble place, as if it were the locus of human suffering on the planet. i have no reason to care a whit more about palestine and israel than i do for siberia or timbuktoo. i ignore it to retain my sensitivities and perspective.

A crass provocative statement unworthy of the man I should be.

moralists
bill bennett, stephen l. carter yes; laura schlesinger, deepak chopra no.

Eww.

nation building
should be the first priority of the united nations, and should be the framework for the lion's share of g7 foreign aid.

nature
is indifferent. the planet is alright. (see animal rights)

palestine 
the people of palestine are behaving like screaming children, expecting that they can escalate their tantrums and bomb their way to independence. arafat is surely one step away from symbolic dictatorship over the palestinians and his inability to rule, his willingness to associate with hamas and other radical militant cells not only cripples the peace but may paves the road to undemocratic rule of any palestinian state.

Yeah but does this kind of talk help?

patriotism
is a good reason for heroism, but no excuse for lies.

porno
is good. pornography is bad. (see violence in entertainment). don't defend porno itself, just defend people's right to create it.

A bit more libertarian than I actually am.

pornography
is bad. porno is good. hugh hefner is porno, pictures of children being raped is pornography.

It's all sin.

police brutality
undermines the rule of law and should not ever be tolerated. nor should citizens ever fear police.

profanity
is the voice of passion. if it's not worth cursing about, then let highschool debate teams decide.

punch in the nose
should be the basic currency of passionate disagreement, as contrasted to small claims court.

race relations
is only a subject of discussion in racist nations.

racial integration
the first american political philosophy that succeeds in making large numbers of nonwhite people successful and rich wins.

Done.

relationships
there is marriage, and there is everything else. if you are not married, and you are not my child, please don't expect me to care.

religion
religion is the pedagogy of spirit. it is our first education.

Is more complicated and useful than most cynics are willing to admit. 

religious fundamentalism
is only acceptable in small towns and small economies, so long as they have open borders.

republican party
isn't what it used to be, ain't what it will be. it has fallen on bad times and has no business being so crudely populist.

But it's like that and that's the way it sadly is.

rock music
rebellion for its own sake is self-destructive. if it's not rebellious, it's not rock, it's pop. therefore no good rock band (or rap artist) can last.

same sex marriage
is oxymoronic. activists for the cause are disingenuous, solopsistic and mendacious. you don't get my blessing.

sex education
if you can look at your parents in the eye and believe they are the best people in the world to teach you about sex, you may be homeschooled. the rest of the world should get the straight dope, from doctors in public school.

spectator sports
no, not really.

sustainable development
is the ecology of civilization. learn it or die.

taxes
taxes are the cost of doing business in america, the greatest society in the world for the management of capital. greedy rich people (especially those who inherit) and stupid corporations should get off the tit of tax abatement. i support a flattened progressive tax.

video games
are superior to television in every way.

violence in entertainment
is sustainable in a literate and critical society and paves the road to hell everywhere else. not all america is literate and critical.

violence in general
old people should be able to walk to church, period.

technology
becomes more necessary in a society of people with poor manners. it is coercive. 

world government
is impossible. don't sweat it. the larger the government, the more corruptible it is. a world government will have loopholes the size of australia. besides, technology will decentralize autonomy. nations will become federations of distributed networks of power.

worship
is the subjugation of the self to nothingness. i don't do it.

youth culture
is retarded by definition. it is the direct result of insufficient parenting, surplus capital and arbitrary creativity (see art).

---

So there. I'm about 65% the same. 

Thanksgiving Haps

Thanksgiving is one of those days that is very telling in that it's also the one holiday that nobody can do for you. I have found that you really can't wish people a happy Thanksgiving, they either have something to be thankful for, know it and are given comfort by that or they don't. Every Thanksgiving wish is therefore a dual-edged sword, because you can't really evade the fact that there is nothing else to do but look to your family and assess what life has brought you. 

