Cobb

Parents vs Seattle

My understanding of the Parents v Seattle decision has marginally increased since yesterday. I've listened to Carol Swain and the head of the NAACP LDF speak out on it on NPR, and I've read a bit more of the actual decision.

Over at Maxambit we're having a great discussion about race raising vis a vis class criticisms within black America and the extent to which they are valid and useful. My last insight to this, had the Parents decision in mind.

I’m saying that the solutions to black people’s problems have already been found, and millions have already implemented them. The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.

The question of race raising has to do with the ability to sustain networks of blackfolks who have already handled their business and getting others to follow in similar tracks. So when Cosby says ‘GET MARRIED’ and other blackfolks don’t listen, what are you supposed to do? Say Cosby isn’t really black?

The primary difference between liberal and conservative thinking is that liberals prefer that the distribution of black peoples solutions be done through government. Conservatives say the distributions should be done through private enterprise. Malcolm said religion was the proper channel of distribution.

It is that matter of channels of power that are rather crucial to the practicality of the advancement of African American interests. I think one of the primary misunderstandings about the black Conservative agenda is that it proposes no government solutions aside from marginal support for Republican programs like NCLB.  The reaction is generally that black Conservatives are disingenuous, but what I think is closer to the truth is that blacks who are conservative, and especially those who are activists, have already overcome the middle class mainstream boundaries that vex so many African Americans. There is a class issue. Our answer is '"just go get a job" and we don't realize that we're talking to folks who can't "just go get a job". Our answer is "don't make racial identity your focus" but often we're talking to folks for whom society has no other way, nor they have any other way to distinguish themselves.

If Cobb take a lot of well-deserved flack it's because I'm flip about this in a way that should be familiar to blackfolks. I assert BAP privilege. Which is to say that I've put up with enough jive Negroes in my life not to be especially attached to their plight. I know a nappy headed ho when I see one and I don't give her the time of day. As well, working class brothers know an uppity Negro when they see one and are just as apt to dismiss me. None of this weighs heavily on my mind except when mischaracterizations are made. I do want to represent my class and political perspectives correctly, and I don't want to do an Imus at anytime. Let me not be misjudging anyone. So I'm especially annoying and fine pointed when it comes to making ambiguity disappear, but I have no problem at all calling them as I see them, and I'm perfecting my vision every day. I've always known that there were going to be harsh class conflicts - I never expected any more than 15% of African America to go Republican by '08.

Be all that as it may

Diversity in the breach.
Are we a diverse nation? I think only a fool would say that we are not. How did we get that way? What do we need to keep it that way. Michel Martin asked this bomb question of her guests and that's when the brother from the NAACP had to pitch out some rhetorical pepper. Unfortunately it was way out of the strike zone.

You really have to tell me what's going on when a school is lacking in diversity. What difference does it make, and what does that have to do with racial segregation? What's not being said here AT ALL is that if all of the plans to integrate were class based, you'd get all of the desired results with one big nasty side effect. You'd have to get all of the inner-city parents to admit that they don't want to live geographically close to the suburban parents. There is no value in 'diversity' which is what I ahve been saying for years. And if race becomes a tie-breaker, it can become the sole arbiter, there is no way of avoiding it, there are just ways of mitigating it. But if people have already decided that the inconvenience is not worth them moving across town to get out of a bad educational situation for their kids, then they have already decided that they want it to be the deciding factor.

That means as mitigated as race has actually become under the guise of diversity, every inch you take away from it is causing aunguish. What people really want is race. There is no getting away from that eiter. Meaning they want positive racial discrimination in favor of non-whites. This has gradually become, for white parents and people clear-headed to see it for what it is, increasingly intolerable. It may be unfortunate that there are some racists riding in the same bus, but they're not driving and they're not in control. The direction we are heading is proper, which is the direction of disabling racial discrimination period.

For a long time, in fact for most of my political life, I have been an advocate of positive racial discrimination. But I have never been able to reconcile that with my desire to bust up the black monolith, and common sense. There can be no denying that blackfolks aren't all alike, nor do we even experience racism in the same way. So to the extent that I cannot bear to be lumped in a racial box for any reason, given what I know about people within one social category of race actually are, I cannot advocate equally for positive racial discriminations. I know class makes a difference. I know attitude makes a difference. I know geography makes a difference. I know education makes a difference. They must be considered first. I cannot say with any certainty that ought to be law, how the state ought to view race, or what ought to be permissible as a racial distinction for the purposes of positive discrimination. Nor can I say under which conditions racial discriminations are actually zero-sum games. I like to believe they are not, and I like to believe that in the aggregate that white suffering is diffuse enough to absorb the negative impacts of positive discriminations for minorities - but that is all contingent on historical contexts that change.

In short, this game is too slippery to nail down, and it's better left aside.

Black Patches, 1966
I don't want the state telling me how much blackness is enough. Let those who will complain and squirm do so. They will play themselves along with their adversaries. I just don't have enough dog in that fight - not over government resources.

I don't know how many Supreme Court decisions and interpretations it's going to take to satisfy every contingent who are chasing after the perfect balance of 'diversity' in public schools, but I'm losing track of where we are now. Bakke, I understood. Hopwood, I think I understood. Grutter I understood. Loving I understood. Aderand, I didn't really understand. Brown I understood. Why do I have to know all this? Because we're trying to keep track of exactly how much racial privilege should count in America and re-weighing it ever 7 years or so in all aspects of life. Can't we just get off this hamster wheel? I really think we're going nowhere fast.

Somebody said that the law was supposed to be like a jungle. Always permeable by the dogged, always impenetrable by the common man. There is no absolute law but God's laws - the laws of physics, the nature of mankind, the Natural Law. Everything else can be circumvented. At any moment, the validity of the law is determined by the consistency it has with itself and the balance of power it maintains as it is challenged from all sides. But the law is never simple, it is complex for a reason. I am coming to the conclusion that our law on race is becoming like tax law - it gets increasingly byzantine by the decade. The ultimate question is whether or not the state has any business getting into those weeds in the first place. Certainly the conservative court has applied tougher barriers over time for the state to have any interest in checking up on race. It's very difficult for me to disaggregate the opposition to that coming from professionals who study race and those who stand to gain or lose most from the application of new regimes. Which way is this hustle going anyway?

Whose Parents?
Parents v Seattle. I expect I'll be hearing that it's "White Parents vs Seattle", but only non-whites could call it that. I don't think it's a reason to make new laws. Then again maybe all of those growlers are denizens of Sherwood Forest who can't settle their differences any other way. I think it's really a damned shame considering the quality of public education in the State of Washington, which was, last time I checked, rather abysmal.

The question begged here is that whitefolks should not benefit from the application of civil rights laws, and that's what's just wrong. As long as Americans are going to play games with race, and that's what this is, high existential stakes poker, then we're going to keep suing and keep sending our complaints up the judiciary. I simply don't believe that these decisions are anywhere near as significant as they used to be. After all, this is all about 'tiebreakers' for 'diversity'. I'm trying to see exactly what that is supposed to mean.

Next
I'm keeping my eyes and ears open on this debate.

How Do You Like Africa Now?

Just wow. See Booker Rising

From the June edition of Essence magazine, based on U.S. Census figures: "Black immigrants from Africa have the highest educational attainment of any group in the country. In 2000, 49.3 percent of African immigrants earned a college degree or higher, compared with 44.9 percent of Asian Americans and 32.9 percent of immigrants from Europe."

Today's Barbershop

A great show if I must say so myself. We talk about:

Dick Cheney's Tribulations
Ralph Nader's Trials
Video Game Addiction

It's a really tight show, funny and informative. Do check it out.

BUI

Ok this is an experiment. I'm drunker than I ahve been in a very long time and I thought it might be interesting to blog in this state of mind. The mostr fair thing to say, along with the fact that I will not edit this, is that it is an experiment in conficdence. Obviously one must be particularly self-assuremd in order to blog while under the influjcnce. As well, it can be said that this is a testiment to ego, which from an existential black position is all good because it indicates the extent to which the black man has not been beaten down by the Stystem, even as he signifies to the air. Let us recall the Jet magazine picture, which I will upload later as my faculties returnh to a confidence interfval which is less than one order of magnitude off center. actually the phrase is standard deviation. How silly of me to confuse the two.

For the first timeI am in Forth Woth Texas. I like it here. The peopel are nice. There are trees. I guess that's all I require, and that my credit cards work. I'm robust like that. Plus, it's easyu for me to make friends and acdquaintences becuase my life, for the omst part, is an open book.

So what's on my mind that makes sense to let slip in this somewhat undisciplined moment. Oh. OK, and if I regret it, then I regret it. WTF. No. nevermind. There's too much at stake. OK strike that. I got this interview, see? Oh wait, snap. They could eyeball my blog. I aint' sahying shit.

You know waht? this is a bad Idea. I'm going to publish this piece in July, far from the momrent which is june 11, 2007. I' am  a loving and insulting drunk. I love you all, but you all really are dumbshits and your girlfriend is ugly.

