Cobb

The Black Writer Speaks

So I'm thinking about EC this morning realizing that the 450 self-portraits post only went through a portion of my life. Why do I write, and what value is psychological honesty in writing? They are core.

I am a writer and I have become one by writing in public. When I wrote for myself in private, I made myself into a puzzle, an enigma. I was answering questions posed by myself to myself and giving congratulations to myself for answering them to my own satisfaction. It exacerbated what was already a smug disposition.

Spy and I were roommates in college, and we had a fight about my intellectuality. He thought I was full of shit and I told him that I was headed to Harvard. So he repeated to me all night, yeah whatever you say, but you're never going to get into Harvard. He was right, I was not headed there, even though I got invited to the seminar, but that's another story. So I had to take him somewhat seriously because my application to transfer to Stanford had not been accepted. I was bored to death at Cal State even though I was kicking butt as a BMOC. The thumbnail sketch was that I was a 3.0 in my major and a 4.0 in my general ed requirements, I had 3 internships (with the MBAs) at Xerox, I was a national officer with NSBE, I was a student adviser to the Minority Engineering Program Board, I was on the Student Senate Finance Committee, I was Alpha Phi Alpha chapter secretary, I had a part time job, a car and an off-campus apartment. I may have been juggling one or two girlfriends at the time, that part was a blur. I was an over achiever because I had to be. It doesn't matter what you do at Cal State, it's not UC, it's not Claremont and it's not Ivy League. I over compensated because of my anonymity.

Now that I think about it, my nemesis was a very cool guy whose name I can't remember. He was a liberal arts major of some sort at Wesleyan or some prestigious place, and he had a yacht. He invited us to go sailing and cruise some chicks. Two of my buddies were down, but quit out when they discovered they had to man the ropes. We needed a crew of four at least, but they just wanted to carouse. So I had to decline the invite. I remember being very disappointed at the time because, like most pretentious people who were clueless about the real deal, I was infatuated by William F. Buckley and his infatuation with sailing. It's not to difficult to admire his prose when you are spending your time in the Valley in the 80s at the very center of the Valley Girl universe.

I began to think of what I should do to manage the excess brain cycles. The answer was to experiment with myself, and it became something of a black man thing. I recognized that if I never got into Stanford or Harvard, I would always have to spend my life explaining to people to take me as seriously as I take myself. When you own the yacht you don't have to do any explaining. I wouldn't own the yacht. If I were to be a bit pitiful in my writing I would extend the metaphor deeper into my life, and the the hook I use when I am being pitiful to myself is two turntables but no microphone. I am one leg short of a three legged stool, always a little off balance. I know from experience that brains are a cheap commodity.

So writing became more important as an expository vehicle to me personally because I didn't have the money to play practical jokes. I could not afford the time to go and do what I would have liked. I had enough experience, hanging around some trust fund kids not to be intimidated by them. I can remember the praise and glory that Bret Easton Ellis was getting, and it pissed me off. I knew everything about that life on the black side and might have easily crept through on the white side too, and I was a way better writer. I knew those degenerate little fucks, but I just didn't have the time nor the money, so I couldn't afford the patience. It was already decided for me, I had to work for a living. Saturday's child.

And yet I couldn't bear the idea of being that thing which we were all destined to become were it not for the coolness of Steve Jobs, geeks. I studied Computer Science, because I *knew*. I got it, just like Steve Jobs. I still have it and I still have 3 insanely great ideas that have still not yet been realized. I'm going to work, OK, but I'll work in the corporate corridors, Wall Street if I can make it. I needed social space. I needed presence. I needed the world to recognize that thing that blackfolks had seen in me all my life. He's special. He's destined for something. He's not ordinary.

So I became a writer like all college students do. To revolutionize consciousness, to turn the world upside down, to boldly go into cognitive science and create a new way of understanding the very essence of thought itself. And to make a boatload of money and score hot chicks and drive fast cars and wear designer clothes and close down restaurants in New York City at 3 in the morning and then go crash on the beach in the Hamptons. Typical undergrad collegiate fantasy for the 80s. Probably more Bret Easton Ellis than I'd like to admit. But I would say, if there is a defense in my defense, that of all the Brats in the Pack, my favorite was James Spader. Still is. Spader was non-plussed by all of the decadence, he had a sense of detachment and control. He was too smart to be self-destructive and understood life was too complex to be self-deprecating or ironic. Spader was a tortoise, expressionless, wise, destined to survive.

That is my writer's eye. I read Henry Miller and loved Warren Beatty in 'Reds' because I would dare to be never surprised. I am a black man, how could I possibly be surprised about man's inhumanity to man? The trick, or so it seemed to me, was to be a black man at Harvard, or at least one with a yacht. Having a yacht means that you can watch the riots from two miles offshore. When there's a riot, everybody thinks about throwing molotov cocktails at the Man in Beverly Hills, but they can't touch you on sea, even if they could swim. The writer's distance was appropriate for eyewitness. I was the right kind of black man, the kind who never had existential doubts about himself or his identity. I thought everybody got it. I thought everybody understood in the wake of Martin and Malcolm that we were to be fearless and bold. I thought the only thing we don't have is wealth and power and a way to communicate. So I had the writer's eye and the writer's mouth - to communicate, if I had time. For time, I needed money and power, just like everyone else.

My girl L told me that there is an easy way to tell how enslaved black people are, in fact all people who suffer in the proletariat no matter how elevated they see themselves to be. That is to ask them their salary. If you are middle class, and you are trapped in the middle class by its morality, there is no truer indication. To say, I make 38,500 is to declare yourself naked. To say my SAT score is 1020 is to tell the world how you think of yourself. Human beings have been reduced to statistics about human beings and the proof is that it's too personal to say. My penis is exactly 6.05 inches is not only an inconvenient truth but an inexpressable truth. Everyone has the secret that silences them so what if all of that is just average. The writer destroys that silence. The writer allows people to say what they can't say themselves. But the writer is better than the singer, because the writer frees the soul. 

My ambition was naked. I have stood so many times for office, for scholarships. I have filled out so many applications for so many jobs. I have told my life story to so many buxom girls trying to trust me. I have made so many obvious statements that I thought that was how life went. I've been a golden boy for various short periods. I have been the hearer of confessions. I expect to hear the truth. I expect to tell the truth. Why would I lie? I'm creative enough to tell a story and ever since high school I stopped telling it like it was my story. People laugh. People get the joke, they respect the tale, they hear me out. So I had no problem telling L my salary. She had no problem riding shotgun in the BMW.

And yet. Telling a black man story. How should it be done?  What is the purpose? What is the point? Why should anyone listen? Why take it public?

I've been thinking more often about what kind of book I should eventually write. It's a very tough choice. I haven't really thought that I might do much before my retirement in terms of writing full length books. But several ideas do have appeal.  I blog because it's the right length for spewing off what I think. I'd have to research and polish...

..this is the thing I hate. That I am a creation and that I write about me. That I'm supposed to represent. But knowing myself makes me a greater writer, and knowing all that I write helps me know things in the world, but it also helps the writer's eye, and sometimes possession of that eye is a fascinating story. How you make sense of it all, how you maintain sanity in the face of cruel reality, the cruel reality you capture in words and phrases and essays and rants. The interaction of emotion with characters. I have cartoon characters, not novel characters. But I keep promising that when I have time, when I retire, I'll write the big book. So I turn outward, I don't want to write about me, I want to write about people in the world, black people from my secret world that the world doesn't seem to recognize. Stuggling people in the shadows of life who work, monk-like to push back the darkness and have a little more life than they thought they might get. Brilliant people who bang their heads against the wall to invent a little something and altruistically give who are beat down and reduced to zero for not watching their own backs. Monstrous people whose twisted vision of the world cannot be held in abeyance because of the cowardice of the ordinary man he bumps into on the sidewalk. There are so many subjects and so many stories to tell.

I write to reprogram people, and yet I debate in blogs, and invite conflict and clarification. I don't have enough ambition to stop being interactive and just sell you something I packaged up. I want the holler back.

(incomplete and rambling and impossible to finish)

Aggregation: Another Look

The one of the first things that the Field Negro and I talked about when we got together in Philly was the neighborhood he used to live in when he was in LA. It was The Palm, where my Aunt lives today on the border of South West LA and Culver City. Ahh those were the party days.

We're part of a black diaspora of middle class and up here in the states, and a lot of us are one or two generations out of the 'hood. My folks were from New Orleans and New Haven. I grew up in LA - they escaped. My wife is from Detroit. We had our babies in Atlanta. We've had all of us, many opportunities to look for and find the best places to be a black family in America and while the jury is still out, I still hear a lot of people talking about the suburbs of Raleigh-Durham, NC the way they used to talk about Atlanta 10 years ago.

We agreed that what we need is several more black billionaires to get that aggregation thing working. One of the things I keep constantly in the back of my mind is that once upon a time, the Elks and the Prince Hall Masons (among others) used to run things in black communities. Spence, Nulan and Gines all speak about the effects of the loss of the black managerial class in today's 'hoods and ghettos. And all the black professionals I hobnob with speak of the inordinate difficulties of the thinning out of attractive folks outside of college. I think this combination of factors aim a great number of blackfolks in the middle and upper middle classes to romance the idea of a new beloved community, a black mecca. Certainly Ladera in LA, Cascade Road in Atlanta and PG County have traded bragging rights as the place to be. But is this really going to happen? Should it?

I have mixed feelings and get mixed signals.

I think it's an extraordinarily complex matter and I don't think about it often, but I have a few strong feelings and miscellaneous thoughts. The strong feeling I have in the first place is that there really should be some follow-up or next level of Martha's Vineyard. I don't know why I still feel like this, it's an unexamined part of me. But I really like the idea that my various internet and real-life homies and I should be able to chill somewhere in the Bahamas at will. I like the idea of having a national network of buddies with big houses so that no matter what city I go to I have a guest house instead of a hotel. But this is not just about relaxation, but about elite activities.