Christmas has been externalized to fit every different shape. You can objectify it and get through it without having to deal with its deeper implications. If you're Jewish, you probably have a tradition of eating Chinese food. If you're an atheist, or a materialist you can do the unreformed or reformed Scrooge act according to your mood without bothering to think about Christ in the Spirit of Christmas(tm). If you're a harried parent, you can get caught up in the busy work of it while getting more or less satisfaction depending on your budget and mall traffic. New Years Day, you can get your kiss at midnight and party like it's 1999, or just watch the ball drop eating cheetos in a bean bag chair in your underwear. It gets easier now that Dick Clark has finally become the ghoul he has avoided appearing in the prior century. On the Fourth of July, you don't have to call it Independence Day. On Memorial Day and Veteran's Day you're not expected to *do* anything but take the day off. They've changed President's Day and MLK to fit the schedules of ski venues, and the white sales of JC Penney. But while Black Friday gets more and more like Wall Street's triple witching hour, Thanksgiving still has that unavoidable weight and presence. You *have* to think about giving thanks and family. There's not much else you can do except be with your intimates and deal with the your measure of gratitude.

Dennis Prager and I share a definition of happiness in that we recognize that it cannot be faked. Happiness is the end result of accomplishment. It is in a three legged stool with gratitude and goodness. You cannot be happy if you are not grateful. You cannot be happy if you are not good. These are two qualities that I cannot wish for you or grant you. They are things you must accomplish for yourself. So in that way, I cannot really wish you a happy Thanksgiving, if you are not grateful and good, then you won't have happiness on this or any other day. While you might be able to fake some cheer on the other holidays, and there is something to be said for having that positive attitude because at least you are spreading cheer, Thanksgiving makes you think seriously about what you have to be happy about. 

All that sounds like an elaborate excuse for me to be stingy with my holiday greetings, and to be honest, that's how I started off. I mean I just wrote about North Korea and Neil Farage, two rather in your face bad news subjects. So I said, well so many people are wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving, oh crap I better write something. But what am I doing, and why is my Thanksgiving going to be happy no matter what people say? Aha. Happiness. 

There are not happiness chicklets dropping from heaven in my happy Thanksgiving so much as there are happenings in my life that are more or less under control that are contributing to my sense of accomplishment. Some fraction of those efforts are bearing fruit and I am grateful for that. So I will be happy, and now is the time to recognize. Every day should be the time, but today is the day to speak up and share that recognition and that means recognizing how the people around you have contributed to that sense of achievement and real accomplishment. Our better selves know this and live in the moment, recognizing real accomplishments as they happen, championing them along their curve to success and anticipating that success by spreading cheer before the fact. 

So the haps are good. I'm learning again. I'm enjoying good health, although I really need to check a few things. I'm finding ways to stay home and stay here as my kids finish high school - the most important matter of all. I'm finding satisfaction in simple things.

I'm grateful for the attention I get here and for the opportunity to share. I'm grateful that my car didn't break before I paid it off (fingers crossed, one more payment on the Transporter). I'm grateful for the backup on my files, and that I have a record of my children's early lives. I'm grateful for the good things people see in me - that I've been able to turn my obsessions into knowledge and work and that work has helped others accomplish what they desire to. I'm grateful for all of my baseball caps sitting over in that box. I'm grateful that I can afford my electric bill and that nobody has come over to my house to steal the things that use all those kilowatts. I'm grateful that my children are mine, that I possess them and that they possess me. I'm grateful for my wife, for that woman who was patient with me and that we made it work 22 years now. I'm grateful for the teachers who work hard to discipline this community's children. I'm grateful for the gifts of the intellectually generous, and for the spirit of people whose faith in humanity encourages us all. I'm grateful for my cultural inheritance - that I have music to hum to over a dinner whose ingredients we all know, speak it in a word. 

I know in every way how I have worked to make all of those things work - that I have no right to it, but that I made efforts that might not be fruitful to attract those virtuous blessings towards me and mine. It's all a part of something we all control and I know that. We do for us. We've done pretty well. So I believe we all have something accomplished. So I just ask you to look at what your work has done. 

 

 

I'm going to say something else here that I have come to understand, I think. It would be easy, and I almost did it on reflex to say 'All things work together for good for those who love the Lord'. That trips off the tongue a bit too easily. My Christian education helps me understand a great deal, but I also know that I cannot impart that education on others. If I could only speak English then I would never speak anything else. If I could only understand Christian ethics then I would speak only in that dialect. But I am beginning to know things beyond that and with any luck will be able to communicate beyond that argot. So I call attention to the spirit of God in every man even to men who do not see it as God's grace or doing. In doing so I am aiming to be consistent to the ends of faith and reason and the laws of the universe, all as one, all that is seen and unseen.  All ends of proper faith and proper reason are the same. 