The Opportunities and Risks of Deracination

This the first of many things I will eventually be writing about the latest Supreme Court decision on matters of school and race. This first essay will be about my reaction and thoughts without having read the decision at all.

As I said on this week's Barbershop episode, I don't believe that race means as much socially now as it did when the Brown decision was made. Society has made significant adjustments and the amount of meaning attributed and attributable to race has declined. The greatest advocate of deracination is Ward Connorly who make sense on one level and is very wrong on another. Connorly rightly understands that no meaning should be applied to race. We should do what we can to minimize official recognition of it so that it becomes over time, more and more impossible to make an official racial determination. He would like race, as far as the government is concerned, to become something like your Zodiac sign. You should never have to apply for any job, school or have any institution ask you about it.

The great flaw in this approach is that certain government agencies have a duty to determine whether or not racial discrimination is taking place, and you cannot measure what you cannot see. For the entire government to be colorblind would render it incapable of policing those who are colorstruck. In this regard, Connorly betrays his unfamiliarity with Civil Rights case law and the legal entities constructed to be watchdogs over racial discrimination. And because he is wealthy and powerful, probably has a specific blindness to the ways and means small racial discriminations provide big hurdles for some people.

The great strength in this approach is that deracination ends once and for all the endless merry-go-round of racial theories, even as they transmute under the guise of culture. We all know how the definitions of a proper black man or woman has changed over time, and we all know how crazy 'blacker than thou' arguments get. All that time wasted could be put to better use, especially since most people who want to disable racism are anti-essentialist anyway.

It is in this strength that any good can come from a Supreme Court decision that limits or ends the significance of race. The problem of course is that no Supreme Court decision changes people's minds.

Dogging Mitt

I just noticed that I don't have a notebook on Mitt Romney so I started one today. It ain't a pretty story. I like what Mitt Romney says, on paper. The man himself is just too through. I think he looks and sounds like a game show host. I'm sorry, I just cannot trust a guy who looks like he'd say 'ew' if you offered him a shot of whisky.

But I never expected this.

The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario. ... Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog. ...

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

Emotion-free crisis management. In my book that's a liability, a big fat liability. It's one thing to be calm under pressure, but hosing down a dog and leaving him on the roof? That's Hillary Clinton territory. Read ruthless ambition.

Strike Two.

Social Welfare vs Honest Work

Now let me tell you a brief story. A couple weeks ago I went out shopping for myself. I was at a very upscale mall and had my knife sharpened. I also had a package to mail. In fact, it was a video game that I wanted returned to Gamefly. There was no mailbox I could find, so I’m walking around with the game when I’m approached by a dude on a bicycle. He was scruffy and asked me for some spare change so that he could do his laundry.

My brother Doc tells me that there are two kinds of homeless people, those with hope and those with no hope. Those with no hope stop washing their faces. So I knew immediately that this dude had hope. I gave him two bucks and asked him if he might drop off my package if he happens to see a mailbox. I patted him on the back and sent him on his way. No doubt about it two days later I see that Gamefly received the game via email notification.

I cannot be a part-time employer of such scruffy dudes without a whole lot of government regulation. But I gave him honest work. And honest work is what people need, not sociological profiling. Every homeless person that washes their face and doesn’t sleep in public areas is a potential part time worker and survivor, but not when we have minimum wage and other government work requirements. We are pushing up the amount of charity establishments and pushing down the number of part-time employers in our system by maintaining minimum wage and such regulatory standards. We are reducing the amount of honest work available.

I don't like the term 'homeless'. I prefer the term 'jobless'. If you give a person a home, they don't necessarily work. But if you give a person a job, they'll make a home. 

Every Stupid Question

Having raised 3 kids to teenhood, I'm pretty much at the point where I recognize childish behavior. One thing that kids love to do is repeat the same word or phrase because they like the way it sounds. It doesn't matter what the word or phrase is or what it means. And of course this repetition quickly gets on everybody's nerves. Often much to the surprise and chagrin of the childish one, they are told harshly to SHUTUP.

One such childish phrase bumping around is 'Impeach Bush'. It just sounds good. It makes no sense and mature people are really sick of hearing it.

So this week everybody is talking about which branch of government Dick Cheney belongs to, especially the people who still laugh at juvenile shotgun jokes. I'm not really surprised that some junior staffers from Cheney's office came up with a SHUTUP kind of reply the first time, because after all this was about Waxman's oversight of a request for archiving documents.

The controversy arises from the revelation last week, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), that the vice president's office has not cooperated since 2003 with officials at the National Archives and Records Administration, who are charged with policing executive branch compliance with rules protecting classified information. In a letter to Cheney, Waxman wrote that the vice president's office had not responded to letters from the National Archives contesting its legal position.

Remember that? This was about who did Cheney meet with (oil) to talk about (oil) energy policy (oil) and why the Bush (oil) administration felt like they (oil) didn't have to give (oil) out details (oil) of private meetings (oil). 

Imagine (blow job) if Republicans (blow job) treated Bill (blow job) Clinton with (blow job) the same callous (blow job) lack of (blow job) respect.

I guess you don't have to imagine that. I don't imagine that this kind of juvenile behavior is going to cease any time soon. Both sides have shown how petty they can be. These days it seems as if every stupid question requires a written reply by an attorney, and of course as long as our idiot (paris hilton) press corps keeps up (paris hilton) with their coverage of these (paris hilton) manufactured scandals then we (paris hilton) will surely not get any better (paris hilton) reportage of the upcoming presidential election.

Does that mean the Hillary Clinton wins? That (whitewater) depends.

But on a halfway serious note. When people think about impeaching Bush, do they also expect Cheney to go or for him to become the new President of the United States? I think that should settle the question about whether or not Cheney's office is an 'agency'.

Outreach

Today I'm going to try and reach out and touch some blogs worthy of our attention, but out in the margins of popularity. Let's give 'em some love y'all.

Acting White
First on the menu is James C. Collier who has some interesting multidimensional links to IATs that I didn't realize had been created on his sidebar. Check them out if you have the time. Meanwhile he advocates some simple health care advice.

New York City Schools will shortly begin a highly-publicized cash incentive program for coaxing improvement out of under performing black kids, and this may be well and good, but paying kids money to learn when their essential vitamin D levels are slowing them down, like a drag-shoot, makes little sense. The vitamin D levels of most of these kids, like their parents, are so low that they fail to register at all in health screening.

Innovate sure. But, while we are at it, how about wrapping some free vitamin D around a promotional campaign? It's just a cheap pill and our future, regardless of race.

Undercover Black Man
Next up, UCB has an interview with the original Ice Cube that we all know and 'loved'. I guess it just goes to show that success in show business means saying that the customer is always right.

So we’re backstage. It’s like, “Yo, man, should we do ‘Fuck tha Police’?” Nobody said yeah and nobody said no. Then we heard our cue so they ran up onstage, Ren and Dre and Yella. They go out first. To me, if nobody said yeah and nobody said no, we ain’t gonna do the song. That’s what I’m thinking. “I guess we’re going to do the regular show as planned.”

So it’s my turn to come up there, and I do “Gangsta, Gangsta.” Kids go crazy. After I finish “Gangsta, Gangsta,” after the lights go out and the music cut off, you hear the kids chanting: “Fuck the police! Fuck the police! Fuck the police!”

Then I go into “A Bitch Iz a Bitch.” After I finish that, I stop. “Fuck the police! Fuck the police! Fuck the police!” That’s all you hear the kids chanting.

He also gives some perspective on some dude named Bobby Cutts Jr, that I overheard was embarrassing black people somehow.

The Last Plantation
It looks as if, FINALLY, Debra Dickerson has gotten herself a proper blog. It's a good thing because that last pile was just too obscure to get my cyber hands on. Now she's got trackbacks, RSS and the whole grownup package. Good. Whoops. Spoke too soon. No RSS feed coming from her direction yet. Hmm. maybe the digital divide is real. I suppose I should send her an email.

Jasmyn Cannick
Speaking of butt-ugly blogs. What's up with JC? I know it's all about the content, but dayyum. She spews a bit on homophobes and the continuing drama at King Hospital which has thankfully been divested of the name of Charles Drew. No sense in dragging the Drew School through the mud. The King Hospital fiasco has been a train wreck coming for a decade now. I can remember mentioning the mismanagement to a friend at a high school reunion in '98 and he got defensive about it even way back then. Pull the plug, man just pull the plug.

The Nearness of You (Stanky Republicans)

"It isnt your sweet conversation
That brings this sensation, oh no
Its just the nearness of you"
-- Hoagy Carmichael

Prometheus 6 demonstrates his distrust of all things Republican and Right as he calls upon his readers to protest the involvement of Frank Luntz in the Democrat Presidential debates with Tavis Smiley (and Professor Kim).

I don't want to hear shit about "fair and balanced." It looks way too much like part of the CBCI deal, and if Mr. Smiley is in bed with Fox News it's going to change the way I categorize him. Immediately. The inclusion of progressive bloggers was sort of last minute and I can't help but wonder if Luntz' appearance on the press release is connected.

Let him appear on Smiley's show  the next day, I could shiv a gitz about that.