And yet I have a hard time envisioning what such elite activities might be. I have three sneaking suspicions. The first is that there is a black conservative clique of Blue Dog Democrats who are chilling with Vernon Jordan who have been there, done that and found nothing worth doing. The second is that there are a bunch of disconnected folks out there thinking they are the only ones and giving up hope on ever getting the hookup. The third is that it's just me and the 200 odd subscribers to the Cobb blog that even bother thinking about such arcane ideas. Worse still is that it's just Ice-T, OJ Simpson, Evander Holyfield out there. Nah I'm being silly. I'm entirely comfortable with the very real possibility that a brother like me, a loudmouth unpublished essayist, simply doesn't rate. So when I hear nothing, I don't fret.

But my overwhelming belief is that there are a whole lot, like 20,000 folks and families like me who would hook up if we could. What am I thinking about, Tulsa before the riots? Blacktown USA? I don't know. It's vague. I don't want some replication of some Jewish formula. I must confess that I think I've lost the entire thread of thought.

Somebody please remind me what I am supposed to expect from the Promised Land. I think perhaps I've gotten too universal. Oh. Now I remember. I had my Afrolantica moment about about two and a half years ago when I was sure that I was going to get rich in my China Deal. I reached the moment of believing I had become self-actualized and the burdens of my heart rolled away. That's what it was. It's personal. See I've always felt that I as a black man had absolutely everything I ever needed except for wealth. As a consequence I've mostly pursued wealth in a half-assed way, always happy with my lot in life. I often feel like I shouldn't need anything more, not that I don't deserve it, but I didn't intend to bend myself out of shape to get it.

All I've wanted to do was be wealthy enough to help good people I know get rich. Perhaps that's why I've been unsuccessful in becoming wealthy. Let's open the thread. What is the point of having a new Talented Tenth with billions? What would we do? What should we do? Wouldn't we get hated just like gangsta rappers?

Sharpton vs Romney

"As for the one Mormon running for office, those that really believe in God will defeat him anyways. So, don't worry about that, that's a temporary situation." -- Al Sharpton

Hoo boy. Here we go. But what the heck is that supposed to mean anyway?

It's not as if Sharpton is anybody's Sister Souljah but he's about to get his head handed to him one way or another. Still, I don't see what difference it makes. It's an opportunity for Romney to make a defensive fool out of himself because up until this point he's been Mr. Gameshow Host, the Stepford candidate. But it does perhaps once and for all bring the Mormon question out of the closet.  Hugh Hewitt will be on fire, I suspect.

Still, it's Sharpton. What are you going to do? Moreover what should you do?

The Problem With Institutional Racism

One of the classic debates within black politics is the debate over the effect of institutional racism over the prospects for African American success. Something very interesting occured to me as I was reading Booker Rising's account of John McWhorter today. That is that the politics of anti-racism engaged by Leftists encourage the culture of dysfunction by blackfolks below the middle class baseline.

Let's start with a little Old School basic premises.
1. The Civil Rights Movement in America was essentially a total and irreversible success.
2. Brown vs Board of Education was decided properly (with all due respect to Harold Cruse' dissent)
3. African American destiny is irrevocably intertwined with American destiny.

Add to that my new premise which is that Black Studies has been a success and therefore black culture is transparent in America.

These lead to some contradictions within black politics that are not reconciled. That is to say, they are strikingly unreconciled to the claims and imperatives of the black Left.

I would offer a strong defense of integration and assimilation as a Middle Class baseline. Which is to say that you must integrate and assimilate to get to the basic 'diner' status of American as a black person. There is no other valid reason for the support of Affirmative Action.

STOP. Think about it. Affirmative Action IS assimilation. Affirmative Action IS integration.

If the mainstream doesn't work for you, you cannot independently swim against it. Part of the failure of progressive black politics is that they encourage people who can't even hack the middle class basics to believe they can beat the system via some Black Power. It never worked, it never will work. NOI is proof.

Upon reaching the mainstream, that's when boldness and vision can work, but only based upon honest and open business dealings and relationships. So this is where I give hiphop entrepreneurs credit. None of them sell 'black only' music. All hiphop product is product for everyone. That's the way markets work, and business works ONLY when you are honest and trustworthy. That's how you can build ownership and wealth, power and prestige in this society.

Academics like Dyson, coming as they do from Socialist backgrounds believe they can identify a structural racism *that can be structurally defeated* through the defunding of 'racist institutions'. But America is not undergirded by racist institutions, America is chock full of public institutions and market institutions that are corrupted and abused by individual racists. Every racist act perpetrated by racist individuals empowered by an institution do not prove that institution racist. It only proves that America is full of racists that we are unable to keep out of the mainstream. It is the unwillingness of Leftists to acknowledge that fact that keeps many blacks distrustful of the mainstream public and market institutions into which they must integrate and assimilate in order to make the American middle class baseline. Instead, they irrationally hate and fear the very institutions upon which their improvement depends.

Every time you hear denials of an 'isolated incident', it is an argument that play in favor of those determined to brand institutions racist. Just last week the subject was refereeing in the NBA. We have become so accustomed to being sympathetic, as we rightly should, to the fight against racism, that we have been manipulated into tolerating broadside attacks on institutions when they should actually be devastating blows against evildoers within our institutions. The alternative is to believe that the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent laws did not work and are not being enforced.

The KKK is a racist institution. The LAPD is not.
You cannot be a member of the KKK and you cannot fulfill its mission unless you are a racist. But that is not a necessary condition for being a member of the LAPD and fulfilling its mission. However everyone knows that racists have infiltrated the ranks of the LAPD and abused their positions under the color of authority.

Challenging the theory that America is a racist country chock full of racist institutions allows us to more clearly see what kinds of solutions the Left poses. As a conservative I see those solutions as degrading the effectiveness of public and private institutions by putting the burden of proof on them. Can it be said that burden helped us deal effectively with Don Imus? Where indeed has the branding of an institution as structurally racist ever helped? Please, name some. I want to know. I think instead we can say that the elimination of Jim Crow was the penultimate battle with the final battle played on social grounds - getting our entire culture past the interpersonal barriers of a Jim Crow society. The first priority of White Supremacy has always been to deny others any 'defiling' of the 'pure' white race. That's not a problem any longer.

Opposition to Affirmative Action comes almost exclusively from the moral injunction against racial preferences. There can be no doubt that there are plenty of racists who can't stand the idea of race mixing on college campuses as the basis of their opposition, good luck trying to get them to say so in public. They cannot because the American mainstream doesn't tolerate such ideas. Not even when they're implied in disrespectful commentary. Virtually nobody stands on the principle of racial segregation. So where are the racist institutions?

Maybe they're all in our heads.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Or more correctly stated, we have a Cobblem. I'm in the house. So if there are any Houston folks who are interested in hooking up for dinner or drinks, just holler at your boy. Aside from that, I have to note that while blogging may be light.

Self-Fulfilling Degeneracy

French loser Royal said last week "Nicolas Sarkozy is a dangerous choice," warning that a Sarkozy victory would unleash "violence and brutality" in the projects.

Fears that Sunday's presidential election victory by law-and-order tough guy Nicolas Sarkozy would spark riots among the nation's disaffected have been realized — hundreds of hooded youths in cities across France have battled police nightly since the poll, smashing windows and torching cars as leaders from across the political spectrum vigorously denounce the violence and plead for calm. But this is hardly a reprise of the 2005 riots that swept France's blighted suburban housing projects: The current bedlam is taking place at the center of some of France's largest cities, and the participants are mostly white, educated and relatively comfortable middle class adherents of extreme-left and anti-globalization ideologies. "There are a few types from the projects mixing things up at the fringes, but most of these clashes involve young radicals and anarchists raging against a democratic election," says one member of France's security services. "This is extreme-left chic — mostly university students deciding to vandalize, fight cops, then go home."

Surprise! Where's the 'cool it baby' speech?  Where is the 'this is supposed to be a democracy' speech? Can't we all just get along?

Preachers, Milestones & The Muslim Brotherhood

I've been trying to get a handle on left blogosphere opinion but I'm having a hard slog of it. The problem is, I think, that there are no lefty equivalents of The Belmont Club, TigerHawk and Captain's Quarters. None that I know of at any rate. The best I've been able to do over the past few weeks is go back to some of the original bloggers that convinced me of their intelligence and insight four years ago when I started. Those would be Kevin Drum, Sean Paul Kelley and Matthew Yglesias. For added measure I included Winds of Change and The Moderate Voice.

Today I am doubting my selection, if not the wisdom of my decision. This is because of the way the commenters at those blogs are interpreting the soundbites of Mitt Romney vis a vis his perspective on the enemy in the GWOT.

Last week I got into some discussion over at Yglesias over misinterpretations of Romney's comments on the nature of the Islamist threat to global security. I've since dropped Yglesias from my reading list because I have found most of his interesting memes redundant to those of Kevin Drum. I pick Kevin, as he tends to write less about sports. I don't like to drop Yglesias, but I really have too much to read. Moderate Voice is dropped too.

At Cobb, I try to be analytical when I don't know something, and haughty when I do. On this subject I'm in the middle. I know clearly that Shia, Sunni, and AQ are enemy combattants in Iraq, and I know clearly that it is perfectly reasonable to wage a political culture war against radical Islam. What is not clear is the extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood is ideologically Islamist with respect to giving aid and comfort to Jihadis. It's a gray area that requires a bit more focus. Aiding in my perception of such matters is my subscription to the CounterTerrorism Blog which has excellently informed writers. One of those writers is Doug Farah who is in the process of debunking the pacifism of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The campaign to portray the Brotherhood as a moderate, non-violent political force is predicated on the notion that the Brotherhood has turned away from the radical teaching of Sayyid Qutb and embraced a more moderate theology that now supposedly holds sway. Unfortunately, this line, while demonstrably untrue, has been seized on by academics and policy makers anxious for some type of engagement with the “moderate” Muslim world.