And that's what's happening today. I wish you the peace you require.

There Are Always Bacteria

I'm thinking about something Michael Pollan said about Twinkies. In the first dimension, via the film 'Zombieland', and in the second dimension via the film 'Phantom Menace'.

In the Phantom Menace, Qui Gon Jinn says "There's always a bigger fish." It makes for a very good aphorism despite the fact that there isn't always a bigger fish. After the whale shark, there literally is no bigger fish. So what kills a whale shark? Smaller fish that outnumber him. Or even if he dies of old age, he will rot. Rot is not spontaneous decomposition, it is the active process of hungry bacteria eating cells that no longer fight back. Keep that sentence in mind when people talk about the decay of society.

Pollan said, there is a reason why the Twinkie on his shelf is still squeezably soft after two years. Hungry bacteria aren't interested in stuff that is not nutrient rich. Keep that in mind when people talk about what's permanent.

In Zombieland, the character Tennessee is looking for Twinkies, and he has to shoot his way across the country through leagues of the undead in order to find them. At times, he despairs. But the Twinkies are eventually found, even at the twilight of civilization. He needn't have worried.

Thus is born Cobb's Rule #30

There are always bacteria, and bacteria never sleep.

Open Thread Thursday

And some fragments.

Stuxnet Worm - Target's Iran's SCADA

Obama's Wars - Woodward is at it again.

 

This Blog Is Not Important

I don't know you people, and I don't care about you. So why do I do it? If I answer that question I may return.

But I doubt it.

Basic Capitalism

Basic capitalism will never change. Check it out and remind yourself. http://www.prosper.com

Two Black Intellectual Stories

A thoughtful reader writes:

1. I think the pathology of white racism impacts Black folks in various degrees depending where you are on the ladder both income and color of hue.

2. To many Black folks are still wounded from the pathology of white racism in America and as a result it makes them create and develop a low self esteem and as such you get this need to seek validation, affirmation from the very forces that wounded and fractured your cultural, self and community and..

3. Black intellectuals who for some reason refuse to create and advance their own paradigms simply then parrot and mimic the paradigms of white intellectuals

4. I would argue that few Black folks have cross this barrier and have the capacity to actually create new paradigms entirely removed from the blueprint and constructs of white folks..

And I respond.

On point 1, yes. I agree that many black Americans do internalize White Supremacy. It's kinda how they know they are still 'black'. And the constant racism chasing done by various parties keeps them assured of their place in society - which they are perversely comfortable in.  Money and light-skindedness are just two ways they offset that. Money is more real, but then it has to be real money.

2. Yes. That's absolutely right. The big problem is, of course, that people believe falsely about who 'white' people are, how they get and how they maintain their power. After enough time of looking at all power as a corrupt white hustle, these black people do themselves in. They doom themselves to powerlessness because they never learn the lessons of what real power is. It's like the man who only looks at women as objects because he's never known a truly good woman and all the ones who answer to 'bitch' are well.. just that. So that's all he knows. That's all he gets. He's doomed.

3. I think we, speaking for myself in this, have put too much faith in somebody special to explain it all to us. On the one hand it's true that we used to lack for enough righteous education and we needed our own leaders. But that's not really the case any longer. After all, it has been almost 50 years of public accommodations. And the fact of the matter is that if you really read Carter G Woodson or James Weldon Johnson, you'd realize that the answers are all out there and they're old answers. The problem is that people have been convinced that their freedom isn't real unless everyone in the race is free. That's foolishness and the Klan talking. See Point 1.

There doesn't need to be a brand new paradigm. The whole of revisionist history 'for' black poeple is wrong, which is what I hope Jelani Cobb was implying in his piece. People need to understand the whole of real history, not the self-esteem steroid version. Christianity is sufficient.

Let me take this tangent for a moment because it's kinda important and personal.

I'll tell my story about Nell Painter.
Nell Painter wrote the definitive biography/history of Sojourner Truth. I met her around 1991 when she joined the faculty at UCLA. So one day I'm on campus and she's being introduced to students and she talks about Tubman and being glad to be in Los Angeles. Then one of the students pipe up. What do you think is the solution to the problems in the black community? And of course, Painter, being an honest peson, can't asnwer. She's not from LA and she doesn't know what's going on in this black community. She's a little flustered but the answer that comes out is essentially, hell you live there, you should be telling me!