Yes, I'm still going, yes I'm paying my own way like all the others. And now, part of the reason is so can pass judgement on the media aspect as well as the political one.

It seems to me that if the candidates had anything worth saying or listening to, then such matters would be of little concern. But when people actually wonder aloud if their integrity is being compromised by being in the same room with people with different opinions, it's a sign that it's more about hate than ideas.

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

The number one thing that the CIA did that became known as the 'Family Jewels'? Well, you still can't know. But you can know a lot of the other things. My guess is that the worst possible thing that might be revealed is some complicity in the murder of King, X, Kennedy or Kennedy and probably through complicity with the FBI's complicity with local police. Which is to say perhaps some sources, but more likely methods were intentionally leaked from CIA to FBI and such info found its way into the wrong hands which acted in effective ways they otherwise could not.

This is my speculation given the 12 pages I've read of the newly declassified Family Jewels document released this week by the CIA.

The Roselli thing seems to be rather old news, or at least a secret that wasn't very well kept. There was plenty of Wikipedia on that guy long before the disclosure of this document. Basically , everybody knew in some way that the CIA was trying to kill Castro. No big deal in that release.

So where was Nosenko's jail. Hmmm. GTMO?  Anyway, here's a guy out there debunking (for profit?) various aspects of the Nosenko legend. If I were particularly interested, I'd take an MD5 of that webpage and see if it changes within the next year.

The Mockingbird project seems almost tame considering the kinds of things that Chomsky would suggest that the CIA does or has done with respect to manufacturing consent. When I first read that book, I was convinced that the CIA was up to having plants at the NYT who were deep, deep undercover. And to tell you the God's honest truth there was always something about Jack Valenti that made me suspect that he was up to a lot more than he let on.

All of this divulging is good, of course. There will certainly be people who will take the time and effort to get through this large document to adjust their understanding of various CIA dirty laundry. But as various folks pick through it, I am brought to mind of the various firewalls that AG Ashcroft mentioned during his testimony about 'connecting the dots' and Homeland Security. I thought he was being particularly scrupulous in an environment of fingerpointing and political spin. The interests that enjoyed portraying the government as corrupt and stupid, especially those who find 'military intelligence' an oxymoronic joke appeared ever so willing to bulldoze those firewalls in the days of Ashcroft's complaint. That these revelations of piercing that veil remain high on the list of CIA faux pas (is 'faux' plural and singular?) suggests to me that these firewalls are taken very seriously.

But it also suggests to me that like the NSA, there are probably other agencies which "do not exist" who are less restrained. The AGs office must certainly know. We don't do jack without attorneys.

Also one more thing. I remain fascinated by the potentials of 'proprietaries' and cutout organizations. Consider this claim about the Ford Foundation.

By the late 1950s the Ford Foundation possessed over $3 billion in assets.  The leaders of the Foundation were in total agreement with Washington's post-WWII projection of world power.  A noted scholar of the period writes: "At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects" (Ibid, p.139).  This is graphically illustrated by the naming of Richard Bissell as President of the Foundation in 1952.  In his two years in office Bissell met often with the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and other CIA officials in a "mutual search" for new ideas.  In 1954 Bissell left Ford to become a special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954 (Ibid, p. 139).  Under Bissell, the Ford Foundation (FF) was the "vanguard of Cold War thinking".

One of the FF first Cold War projects was the establishment of a publishing house, Inter-cultural Publications, and the publication of a magazine Perspectives in Europe in four languages.  The FF purpose according to Bissell was not "so much to defeat the leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat (sic) as to lure them away from their positions" (Ibid, p. 140). The board of directors of the publishing house was completely dominated by cultural Cold Warriors.  Given the strong leftist culture in Europe in the post-war period, Perspectives failed to attract readers and went bankrupt.

The collaboration isn't shocking, and today we already know what's up with Sciafe and Right Radio. But you gotta admit it's a bold, if not particularly effective idea whose time will inevitably return.

Don't Talk About My Mama

A couple folks forwarded me the same item upon which I will briefly comment. The item is an article which essentially said that whitefolks would expect to get 10,000 for being being black, but 1 million bucks for giving up TV. This evidently shocks a lot of people who are convinced that whitefolks treasure and value their whiteness.

How much do white Americans think it "costs" to be black in our society, given the problems associated with racial bias and prejudice?

The answer, it appears, is not much.

When white Americans were asked to imagine how much they would have to be paid to live the rest of their lives as a black person, most requested relatively low amounts, generally less than $10,000.

In contrast, study participants said they would have to be paid about $1 million to give up television for the rest of their lives.

The results suggest most white Americans don't truly comprehend the persisting racial disparities in our country, said Philip Mazzocco, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus.

So, like I've been saying, this is another proof that black culture is transparent, and there is really nothing mysterious about it. We have a shared culture in America and there are no profound differences.

Secondly it proves that whitefolks, swimming in a sea of whitefolks, don't take their whiteness half as seriously as blackfolks swimming in a sea of blackfolks take their blackness. What it means to be white is not an important question to whites. What it means to be black is not an important question to whites.  What it means to be black is an important question to blacks. What it means to be white is an important question to blacks.  Blacks care more about racial identity. I will call this a cultural psychology. Everyone who thinks of themselves as a minority obsesses over their perceived differences. One's ability to self-destruct, especially when worn close to the surface, far surpasses others' ability and willingness to destroy you.

What do you do the the man who tells you that you better not talk about his mama? How do you oppress a black man? What does it take to make an overweight woman insecure? All of the answers are as simple as falling off a log.

I Don't Mean to Brag, I Don't Mean to Boast

  boat 
  Originally uploaded by cobb_tcb

..but I got me a yacht on every coast.

Now you can smack me around. This is bragging.

A Blind Confession

I've been thinking about class mobility and income differentials recently as the 25 minute unscripted video on Juneteenth suggests. Something occurred to me, especially in light of the discussion we're having over at Maxambit.

One of the constant criticisms of the Left and even of sensible people, including me, is that of the 'growing gap' between the rich and the poor. I see the problem as a species of cultural dissonance and class conflict rather than one of a fundamental flaw in capitalism. But there's something I understand, which is a large class of rich people and wealthy industries could not and would not be, unless they were paying close attention to those who are not so rich or wealthy.

This occurred to me this morning as I drove up past Radio Shack in Fort Worth. The HQ is there as is their flagship store. It is well known that Radio Shack has been up against hard times and have been getting the crap kicked out of them by Best Buy. As I perused the flagship store last week, I kept asking myself why I would go to Radio Shack instead of Best Buy. In the back of my mind, I am thinking about the rumor that Dell might acquire the chain for its retail presence. That made me think about the fact that McDonalds is in the real-estate business and that they are huge landlords. But what is different about the tech of Radio Shack? The other thing that was on my mind was that I'm the last person you should ask, because I don't need tech sales or tech service of the sort Radio Shack offers. I just need the product, so for me, I'd rather go to a specialty big box like Micro Center or Fry's. I'm DIY.  Now that CompUSA is closing stores and Tweeter is Chapter 11, it's hard for a guy like me to see why anybody would go for Radio Shack.

Now this is the problem that the CEOs of Radio Shack, CompUSA and a bunch of folks in similar businesses have to figure out. In this regard they are blind because their own personal tastes and needs have little to do with what the average consumer of the products in their stores want. If what I want isn't at Radio Shack but Fry's, imagine what the rich guy who already has a 60 inch flat screen wants. How could he relate? But since their very survival is based on the fact that they must serve those customers, then is is a problem they must address.

What if you can't relate and you are not convinced that your survival is based on service to the people to whom you cannot relate?

I think this is a particular blind spot of the emergent classes in America. Moreover it is a blind spot of the most successful ones. Successful groups of people emergent from the lower classes do not feel that their success depends upon the success of people they no longer relate to, or don't want to relate to. Their success is generally predicated on affiliations they can only recently afford. (That's emergent by definition).

What I'm trying to illustrate is the creepy feeling I get around new money, why I think it's often morally suspect, one of the reasons I am attracted to conservatism. I don't like the petty bourgeoisie-ness in that Fanon manner of speaking. It's something I'm often accused of. I think it confuses my critics when I tell them I don't second guess blackfolks, and also don't give a whole lot of eartime to issues that tend to burn up the airwaves. This man shot by cops, that child gone missing, this group of prisoners given a raw deal, this convict sentenced unfairly. I'm trying to grasp the philosophical and operational underpinnings of the entirety of Western Civilization. I'm not particularly impressed by the class distinctions - that's a Western thing and a Christian thing and a Conservative thing. I was in my 20s when I was a role-monkey, but I've been cured of that pettiness. I hope.

Still there is this blind spot which I'm tentatively copping to, so let me make it personal. I've been sold on black power. It was how I was raised, and it's what has led me to political philosophy and theology. I think the black formula was delivered and that essentially all blackfolks needed to do was follow the formula and use some common sense. An axiom of this approach to life was that we blackfolks had everything we needed, just not enough money. So the game was to let all that Civil Rights action get us into the Bigs. Then score, score, score. This generates the same kind of blindness, and we ought to see it in ourselves - when we meet the official black 'leaders' and Talented Tenth types who act like they have it all and the rest of blackfolks have nothing. All the blackness, all the money, all the whatever it is that has taken them to the next phase, beyond the point at which they can relate to those other blackfolks left behind.

