My jheri curl story is that I have a jheri curl story. In 1979 I had a shoulder length California curl. It was like a jheri curl but not wet. I rode a motorcycle. But that's only the half. The rest of the story is that I had a Prince hairstyle in college.
In the early 80s, when I was a sophomore in college, I had a high top fade. It was taller than the one worn by sprinter Carl Lewis, but it was not quite as extreme as the one Kid had. Fresh from a dalliance with the fashion of preppy, I went directly to the Larry Blackmon school of fashion. But that wasn't enough. So I curled it.
Now you sorta know the style of the 80s. You know about the big huge jheri curls. Full Force were the kings of curl, the problem was that they wanted to be bad boys. It worked. The muscle shirts, the two-tone were cool, but when they tried to fake like they were cool, it simply didn't work. Me, I was a bit too sophisticated and quite frankly liked more of what Morris Day was all about. Except Morris was too tame and Prince was too wild. So I generated a middle and the closest thing to it was Jesse Johnson's look. So if you can imagine I high top fade with a curl, but a buzz cut on the side, that was my look in the fall of 1984.
That look lasted about 2 months, then I pledged Alpha and got all conservative. No photographic evidence of my 80s hair exists. None.
Michel Martin brings up an interesting question about what it is black men find desirable in black women that may be killing them.
Michel here...just wanted to add a quick thought about yesterday's back of the book segment on black women and obesity. Debra Dickerson's provocative essay
in Salon caught our attention. It kinda speaks for itself, but I can't
help myself...it's titled, "Healthy, My A__" (fill in the blank).
She argues that part of the reason African American women are
struggling with their weight are all the cultural messages telling them
it's okay -- the greasy food, the shout-outs from the brothas who want
to see some "junk in the trunk."
Now, it seems to me that women all over this country are struggling
with weight issues -- whether it's the pressure among Hollywood
starlets to be dangerously thin (Hello? Nicole Richie?) or the ballerinas before them, or black and Latina women struggling to keep their weight and blood pressure in check.
We also invited jasmyne Cannick, blogger extraordinaire to give her take. She's trying to lose weight for health reasons.
If you don't recognize the title of this blog post, it's from the funky Rick James song 'Superfreak'. If there's anything about cultural messages that are dangerous to women, it's that sluttery is OK. Feminists have muddied the waters with regard to femininity. That we even have discussions of 'gender roles' at this late date is evidence of an overreaching agenda. I mean after all how many PhDs for how many decades does it take to figure out how women ought to behave? Something's broke here and it's easy to see. That is that we have elevated looks over character, and what we expect from good looking women is bad character.
If superfreak girls are alright with you, then you're part of the problem. Speaking of which, I'm a bit too old to know, but now I do want to know what exactly is a 'dime piece'?
If GW Bush believes he has the power to persuade Congress to make some more motion on the now 'mostly dead' immigration bill, he's huffing. GW Bush has long lost the ability to persuade period. He certainly doesn't have the juice on this issue.
The good news is that it won't be long before we have a new president. And all any of the Republican candidates needs to promise right now (meaning any of them but McCain), is that the first order of business when they get to the White House will be to build the goddamned fence. DHS is fast losing credibility on the issue because exactly 11 miles have been built out of 850. 150 miles are promised by December, but the land hasn't even been purchased yet. This is bullcrap of the highest order and everybody knows it.
As the NRO said a month ago, the conservatives have gone from 'trust but verify' to 'verify' on immigration law. That movement is not going away.
OK I admit it. I confess. I don't understand health care.
I know it's expensive, but I'm not quite sure why. When Democrats say that they want to improve health care, what exactly is it that they mean? Anyone care to enlighten a dumb yuppie who has always had health insurance?
There's one candidate who knows how to talk like a man, and that's Fred Thompson. Yeah I know he's an actor but man when he comes with it, he comes with it. I cannot succumb to the fantasy that Thompson would make a fine leader. He's a Senator and I simply don't trust Senators to be executives. With GW Bush's example, I'm inclined not to trust many Governors either, although I expect them to be the best. As for military types, private citizen billionaires and bold independents, the record goes downhill from there.