I'll tell you another story: of Derek Walcott.
I bought his epic poem Omeros when it came out. I was reading Moliere at the time and digging it, but thought I should perhaps pay attention to some blackness. So every once in a while, you could catch me with his book trying to rap it. And I would do so in cafes like the young pretentious aesthete that I was trying to be at the ripe old age of 29, just loud enough so people could ask me what I was doing. And I would explain that Derek Walcott was the darling of the intellectual set (and he was) and everybody acknowledges what a painstaking act of genius it was to take the story of the Illiad and translate it into a black Caribbean metaphor. Have you never heard of Derek Walcott?  He won the Nobel Prize in Poetry. But he didn't solve the problem of the black community. And nobody in the black community reads anything by Derek Walcott.

The black community is its own problem. Black Intellectuals who try to solve its problems always fail. Black Intellectuals who don't try are not long considered Black Intellectuals. So it basically comes down to this point. Who's down with The Struggle and who's not. 

Now the difficulty with The Struggle is that it has been hijacked by people who can't think their way out of a paper bag. And that's because the Real Struggle has already been won and the architects of that struggle have moved on. The laws of the most powerful nation in the history of the planet are now not against you based on the color of your skin. And in case you haven't noticed, thousands of people from halfway around the planet have come here in the past 20 years to work in an industry that didn't even exist until 20 years after those laws were changed. So why are there more Indians than black American in Silicon Valley? Was there ever an apartheid of computers? No, of course not. But the Black Intellectuals didn't go in that direction - they all wanted to rewrite history as academic department heads, not through private enterprise. The Struggle is a farce. It's about getting police officers fired. It's about getting comedians to apologize. It's about getting 20 year olds into undergraduate programs. That ain't power. That's middle class meddling.

So The Struggle is all about getting people out of ghetto depravity into middle class mediocrity, which is the essential component of Christian Missionary work in deepest darkest Africa. Teach 'em some hymns. Not that it's an entirely bad idea, lord know some of those pound cake thieves could use a lesson in Christian ethics. But it doesn't take an intellectual to effect such a program. Just a big bleeding heart and gobs of patience, which could easily be substituted with condescension - your mileage may vary.

Now might be a good time to go back and watch Sanford and Son. A father raised his son. Lamont Sanford didn't turn out so bad.

On the Necessity of Knuckleheads

(from the archives July 2004 )

You know, I gotta admit when I am wrong, and I think I've been caught in something of a dilemma. That being the case, I tend to think the subject is exhausted. I keep torquing the nut until it doesn't move, then I back up off it a half-turn. And so I have to talk about it.

Spence, whom I salute again, mentions the following:

It was the knuckleheads that taught me the dozens--the value of using wordplay as a means of attack and defense. The knuckleheads taught me to stand up for what I believed in. The knuckleheads taught me what it meant to be confident in myself when all around me doubted. And it was the criminally minded knucklheads that taught me the value of having game even as they gave me strong anti-role models.

There's talk, now and again, about how many black middle class parents feel the necessity of sending their kids to live with their grandparents down South for the summer, or to stay with their ghetto cousins for a spell. Assuming these parents aren't complete idiots there is a reason I could agree with although I'd probably try to accomplish it a different way. That reason is to toughen up their otherwise dainty suburban offspring.

I know my kids ain't black. And when it comes to their adulthood, they won't need to be. They're brown - like the zillions in Africa, India and South and Central America. That's a good enough sample, and it's only skin color. They can't be black like me because my blackness was born of the times, not an essential, inescapable box, but a response to a condition. But so much of who I am is locked into that alternatively golden and grim experience. I wish I could teach them things I learned the way I learned them. I cannot send my kids back to the neighborhood I grew up in, but I understand why somebody might want to.

In the three-bedroom house I was raised in, we had Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pox, Rubella, Impetigo and Roaches. Every one of us five kids who bunked there survived them all and most of us, excepting my sister and I, grew taller than six foot two. In my neighborhood school, "Meet me after class" was most likely followed by "so I can kick your ass". I've played bicycle chicken with the Ice Cream Truck and been chased by more stray dogs and gangbangers than I care to think about. My sister swore to me last week that we used to jump from rooftop to rooftop. I don't know about that but we did make zip lines from the transformer level of power poles and hogtie each other for fun. I've talked about all kinds of ghetto games from suicide to slapboxing to stomp - but I never really wrote about 'Hide & Go Get It'. Use your imagination.