I think I avoid that blindness by not second-guessing, but then again, I do believe in survival of the fittest with all due respect to the Africans at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Palm 755p

I went and bought it on impulse, but it was an impulse a long time coming. I'm sitting in Happyville. From the hills of Happyville I look out over towards the horizon and the Valley of the Shadow of Synch Hell. Fortunately there was a Bluetooth highway right over that chasm. I just sent my whole 5000 some-odd contacts right over the non-wire and in about 3 minutes I had some of the most valuable information I possess securely in place on the new phone. If my Treo 650 had one shortcoming it was the joke of internal memory space. It had gotten so bad that the phone would reset when I tried to synch. So I haven't synched my old phone for over a year. That was crazy, but it also illustrated a measure of confidence that I had in the phone itself as an independent device. I never lost any data on the old 650 and it was a great old pal. But now with my new 2GB MiniSD, I'm just rolling in memory.

I'm taking movies... It's crazy.

Daddy Day Care

I'm having fun blasting holes in the head of a certain MarkM over at Booker Rising as he and my afrocentric nemesis Ngosama jump up and down calling me a Neanderthal. The subject matter is schooling and parenting, something I blog about en passant. I haven't thought of a good way to pontificate about it quite yet, other than ordinary dad-pride. However I do think I've learned some fairly important lessons and I have been asked to do a bit more commentary. So I'll try to work in a new category and a style of writing about it from the perspective of the kind of guy I am.

As regular readers of Cobb know, I am rather protective of my family, and while I refer to them directly, I use pseudonyms. So one of the things I'll be dealing with in creating new guidelines for writing about this subject.

But for now, I'll deal with some basics that I feel fairly comfortable with.

Daddy's House Is Full of Love
All of my kids know this. If I say 'Daddy's House' as the call, the response is immediate and unanimous. In one respect, part of my job is to let my kids see me with my guard down. At some point in their lives, they will understand and come to respect the things I have accomplished, but I make sure that everyday they know that I'm a nice guy with a goofy sense of humor who belches out loud and sometimes walks around with no shirt on in the house. What "I'm really like" is a combination of things for my kids and I am always very conscious about what parts of my personality I am sharing with them. For the most part it is intimate. They are to see me relaxed and comfortable, unflappable and able to handle whatever with ease and confidence.

Strategies & Tactics
My kids understand very much that their mother is going to make about 80% of the decisions that affect the everyday, and Daddy is all happy and nice and saying yes or 'Go ask your mother.' But they also know very much that when it comes to the big things, Daddy is the man. That would include the time when baby girl ran into a pole and chipped her front teeth and everybody everywhere freaked out. Daddy was the one who was calm and set the situation right. Daddy is the one who decides about the cars we own. Mom decides if your face is clean enough to sit down at the table. These are negotiated and natural roles, but over time we have found balance.

My philosophy behind this is as old as history, and it's actually feudal. So my critics were halfway right when they suggested my ideas were not [post]-modern. I decided long before I got married and had children that I would give my wife all the money to run the house, and all the authority about the everyday business of the house. I did not want my judgment to be colored by expense. I set the strategy, she has the last word on tactics. I handle the long range goals, she runs the operations.

Running the operations of the house is a fulltime job, especially if you think of the house and the family as your life. I work to feed my family, that is to say I advance my career primarily for the benefit of my house, not for myself. Everything we do is constrained by supply but every reason I work is driven by demand. If my son develops a talent in playing the trumpet, it is my duty to provide one, given that the strategy is to develop artistic sensibilities in him. But I'll talk about the strategies of child rearing in more detail later. Mom shops online for the horns and buys the one she feels fits into the budget.
Mom knows the neighbors. Mom directs the chores. Mom runs the house, period. Dad bankrolls the operation.

My Square Mile

Spence asks a critical question about our trust in society. How far could you roam as a kid. I was surprised to discover that although I felt like I had a virtual infinity by the time I went to high school, before I was 14 years old it was basically one square mile.

This little grid from Google maps is where I grew up. LA 90016. We had pretty much everything we wanted in that square. Football, basketball, swimming, box tag, skateboarding, fruit tree raids, capture the flag, chicken, ditch, hide and go get it, drag out and dozens of other ghetto games that kept our attention. By the time I was 14, I took the bus to Venice Beach (9 miles)  or to Hollywood Roller Rink (7 miles).

But during that childhood, we took a whole lot of trips up to the Angeles National Forest and we took a lot of neighborhood kids too. So there was an interesting sense of mobility in that.

In fact, as I think of it, a great deal of my own mobility and comfort with that came from camping. I can't think of any other black kids or families that spent much time in the Army surplus stores for trips up the Angeles Crest. But it seemed like we were up in them hills every weekend ever summer and at least once every snow. We would bring back snow to the 'hood and have snowball fights right in our front yard. Then we would go to summer camp with the Crenshaw Y at Big Bear and with the Episcopal Church down in San Diego County near the town of Julian.

A New Existential Partner

I'm about to do something that I haven't done in years. I'm going to add an existential partner. The curse/honor goes to E. C. Hopkins who is a regular commenter here at Cobb and also the brilliant mind behind the new blog Maxambit. An existential partner is somebody who in some very touching way echoes a part of my mind so closely that I could see myself being him or him being me given a certain twist of fate or circumstances. But it might be more fair to say that they are, in many ways, the black writers that I want to be.

Right now I have a half-dozen EPs. It's interesting to note that they are not all personal friends although I'm sure they would be if we knew each other in ways other than reading and writing. I do have personal friends who are not existential partners - it's a tougher cut.

The rest you may know. They are Lester Spence, George Kelly, Bomani Jones and Jimi Izrael.

Villaraigosa's Baby

The other day Doc told me a shocking rumor. He told me that word around the LAPD is that LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's wife filed for divorce last week. The reason is that one of the local TV reporters for the Spanish language station Telemundo is pregnant. Evidently, the LAPD is about to prank him by putting a plastic stork on the City Hall lawn. Doc says, all hell is about to break loose.

Nobody is talking about this, but a lot of people know. You heard it here first.

All the LA Times said was this. They shouldn't print rumors, but I really never even heard a hint of the story until he told me last Friday.

The Beryl Motto

At Beryl, I strive to:
Be the best I can be, to put forth my best
Effort in all that I do, to be respectful and to take personal
Responsibility for the choices I make. I have begun my
Year long journey as a positive role model for
Life-long learning.

Juneteenth, Class & Liberty

Making distinctions between petty class criticisms and the larger issues and values that drive success.

Scraper Bike

Ah to be young and stupid. This is just goofy enough to be... what? Popular? Cool? Trendy?

Juneteenth Podcast

Download junteenthvideo_14.mp3

Cool Movies

Today was a big radio day for me. I got in on the call in to the Hugh Hewitt show talking about a top ten list of cool movies. Dean Barnett was so off the mark it was pathetic. Maybe we have to do another survey, but there are really a lot of cool movies to talk about.

I think I'd have to agree that the coolest movie of the past 20 years was Pulp Fiction. But there are just various genres of cool that ten movies cannot begin to handle. I mean, kung fu movies are cool, by definition. Motorcycle and car chase movies are cool. Rockstar movies are cool. Period gangster movies are cool. Caper movies are cool. There are cool cop movies and cool musicals. But a cop musical can never be cool.

So if you were listening at approximately 5:51 Pacific time, Michael from Redondo mentioned three movies, but the third got cut off. The third was Devil in a Blue Dress, which I say is a toss-up as Denzel's coolest movie, the other being Training Day. I thought Face Off was a very cool movie although I actually liked Swordfish better. Big Wednesday is the greatest surf movie of all time, and you don't get much cooler than that.

Biker Boyz was very cool, as was Fast and the Furious. Nobody mentioned The Score, which is one of the great caper movies of all time. They did get Heat, which was very cool and right around the top movies of all time as far as I'm concerned. Michael Mann is just a cool director, as is Michael Bey, as is Tony Scott, and so is Ridley of course. But you can't forget any movie with Jean Reno is going to be cool, as is any movie with Rickey Jay.

There's so much to say, I'll let y'all say some.

MDCB on NPR: Juneteenth

Today's Tell Me More show will feature yours truly. All about Juneteenth.

As I thought about the subject some more, again way overthinking what turned out to be about 30 seconds of airtime, my mind went in several interesting directions about the prospects for celebration. The interesting thing is that I brought about seven different examples of what I think the theme of Juneteenth implies, and for me that theme is ambition and freedom.

Douglass
I say that freedom is tied to ambition, without one you can't have the other. They reinforce each other. Start with Frederick Douglass who said "I didn't know I wasn't fee until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted." So there is total freedom and their is relative freedom. America, of course, has tons of cultural material and wisdom around the subjects of slavery and freedom. We could talk about it all year long.