Michele Martin will be asking questions of Democrats, while questioning the format of the debates. She raises the exact right question from the exact wrong position. I think she's the kettle calling the kettle black. In other words, it is the media which has made all of our candidates behave like game show hosts by putting them in production value nirvana, with all the red white and blue graphics and zillion degree lighting. Only Fred Thompson, that I've seen has managed to YouTube his way directly into my heart, although I gotta admire Bill Richardson's uncanny ability to undo all the glitz around his on screen personna.
Thompson's YouTube drama is a brilliant response to Michael Moore, and he backed it up with a comprehensive and intelligent text.
I also happened to be a fan, by the way, of the talkshow format done by Orlando Jones. In fact, I would have to say, for those of you curious enough to ask, especially armchair psychiatrists who think I've got blackness issues, Orlando Jones is the closest TV personality to mine. You'd still have to mix in a little bit of Lou Gossett Jr, Kadeem Hardison and Wesley Snipes to bake that cake properly, but I digress. (And while I'm digressing, does anybody remember Steve Jones, the second greatest black martial artist star ever?). The point I'm making is that some people are blue-suit on the podium kinds of people, but the President of the United States shouldn't necessarily have to be that kind of person, and I am absolutely flabbergasted by the fact that Hillary Clinton is too dumb and clumsy to fundamentally change the style of debate this season. Then again, looking at her, I understand. She's incapable of doing anything but keeping a straight face. If she had to do what Oprah does, she'd crumble in 30 minutes.
Which goes to the point of the drab and stilted way we have come to experience intelligent exchanges of ideas through television. But think about how quickly we recognize it when we're channel surfing. You will know within a second or less as you are channel-surfing if you are seeing a televangelist, an informercial, a motivational speaker, a standup comic, a reporter on location, or a PBS documentary. It's really that cliche, and the media does absolutely nothing about it.
If I were running for president, I would work it like Charlie Rose, whose style is impeccable. I would have a one hour interview with my own press secretary on 12 issues of national import, and I would fully explain my thinking. I would put them on YouTube and accept every invitation to the MSM debates insisting as I respond that people see the real deal on YouTube.
I think I have just witnessed one of the most stunning exposes ever. I cannot help but believe that absolutely everything this guy says is the truth. It's just that deep. Just wow.
I'm spending a lot more time in airports these days. Now I can say I have experienced my fourth or fifth freeze drill. I'm not sure what they call it when something goes wrong in security and they make everybody freeze in place, but I'm getting rather used to it. I'm not up to the level of frequent flying that I once was, but I'm about halfway back up the scale again. In fact, I'm starting to recognize some of the security personnel at LAX.
Anyway, today I decided to talk to a pilot and ask him a question that had been on my mind. See the other day at IAH, we sat on the runway a little extra time and with a relatively empty plane, the pilot locked the brakes and revved up the engines. He cut them loose and we really started moving down the runway. This was a 757. I tend to notice that the 767s are really powerful, but I always thought pilots would prefer to fly the smaller planes, them being more maneuverable and taking off quicker. So I ask a guy with three bars which plane is the most fun to fly...
He thought I was being general and said, well that he likes those he can land on carrier decks. Well, duh. But I meant commercial planes. He said that was like asking which car do you like most driving on the freeway at 65mph, and the answer is the one with the nicest dashboard and coolest stereo. Commercial flight is so boring that to ex-military pilots it's like driving a city bus. I knew that commercial pilots are called bus drivers, but I didn't expect the first pilot to say it out loud within 30 seconds of me meeting him. He said, "You really can't do anything in them. It's all done for the safety and comfort of the passengers." He said so with the kind of earnestness of a shotgun husband.
We blabbed for a minute about this video, and he kinda agreed that the biggest, newest planes are the 'most fun'. That's word from Cobb. I thought you'd like to know.
In reminiscing about my charmed youth and my ability to hobnob with various black elites it suddenly occured to me that I'm fighting a feeling with Obama.
This weekend I have been invited twice to march for Obama. I have basically ignored those invitations on the basic premise that, despite the fact I'm impressed with his campaign, I'm just not going to vote for him. The direct conflict between 'black' and 'Republican' never quite occurred to me until I thought about it in the context of Michael Bowen, charming young black up-and-comer hanging out with the black elite. Doesn't that sound presumptuous? It does, a little bit, but I know a part of me could work it. And the presumption that I should work it and be an elite black insider with connections to Obama... well that's honestly not irresistible any longer.