One of the reasons I don't back down about talking about my Black Nationalist roots is because, like my neighborhood, all that shit made me tough. And yes it was shit. You can't get that just by reading Ulysses. You get it from surviving the risk and the danger. Perhaps the Baby Boom was the lone exception in the struggles of life, and perhaps that cannot be compensated. Perhaps some folks feel the need to run with bulls in Pamplona, but I don't. Don't get me wrong, I got out of my hood before the Crack Wars. I would have needed a different kind of level of toughness, one perhaps completely incompatible with the life I live now, were I stuck back with Frankie, Mountain, Boo, Tissino, White Jerry, Nudie, Twin (and Twin), Shabazz, Ralphie, Rabo and KK. But I learned, and I overcame.

What do we owe our adversaries? What do we owe those thugs, knuckleheads, triflin' niggas (yeah that's what we called 'em), skanks and skeezers? We owe them not to punk out. They couldn't take us out of the game, so we shouldn't quit the game. I'll get mystical for a moment and talk about Lord not taking away my stumbling block. I don't thank God for creating temptation, but I understand purpose in the overcoming. But back from the abstract to the people. What do we owe them? I think we do owe them a little bit of respect for forcing us to deal with their reality.

After all, we know that achievement is real because we look at those who fell off. We faced the same choices they did and our choices landed us standing. And we've learned that the good are punished and the bad escape because of those knuckleheads. But we also know what works in the long term.

Clotheslines Between Tenements

My daughter is starring as Yenta in Fiddler on the Roof, and somebody asked what is America to do with its new poor, the people who have worked a lifetime to make an honest living. So I'm thinking about the old poor.

Why do we need a bigger government to fix what the free market has not? Because there are people who honestly believe that money solves every problem - the only question is who they trust with the money. State capitalists. Now I get to use Chomsky against the Left. I just ranted the following over on Facebook.

I think Desmond is thinking of a bigger solution than corporatism can create, which means creating a bigger state with more power of fiat to create the proper job/occupation/lifestyle/grave for the masses.

On the other hand, my grandfather grew up as an orphan and managed to teach himself Latin. Which is to say that quality of life doesn't come from employment and the political impulse to provide the masses with "meaningful employment" is merely evangelism of a godless sort.

If I were an academic, I would spend time looking back to the literature and quality of life in the slums. Yes slums. Before urban renewal and eminent domain destroyed the Little Italies and Little Polands and Little Irelands of the world and created a great de-ethnicized, mainstream, whitebread white middle class, there was *something* of value there. And anybody who pretends to be a serious multiculturalist says so all the goddamned time. Not to mentions saving the indigenous people of the world.... See More

I'm saying that an underemployed America can be an urban indigenous zone without any need for a safety net or the requisite taxation. A deflated negative growth GDP could take us to that child-growing village some people always claim to desire, and the desire for the nanny state is inherently conflicted with belief in the human spirit.

What is a police state but a nanny state with boots?

My more complete point is that I am thinking of the romance I have with my spiritual connection to old mensches who grew up playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn. I am thinking of the feeling of longing I got reading about gardens in the city in my first grade Ginn Readers knowing that little grew in the dust of my backyard - but somewhere in New York, even the New York of Bugs Bunny, there were little gardens between brick tenements.

While I'm at it, let me go there, back in time to when we kids at Virginia Road School used to brag and boast about which Ginn Reader we were in.

1. Little White House
2. On Cherry Street
3. Around the Corner
4. We Are Neighbors
5. Friends Far & Near
   
6. Roads to Everywhere
7. Trails to Treasure
8. Wings to Adventure
   

In one of those books was the story I'm talking about, and yes I do remember way back to elementary school 40 years ago - back when Mrs. Byers used to curse our parents too poor to send us pickanninies to school without our own pencils. I didn't know - the school always used to provide the big fat blue pencils and the parallelogram erasers upon which we drew mag wheels turning them into Dan Gurney's Lola GT.