Living Colour
This band had a song that many Americans will sing metaphorically in their quest for the American dream. Tell me how to get to your America. Or as the Isleys wrote (and my senior quote) half of us are satisfied, half of us in need. We African Americans have ritualized tropes of ambition and relative freedom in our history. The world is not enough, and we share that ambition with all sorts of emergent groups within American life.

Iraq
You gotta throw Iraq into the mix. Sometimes the desire for freedom isn't sustained. One of the things both Americans and Iraqis are going to have to face is the question of amnesty. In order for Iraq to have a functioning democracy, there is going to be a point at which a lot of combattants are going to have to get amnesty. That means our commanders are going to have to forgive Iraqis that killed our soldiers. It means Sunnis are going to have to forgive Shia, etc. Today, nobody is ready for that. But it will be a requirement for future freedom in Iraq.

Today's Trivia Question

Who said this, and in what context?

I can't even eat. The food keeps touching. I like military plates, I'm a military man, I want a military meal. I want my string beans to be quarantined! I like a little fortress around my mashed potatoes so the meatloaf doesn't invade my mashed potatoes and cause mixing in my plate! I HATE IT when food touches! I'm a military man, you understand that? And don't let your food touch either, please?

Digital Divide Postmortem Pt 6: Free Modem

Just in case you hadn't heard:

Without any sort of fanfare, AT&T Inc. has started offering a broadband Internet service for $10 a month, cheaper than any advertised plan.

The DSL, or digital subscriber line, plan introduced Saturday is part of the concessions made by AT&T to the Federal Communications Commission to get its $86 billion acquisition of BellSouth Corp. approved last December.

The $10 offer is available to customers in the 22-state AT&T service region, which includes former BellSouth areas, who have never had AT&T or BellSouth broadband, spokesman Michael Coe confirmed Monday. Local phone service and a one-year contract are required. The modem is free.

There it is.

The Smart Get Smarter

I don't exactly know what NCLB does. Here's what I think it does. I think it requires schools to get their kids into a standardized curriculum and then test those kids according to standardized tests. The thrust of this being that no school can graduate its students with a substandard education. Schools who don't have the requisite number of kids passing the requisite tests are put on an exception list and defunded if they fail to perform over time.

That's a good idea. But there are better ones. Unfortunately they are not ones that can be mandated at the Federal level.

From my perspective, there are a couple of downsides, and I'll speak to those as they apply to my family in particular. My family lives in an upper middle class neighborhood where the public schools are just peachy. I just learned the other day that our local high school campus is physically the largest west of the Mississippi. It's rated about 450th in the top 1200 or so highschools in the nation which comprise the top 5% according to The Washington Post. We've got everything a public school needs. The number one problem I see is that NCLB will encourage teachers to teach to the test. This essentially means that it takes all of the creativity out of teaching and flattens the educational experience of the kids. That's bad for my kids, it's good for kids who suffer because of 'creative' teaching. Which is to say those kids who need rote the most will benefit. Those who already get it, will suffer the most.

In my neighborhood, there are parents who are well educated and these parents are very quick to make value judgments about which teachers their children are taught by. They will use their social skills to steer their children into the classes that they believe will have the teacher with the right attitude for their kid. For example. Boy needs a teacher who is very direct, a teacher who tells you exactly what is expected and calls you on it every time. This is the kind of environment he learns best in. Scholar, on the other hand, needs a teacher who encourages class participation and wants to have long conversations about the material at hand. Boy will never raise his hand unless he absolutely has to. Scholar will always pipe up in class. Very different learning styles very different needs. Again. If a teacher's class is not hitting the NCLB mark, then the school gets on probation. That reduces the chances any teacher is going to take to give their own classes personality. This counts in every dimension. Homework vs classwork. Tests vs papers. Projects vs in-class participation. Individual study vs group activity. If you don't know these things about your children and how the teacher's style is, then you get what you get. That's the attitude in my community.

William Weston, a sociology professor and moderate Democrat, writes:

"I think the best idea in Kay Hymnowitz' Marriage and Caste in America is that higher class parents see their main job as educating and developing their children, while parents in the lower classes see their main job as simply assuring that their children have the necessities of living. Middle class mothers, especially, organize their lives around what Hymnowitz calls The Mission. The mission to educate the children becomes the organizing principle of middle class households.Hymnowitz says the importance of the Mission has multiplied in recent years, as our economy is more and more based on knowledge and the sustained capacity to learn."

This is a fascinating commentary that I found after I wrote the above, so I just had to stick it in there. The point is that if it takes a village to raise a child, a lot depends on what kind of village you live in. In my village, the parents have the power, namely the stay at home moms who have the motivation and the time to get deep into the business of schooling the school.

From my perspective, the best way to teach children is skills based. I first learned about a skills based curriculum back in the early 90s. A guy I was working with told me about his perfect daughter and the program a one of the schools in Providence, RI. Basically, its rather like Hogwarts. You go through the years of school with your class, but not everyone graduates with the same amount of credits. If you don't get good grades in Geometry, then you simply don't get to take Algebra 2. After four years of high school if you only have two years of math, that's all you get. You don't get credit if you don't pass the proficiency tests.

I don't think you can begin skills based teaching until after middle school, that is primarily because of the importance of socializing children together. The difference between 10 year olds and 12 year olds is large and between 12 and 14 is larger still.  Despite the fact that there is really no math to teach after arithmetic except pre-algebra and algebra there is no way I want 14 year old kids in the same pre-algebra class as 11 year old kids. Tracking within middle school makes sense but after that, I believe that high school should be skills based.

Our experience with skills-based teaching is extracurricular. We had all of our kids in Kumon, just to give them an extra boost in addition to the good public school education they were getting. Kumon, like many other tutoring programs, breaks down a very precise program into small intervals. So unlike the chunks I was talking about above, say Algebra, Geometry, Algebra 2, which are year-sized chunks, they create a rubric within each area of study. So there may be 8 levels of Algebra, 6 in Geometry and 10 in Algebra 2. A score of 24 after three years or 2 if you're good, indicates mastery of college-prep mathematics.

My personal experience mirrors that of many kids who had SRA Labs in elementary school. Now you can see SRA has so many different educational products, it's very difficult to distinguish excellence from achievement. At the end of the day however, only a few of us need to be certified, bonded or otherwise sworn to levels of competency. This is the downside. But one would hope that some standards are maintained somewhere against which all competencies of public educations can be judged. Isn't it odd that we're running to newspapers and magazines to help us make the distinctions.

Michelle Delgadillo: Threat or Menace?

We all expect a little graft from politicians. Fixing tickets is probably the first lesson in Corruption 101. We also expect that family members might get a favor from time to time, but the situation with Rocky Delgadillo's wife is getting ridiculous.

After stonewalling for more than a week, Delgadillo finally admitted Monday that his wife needed to get to her doctor's office in a hurry in 2004, while he was out of town. Her car wasn't running, he said, so she took his city-owned GMC Yukon and accidentally banged it into a pole.

This little escapade could not have surprised anyone familiar with Michelle Delgadillo's driving history, which has included license suspensions, failure to show proof of insurance and in 1998, a bench warrant for her various misadventures.

Rocky Delgadillo's staff handled the paperwork on his wife's 2004 accident, and the city attorney said he was unaware that a required report on the accident was never filed with the city.

Of course that doesn't explain why he thought you and I should pay for the repairs. Delgadillo said he thought it was OK for his wife to use the car. The city's policy, he claimed, is ambiguous.

Good story. Wife has to get to the hospital.  Let's hope that her doctor is dead and that she has a new doctor now, that way if somebody asks for a note from the doctor, she doesn't have to provide one. In fact she can say that particular trip, well the next one, is the one the finally cleared up the condition she no longer has, since there will be no record of it at the next doctor.

It's really time for this sucker to go, and this is exactly the prurient level of comedy to which the situation must descend for apathetic LA voters to contribute towards a solution. 

Baquba

Wendy Y. Carter

Raised in a home filled with poverty, alcoholism and abuse, Dr. Wendy Carter persevered against the odds to earn five degrees from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently serving as a program coordinator for the University of Maryland Baltimore County PROMISE (Maryland’s AGEP) program, Dr. Carter also owns her own company that markets her dissertation completion product, "TA-DA Thesis and Dissertation Accomplished™." TA-DA is a product which she created, developed, and shares with graduate students to help demystify the maze of higher education.

As a result of her personal adversities, Dr. Carter has a passion for helping people succeed.  A strong advocate of higher education, in the midst of her educational trials, Dr. Carter realized that the thesis and the dissertation phase is where fifty percent of students drop-out. In response to this startling statistic, she developed an interactive CD-ROM tutorial product designed to alleviate the high attrition rate among graduate students working on dissertations or theses.

One of five children, this eager young scholar’s parents could not afford to send her to college. Keeping her eyes on the prize, when told something could not be accomplished, Dr. Carter, found the means to succeed despite the obstacles. As a result, Dr. Carter has adopted author Julia Cameron’ s (The Artist’s Way) personal philosophy "Leap and the net will appear," a motto which served Dr. Carter throughout her educational career.