I need it not to be irresistible, so I think, does America.
When I was a role-monkey, I got bored kinda quick, but I was always thankful to not be the only black in the room. The more black people were around, I reasoned, the more opportunity I got to be me instead of the black guy representing the race - perhaps somewhere they had never seen black people before on the presumption that we simply weren't good or sophisticated enough. I almost never get that feeling anymore despite the fact that I'm almost always the only black guy. I have felt no self-consciousness about being me, as black as I want to be, since (I'll say arbitrarily, 1986). I kind of forget the feeling. Maybe when I was in Paris and some freaky businessman caught me walking through an alley and thought I might be a puto and invited me to ride in his Mercedes.
But now I take it for granted that I'm me and I can be taken at face value. Sure, I have to wait occasionally for people to snap out of the daydream and deal with me in their face, but that's partially my fault for being so.. un-edgy and Dadlike in my bhudda. But I gotta be me and I have to resist the default solidarity that is enforced by feelings of inferiority and isolation. There's room enough for all of us to do our own thing. And if not, racial unity is not going to solve that problem. Of course I was born in an era where that was not the case. That's why I have to fight the feeling.
The Kwaku Network is afire, and now Howard Witt is driving volume.
There's a best-selling author who goes by the name of John Sandford. I'm on my fourth book of his in as many weeks. In the one I just finished, a gay US Senator is drugged unconscious, burned alive, chained to a tree with barbwire and beheaded.
Shocked?
Everybody knows, who watches television news these days, exactly how our media would behave and how much public opinion would be swayed by such an event. That's why it makes for a great murder mystery book. But very few people know how police would investigate such matters, how the FBI would get involved and how this differs or does not differ from other murders, about 17 thousand of which occur in our country every year. In one way, the American public is prepared to deal with this quite easily as media consumers. We are not no prepared to deal with the police investigations, and legal proceedings behind it.
How does one become accustomed to the fact that there are that many people murdered in America every year? Only if you are the sort whose business it is to do something about it. You might be a judge, a defense attorney, a prosecutor, a detective, a jailer or some part of the system. You have to look at it straight. And yet I'm convinced that there are people who do this everyday who find themselves shocked at the brutality of some fraction of these crimes. I think they'd know a hate crime when they see one.
A while back, I negotiated with some thoughtful people The Boohabian Hate Crime Standard. I thought it was appropriate at the time to recognize the terrorist intent of criminals who wanted to send a message through their intimidations and crimes. For what it's worth I think this remains a good principle.
To win a hate crime prosecution, the prosecution has to show a clear
expression of group hatred through the felony. It is not a "hate crime"
merely because the perpetrator hates people of that group. The crime has to
be intended to communicate that hatred of the group to the victim. The idea
that police search for hidden hate motivations is antithetical to the notion
of hate crime. Hate crime statutes don't enhance your punishment merely for
thinking bad thoughts. They enhance your punishment for committing your
crime in a manner that creates added psychological injury to the victim and
society.
There's something of a problem with that standard which is that depending upon who you are, you may or may not be psychologically injured. This is the difficulty when such ideas are promoted by multicultural activists of all stripes. Some of them are simply too touchy feely. How can you trust the kind of person who is deeply offended by Don Imus to be anywhere near objective enough to determine whether one murder is more offensive than another? You can't. But you also cannot expect the most relatively jaded people who deal with criminality on a daily basis, to be the sole arbiters of what society should deem especially cruel.
It was with something like that in mind that I heartily welcomed the Depravity Scale study. I think that we can studiously and empirically approach an understanding of what is truly evil without the prompting of political advocates and we can build the appropriate punishments into our laws.
As we grow as a nation in population, the odds are that we are going to see in greater number and greater detail with the advance of communication technology, more heinous crimes than ever before. Some of it will rise to the level of terrorism, and we should acknowledge that and work accordingly. 'Hate crime' is nothing new, it is just something newly noticed. Let us recognize that and evolve our justice system rationally and carefully.
Beyond that, I'm not on the Boohabian mission any longer. I don't believe that there is any progress to be made in race relations that originates from the prosecution of crime. Think about that for a second, then agree with me. Moreover, I'm not particularly interested in 'race relations'. That is nothing more or less than the negotiation of stereotypes.