In a nutshell, the argument, put forth by Leiken and Brooke in their controversial Foreign Affairs piece, as well as James Traub in the New York Times Magazine and others is this: That the radical tract Milestones , written from prison by Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb calling for violent jihad against non-Muslims, particularly the West, and apostate Muslim regimes, has been repudiated, at least tacitly, by the current Brotherhood.

Replacing Milestones, the argument goes, was a book written by a fellow prisoner named Hassan al-Hudaybi called Preachers, Not Judges.

The conversation at Farah's blog is exactly as I would hope. We even have a relative of al-Hudaybi in the comment section. So while some facts remain in dispute, at least we are dealing with some authoritative folks deep into the weeds on the significance of the philosophical basis of the Muslim Brotherhood's politics.

Be that as it may, and it must be said that Hudaybi the younger claims anti-terrorist intent, it's difficult to assess the influence of a publication on the Arab Street. I find it unlikely that heads of Wahabbi madrassas, for example, are likely to deal at that level of subtlety with such students as eventually become suicide bombers. How is it then, that such people emerge from the embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood or any other such political organization without the express backing or consent of their leadership? I think the explanation is simple, it is one of compatibility with militant radicalism and a lack of control.

The Muslim Brotherhood, from my perspective, stands as a fine target of a political culture war but not as a target of military action or diplomacy. There is no command and control here that I can see, there is influence and support however. The conversation continues.
 

On Sarkozy

I've never been one to tell French jokes as symbolic of much beyond the level of an episode of Blackadder. But there are a putative number of reactionaries who find it convenient to call them 'surrender monkeys'. All of them are thinking twice today as the inevitability of a Sarkozy administration makes its presence felt in France, and in Europe.

I cannot recall there ever being, in my lifetime, a French President that could be seen as aligned with things I find appealing about conservatism. Sure people called Le Pen right-wing, but was he conservative? Not the way we think about conservatism. I learned today that President Bush never even really had a relationship with Chirac. Considering their behavior during the Islamic riots in Paris, it's no wonder.

When I was in Paris, some dozen or so years ago, I witnessed the most astounding sight. It was a parade of telecommunications workers on strike. I had never seen a demonstration so well organized in the US, that's why I tend to want to call it a parade. They had bands, they walked in unison, cheered in unison and stopped all traffic. Despite all of the agitation inherent, there were no police really doing anything. People stood on the sidewalks in bunches and clumps just watching them go by as if it were the most natural thing. People seemed perfectly ready to adjust their lives for as long as it took for the unions to get their way. My cousin told me about transit strikes and the like. In Paris, they're unstoppable.

I also noticed something else about the strikers. They were all very middle class looking. Some were in uniform. Plenty of them were chubby. In Pasadena, we have the Doo Dah Parade. It is a parody of Pasadena's  quite serious Tournament of Roses. The Doo Dah is quite notorious for the its presentation of the synchronized breifcase drill team. I got some of that feeling on that day in Paris. Silly, scary and somewhat awe inspiring all at the same time. Those Frenchies know how to protest, for some of them it must be a profession. I am reminded of that professionalism every time I see a ragtag protest in the States. Why not have agencies and outsource strikers and demonstrators, have some people who know how to chant, get picket signs done by pros?

Anyway, the time for the foolishness of the 35 hour workweek is about to end. Sarkozy is in the house. But much more importantly he strikes a strong chord for liberty and he is serious about engaging the political battle against the Islamist threat. This is classic conservative talk and as Wretchard notes, the Left should be embarrassed by their failure on this matter:

  Question: What do you think of polygamy?  

Answer: I respect all cultures throughout the world, but so that it is   quite clear: if I am elected President of the Republic, I will not accept   women being treated as inferior to men. The French Republic holds these   values: respect for women, equality between men and women. Nobody has the   right to hold a prisoner, even within his own family. I say it clearly, that   polygamy is prohibited in the territory of the French Republic. I will fight   against female genital mutilation and those who do not wish to understand that   the values of the French Republic include freedom for women, the dignity of   women, respect for women -- they do not have any reason to be in France. If   our laws are not respected and if one does not wish to understand our values,   if one does not wish to learn French, then one does not have any reason to be   on French territory.

Nicely done.

Infected

I am becoming increasingly impressed with Barack Obama, and a bit more wary of Romney, and hopeful for Giuliani. I'm still rather surprised by the kick in the pants that McCain got over the past week. But let me stress the big news. You really have to read the article in the New Yorker about Obama. It gets me past the boredom of his 'Dreams of My Father' book which I put down two days after I got it and haven't picked up since. I think Obama is really an interesting thinker, and it actually turns out that his style of problem-solving is very much like my own.

This is, again, partly a matter of temperament. “By nature, I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things,” Obama writes in his second book. “When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously.” He tends to think of his opponents as deluded and ridiculous, rather than as demons. “I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.”

So let me put it to you this way. Right now I am showing some of the symptoms of an Obama infection. I am beginning to look at him in a new way, which is to say actually buying into some of the hype about the way his campaign operates fundamentally differently and that having a salient effect on the electorate. This week, people are sending me invitations to the Obama Walk-A-Thons that are sprouting up like weeds around Southern California. The fact that he is demanding of the electorate is really stunning, it reads to me like he's becoming more like Kennedy vis a vis 'ask not'.

I would say that right now there is a 20% chance that Obama's campaign will make me break with Republicans based strictly on the fact that it is evolving into something which is not business as usual and, as I said, is truly engaging the electorate in novel, yet demanding ways. The New Yorker article, and especially the wariness I'm hearing from some liberals, is convincing me that he's no softy when it comes to matters of national security. As I said in Obama the Neocon, he's striking the proper pose. And it's surprising to me that this seems to be going without comment.

But really, just check this out: (Emphasis mine)

“There is a running thread in American history of idealism that can express itself powerfully and appropriately, as it did after World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, when we recognized that our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others. But the same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.”

In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”

It seems to me that this is the Barack Obama that conservatives want to see emerge in ten years when he becomes the shoe-in that people already infected with Obama fever believe is the case today. The thing is that I think folks like me still strongly believe that he has got to grow some backbone on lines where a conciliatory attitude my work, but compromise does not. And in his effort to appeal to youth and evolve the way campaigns are run, that hard line is blurred. Still, there may come a time when he shows that he can be forceful which he's going to have to be as an executive. He's still very Congressional, and I think he has the liberty of taking the time to suss out synergies because he's not responsible for solutions and consequences of failure. America doesn't need a Consultant in Chief, but a Commander.

So the line on Obama today is that he's showing some interesting colors and depth. But the bottom line is that it is better to have a president who is strongly wrong than one who is weakly right. The ship of state needs hard ruddering.

Side Notes on Blackified Republicanism

I have a few minutes to digest a few tidbits over at Booker Rising about the soundbites of one Angela McGlowan. She is the latest tip of the black conservative iceberg to show and prove in the mainstream media. McGlowan is now, and if not will soon be the target of some angry bloviation.

In this regard I know that I'm just repeating myself because I've run the gauntlet of black man as conservative. It was a harsh lesson that did not leave me bitter nor crippled, but certainly wiser and a bit less strident than I might have been. You see anyone with the temerity to suggest that black Americans would do themselves a favor by abandoning loyalty to Democrats and applying loyalty to Republicans is in for the political equivalent of a food fight in a junior high cafeteria. Or perhaps a more interesting analogy is to the plot of Danny Kaye's 'The Inspector General'.

An illiterate stooge in a traveling medicine show wanders into a strange town and is picked up on a vagrancy charge. The town's corrupt officials mistake him for the inspector general whom they think is traveling in disguise. Fearing he will discover they've been pocketing tax money, they make several bungled attempts to kill him.

Any illiterate stooge can tell that the Democrats are corrupt when it comes to fulfilling the promises black politics makes for itself and to black people. But the problem is that having discovered such corruption, blacks are targeted for political killing and called illiterate stooges. Or worse.  But that's only one third of the problem. Aside from surviving assassination attempts, one has to illustrate the benefits of the alternative loyalty (as opposed to apathy) and one has to get Republicans to pay attention.  I have concluded that both tasks are well-nigh impossible in today's political climate. The consolation I get is that of just being right, like a scientist whose theories have been independently verified but not publicly disseminated well.

Just the other day somebody asked why anyone should trust Republicans if it is a scientific proof that steel cannot be melted by jet plane fuel.

It's a political zen koan. It almost makes no sense to answer such questions because it begs questions that are part of conversations conservatives and libertarians and Republicans aren't particularly interested in. I can think of a couple others like:

• Why should anyone listen to John McWhorter if he's married to a white woman?
• Why should anyone trust Republicans when the price of gasoline is $3.75?

It's not that they're not interesting questions in an of themselves, but that they are gateway questions to taking the Republican alternative to Democrats seriously in the first place. I liken it to a kid from the sticks coming to dinner at Morton's in Beverly Hills. All he wants to do is prove that he's not a hick, so he cuts his eyes at the valet parking guy, he's prepared a retort to the maitre d', he's ready to one up the waiter, and he has a snappy bon mot for the wine steward. You feel sorry for the rube, and you just wish he would shut up and eat the steak, but he's had so many conflicts with the look and feel of the place that he's already to leave in a huff before the appetizers are served. These are the blackfolks we fight when we are diners at the Republican table. Nobody will just shut up and eat the steak.