As a student at the rigorous Boston Latin Academy (formerly Girl’s Latin), Dr. Carter was able to attend one of the country’s most demanding preparatory schools and excel both academically and as a leader.  To escape an alcoholic household, she applied to Stanford for her undergraduate program, where she was accepted.  She earned both a B.A. and M.A. from Stanford in six years, in addition to becoming a single parent.

After graduation, Dr. Carter went to work for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Unchallenged by her work, Carter applied for and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon’s School of Urban and Public Affairs for their Master’s program in Management and Public Policy.  Acceptance into the program was a stellar accomplishment, but as a single parent without financial aid the news was bittersweet. In keeping with her motto, she "leapt," and the funding net appeared with a Patricia Harris Fellowship.

Again getting funding after her admittance to the doctoral program, Dr. Carter was accepted to the nationally-recognized Ph.D. program in sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Securing a six-year research assistantship, Dr. Carter honed the skills she now markets to become the first in her group to finish her course-work in the doctoral program.  Despite failing her qualifying exams, she succeeded in her second try while suffering from depression and continuing to raise her daughter. Today, her daughter is a senior majoring in Communications at Howard University.

In all, Dr. Carter has identified roadblocks throughout her life, overcome them, and moved forward to advance to new levels of success. As a woman, parent, educator, motivational speaker and business owner, Dr. Carter exemplifies leading by example.

The Unintended Consequences of Zero Tolerance

The aphorism I would coin is that the unintended consequence of zero tolerance is inevitably extinction. That is because, as Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, life always finds a way.

Those who don't find a way to deal with change and adaptability are doomed to suffer in a world that throws curveballs, spitballs and floogleballs every day. Never heard of a floogleball? My point exactly. In my backyard, these kids were forced to remove the weapons from toy soldiers because the school has a zero-tolerance policy for weapons, even and perhaps especially toy weapons. Smart kid that he was Austin Nakata realized that he'd have to cut the hands off of his soldiers to separate them from their rifles. And so they are bloodied and bandaged. Smart kid.

Juneteenth & Volunteer Slavery

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
-- William Gibson

Juneteenth is a reminder that this is the nature of reality. Some groups of people are always dealing with a smaller set of facts, and because of that, they live in a constrained reality.

African Americans are not all fully accustomed to using their freedoms. Though all of us have the right and liberty to pursue nearly infinite options in America, the fact is that most of us don't. We live in the same towns our grandparents live in, we eat the same food, we watch the same TV shows. An example I like to give is this: although all of us have been to McDonald's hundreds of times, how many times have we ordered the vanilla shake?

Jill Nelson published a book almost two decades ago called 'Volunteer Slavery'. She describes how for all of her life she was encouraged to break certain barriers and attain certain goals, for her the march up the corporate ladder. When she got there, she found that she was a prisoner of her ambitions, bound by her commitments to fulfill dreams that hadn't changed. She quit and eventually saw herself and life in general in a whole new light. But she had to take that leap of faith, that even though nobody could see what might happen, she had to believe that she could use her freedom and make it work.

How many of us are volunteering ourselves for the same old positions we have always been told are good for us? How many of us are afraid of change? How many of us have become so accustomed to answering the same doorbell that we think that is our purpose? As a black man who is a member of the Republican Party, I know how difficult it is to break old habits. I know how treacherous freedom actually can be. I understand how stepping outside of commitments to old dreams puts one in the crosshairs. I know the feeling of clumsiness when walking on unfamiliar ground. But this is the very challenge of life, to discover, to adapt, to move forward.

Here I am talking about change and yet pontificating about the Old School. How can I reconcile this apparent contradiction? It's actually pretty simple when you think about it. After all, God is older than the Old School. If you believe in some unassailable truths and you seek after them, then you'll find yourself drawn to some permanent facts about the very nature of humanity. One of them is that we were born to be free, and that we have responsibility to that freedom. It must be worked for. Everybody doesn't work at the same pace, that's why freedom and all of God's gifts are unevenly distributed. We all too often fail to acknowledge who we are as creatures of God. We submit to inferior ideas. We hide our lights under a bushel.

Michel Martin asks if we have a shared freedom:

Is Juneteenth something that speaks to shared values and experiences? And if we are celebrating...what's on the menu?

It seems to me that the answer to that is as easy as asking if you believe that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.

That's Pig Food

On the day of Juneteenth I relate a short but true and fascinating story I never knew. According to a colleague of mine born and raised in Texas, there was a time and place in America where certain folks regarded the watermelon as pig food. Not all of it mind you, but most of it.

We ate lunch today down at the local BBQ and the story was about my friend's father who grew up on a farm. Back when her father was a kid, on any old given sunny summer day, he'd go out into the patch and pick up a melon then bash it to the ground. Then he'd scoop out the juiciest part, right in the middle, then leave the rest on the ground. After a day or two of the broken melon sitting out in the sun, he'd have to scoop it up and go feed it to the hogs.

So one day as this farmer grew up and got married he was out on a picnic with his wife who proceded to eat the watermelon like most of us do, down to the rind. He was revolted. How could you eat that, he protested. That's pig food!

Now I can remember days of being so close to the struggle that I'd suck the marrow out of chicken bones. I can remember when we couldn't afford regular milk and had to drink powdered milk. Hell, I even remember eating mackerel instead of tuna. Now that I'm a big fat success I leave the lights on, and even throw away food on my plate. But I don't think I'll ever get so rich that I don't eat watermelon down to the rind.

On Tyler Perry

I haven't seen enough Tyler Perry to hate on him. But that's because I already know there's only so much of that genre I can stand. Which is to say if I was forced to watch Tyler Perry and take him seriously, I'd hate him. I make the distinction between the man and his work. If introduced I wouldn't say, you suck. But then again, comparatively speaking, he does.

This is not so much about Tyler Perry as it is a class issue, as the folks over at YBP must surely understand:

So why are so many critics hating on him? Even black people try to hold him down instead of lifting up his many accomplishments. I can see if you do not care for his sense of humor or comedy style, but why hate on the man who came from nothing and made a huge success of himself? Then again, not being a hater myself, I’ll just never understand the logic.

I will invoke the old Prince quote. You eventually get the audience you deserve. Judging from the one Tyler Perry flick I watched, his favored demographic is the working po'. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But one certainly cannot expect highbrow critics to bend over and kiss Perry's ring, simply because he's made 50 million in the film business. In fact, you can expect them to piss all over him even more because of his success and piss on his audience too.

Tyler Perry is not going to replace Colson Whitehead, Wynton Marsalis or Garth Fagin any time soon. So as long as there are Americans who prefer sophisticated literature, fine jazz and modern dance to updated versions of the old mama-on-the-couch plays, filmmakers like Perry are going to get critically dissed.

The question is whether or not in the interests of 'black images', adulation of Perry is to be a litmus test of any sort, because if it is, then YBP has got it twisted. The man's art simply doesn't stand that tall. It's entertainment - sitcom level entertainment at that, and it's not half as funny as The Simpsons. So YBP is going to have to determine the appropriate benchmarks for giving props up to Tyler Perry, then we can talk.

BTW. We've been through this kind of stuff before. Don't make me go there.

Prosecutorial Follies

Nobody seems satisfied that Nifong bites the dust. Now we should go after DAs and US Attorneys we don't like? Hmm. Easier said than done.

Texas Torrents

Last night I drove through the most intense rainstorm ever in my life. It was spooky.

I got into DFW late, like every other flight into the area, because of bad weather. By the time I got out of the rental lot the rain was coming down in torrents. Since I've been in a funky mood, I burned a CD of some of my old favorites, so by the time I got out onto 820 heading west towards Fort Worth, Maggot Brain was playing. At this point, the scene ahead of me seemed like something out of a strange dream with the perfect soundtrack.

Lightning was hitting every 10 seconds and I mean daylight bright stuff. Blam. Blam. The entire world turned black & white like an old horror flick. With wipers on full twitch you still couldn't drive any faster than 30 mph. Blinding sheets and massive drops pounded the car, wind blew it sideways, fast-lane puddles dragged the wheels to the left.

Then suddenly after a rise in the road, lightning hit with a smack on the left side of the highway frighteningly close. Instantly all of the roadside signs went dark. I've never seen anything like that close up.

Ten minutes later at the hotel, it was all wind and no rain at all, though curbs were submerged churning with torrents of dark water coursing downhill. Glass doors were fogged to a soggy opacity and slammed shut as pressures tried to equalize. As I finally got into bed past the soaked floors and dripping windows, a tornado warning showed on the television for the county immediately north.

Today I can see 30 miles in any direction from my office and there is hardly a cloud in the sky. The newspaper says a four year old child was swept away by the flood.

Tiger Woods lost the US Open and the markets won't correct. Today is the day of events and circumstances beyond predictability, let alone control.

America At Night

You never know what you don't know.