There is a global war on terrorism going on as well as an ongoing battle against a domestic threat. I think I've made my position amply clear about that. For those who forget, remember Posner. Also remember that I have friends and acquaintances in the FBI, and I know that despite what complainers may complain about Waco and Ruby Ridge, they're very effective in shutting down domestic militants. Everything else is crime, and you know that I live outside of Sherwood Forest.
Firstly I want to dedicate this survey to UCLA English Professor Richard Yarborough, who of all the dorky looking brothers who appear to be far too nebbish to even utter the word 'funk', absolutely floored me with his encyclopedic knowledge of all things funky. Even though his punk ass never returns any of my emails, but that's OK. Sometimes it be that way.
I dedicated to him because I am prone to be all up in people's grills talking about how nothing ever gets done if I don't do it. These days I'm thinking why, despite the new underground of the AfroSpear, not one of them (us) has been able to aggregate snap into the TTLB. It's downright embarrassing. And yet despite my woofing there just as often as not is some spook sitting by the door taking notes, names addresses and all that. So when I started talking about The Family and Yarborough started naming tracks, I had to remember that there still might be half a million intellects of my persuasion out there. The problem remains - we are unhooked-up. And so with the Yarborough Caveat, I will say that this is unquestionably the biggest and bad assest funky survey in history.
So what's funky and what aint?
High & Low It seems to me that a fundamental aspect of funky music is its self-deprecating irony. Some of it is clever and some of it is just deeply undercover. But that irony is best expressed in counterpoint. Consider School Boy Crush. You have sleigh bells and bass guitar. That's just mad genius. Then consider Funky Worm, the synthesizer solos just work their way all over the stratosphere. Another classic is the intro to Faze-O's Riding High. Synthesizers and vocals way up there. Bass and beats way down there.
Breakdown Nothing is quite so funky as a deconstructed beat. Even though we didn't nominate much rap, it is true the Dr Dre is a master of this. When you let the beat drop, and then pick it up again. This funk essential is what James Brown invented so far as I'm concerned. Take down the instruments and then build them up again, oh man that's the juice.
The Cosmos References to the cosmos, whether explicitly or implied through the use of sound effects make things funky. Steve Arrington wants to take you Way Out. The Brothers Johnson want you to Ride O Rocket.
The Funk Box No instrument belongs so totally to the oevre of funk as the Vocorder voice box. It's pretty much called the funk box because of that. Nobody played to this strength like Roger Troutman. It's hard to imagine him talking in a normal voice at all. GCS employed it very well in 'Now Do U Wanta Dance', and Herbie Hancock employed it on his funk albums.
Poppin' Bass It's not enough just to have a bass line, you have got to pop it. The classic and possibly all-time greatest poppin' bass line is Glide by Pleasure. And of course the reputation of the Brothers Johnson relied to a certain extent on Louis' extraordinary ability. Sometimes a bass line is sufficient with a minimalist rhythm guitar to make a funky song. Aurra's "Are you Single?" did just that.
Synth Bass On the other side of the bass fence is the funky synth bass. The synth bass in Jamaica Funk and that applied by George Duke in Reach For It. Most of Parliament is synth. It's got the advantage of going way lower than a Drop C on a bass guitar. That makes for some extra deep funk.
Horns There's just no substitute for swinging horns. Everything wrong to today's music is that few people know how to do funky horn arrangements. I won't belabor the point. Horns are funky.
Ugh Go ahead and say it, but you gotta say it on time. This is where Cold Sweat just enters another realm. This is so funky that you can sample an Ugh from another song and drop it into your own and make it funky. The overweight lover Heavy D did that.
At the height of my single life, I got invited to a party in the Hamptons by a woman whose family worked at the White House. Not long after that I met some folks who summered at Martha's Vineyard whose family worked with the Vanderbilts. If I wasn't such an arrogant prick, I might have gotten somewhere with those beauties, but I had self-defined genius disease. Ah. Another time.
But I also met, as an Upper East Side wine and cheese poetry reading with Shay Youngblood, the only real talent in the room, a dude who was connected in Africa. He struck me as somebody who had very little patience with most folks and blackfolks in particular. But since he himself was black, he had to be around snooty black functions, just in case. It goes without saying that he was rolling in dough. I dressed nicely enough to get invited to fly out with him to the Congo sometime. He promised me he'd show me how business is really done in Africa despite what the lot of us pseudo-Pan-Africanists thought. I had a very strong feeling that he was dead right, and that rightness gave me an secondary uncomfortable feeling. It was a feeling I recall having once before.