I understand the class conflict inherent in these ideological skirmishes. That's why I don't really fret about race as an issue per se. You can assert that the majority of blacks are poor and that poor folks have no stake in conservative or Republican policy. I call that using blacks as a human shield. The problem of course is that all blacks are not poor, nor in fact are the majority of blacks poor. And what is to be said about those blacks who are decidedly not poor, and who are decidedly Republican? Well, goes the popular argument, there must be something wrong with them, and who cares about a minority within a minority anyway? This is the source of an interesting dilemma that all of us on the iceberg face. Should we show and prove these critics wrong, or just enjoy our steaks?

I tend to believe that eating the steak and dining with a stake in America from the Right side is quite enough reward in and of itself. That there are already more than enough jacklegs in America trying to prove that their black experience is more universal than somebody else's. But then there is the writer in me who cannot resist yet another attempt at making all of this plain for those who bother to read. Not only can the Zen questions be answered, but they can be dismissed. But there is a limit to the patience anyone can display. I'm past it, but that's where things get ugly.

You see, when it comes to black conservatives who eat steak, you have to deal with a political sticking point. That sticking point is that you're often talking to a mix of people who are vegetarians and those who have never been able to afford steak. So when you tell them about the goodness of the your American viewpoint, some of them challenge the very benefit of what you're eating. And some will go as far as to make a racial case for it. Black people, they say, should not be capitalists because capital is evil. Black people, they say, should not participate in the American armed forces, because our Army is evil. Black people, they say, should not be a part of the part of America Republicans cherish and defend. Black people, they say, should not stand at attention when the National Anthem is played, should distrust police, should distrust Republicans, should distrust whitefolks, and the list goes on.

When black conservatives and Republicans fight back, it is almost never seen as a war of ideas, but a war on black people.

There is a 'do no harm' omerta of silence in black politics. It has to do with the management of the Black Image. There is no way around it, especially not for whitefolks. The reasons are complex but all you have to do is look at the misinterpretations and petty insults that have gotten various whitefolks the noose in the media. So long as the Black Image is in play, so long as there are those dedicated to the manicuring of that thing (Echoes of Lauren Hill, some guys are only about that thing, that thing, that thing.), then there will always be some criticism the 'black masses' will never be able to deal with in a psychologically honest way. Whether we like it or not, there are certain bones one has to earn in order to have the privilege of dissing black people whether or not such people deserve it. And that privilege has been long maintained and held close by the Talented Tenth of whom I am a previously proud member. You cannot diss the black community or its members unless you have been given explicit permission, and by the way that permission can and will be revoked. Witness Bill Cosby.

I'm thinking today about Shakespeare, Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni just to name a few. I cannot recall them having anything to say about current events, and so perhaps by evading commentary, honest commentary, they are keeping their license intact. See I know that somebody like Audre Lorde or bell hooks, has license to talk black men into the dirt. Not that they have or that they might have, but they could. That's because there are legions of black women who are having difficulties with black men who are ready willing and able to take their words seriously. Michelle Wallace who wrote 'Black Macho & the Myth of the Superwoman' messed with my action back in my college days. Just the way the numbers play there will continue to be thousands of black families crossing that boundary into college education for the first time this generation. They'll be listening for black signals signifying in the old argot about what they used to have to put up with, but no more. Those voices of authority have license to criticize black communities. They won't be easily revoked but they could be.

This was the doing of my father's generation. They took the 60s in the streets to the 70s on the campuses. Now black studies, black women's studies, American studies are all institutionalized. The multiculturalisms implied in the 80s when Affirmative Action was still OK, grew wings in the 90s and has now hardened into dogma. My father's generation didn't send any Keynesian economists to the academy in large numbers. You're much more likely to hear black faculty talk about CLR James and Manning Marable in tones of approval. All that complaint (and I mean it in the most non-derogatory way) is institutionalized. You step out of school to eat Republican steak instead of the gruel of Marx. (Stepping out of school is a polite way to say 'leaving the plantation', which is another metaphor we black conservatives are chided about using.) It doesn't stop at English or Economics or Political Science, in just about every academic discipline there are demarcations. Blacks from the 60s and 70s have established the ethos and the rest of us are defectors from it.

It is that context which gives us the sticking points of debate. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams are not championed as blacks, they are derided and discounted as outsiders. And they are outsiders. Outsiders of the alienated class of black Americans who do not consider themselves politically to be diners at the table of American goods or inheritors of a positive legacy of American political freedom. And this will be my key point. A political majority of black Americans feel that they owe their political freedom to Democrats and indeed a specific subset of 'righteous' Democrats alone, rather than to the American system of government under which the Democrats operate. They therefore mistakenly view antagonism to opposing points of view, Republican points of view, as a necessary condition for black political freedom.  They view a Republican majority in Congress as fundamentally and necessarily oppressive of blacks.

The Republican party has no racial agenda. It therefore is not equipped to deal with the load of requirements and expectations that have aggregated over the past two generations of black politics. All of those requirements and expectations can easily be gotten from the legion of black academics and political operatives of the liberal and Democratic Left. The GOP has no interest or need to be part of the infrastructure of maintenance of the Black Image. The Republican Party is breaking its neck to make sure that the supply of steak is healthy. It's not micromanaging the attitudes of the Maitre D'. The whites only sign came off the door a long time ago, but it's still all about the steak.

McGlowan and others like her and I will continue to face this ironic opposition. Yet I still hold out hope, without being particularly blackified about it, that the best ideas will eventually win. Moreover that blacks will come to recognize and therefore ignore the sometimes juvenile spats between the parties especially as regards who belongs where. That will inevitably involve the subordination of the DuBoisian framework of race raising as a hallmark of political struggle. There is no Black Party.  Should there be?

Peter Parker: A Man for the Ages

Take your kids, run don't walk.

My kids don't read comic books. I never did, but somehow I think of boys who don't as somehow missing something. Various strains of goodness and evil, power, fame, shame and desperation course through the veins of comics. I haven't known very many introspective geeks who didn't feel a special attraction to the X-Men. But the most human comic hero ever was and still is your friendly neighborhood Spiderman, in the latest film he's a hero once again by golly!

I can't say how many universes I know vaguely, but of all the ones I do know, only the cartoon universe of Spiderman carries so much emotional weight in the form of love. Peter Parker's troubles are one degree further into melodrama than a soap opera, and yet I can't think of a purer way to communicate something about the maturity of love to pre-teens than is done in this flick. In a world of wimped out sitcom dads and kung-fu cartoon chicks who do six backhandsprings as a windup to anything, there's something charmingly real about a movie about friendship, love, betrayal and redemption at the Spidey level. You killed my father is written all over it, something we sophisticates are tempted to call hokey. And you have to stop your inner snark, at least I did, from combating the sniveling scenes of heartbreak in this movie. But if you can, then you'll find it magnificently touching, like a Nancy Wilson song, simple, pure and heartfelt.

450 Self-Portraits

One of the things I did this weekend was to go through all of the scanned pictures I have of myself and pick the one that best describes me professionally. I don't really have one. The picture I finally selected was this one to the right which I took for my 10th wedding anniversary a few years back. I 'shopped it with the best whiteboard photo I could find in my library, and this is what I got.

My stellar and stunning weakness is that I am unable to stand still without overthinking the moment. Every snapshot of me is incomplete, whether it's for the purposes of a resume or a posed picture. It's a rather disturbing thing for me, and I think it is one of the reasons that I seek uniformity in life. I recognize my fluidity. There are only about four pictures of me that I find accurate throughout my life. Others find me in a strange mood specifically for the camera. None of them seem complete without a backstory. In that I guess you could say that I'm non-trivial, which is to say that there is no single interesting fact about me that can be memorized and said representatively of who I am, or who I've been. So searching thousands of pictures and finding only a few iconic ones that are truthful is stranger still.

I expect that a small mob may come to Cobb as Michel Martin's show kicks off. For that reason, I'm sprucing things up a bit. I'm trying to kill dead weight off my blogroll and make it more representative of the stuff I actually read. I'm replacing the banner with apologies to the reader who helped perfect it, with one a bit less stereotypically Malcolm-y. I'm looking to actually spend some time conveying a more accurate sense of why I'm here and what I'm trying to accomplish, and in light of my Cotton Update, I'm convinced that the best way to do this is visually.

I've written over 6,000 blog entries over the past few years. It was Charles Cameron who convinced me that my opinion would be of use in the larger world, and I took him seriously. The larger world has taken me seriously to the extent that the blogosphere is the larger world. And now I am faced with the challenge of being a recognizable conduit for the ideas I profess. I need to take my image a bit more seriously.  I like 'essayist and political cartoonist', because I think it accurately describes my approach and demeanor. One without the other isn't quite balanced or fair. I don't want to be a humorist like PJ O'Rourke, but I love the space that is his. I'd like to think that I can be that kind of funny. I like the space inhabited by Stanley Crouch, and I can only hope my first book will be as cool as his "Notes of a Hanging Judge", but I obviously don't need to take a swing at effeminate literary types. But at some point in my life of writing, if it is possible within the medium that online is or may become, I would like to have the stature, or at least the contextual shadow of one of the great wise writers. In that way, part of me resents having to take pictures at all. I've always wanted to be older, wiser, wealthier and more influential than I am. I never liked being a child. I never liked being led.

All of these pictures of me are cute. And I was cute in that way on that day.

The first I've explained. The second perfects me in 1983 when I was a sophomore in college reading Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America. It was the second year of me considering myself a neocon, after Sowell. It was the year I started thinking of myself as a new kind of immigrant in America. That was Easter, but I didn't marry her. In every way that me was living the kind of Old School that I thought everyone would always appreciate, in the way you think Frankie Beverly and Sade would never go out of style and the Talented Tenth would always be in charge - I took that bearing for granted.