We had a garden in the third grade, and next door Mrs. Arnold grew her own greens. All three kinds. It was called the horticulture class, but none of the Arnold kids needed it because they grew tomatoes already. That's how you fed a family with eight kids in 1969. They were from Texas. People still come from Texas with horticulture skills don't they, or do they just fly planes at their enemies because they can't find the right kind of engineering job so that they can afford, AN AIRPLANE.

I have lived in Southern California for too long, two steps ahead of a non-English speaking minority with little or no skills that somehow managed to survive and move into my old neighborhood without the benefit of police protection or welfare. It seems I remember too much of the old days and the old ways, when kids cracked bicycle frames from jumping them off wooden planks sitting on wooden milk crates without the benefit of helmets. And the boys bike frames didn't swoop down in front of the seat like girls bikes so we crushed our nuts on bad landings and *then* cracked our heads on the sidewalk. 

We grew up believing that President Kennedy wanted us to do pushups and run miles so we could get to the moon first. We had ashy knees and hardscrabble values. And just in case we ever got soft, every year we'd watch the Grapes of Wrath when it came on TV. I cannot imagine, I cannot *even* imagine that being shown on broadcast TV. I think it would remind us that Progress, bought to you by Congress is not actually nor were they ever a sponsor. I seem to recall that Alcoa and US Steel were the sponsors. But I could be romantically misremembering, after all, this is just about what I grew up believing.

When Bugs Bunny fell off a roof, there was always a tangle of clotheslines between tenement building. Old ladies clothes would be between him and the ground, and every few stories he'd end up in a corset or a dress or a petticoat before he landed in the dirty garden on the first floor. There's a class of people out there today who give a lot of lip service to the organic bonds between humans, and yet when money runs out for government entitlements, they think we're going to crater as a society. I don't think so. I think that the urban poor will survive. They'll survive without socialism. You have to forget a whole lot of American history in order to believe otherwise.

The Rules of Popularity

According to Facebook, I have 501 friends. (According to Levi, I have 501 jeans). According to Dunbar, I can only maintain real relationships with 100 -150 or so of them. If you want to know the honest to God truth, I think I have about 3, excluding my immediate family. A friend is somebody who comes whenever you call, according to me right now. According to Twitter, I have 150 followers, but I inflate. On none of these scales do I come remotely close to Tiger Woods.  

I've always said of myself that I am unlike Tupac or any pop star who only wants and needs 17 dollars worth of respect, the price of a CD from a million people. Given the choice of 17 million dollars, I would rather have one million dollars worth of respect from 17 people. Whenever I attempt to be popular or market myself, something goes wrong with my motivation. One of my lifetime's favorite quotes went like this: 

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.

I've always wanted to be the author of the noble, logical diagram. It is why I am a programmer. The integrity of the artifact - its order and beauty were always the aim. I have striven to create order out of chaos, but the ordered thing wasn't me, it was my creation. My perfection comes from my ability to perfect. So if I had the admiration of 17 millions, I want their dollar to be the price of admission into the place I built, I sure as hell don't want them to come ogle at me. I'm having steaks and bourbon with my 17 closest friends.

This is the context by which I am saying that Tiger Woods gets whatever is coming to him and deserves it. There is a point at which one capitalizes on one's friends, or followers and so is in their debt. That is the price of fame. Fame is sticky. Once remembered you cannot easily be forgotten even though once loved you can easily be hated. 

'Fan' is short for fanatic. And so one must conform one's expectations of a fan base to a mass of fanatics. To gather people unto yourself who only care about your life because of the deficits in their own is to open one's house to friendly thieves. They come in full of compliment. They inevitably leave jealous, and if you live long enough, betrayed. And so they will take back what is rightfully theirs - all the furnishings financed by their overwrought attentions. 

Cobb's Rule #24. Only be a fan of the dead.

Cobb's Rule #25. You ultimately get the audience you deserve.

Go Ahead and Ask

I've been challenged by not having *any* free time over the past month. I mean like getting home at 10pm at the earliest when I know I have to get to bed by midnight at the latest. So my last few entries have been a rush of too many things said at once.

I've added a new feature which will allow me to miniblog - somewhere better than Twitter but not quite to a full 500 plus words. So in the top corner on the left banner, you may ask, and I will answer.

To Them What Got Racial Issues

i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i'd be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural 
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman 
does when she's natural
i would have a revolution
---

 That's Nikki Giovanni. And for all the non-liberated negroes of the world, the message is simple. As long as you are a Negro, your life will be pain and suffering under the intentional and unintentional slings and arrows of people no more powerful than drunk suburban adolescents. Because they are They and you are Other, and you cannot think your way out of that bag. Pity. Pity. Pity. 

