"If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the
couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go
to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.''
-- Barack Obama
You wish.
One of the problems with being Old School is that you refuse to be appropriated. But Obama and Clinton are all about appropriation. This quote, more than anything I could invent, is just the evidence that Obama is trying to create a new political class and ride the wave of their unsophistication right into the halls of power. It's a classic Democrat strategy, and they will take any new idea that has sticking power, whether or not it makes sense strategically, and pub up any so-oriented coalition. Whether you believe that half of Mexico should live here by any means necessary or that Mother Earth is being serially raped by Big Whomever (as long as they're Big), Obama and the Democrats will put your outrage into an echo chamber and make you sound louder than you deserve to be.
This is the classic 60s strategy. The problem is that the 60s wasn't the 60s. The 60s was a period in American history where many different movements were working at their own purposes and that the Democrats took advantage of the chaos and appropriated it all towards their political purposes. Was MLK a Communist or did Lefty Democrats try to jump on board the Civil Rights Movement with their counter-cultural agenda? The latter was more true than the former. And so you will hear me complain that black politics that demanded much of America did not demand it for Leftist reasons, and yet the assumption is made that the future of black America depends on the strength of Left populism. You cannot appropriate the Old School and conservative black values by appealing to reprobates. We won't have it.
Yes we all know that 'Pookie' is trifling. Why should he be emblematic of black empowerment? If Obama really believes that the future of black political empowerment depends upon the enfranchisement of the Pookies and Jethros of the world, this is where I cut him off at the knees. There is no future in that, or rather I should say, Obama is the future of that. Because he is just the kind of politician such encouragement makes. After all, didn't white liberals think we were all Pookies back in the 60s? Wasn't that how they addressed us? And didn't they make Obama who he is? Doesn't Obama stand directly in the tradition of the empowerment schemes of the Democrats? Doesn't he represent their triumph?
I think people have to really listen closely to what Obama is asking for and why he thinks he can talk about Pookie in Selma, Alabama and have that somehow resonate to all of Black America.
Tell you what Obama. You and Pookie can hang out. I leave you two together. But don't be paying him a make-work job out of my taxes.
Recent Comments