The third was me in full buppy mode. Black urban professional, dancing in suits. All very smooth and sophisticated. The year was 1987, the town was El Segundo. I had yet to meet the love of my life and I was a member of the Babeless Crew. We gave the coolest parties in upscale black So Cal. I was still me, but I was enjoying life a whole lot. I was playing fast and loose in the go-go Eighties. It was an arrogant time for all of us. I drank, I smoked, I danced to Housequake. Politics didn't matter, what mattered was self-improvement. It was a great time to be in your mid twenties. Nobody had heard of AIDS, even Reagan got busted partying with Iranians, no worries. I was making up for lost time, all the hard work it took to get the right kind of education.

Before then times were hard. I worked basically four years after highschool. I clerked, I tellered, I sold radios, I did ten key by touch. I sold toner from a boiler room. I was a union employee. I had a dozen odd jobs with a private prep school background. I took a picture of myself in black and white trying my best to show that there was more to me than a black kid with a high school diploma. That was my most expensive sweater from Alexander Julian, and those are the lace curtains in my parents' bedroom. I took the picture with a Minolta SRT-101. I made a calendar of pictures of myself in black and white. I was solemn in the way that only 20 year old black man knows. I couldn't afford an apartment, a car, a suit, and I just got sick of partying with the guys in the warehouse.

But after the yuppie partying was done, after dancing on the speakers with Rosie Perez, I read Toni Morrison. And Audre Lord, and Cornel West, and Gloria Aldanzua, and bell hooks, and Derrick Bell. I caught the fever and buried myself in T. Boyle and Threepenny Review. I had to make sense of the world of the liberal arts. I stopped wearing the Nordstrom shirts and ties. I started wearing the bandanna. I became an intellectual insurgent, an organic, a roughneck poet, a guerrilla videographer of potentially rogue cops, a groupie of black intellectuals in academia, a diarist gone public.  But I still drove the BMW, and I still lived near the beach. I opened my eyes past the point of dilation and became suddenly disgusted with everything and everyone. That which allowed me to ignore IEDs in Afghanistan and the poverty of South Central LA, I cast off. I became sensitive, and my writing became like a socio-economic seismograph. I went Boho.

I moved to the East Coast and realized that there was some glamour in writing. I found all the wannabes who hung out with the junior staffers from the New Yorker. I knew the clerks in the black bookstores by name. I had met Haile Gerima, Trey Ellis, Greg Tate, Lisa Jones, George C. Wofe and... I finally realized that it was not my career. That when the chips were down, as they always are for brilliant black writers who suffer in penury while knucklehead rappers like Onyx shit diamonds, I wasn't going to stick it out. Besides, I was now better able to distinguish important writing from existential bloviation. I had figured out the identity game. It wasn't for me. The time was nigh to find a wife, and put all this nightcrawling to bed. So I did.

Jeremy Clarkson: My Kind of Brit

In speaking about a 185 MPH car, Clarkson writes:

"Think of it as an Aussie from the outback. Maybe he can’t quote Shakespeare. Maybe he’s never heard of Terence Conran. But he can smash all the teeth clean out of your mouth with a single punch. That's the Monaro"

I love this guy. When it comes to lining up ballsy adverbs around the performance of hot cars nobody matches Clarkson. In the wimpified world of American metrosexuality, few people have managed to distinguish between manliness and machismo. I hear that they've got that problem across the pond as well. But Clarkson has managed to keep just the right amount of cave in his manhood, abetted as he his by access to the best sports cars the world has to offer. 

The Regulars

When I was a kid, I asked a kid named Collins if his dad was the astronaut Michael Collins. It didn't really occur to me that he might not be even though this kid was black. He had a common name so I figured he was related one way or another. My name is Bowen. Aint many of us around. But because of my memory I always try to recover people and things. I have failed in many ways, and so perhaps it is my fate to be a Bowen, different.

My impulse to make and maintain contact with the people who come and go in my life is best manifest here at Cobb. Only recently have people who know me professionally come to know that I'm a blogger, but I'd say at least 75% of the people who know me personally know about my online writing. I've even had friends tell me that strangers have talked about Cobb. That's lovely, but I'm actually much better, in some ways in person. That's why several years ago I endeavored to start a small men's club.

I originally wanted to call it "The Brother's Cup", and I still might. But there were some connotations in that song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers that I wasn't trying to have, and so I ended up calling it "The Regulars". The idea was simple. Get eight black men together on a monthly basis just to chill at a restaurant. We'd have a regular table, perhaps in the upstairs room, and we'd eat, smoke, drink and enjoy each other's company. This is something I've never had because my education, career and interests have taken me all around the place. Since I turned 18, I've never lived at one address for more than 5 years. Even since I've been married, I've lived at six different places in three states.

The same is true for my best friends. Mini Me, The Cartoon Hero, The Dancing Professor, & Felix Unger are all in different states, Baby Boy is in London, and The Spy is either in the Seychelles, Khazakstan, Sweden or the middle of the Pacific. Only The Last Blackman, The Playa and Moleman are in LA, and they mostly have no time, them being on toddler lockdown.

All of these men are doing well in their lives, and if I were another kind of writer I'd probably write stories about us. As you can guess by the nicknames, these are interesting brothers. Few of us show up anywhere in common. There's just the occasional email. So I'm going to say a few things about some friends I've collected over the years who endure in my heart if not in person, my real best friends.

Spy got married. I have yet to meet his spouse. It's killing me to know, because he's essentially gone all around the world looking. We were talking about whether he should get married after 40, and I said that I wouldn't. But he went on and surprised me. See the thing about Spy is that he's one of those men who guys actually admit - OK I wish I looked like him. Spy and I have a lot in common in the vein of arrogance, but I think he has mellowed out considerably. We once thought about becoming submarine officers, he ended up attached more closely to the military. Spy is the man you want to have your back if you ever get in a scrap in a parking lot with an ex-convict. The problem is, no matter what happened, Spy would get blamed for starting the fight. That's because he looks exactly like a spit & polish Special Forces guy with a superiority complex, or he did the last time I saw him which had to be 6 years ago. I always admired him because I could see what kind of man he really is behind all that. He's got a great laugh. Oh, and women hate him like they hate James Bond.

Moleman disappeared on us and went underground. He and I used to throw the biggest beach parties in LA amongst the young, gifted and black. It was our reputation. We had something of a monopoly. But some years after I moved to New York, Moleman just stopped calling folks and going out. The weird thing is that he knows everybody's business. I mean I can't believe his memory. Moleman is the guy who got me to pledge Alpha and he's the one who convinced me that sleeping more than 6 hours a night is for lazy people. He's a certifiable programming genius, but these days he is totally dedicated to his wife and family. We deserve to be rich, Moleman and I. But we were just kids without capital. What did we know?

The Playa exemplifies another aspect of my personality (as do all of my existential partners). Because of that, my wife can't stand him. Playa is the man least likely to hold down a j.o.b. but most likely to have more cash than most people. Thing is, he's an entrepreneur, and has been since day one. He cannot be managed. The scourge of pointy-haired bosses everywhere, he grew up in the grit of Gary, Indiana and you can see all that in him. I'd call him the brother most likely to say "I'm your worst nightmare, a nigger who can hack your Merill Lynch account and sleep with your daughter on the same night." Except he's a very happy dude. He is a pig in the slop of humanity without lightning fast reflexes, a true independent.  Anything that can be done with low level drivers in Linux, he's done it. He can smell a hoochie mama from six blocks, and rope her in within six minutes. But that's about all I can tell you. I'm indemnified.  And even though he owes me $3,000, I trust him with my life. Oh and women love him.

The Cartoon Hero is one of those preternaturally hard working individuals who likes to think circles around everybody and everything. He cannot be fully understood except through a combination of inconsistent absurdities. Like the other gay buddy in this crew of my best friends, he is everything he appears to be, and yet none of them at all. As far as I know he's not open, but he's safely ensconced in a community that would be plenty friendly if he chose to be, I think. We share a passion for black politics and culture and I think he is one of the few people that can actually call me on my bullshit without breaking a sweat. At least he can lead me to believe that he's called me on my bullshit. The problem is he's well... too academic. But you know the kinds of grudges I hold against black academics who get deep into racial theories. I personally think he would a better MD than PhD, then again, I think that of most PhDs.

The exception however is the Dancing Professor, my homie who gets all of my musical references. Not that I make them any longer. Still, I like that he's the most practical and dedicated of my politically minded existential partners. He takes himself exactly the right amount of serious, which is damned hard to do when you know as much as he does. He's the kind of down to earth guy that you wish could hit the lottery because he works so hard and is so earnest. I want to get rich so I can endow him a little somethin' and I wish my kids could grow up around his kids. Who knows? Someday all that could happen.

Speaking of rich. I expected The Last Blackman to do that. I don't know what happened. Well, the story I tell is that he decided to get off the corporate hamster wheel, but I never pushed.  The Last Blackman is the kind of Old School cool guy that you immediately recognize - the kind of brother that is always insulted if you don't give him the full dap and speak in the dialect. He's what I call astonishingly under-cover. Could describe to you the inner workings of synthetic aperture radar, but would much rather chill and watch the basketball game. He's the man that hooked me up when I was dead broke. I always think of him in three contexts. One, he was the brother who hipped me to John Coltrane and Pacifica's Black Metal Liberation Weekend with Kwame Person Lynn, while we were doing benchpresses. Two, he's the brother whom I watched all the hotshots at Stanford's EE department break their neck trying to get him to come for his Master's. He did. Three, he was Lauren Hill's biggest fan, to a somewhat creepy degree. We share a deep love for the P-Funk, the uncut Funk, the Bomb. Plus he can play a mean bass guitar.