Maybe that's why you're still unloved. 

I wonder with doubt if the peasant generation of negroes, without the benefit of literacy, will ever achieve beyond this self-pity they call 'sensitivity'. It's the ignorance of the echo chamber - you know. Only babysitters respond to baby whining, and babysitters are paid to *mind* you. So crawl out the back door and learn to walk.

Stand up. Run. Run away from that little old hovel you complain about being a hovel. Get fledging. Drop to the forest floor and work them winglets. You may not grow up to be a raptor, but at least you could fly. Do you believe you can fly? Do you believe you can touch the sky? Then think about it every night and day until you can spread your wings and fly away. 

Skip Gates - Keepin' It Bourgie

The Black Man's Guide to Living Large - Part One

In 1995, I was in the middle of a contract for my own business. I took the day off because I could. I decided to wear a suit and so I took a stroll in downtown Atlanta in the middle of the week. I came to the sudden realization, I suppose rather late in the career of someone determined to live large, that the experience put me in an entirely new realm.

The fun part was knowing that I had all my bills paid and the money was rolling in and I had lots of cash in the bank. My net worth was all good. So I walked down by Morton's which I had only been to once before several years back all impressed knowing that now I could go get me one of those monster steaks if I wanted. Or I could buy another suit. Instead I walked through the mall at Little Five Points and window shopped in every store. I impressed myself. I bought nothing.

At the same time I noticed the people noticing me. Working people with no free time in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. They were the kind of folks I had once been, wondering how the hell anybody could afford anything in these crazy overpriced shops and restaurants. I recall that not four years before I had my first $100 date in New York City, and I was amazed at the fact that I would spend that much money as a single man and not put any pressure on the young lady to put out even though that was the expectation all around. I recall being a freshman in college the year that alfalfa sprouts and avocado became popular sandwich ingredients and that it took me two hours pay to afford such a sandwich. That afternoon in Atlanta, the Black Mecca, I thought about all of the previous moments I had reflected on the times that I poked my head through the decidedly low ceilings.

How high is the glass ceiling by the way? It's relative to your expectations, and expectations vary like crazy.

It turns out that yesterday I had one of those moments, except I played it like I am more likely to play it now. So let me explain how I play it now and why. In that, there is another tale with which some Cobb readers may be familiar. But to my way of looking at the existentials of being black, the only thing missing is millions of dollars. And while there are plenty of old money black families who remain so fussy as to eschew outreach,

About five years ago, I had something going on called the China Deal. To make a long story short, I had guessed that I had stumbled onto that particular job that made me feel like this was the one I always was looking for. Some days it feels like a set of circumstances that were too good to be true, but you know they say that you cannot cheat an honest man. So I didn't get cheated. Nevertheless, although the opportunity didn't pan out, I was there. You know, that place you get to when you know your hard work payed off. When you say "I've got it made" and now everything else is gravy. That's where I was - mentally. It was very satisfying to look back at my life and say with confidence, I'm a success, so what do I feel like doing today?

Having been through that moment, it has been easy for me to relax and let the goodness flow through me to others. I am validated and prepared to deal with new opportunities. I look at myself and I say, why shouldn't I be happy? And I am. Happy for me, and thus sometimes a little bit lazy. This is very different, however, from the feeling I had in my last days of being single. Back then, I felt unleashed.

'Unleashed' is very much like 'off the chain' meaning apt to do anything just because I can - nobody can hold me back, especially not me. It's the energy of feeling not responsible to anything or anybody because you are not the stereotypical person you think other people think you are. So you have this kind of snarky mocking attitude towards everybody. That was me before I got married and had kids.

Now I'm married, survived the seven year itch, have kids who are succesful and bright and have taken on much more responsibility than I get paid to take. I'm not unleashed at all. I have leashed myself to a new set of restraints on myself, just going above and beyond, responsibly, also because I can. I'm at a point at which I think I honestly can do a little good in the world. Imagine that. But what I'm not going to say is something like, 'pretty good for a skinny black kid from the ghetto'.  Why? Because those were never really the standards by which I wanted to be judged. Even when I was a skinny black kid from the 'hood, I had more self-esteem than anyone thought I deserved, which was what got me in trouble with people who thought a skinny black kid from the ghetto is all I could ever be.