The reason success is fleeting is because human desire is infinite. As soon as you know one thing, you want to know another. Suddenly the value of what you know becomes relative, and then you get bored with yourself. Conversely, the value of knowing something new may be proportional to the time you've been satisfied knowing relatively nothing about it. I know all that sounds convoluted but I deal with economies of thought all the time, and to me such notions are fascinating.

It is with that in mind that I approach the almost invisible reception of Larry J. Kolb's 'America At Night', which is an expose of the highest order of the nature of dirty tricks and dirty tricksters who insinuate themselves into the corridors of American power. I could tell you the crux of the book, but with all respect to the price of the book, letting you know the easy way would be somewhat unethical. You need to read the first 100 pages of this book, and then you're there - in the middle of what would have been one of the greatest scandals in American presidential election history. If you think Bush stole the election in 2000, wait until you read what was going on in 2004.

Larry Kolb is an ex-CIA man whose specialty was political espionage. He is the author of the excellent 'Overworld' reviewed here by me a while back. He understands very well, having learned from a great spymaster, what efforts are made and what tools are used to assault and batter political candidates. In this tale of high intrigue he finds himself, now done running for his life, once again drawn into the world of enormous consequences. This is the result of him playing his hunches and employing his considerable research skills in connecting dots that the American intelligence community had not hitherto connected. What he discovers are a couple of operators, each of them incredibly clever and dangerous on their own, who might be working together. Considering the grudge one of them has against the US, which has thwarted his international grifting in the past, Kolb wouldn't put it past them to collaborate with Al Qaeda for profit and vengeance. Having made a startling discovery, Kolb determines he must do what must be done to save the integrity of the 2004 election.

At this stage of the game, especially in light of the fates of Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, Sandy Berger and various other convoluted intrigues, it's almost impossible to tell how important Kolb's account will be in the scheme of things. It's rather like finding out the truly ugly side of a woman you've already decided to divorce. Once your heart is broken, the marginal insult to injury makes no difference. And yet, we must know, and we are driven to know such things. I say "Bob Sensi" here in this blog, and challenge myself to find it in any search engines six months from now. If you Google it today, no blog has it. Why? Has the Internet been scrubbed? Such things actually happen, in America, at night.

I'll finish this blogpost when I finish the book.

The Biggest Parties Ever

Back in the day, Uncle Jam's Army was all that. Google would tell you that Cobb is the only place on the whole of the internet that talks about those days. But I just found something else:

This month I am going to tell you how it was in the 80's when Uncle Jam's Army gave dances for 10,000 party people. It all started with High School dances at lunch time, then local parties at Hotels, then auditorium parties that held 2,500 people, then the Big One The L.A. Sports Arena. The main guy in Uncle Jam was Roger Clayton and he was the brains behind the way we promoted the dances. He made the commercials (That was off the Hook) and also programmed the music for the parties. He was the one who taught me about how to rock a party.

Yeah I remember those days.

Lewis Hamilton is For Real

OK this one almost caught me by surprise. I say almost because I've actually heard this guy's name before today. Now I'm not one of those folks who actually keeps up with Formula One racing, in fact the sport has been going downhill for a while, and they keep thinking of new ways to revitalize it. Well Lewis Hamilton might be the guy to do that.

Today Hamilton won the US Grand Prix. He's only 22.

Rookie sensation Lewis Hamilton did it again, racing to his second straight Formula One victory in Sunday's U.S. Grand Prix.

   The first black driver in F1's 61-year history has finished all seven races this season in the top three. He now leads Mercedes McLaren teammate and two-time world champion Fernando Alonso by 10 points in the standings.

I'm a car freak, I must admit. OK maybe a car fan, but I really am about the technology, not so much about the thrill of being a fan of the celebrities. But race drivers are no joke in the skills department.
A young, good looking guy like Lewis, who his folks named after Carl Lewis, the sprinter, has a good chance to bring a lot more attention to the sport.

Of course lots of blackfolks are going to claim him in the old ritual. And much bloviation will follow about breaking barriers. Maybe my bow Willie T. Ribbs will get some play out of this. His debut a decade or so at the Long Beach GP where he failed to win any commanding titles left the hoo-rah section a little cold and limp, and of course Ribbs had serious attitude. So he wasn't about to be placed in anybody's poster. That's something rather common about F1 and certainly superbike racers. They are incredible egos, like jet fighter pilots, they simply don't downplay it. So if Hamilton is like other speedsters, and unlike the Aw Shucks crew in NASCAR, then his adolation from the black rank and file may come late if ever. I can't see him trying to get an interview with Tavis or Oprah.

Tavis? Oprah? Where do we get these names?

Anyway, congratulations to Hamilton. Another black person at the top of another pile. Get use to it.

Here is a great interview with Hamilton to give you an idea.

Nifong to be Disbarred

I don't care if you've heard it a thousand times. I'm going to pile on. Nifong deserves all the enmity people can pitch at his fat head.

When the facts came out in December, the correct side of the blogosphere was all over him, including me. Now it looks like just desserts are heading down the pike. His announcement of his retirement was certainly timed to give his office to get him out there before the ton of bricks hit. He's got no option but to sit there and take it. I would hate to be that guy for the next ten years.

What I wonder is how he's going to live with himself.

It's Not 'Magic'

Barack Obama's Secret Service callsign has been released to the press:

Sen. Barack Obama has a new tag: "Renegade."

That's what Secret Service agents are calling the Illinois Democrat, in the time-honored tradition of giving "secret" code names to presidential candidates and other protected dignitaries. As is custom, the Obama moniker reflects something of the man himself (though he might prefer "progressive" or "independent").

I think I owe somebody five bucks.

Let There Be Funk

Well it's all here. The results are in. Our little corner of the world within earshot of this blog has spoken and we have finally compiled the 100 greatest funk songs of all time. Without further ado, here are the results.

Download FunkyFinalResults_06152007.pdf

Libel, Truth & Commentary

A thoughtful yet disgruntled reader sent me a note the other day. Evidently, someone had informed her that something said about her in this blog by a commenter seemed defamatory. By the use of her language she had apparently considered her legal rights.

I have little consolation in the action I have determined to take which is to wipe out the offending comment without regard to the credibility of the person who wrote it or the verity of the claim made. I simply find it a prudent, simple and relatively painless thing to do. However I am still annoyed by this decision because of a brief exchange I had with this reader.

My initial response was basically 'man up'. If somebody lies about you, then defend yourself. If they lie about you in a street where ten people can hear then tell the truth about yourself in the same street so the same ten people can hear you. If in a newspaper, then back in the newspaper. If in the comment section of a blog then back in the same place. She declined to do so saying she has no intention to make any comments in any blog. In that regard, blogs are beneath her consideration. From one point of view, this is a perfectly reasonable and practical position. If bratty children in a playground were overheard calling me a fat man as I walked down the street, I would hardly condescend to find the offending brat and shake my finger in their face. It's the old 'drag me down to their level' stiff upper lip. I would simply have their teacher hush the little varmint. It's certainly not worth my time and effort to go chasing around every kindergarten and stop the lies. After all, teachers do have some responsibility.

But I am incapable of ignoring the lazy hypocrisy of such a position in the public sphere among citizens. If blogs aren't worth taking seriously - if one does not condescend to respond in public how then can such an offense be considered? Either a blog is a legitimate public forum for adult conversation and debate or it is not. If it is not, then there is little here to be respected and therefore little here to be heeded, including and especially specious, insulting claims.

Now, it would seem to me that if I were Hitler and I were speaking in a beer hall among mindless brutes against some innocent, it should be considered foolish for that victim to attempt to make a correction in place. However I was convinced that she saw me not as some rabble rousing fool. Rather she suggested  that for the sake of Cobb's continued respectability I might keep a tighter leash on potentially libelous commentary. But that is a burden no blogger can take, rather for the same reasons potential victims of hurtful talk shouldn't be bothered running everywhere Google finds their name in a sullying context to shout down enemies.

Legally, bloggers are generally covered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, more or less. I can say that here, but what any two opposing lawyers and judge might say on any given day is a bit more arbitrary than my declaration. Quite frankly I'd rather just make the point I am making. The individual in question was not even the subject of discussion and could only be best described as charged guilty by association, as any thoughtful reader could reasonably determine. But the theoretical determinations of reasonable people are beyond my control, as are the hypocritical annoyances of people who would have me defend their honor in an arena they deem unworthy of entering.

This one falls under the banner of wishing for a better public. It ain't gonna happen. Civilization is where you put it, and I'm not putting up my dukes for any of you brittle, arrogant weenies, be you commentor or complainer.

 

References:

• Section 230 (EFF)
• What Bloggers should know about section 230

Hamas vs Fatah & Afrolantica

I've been on an odd schedule but found out yesterday morning that our poor friend Abu Mazan may have to dissolve the Palestinian government as fighting has broken out in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah factions. I was going to go directly to some geopolitical details about that situation but an interesting parallel occurred to me as I was writing about the Middle East elsewhere.

Harold Ford says:

Finally, we must continue to ally ourselves with and fund moderate elements in the Arab world that appreciate freedom and democracy. We must encourage more Americans to learn to speak Arabic and have a deeper understanding of Arabic culture and history.