Mini Me is my actual best friend. We are the most alike of all the guys, and not a season goes by when I don't think that there ought to be a way that I could move back to Atlanta, just so we could hang out. He's an AI researcher and has the biggest collection of videodiscs, yes the big 12 inch ones, left in the country, probably. We're both BMW fanatics, and I remember driving his new one as one of the highlights of the day I stood up at his wedding. We both have the same inner conservative, mom, apple pie and family selves, masked in big baldheaded knobby kneed blackman-ness. We both talk a mile a minute and could live on Thai food if it came down to it. But most of all, I like his matter of fact, directness and ability to hold five conversations each at varying levels of complexity and seriousness at one time. I don't think I've ever seen him truly uncomfortable or lose his cool in front of anyone but me. I think I need to call him because it has been about 3 months and he probably has something to complain about.

Felix is well, just what you would think. He's the most charming, neat, clever and damned near perfect individual you could possibly imagine a man to be. In fact, he's probably the most famous of us all for attracting women looking for Mr. Right. Except that Felix doesn't swing that way. He's a rather flawlessly generous character and I have to tell you that I actually get him. That is to say I think that if I were a young black gay man who felt really out of place in that way I suppose only young black men who look like Urkel might feel, then I would be happy as hell for Felix to pick me up. Of course, Felix is a heartbreaker because he's such a hot dude, something he likes to remind me every time we speak. There are times when I think that's the only reason he became my friend. Just kidding. He actually does dress better than me, and he actually is more conservative than I am - that's the reason that people just felt like we had to know each other.

Baby Boy is in London. I think. He was a shy kid who came up with a cool idea, sold the company, bought a Porsche started hanging out with Hollywood starlets, all when he was about 27. The last time I heard from him he had just been hanging out in Liberia and had done his own Middle Passage between Ghana and Brazil dining every night on the bridge of a container ship. That was many years ago.  Baby Boy got the bug, and he bugged out of the States. Where are you Baby Boy? You need to bring your ass home and take care of Stockton. You know what I'm talking about. The strange thing about Baby Boy is that we thought we corrupted him, at least that's what The Spousal Unit would say. But they don't know.

Friends. How many of us have them?
 

Ice Cube vs Eddie Murphy

I was recently in a short discussion with some smart brothers of color in the context of a big surprise and endeavor that will increase my famousity. One of the things I would have liked to have talked more about is the passing of the baton of Head Black Actor in Charge over to Ice Cube.

What most people don't know is that Ice Cube's parents were both UCLA professors. He expresses perfectly the black anger of liberal fantasies, and why not? It's in his blood. So while many people raise a puzzled eyebrow over his 'transformation', nine will get you ten that his ghetto diction is affected and he can code switch with the best of them. In other words, Ice Cube is nothing more than a suburban rebel of the radical chic variety. A black punk rocker. (You see I'm grasping here because I don't know any punk bios well enough to give an example of such a good kid gone radical to make a political point, although I'm certain the airwaves are full of them).

Now as Daddyman, it's my job to see to it that my kids get there share of wholesome lightweight entertainment. But that's something, until recently - with the death of the Huge-Black-Cast (ala Uptown Saturday Night) and the Nobly-Suffering-Black-Family (ala Claudine) genres that I couldn't get from African American films. But then behold the miracle of animation, and voila, black voicification! We actually owe it all to Eddie Murphy's pioneering sidekick Mushu the dragon in Disney's 1998 'Mulan'. Before Mulan, Eddie Murphy was off limits to kids.

So it took the incredibly strict discipline of Disneyfication to make Eddie into a family friendly commodity. And because of that, we now have pure comedy to pass on to the next generation which is completely stripped of the burden of bawdy, vulgar, self-righteous cursing that none of Murphy's generation was any good at anyway - vis a vis 'deep' as compared with Richard Pryor and the still living, still hilarious and still rather seriously thought provoking Paul Mooney. In other words, Eddie, and Martin and Chris are all excellent, but.. will they be funny in retrospect like Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx? Debatable.

Therefore if they are not deep comics, they're best as pop comics, and when it comes to pop movies.. Hmmm Murphy's best movie? Shrek. Martin Lawrence's best movie? Open Season. Chris Rock's best movie? Osmosis Jones. Do you see the pattern here?

Just 10 minutes ago some telemarketer from the Dove Foundation called my house. The who? I looked them up of course and it turns out that they give four 'doves' out of five to Ice Cube's latest movie. Don't you find that a little bit odd?

Pan's Labyrinth

If it weren't for the Spousal Unit, I certainly wouldn't have gone to see this film.

Now it has been several weeks and the memory of it fades like an old story hidden in memory. It was a very good but not great film, entertaining in the way that foreign films give us access to a naive innoncence mixed with a violent and sexual hitorical plot that offers us wise cynics a way to rediscover a simple morality. I'm thinking of Il Postino and The Bicycle Thief as perfect examples, but there are others you know. I don't know, because I quit watching foreign films after grew up and got married. Well except for Kurosawa, but that's different.

In Pan's Labyrinth a girl dreams her way through a sorrowful childhood as her mother abuses herself for the sake of a sadistic army officer. Things get very ugly as they go to stay with him at the last outpost of a fascist military which is on the brink of collapse at the hands of hearty mountain rebels. There are multiple plots afoot and somehow it gets very dark before the dawn and the girl comes of age.

On the whole PL was a very diverting entertainment that was easy to get lost in made easier still by the anonymity of the actors. It was subtitled, if I remember correctly, and though I'm not the type who likes to go out and read a movie, I was pleased by this story. It's not suitable for kids although it would work well taught in a high school AP English class.

Globalization, Class & The Limits of Learning

Finally, the Agonist has pulled a decent conversation out of, for him, thin air. It is the conversation that liberals don't want you to hear, because it cuts to the heart of their ideology / wishful thinking. I jump to the crux:

And that's where it got interesting. We had a long debate about the merits of development and debt forgiveness. Then we talked about the difference between our way of life and theirs; how what the Ethiopian's want, all 73 million of them, is to live like us. All three of us agreed that the world cannot sustain all 5+ billion people with an American lifestyle. The consensus was: "Not gonna happen."

Then I interjected, "That's a conversation we've not had with the people of the 3^rd world. I don't think they are going to take kindly to be told they cannot live like we do."

At that point both ladies moral superiority--well deserved in the sense that they had sacrificed much to help Ethiopians--was completely deflated. There was a bit of defiant denial at first, as well, but then they realized how much a part of the problem their lifestyle at how was and how dire, serious and grim the real conversation was going to be.

It was a tense conversation between 4 very liberal, open-minded people with a genuine concern for the future of the planet. Four people who had all, in their own way really sacrificed to make the world a better place. Four people who realized it would take much, much more than they imagined and cause much, much more devastation regardless the outcome.

You see, Don's right. It's not us who are or will sacrifice. It's always someone else. Even those of us who mean well and do good.

Pretty shitty dilemma, ain't it?

It's a baseline assumption. It's a fundamental difficulty with mankind, but I think it's a problem that conservative thinkers deal with better. We always understand, in the context of American conservatism, that there is something precious and special that we are defending. The cost of defending a series of rules is that some people are in, and some people are out. The premise of liberty is that, given acceptance of the rules, you can be in. One of the important rules is meritocracy. This is the thing that gets forgotten as soon as you start thinking global utopia, or global anything for that matter. We don't (and can't) set a standard for behavior without recognizing that people who will participate in the benefits will have to conform in order to play. Conformity and meritocracy go hand in hand.

The liberal impulse towards global utopia is stunned by the realities of supply and demand, especially by the supply side of personal values. That is to say Third Worlders have to give to get. They have to be prepared to accept the premises of inclusion in the benefits established by the civilization we take for granted. You cannot just throw money at the problem of world poverty. There must be culture and institutions involved - self-sustaining institutions. But are Thirds (no disrespect) well-motivated to assume the responsibilities of conformity and meritocracy in the context of justifying their desire for the comforts of a First World standard of living?

This is where it's difficult to get a clear logical discussion without bumping into the political wall of arguments around anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, the value of indigenous cultures and hard multiculturalism. But I'm content to throw all of those into the bucket of refusal of give to get. So the demand for modern convenience and advanced tech is implicit in the impetus for the alleviation of global poverty, but... This may be entirely a matter of donor politics, ie American liberal criticism of the World Bank, IMF and other 'economic hit men'. But it also may be a matter of Third pride.

I don't want to get into the characterization of Third pride beyond the general sweeping generalizations of the defenses of female genital mutilation, Islamist regression, ethnic rivalry and clannish behavior. But I will make a passing allusion to parallel this with all of the very familiar resistance we have seen in American blacks to assimilation. Selling out is buying in. It's not always worth it.

When we talk about Darfur and Saudi Arabia we recognize the First World's 'unfair' interest in the places that have and have not acquired value with regard to natural resources in the world economy. Darfur has nothing. Saudi Arabia has everything. But what, besides enormous bling does Saudi Arabia have? They clearly do not have democracy, and their society does not reflect the values of liberty as we Westerners in the First World protect.

So I am suggesting that short of imperium there is implicit a long learning curve that brings Thirds to modern Western standards. There are forces of supply and demand involved in keeping the world's billions where they are socio-economically. That inertia cannot be overcome with wishful thinking, good intentions, military coups, massive investments or any such quick changes of heart or policy. You simply cannot teach a man to fish quickly. You need to teach him how to build a boat or hire him as a hand on yours.

Scrimp

Bomani cracks me up:

Is it just me, or are black people entranced by shrimp in a way that others aren’t?  I feel some obligation when I’m at the buffet to eat as many shrimp as I possibly can, as if I’m getting over by eating all that shrimp.  It’s not good shrimp.  It’s just shrimp.  But I do love me some scrimp.  And if it’s all I can eat, I’m gonna eat all I can stand.  Or at least all I can stand while still having room for some red Jell-O.  My affection for Jell-O is pretty strong, I must say.