So that is the point of departure for the idea that's been bubbling under the surface for a couple weeks which has something to do with why there is no black men's magazine that you could possibly imagine that would be edited by Denzel. And why I kind of sneer at Steve Harvey's new book. And while I'm at it, let me repeat the deepest thing I every heard about hiphop. Hiphop is a success because young black women are that desparate for men in their lives. And it reminds me that the market for literature for young black straight men is tiny. All the books published in the past 10 years could be locked in the trunk of Suge Knight's Escalade and never heard from again.

--

What happened yesterday is that I met Sam, a very bright and successful young black man. Funny as hell. We share a black Catholic school background, and although I can't tell if it bothered him much, at some point in the day I felt a certain confidence given to me. You know the kind, the code switch in the lowered voice, the voice that indicates some fraction of embarassment and perhaps even pain. It's the pain of being beat by Biff and Chad, the pain we sometimes take out on Becky if we can roll like that. Sam's not ugly, I know he could do that kind of roll. So could I. But Sam reminded me of another cat who actually did. He was the man who called himself a 'nouveau nigger' drove a Ferrari, wore polyester three piece suits and only dated Beckys. Blonde, blue bombshell Beckys. You can imagine him parking the red 308 on Rodeo Drive, making her stay in the car and getting out of sight just to watch everybody wonder who was the owner of the ultimate boy toys. Then he'd pimp walk, loud-talking, beep the alarm and burn rubber giving the bird to the jewelry store owner who had him followed.

I cannot remember the last time I wanted to make white people pay. I guess it was the day before Nelson Mandela was freed. I've spent a long time, the greater part of my life, indifferent to the majority of white Americans and their racism in practice and much more time to their racism in theory. Just like the Catholic priest who never bothers to stand on a soapbox at Venice Beach, I don't fear the apocalypse. I don't await the second coming of Malcolm X or secretly thrill at the threats of Farrakhan. Ordinary whitefolks never hurt me. Then again, Biff and Chad aren't ordinary. Biff and Chad walked in doors we honestly thought we ought to be able to walk through and couldn't. And so Biff and Chad were never the hopheads in front of us, they were a kind of spirit transferred. Because wherever it was we discovered a bigger fish, there was surely somebody trying to be Biff and Chad there.

I don't know how long it was after I had been watching golf on TV as a kid that I realized that there was someplace called Augusta and that place never had a black member (if that's true). I don't know who it was that told me the best scuba diving was in the Red Sea and in Belize and it made me both proud and jealous. Proud because I've got black Belize and most Americans aren't welcome in the Red Sea where rich Russians tend to gather and jealous because as much as I dig Jacques Cousteau I had no idea about these places. You grow in sophistication and then you find someplace more exclusive and you know Biff and Chad are not cluing you in. How long does that eat at your soul until you get all frustrated and feel the need to bogard - to put on the dark glasses and smack up the nearest innocent white boy?

Every black man has at least one whiteboy he can beat up on. It doesn't take much, I mean we're all Americans here and black men and whiteboys in my generation learned to drill early. Eldridge Cleaver wrote the book. He wore his mask. Steven Weed wore his, as did Bernie Goetz. Even the sweet deals were stereotypical. I didn't ask to be shown that movie about Gayle Sayers and Brian Piccolo, but we all knew that our Christianity was insufficient just three years after 1968. But is that what we really want to be, as thinking men? No we don't. We're all too complex for that. And yet sometimes we feel like we have to be unleashed instead of merely free.

Up From Freedom is the name of my autobiography if I get to write it. I don't think I will have achieved anything like Frederick Douglass, but somehow along the line enough of America forgot old Frederick so that MLK had to repeat the obvious, and a new generation had to come up with a new name for 'Free People of Color' and enshrine their own heroes and new schools of thought. And so for my little piece is something that wasn't taught to me which is how to comport oneself on the other side of that Mountaintop MLK kept talking about. How to be cool, if cool was the thing to be, in the face of people you fear to be Biff and Chad even if they are not. I'm talking about how to sublimate the cool pose of fake manhood and experience life with the sunglasses off, with the music turned off, with the hostility turned off, with the fear turned off.

I'm talking about being happy.