The understanding is that all of the Arab countries in the region, having been independent for decades have done nothing to absorb the squatters in Palestine. Instead, they have used 'humiliation' as an excuse to incite fundamentalist whackos and blamed the whole mess on Israel. The current deadly conflict is just another proof that all of the Palestinian understanding and Arab understanding is not nation-building but fratricide. The Palestinians are incapable of helping themselves, and the Arab world in unwilling to help them in any honest way.

Many blackfolks know the fable of Afrolantica. It was written by Derrick Bell, and tells of the mystical city of Atlantis rising from the sea. It turns out that all the inhabitants of this legendary greatest civilization on earth ere black, and that when African Americans visited, all the burdens of their hearts were rolled away. In fact, the effect of this nirvana were so profound that the very knowledge that they could go there at any time gave African Americans the inner peace they had desired for generations. This was a very powerful story because it illustrates how true hope can be more important than real gain. It's lesson certainly wasn't lost on me.

When I think about the suicidal rage of Palestinians I wonder if in all of their Arab culture and history they had such a poet as Derrick Bell. Bell is by no means a leader of African America, but he has contributed to the last twitches of separate thinking, and in that regard has been inspired and insightful if pessimistic. Bell would never pick up a sword or advocate violent rebellion because he knows than in many ways his own ascent in America provided Afrolantic moments of hope for many blackfolks. It was less than 20 years ago when Derrick Bell resigned in anger of not having a black tenured law professor at Harvard other than himself. Shortly thereafter, Lani Guinier took that spot, and among the many hundreds of black graduates of the Harvard Law School, one Barack Obama is showing himself to be a great hope as the surest black candidate for the office of President America has ever seen. Even with our great pessimists, African Americans could show the people of Gaza a thing or two. It is they who should be trying to understand us.

Freedom and democracy can only be sustained through confidence. I am reminded once again that our Founders pledged their sacred honor in defense of liberty. It is a level of commitment some of our people have often struggled with maintaining. It certainly isn't easy. You just can't desire liberty, you must work to sustain it, in the face of tragedy and hopelessness. It is, finally, a measure of character and of leadership which sustains men of character and purpose. This is something the Palestinians lack, and the war between Hamas and Fatah demonstrate that corruption of character and purpose. I don't know how they will raise themselves from the desperation they have created. I don't see how the defeat of one side by the other can bode well for the fate of people in Gaza. But I do expect to see this cycle repeat. The Palestinians lack confidence and their Arab brothers lack confidence in them. So, I must confess, do I.

Here in America, black critics such as myself and others in the 'sphere, are constantly criticizing aspects of black life we find abhorrent or distasteful. We stand in a long tradition of self-criticism and self-correction, and sometimes it sounds as if we can't see any good in ourselves. But the difference is that this tradition, as old as Frederick Douglass, is one generated by confidence in our own triumph. Despite the temporary inversion and celebration of degenerate rap celebrities, the African American tradition of the bully pulpit comes from true American heroes like Harriett Tubman and Booker T. Washington, James E. Just and Matthew Henson. There's a string of them whose names you know, men and women of peace and substance whose triumph inspires us all.

Harold Ford, unfortunately, is talking out the side of his neck. Few will long note nor remember what he's saying here.

Two Guns

Very interesting.

Please watch both videos.

Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

The Crack Rapper

You absolutely must read The Literary Thug today:

What makes someone like Jeezy get under the skin of millions of black people lies in how he manipulates the vocabulary of black music to make his money. James Baldwin said it best here when he said that

Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand--or sleight-of-hand--by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary--without the faintest notion of what it really means--the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.

What the crack rapper does is turn this shorthand on it’s axis. He takes the rhetoric of black english and creates a vocabulary for the privileged white teenager in which he makes the most vicious damage against black people seem like a day at the beach. In this vocabulary, he gives the white rap fan a sort of self reflecting mirror into black life, not enough empathize with the black people that rappers are bragging about committing crimes against, but enough to trample on black people’s most vulnerable wounds and get away with it. If black music has been an artistic sanctuary from life, the crack rapper opens the church gates, burns the church down, and allows life to smack the parishioners around as they leave.

I'm not prepared to riff off this immediately as I am in the midst of frying other fish, however it does reflect a theme I've been pushing from the Old School perspective. I think we are all in agreement that hiphop is an artform, and that there is no such thing as 'hiphop culture' or 'hiphop politics'. However LT illustrates the default of progressive, multicultural and liberal critics who have allowed hiphop to represent black culture far beyond the extent to which it is actually representative.

The conversation I really want to have is with people like Jimi Israel and Danyel Smith to understand where black critics to the left of Stanley Crouch went so wrong when the commercial appeal of hiphop took off and left the more organic elements behind. From the perspective of my timeline, John Legend, Common and the rest of Neo Soul came ten years too late partially because of how black critics allowed The Source and Vibe to become what they became, the literary bitches of gangsta. New Jack was there, and it didn't do this. Kid & Play and Salt & Pepa and Heavy D were there and they didn't do this. The aesthetic of spoken word died for a lack of critical oxygen and money. Savion Glover was there and didn't do this. And I think really that Janet Jackson was the last R&B star who understood the hiphop art. And it ended with her with all due respect to the Native Tongues.

The head svengalis of rap degeneracy have to be producers like Master P and others too numerous (and partially unknown to me) to mention. But I think we can start there.

Republicans for Obama

From Deet, my brother.

So I took my 12-year-old daughter to the doctor this morning to have her cast removed following a skateboard accident three weeks ago. I'm wearing my 'Obama Is America' shirt that each of us who volunteered at last night's tremendously successful fund-raiser received.

The doctor said he has been extremely impressed by the campaign that Sen. Obama has run so far and would certainly have attended last night's event had he known about it.  The shirt gave me an opportunity to talk about some of Barack's accomplishments and share my feelings about why he is the right president for our country.  We agreed on many issues, I obtained his phone number and Email address and will stay in touch with him.  He is considering throwing all his support behind our efforts to bring the Obama Administration to the White House next year.

By the way, did I mention the doctor is a Republican?

My family will not let me sleep, of course.

There's a website with a modicum of interactivity called Republicans For Obama. It isn't fake, but it's not breaking any records. Check it out. As I'm finding out more about how Bill Richardson may have a serious conflict of interest on immigration, I'm starting not to like him.

Three More Days of Funk

The votes keep coming and we are just a few days from the final results of the 100 greatest funk songs of all time. This morning I put together some preliminary tallies from the voting so far.There are some surprises, but a lot of unanimity amongst the funky faithful.

A lot of people thought perhaps that P-Funk and James Brown would dominate, but in the top 20 so far there are 14 different bands. We've got a wide variety of funk. Also down at the bottom of the list are some songs deemed horribly unfunkified, among them The Power Station and The Steve Miller Band.

So let me talk about the methodology so you'll know what's up.

Straight Funk & Hype Funk
There are seven grades of funkativity from 'No' at the bottom end to 'Da Bomb' at the top. Each song gets two composite scores. There is the Straight Funky Score and there is the Hype Funky Score. The point systems work out like this:

                                               

Rating	Straight Funk	Hype Funk
No	1	-1
Barely   Funky	2	0
Somewhat   Funky	3	1
Funky	4	2
Extra   Funky	5	3
Hella   Funky	6	4
Da Bomb	7	6

The Straight Funk Score gives every song the benefit of the doubt. The Hype Funk score takes no prisoners and gives extra props for being Da Bomb. The two scores are combined to give a maximum Funk Score of 13 which is the funkiest number in the Cosmos, last time I checked.

The Boogie Factor
Since everybody didn't vote for every song, the averages are calculated according to the number of responses. So while it's possible that one song might be voted 'Da Bomb' by only one person giving that song a perfect score, it didn't happen. So while I didn't have a cutoff, or an adjustment for songs that were very funky but unpopular, no song in the top 100 has had less than 10 responses. So I calculated a Boogie Factor which tells me how well situated the song is in its ranking relative to the score that it got. The higher the Boogie Factor, the more certain you can be that the song got the grade it deserved. Boogie = #Responses / Combined Funk. Average Boogie Factor is 1.94. It's not currently figured into the ranking, but it could be.

The highest combined funk score is 11.59 with a boogie factor of 1.47.

On GW Bush's Wristwatch

I've been trying to find out all day what kind of watch the president wears. For one thing, I've been in the market for one myself and I wondered if I might have the same kind. Actually, the Bremont watch has caught my fancy thanks to Bear Grylls. But I can't afford that kind of luxury. Then it turns out, according to those who are spinning this funny story, that he wears a $50 Timex. What a letdown.

So here's my question that I haven't heard anybody answer. Why was he shaking with both hands? If GW Bush is a proper right-handed American, he should be wearing his watch on his left hand. Furthermore he should be shaking hands with his right. So how does an erstwhile thief get to his left hand? His personal space is a little bit to small for me. I'd give high fives with both hands, but not have a lot of people grabbing on my arms. With this kind of crowd, he should be throwing T-shirts.

Anyway, at least it didn't cost the taxpayers any money.