It's 2007. Is it ok to like fried chicken and watermelon yet?

Koonin's Slide Presentation

Koonin put together some great stuff that I talked about before. There are plenty of great slides, but here are my favorite two slides. I was really surprised to find that nuclear isn't likely to do as well as I thought. It turns out to be a very expensive way to generate electricity, and the developing world doesn't much care.

This one basically eats the Peak Oil scenario alive. All we have to do is be ready to pay $40-60 per barrel and then we have oil. Alternative oil. Yeah it's still fossil fuel, but it's there.

So here is the rest of the deck.Download Koonin_UCSB_0307.pdf

The Magic Number

It starts with 09 and ends with C0. It's a 128bit key that unlocks, given the proper software, all encrypted HD DVDs and Blu Ray discs. I was made aware of it just this morning, not quite by accident, but because I'm a news junkie and I have software agents that find stuff for me. Given that, it only took me a couple minutes to find the code I need to crack the AACS protection scheme. I'm not going to publish it, that would be unethical, like publishing Richard McBeef or Nick Berg's beheading. But it is a fascinating thing.

In the latest battle between the hackers and the hacked, the hackers have won. But the hackers should win because this is a war over the right to know. Interestingly enough, here in my ancient hotel with only 20 channels of television, this parallels an episode of Dr. Phil that I was forced to watch last night out of pure boredom. Some chick and some dude were on an episode of 'Is this Normal?', which I imagine to be a regular segment for Dr. Phil. And the chick was obsessing over whether or not the dude was cheating on her. So she would text him 80 times a day to see where he was, demanded his passwords to his PC, checked all of his personal and work email, checked to see how much gas he used in his car and even checked the position of the passenger seat in his car. She was hacking him obsessively because she desperately needed a daily assurance that  he wasn't cheating. There was basically no trust in the relationship.  She felt she had a right to know. 

Besides the fact that dude was a total doormat it's clear that the provocation was the chick's fault. But in the case of hackers, their provocation is necessary. That's because, as was shown in the DeCSS case, students need to be able to communicate security. Now simply because it's widely known that classrooms are hacked for the sake of DVD piracy doesn't mean you can restrict that speech. Part of the outrage, if any, that will ensue from the decisions of Digg and others to stand by the free speech argument is that relatively few people pay attention to other hacked classrooms.

Given a healthy or morbid obsession, everything can be hacked. You should always assume that somebody somewhere wants to hack you, what you know and what you do. But the crazy part is, like the obsessive chick, they really don't want to leave you.

Obligatorily, I think it's unethical for me to publish the number because I'm not involved in the business or avocation of teaching security or low level programming, but I think it's clearly ethical for those who are.

Satchmo

(from Pops)

“SATCHMO, WHY I HARDLY KNEW YOU”

Brother Ray will readily recall the youthful joke that went something like this: “I don’t like ____ (I can’t recall the name) cereal because my brother likes it and I don’t like my brother!” Of course, that had nothin’ to do with Ray and me! All the same, we said it and laughed at it without fully understanding what that indirect slam was all about. It hardly mattered. In this many years later instance, I’m shifting the context a bit to say this: “I don’t like Louis Armstrong because my father didn’t like Louis Armstrong; and I loved my father!” There, now you have the long and short of the explanation…not really. What you do have, however, is an earlier Bow Tie in which I wrote about the pride which characterized Chico [ed. note - Chico is my Pops' late father, my grandfather] . He was never “preachy” about issues having to do with race; but it was always clear that being a Black man meant something to him…at as well as below or beyond his dark-skinned surface. In this connection, he had real distain for Black men whose “antics” he found distasteful. His label for these characters was a far cry from the label so freely bandied about these days. But he was not at all reluctant to show his distinct dissatisfaction. For Chico, Louis Armstrong did entirely too much “skinnin’ and grinnin’.” And catching Chico’s drift early on, I became more attuned to Armstrong’s sight than I was to his sound. The same holds fast even to this day; and I am the first to admit the unfairness of it all. I am more than casually aware of the many jazz musicians who, in telling of their own growth and development freely and even joyfully acknowledge their debt to Armstrong. It is not an overstatement, in fact, to say that his impact is legendary. So be it. When I visualize him, I see a “Hello Dolly” character with a white hankie and shiny white teeth. A legendary clown!

Ken Burns’ extensive albeit uneven jazz history project makes a big splash over Louis Armstrong’s role in the history of jazz in and beyond this country. And it would not be fitting to discount that role. At the same time, the distance I put between myself has less to do with his musical talent or innate ability than his persona. Even in the jazz workshops I have done at Antioch, I readily admit my bias. So, students came to understand that they would have to check out other sources to gain an appreciation for the man. In one workshop an avid and outspoken student gave high praise to Armstrong. And, quite frankly, I was glad he spoke up with so much information, so much passion because I knew the students were not going to gain that valuable insight from me!

Quite often I have inwardly played around with the differences between the fool and the clown. There are times when I am not sure that there is a difference or that it matters that much. For my own purposes, I complicate the otherwise trivial matter and consider the wider picture, the context in which the fool/clown does his or her thing. Sadly, I have yet to find it within me to place Louis Armstrong in a context that allows me to take Chico out of the picture and simply enjoy the music. That’s my problem, not his. Drum roll and curtain down.

Mitt Drops a Softball

Mitt 'The Gameshow Host' Romney has uttered the first genuinely stupid thing I've heard all season. Kevin Drum picks up the story:

Today's mandatory blogging is about Mitt Romney's declaration that his favorite novel is L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, a bad science fiction book made into an even worse John Travolta vehicle a few years ago (Scott McLemee provides a precis here). Several people have suggested that Romney must be telling the truth about this since no one in his right mind would lie about liking this book, but I suspect something else: I suspect Romney just doesn't read much fiction and was stuck for an answer. His neurons fired away momentarily searching for something to say, and Battlefield Earth is what popped up.

Following Drum's meme:

Needless to say, I'm here to help. Sort of.... I promised to follow up with a selection of "safe, patriotic, audience friendly 'favorite books,'" but I never came through. So let's do it ourselves! Here are the original categories:

• Moderately intellectual choice, suitable for being interviewed by George Will
  

• Funny choice, suitable for being interviewed on MTV
  

• Multicultural choice, suitable for being interviewed by New York Times
  

• Populist choice, suitable for being interviewed by Parade
  

• Safely patriotic choice, suitable for being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh
  

• Thoughtful choice, suitable for being interviewed on PBS
  

• Anti-terrorism choice, suitable for being interviewed by Andrew Sullivan

These are actual favorite books of mine:

George Will: Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
NYTimes: Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
Parade: Timeline by Michael Crichton
Rush Limbaugh: Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
PBS: Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
Andrew Sullivan: The Bourne Ultimatum (just to see what he'd say), then The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright

What Drum doesn't get is that Romney is probably catering to people who read the 'Left Behind' series of Christian fiction in order to make bonds across Christian sects. But he couldn't come out and say so, but people who know, know.

Byran Hirota & The Asian Model Minority Myth

(from the race man archives, circa mid 80s)

Statistics and figures have been floating around this group, that when taken out of their proper context can be misleading. The asian model minority myth is nothing more than a myth. The following comes from the book titled "Asian Americans - an Interpretive History" by Sucheng Chan - and I highly recommed the book to anyone who wants to begin any kind of study on the asian american experience. It even covers Asian Indians [although not in an extremely indepth manner]

Ten years later the U.S. census Bureau released data that further under- dergirded the model minority image. According to these figures, Chinese and Japanese Americans had outpaced whites even in terms of median family income by 1970. Japanese American median Family income was almost $3,000 higher, and Chinese American $1,000 higher than the U.S. median family income. But the federal government's study failed to place these figures alongside other relevant information, such as the fact that 60 percent of the Japanese American and Chinese American families (compared to only 51 percent among the U.S. population as a whole), more than one person worked, which helps to account for their higher family income. If per capita income, rather than family income, had been used as the measure, then the public would have learned that Chinese Americans (thought not Japanese Americans) were making considerably less than the national average. Moreover, if Hispanic groups, which earned much lower than other whites, had been removed from the aggregate white figures, then Asian Americans would not have outranked whites.

Social scientists who analyzed the 1970 cenus data reached various conclusions depending on whether they used statistics for the nation as a whole or for states with particularly high Asian concentrations, whether they separated the American-born from the foreign-born, and whether they distinguished between males and females. Studies based on national data, such as those by Barry Chiswick and by Charles Hirschman and Morrison Wong, invariably showed that American-born Chinese and Japanese men had a higher income than white men, but as Robert Jiobu, Amado Cabezas, and David Moulton have documented, such was not the case in California, where 58 percent and 45 percent, respectively, of the Japanese and Chinese in the contiguous states resided in 1970. In that state, American-born Chinese and Japanese men indeed had significantly more years of school than non-Hispanic whites, but their median incomes were no higher than that of the latter, because their returns to education - that is, the additional income derived from increased years of schooling - were lower than those for whites. According to Robert Jiobu's 1976 study of American-born men in California in 1970, for each additional year of education, whites earned $522 more, compared to $438 for Japanse, $320 for Chinese, $340 for Mexican Americans, and $284 for blacks. Thus, the Asian-white parity in income was made possible mainly by the Asian American's higher level of education.

League of Democracies

John McCain gets credit for the first new, big and good idea of the campaign season: a League of Democracies.

The Arizona senator will call for such an organization to be "the core of an international order of peace based on freedom" in a speech Tuesday at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

"We Americans must be willing to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies," McCain says, according to excerpts his campaign provided. "Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom, knowledge and resources necessary to succeed."

"To be a good leader, America must be a good ally," he adds in the speech, another in a series of policy addresses as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination.

Some folks at Yglesias are disturbed that this sounds very much like an idea emanating from Princeton and one of the Obama strategists called the Concert of Democracies. If you hear that phrase, then you can be sure that it's the 'blue' version which might be updated for partisan spite.

Since we are in the world of post-state actors, this can fill some of the diplomatic vacuum that has rendered NATO into something of a nullity. It can also give a name to the program started under GWBush to the international information sharing that has attrited the AQ network. The opposition has been loathe to acknowledge this aspect of the GWOT, focusing instead on GTMO and Abu Ghraib as exemplary instead of things like the capitulation of Libya and the busting up of AQ Khan's proliferation network.

The League would be a validation and strategic acknowledgment of the defacto military arrangement that the US provides the global economy. Which is to say Europe and Japan don't spend money on their own militaries because the US does. That is what the US Navy does - it keeps the seas safe from piracy and projects force. The Netherlands needn't have a naval power to protect all of the Shell supertankers despite the fact that they would make a great terrorist target for AQ.

It's a much more proper establishment for security arrangements as it would have requirements for certain standards of human rights that everybody knows China and Russia and Saudi Arabia are not interested in. It thereby becomes a moral organization for stability that you simply can't buy your way into while still funding assassinations, suppressing free speech, or oppressing women.

It seems clear to me that Pakistan doesn't get to belong. Nor Iran. That is because there should be a presumption of non-aggression within the pact. We simply have to say that India is more democratic than Pakistan despite our unilateral agreements. Obviously we can't have supporters of non-state actors like the global Hizb. Of course I like the idea of Mexico, Brazil and India in the mix.

The Jeremiah A. Wright Letter

Fresh from the Kwaku Network, this un-authenticated letter to Jodi Kantor of the NYT.

    March 11, 2007

    Jodi Kantor
    The New York Times
    22 9 West 43rd Street
    New York, New York 10036-3959

    Dear Jodi:

    Thank you for engaging in one of the biggest misrepresentations of the truth I have ever seen in sixty-five years. You sat and shared with me for two hours. You told me you were doing a "Spiritual Biography" of Senator Barack Obama. For two hours, I shared with you how I thought he was the most principled individual in public service that I have ever met. For two hours, I talked with you about how idealistic he was. For two hours I shared with you what a genuine human being he was. I told you how incredible he was as a man who was an African American in public service, and as a man who refused to announce his candidacy for President until Carol Moseley Braun indicated one way or the other whether or not she was going to run. I told you what a dreamer he was. I told you how idealistic he was. We talked about how refreshing it would be for someone who knew about Islam to be in the Oval Office. Your own question to me was, Didn't I think it would be incredible to have somebody in the Oval Office who not only knew about Muslims, but had living and breathing Muslims in his own family?

    I told you how important it would be to have a man who not only knew the difference between Shiites and Sunnis prior to 9/11/01 in the Oval Office, but also how important it would be to have a man who knew what Sufism was; a man who understood that there were different branches of Judaism; a man who knew the difference between Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews and Reformed Jews; and a man who was a devout Christian, but who did not prejudge others because they believed something other than what he believed.I talked about how rare it was to meet a man whose Christianity was not just "in word only." I talked about Barack being a person who lived his faith and did not argue his faith. I talked about Barack as a person who did not draw doctrinal lines in the sand nor consign other people to hell if they did not believe what he believed.

    Out of a two-hour conversation with you about Barack's spiritual journey and my protesting to you that I had not shaped him nor formed him, that I had not mentored him or made him the man he was, even though I would love to take that credit, you did not print any of that. When I told you, using one of your own Jewish stories from the Hebrew Bible as to how God asked Moses, "What is that in your hand?," that Barack was like that when I met him. Barack had it "in his hand." Barack had in his grasp a uniqueness in terms of his spiritual development that one is hard put to find in the 2 1st century, and you did not print that.

What a surprise. There is definitely a market out here to formalize some aspects of the Kwaku Network. We're better off with it than without it, but really, what does this guy expect? I've been fussing that the black church is in over its head when it starts messing around national politics. Perhaps things will improve. Anyway, there's more...

Obama the Neocon

Read Robert Kagan's article today in the WaPo:

Okay, you say, but at least Obama is proposing all this Peace Corps-like activity as a substitute for military power. Surely he intends to cut or at least cap a defense budget soaring over $500 billion a year. Surely he understands there is no military answer to terrorism.

Actually, Obama wants to increase defense spending. He wants to add 65,000 troops to the Army and recruit 27,000 more Marines. Why? To fight terrorism.

He wants the American military to "stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar," and he believes that "the ability to put boots on the ground will be critical in eliminating the shadowy terrorist networks we now face." He wants to ensure that we continue to have "the strongest, best-equipped military in the world."

Obama never once says that military force should be used only as a last resort. Rather, he insists that "no president should ever hesitate to use force -- unilaterally if necessary," not only "to protect ourselves . . . when we are attacked," but also to protect "our vital interests" when they are "imminently threatened." That's known as preemptive military action. It won't reassure those around the world who worry about letting an American president decide what a "vital interest" is and when it is "imminently threatened."

Nor will they be comforted to hear that "when we use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others." Make every effort?

Conspicuously absent from Obama's discussion of the use of force are four words: United Nations Security Council.

Kagan says Obama is 'pure Kennedy'. The evidence is mounting. Today seems to be the first day of the geopolitical positioning. Barnett says:

..there's exactly no reason now for any centrist Democrat to prefer McCain to Obama. Ditto for Giuliani versus Obama. Ditto for Clinton versus Obama. Personally, I don't see much difference between any of the top four now on foreign policy, with just McCain coming off as most belligerent but hardly a hawk that separates himself from the pack. Strong speech by Obama that makes me feel a whole lot more comfortable with him.

Could there be a way for Obama to geopolitically triangulate his way more effectively than Edwards or Clinton? The answer to that question is very important, because between him and Richardson are the only candidates that don't sound like business as usual from the Democrats.

Obviously for most Democrats, things can't get any worse. Obama personifies the change agent. Whether you want to call him 'magic' or not, he's too new to be status quo. I think Dems will take that leap. His campaign agenda is getting heavier and deeper, I think he's making the right moves.

The Westphalian Achilles

Belmont states two extraordinarily insightful paragraphs, which essentially sums up the real problem with current military solutions to AQ's terror.

The incident at Ghazni indicates what radical Islamism thinks is the "winning combination" against Western armies in the field. Both Iraq and Afghanistan have taught them the West is willing to allow them a cross-border sanctuary. From Syria, Iran and Pakistan they can strike at leisure and from there can deny the West a strategic victory for as long as they please. They understand that a strategic victory for the West consists in being able to establish a stable, equitable and prosperous successor regime that will serve as a counterexample to radical Islamism. Iraq taught them it is unnecessary to defeat an opposing Western army so long as they can totally wreck the progress towards a successor regime. For so long as they can make life in the neighboring country a hell on earth their purposes are served. Promoting criminal activity, dealing in drugs, sowing chaos, unrestricted terrorism, sparking civil war -- all of these are acceptable and even lucrative tactics which prevent the emergence of a stable regime.

Unable to create a stable successor regime, the Western opponent is caught between the alternatives of struggling against chaos or leaving the field to Islamists ready to turn their conquered Caliphate into a gigantic terrorist training camp. This choice is stark in Aghanistan because everyone remembers how the Taliban and al-Qaeda once controlled it and know they seek to control it again. Once it was a base for al-Qaeda; and al-Qaeda is determined to get it back. But it is no different anywhere else. In Iraq, with its strategic location and oil wealth, lies a glittering prize ready to be seized; and if the US is unwilling to fight for such a valuable position why should they stand elsewhere?

Believe me when I say that the next phase of the War on Terror that's going to be fought with any gusto is all going to fall into the Directorate of Ops for the CIA. The nasty lesson is that the US, if it is humiliated properly, will completely undermine the principle of sovereignty in the future. Things will blow up, people will disappear, borders will be crossed. Speaking of which, I'm a bit angry at myself for not getting names of the Dems who were harping on the term in the months before the provisional government was established in Iraq. How many of their drawdown plans include partition? Hmmm.

Tenet Backwards

Today I was going to by the new book out by former DCI George Tenet, the longest standing head of the CIA in almost a generation. Today, the consensus of peoples whose opinions I tend to trust on such matters is that Tenet was a total screw-up or at least that he paints an ineffective tissue of lies in his certainly vetted memoirs. Indeed today was an auspicious day in that another intelligence expert sent me an email so very soon I may be doing some off the cuff analysis myself. One needs to assess the wobbly orbits of bright stars in order to find the positions of dark worlds.

As I look back on my own notes, the most detailed I ever got on Tenet was over the 'sixteen words' that became such a big hit in the press and his fudging around that. Tenet was tangential to that and said they shouldn't have been said. Today his book is saying that 'slam dunk' was misinterpreted as well. There doesn't seem to be anything whatsoever that George Tenet has said that sticks in anyone's (ok my) mind that associates him with any credible success. That ain't right and it certainly can't be good. The Anchoress has the best rundown of Tenet fisking.

So now, it seems likely that anybody who wants to use the term 'intelligence failure' is going to have to look more closely at how Tenets apologies and excuses stand up to the wave of criticism which will be smashing him against the rocks for a while.

Check Thyself

Oh. My. God.

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to pretend that I'm not occasionally exposed to (ahem). But today I happen to be in a very old school hotel, with very limited cable TV. So yes Channel 28 is VH1 and tonight it's 'Flavor of Love Charm School'.

Tonight. Jennifer got expelled. This is amazing stuff. Unbelievable. The production company? Mindless Entertainment.