Well, I might as well describe that little event too. It was in Washington DC. This one was one of the first meetings of Congressional Black Caucus Foundation just as their other money got cut off by Congress in the 90s. Present were a stellar array of heads, including Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and the very impressive black guy who was running as COO a now defunct devision of Sprint, plus the New York black communications magnates whose names I'm too lazy to lookup but everybody knows. Anyway, as part of this hoohah, there were some African businessmen in the room and I introduced myself as a young software guy and how could I begin to do business in Africa where my talent would be rare and valuable. The guy gave me this look as though I were a dog who just peed on his Mercedes. Except this was a guy who owned 3 Ferraris and a Maybach.
The net of this was that there is no kind of legitimate entrepreneurial business to be done by enterprising African Americans in Africa. That's why he was in Washington DC. That's why I was a little barking weenie dog who didn't know jack about doing business in Africa.
So now I hear that Congressman William Jefferson allegedly cut himself some side money in doing business with Africa. Introductions to men such as the African fellow with the Ferraris probably don't come cheap, and this is something I'm sure my acquaintance on the Upper East Side knew very well.
Outside the courthouse, Jefferson, wearing a dark suit, blue dress
shirt and red tie, spoke to reporters in a low but urgent voice about
his wife, five daughters and three grandchildren, emphasizing their Ivy League degrees, their patriotism and their commitment to both church and public service.
He
contrasted the family's accomplishments with allegations in the
indictment that Jefferson advanced his schemes by placing relatives on
boards of companies to solicit bribes and kickbacks.
I get the feeling that Jefferson not a crook, but is now in over his head and will be found guilty as hell. And in fact, I tend to want to defend him in the same way his fellow Democrats defended him, on procedural grounds. It's obvious that's he's a well-connected uppity black man. The problem is that he got that way on the public dime. If he had made an equally large name for himself on the private dime, all of this news would not be news. There are simply a class of blackfolks here in the states who want to do business in Africa, and we're new at it. So I don't doubt for a minute that this isn't some kind of business as usual. But Jefferson doesn't have millions, so he's in trouble. If he had millions of his own, I think he'd have no problem whatsoever laundering 90k instead of stashing it in the freezer. Jeez man, I coulda done better than that. Hell, Ice-T did better than that.
The good news is that he's got kids in the Ivy. They'll learn how to do business with Africa a bit better than their pop.
In case you haven't noticed, we're all pretty much in agreement in the Old School, which can be called the Black Right, that African aid through NGOs is killing Africa in classic Welfare State fashion. We're sick of it and we're not going to take it any more. So I think I had, and we have the right vibe. The question is which kind of business was Jefferson pushing? Entrepreneurial, standard international oil-style bribery, or liberal European NGO Oxfam flies in the face hunger money? My nickel says it definitely wasn't the latter. So I'm real curious to see how business as bad plays in the politics surrounding Jefferson. Whose big toe did he step on, or was he just sloppy? Hmm.
My rather simple but devastating critique of this load of crap was flushed into the bit-bucket for presumably nefarious reasons. The response was easy enough to replicate, but I'll be brief.
About 20% of Israeli citizens are non-Jewish Arabs
Muslim services are held at Al Aqsa Mosque all the time.
The Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip ended last summer.
Hamas and Fatah policies are fundamentally hostile to Israel.
For people who study the Middle East with any modicum of rationality, such matters are elementarily obvious. However, for activist poseurs, who wish to draw up specious analogies to South African Apartheid in order to play on the sympathies of African Americans, such facts get in the way of 'progress'.
Today I'm calling bullshit on the Blackadmics blog.
Depending upon your revulsion to the prior two axioms, you're probably on one side of a continuing debate in America about the fate of blackfolks. I am heir to this annoyingly perennial race debate, so I'm part of the problem. But at least I'll admit the fetish.
For those of you living in reality, Paris Hilton, idle rich heiress with nice boobs, was busted for drunk driving or some such violation of probation having to do with such world historical evil as suspended drivers' licenses. She was sentenced to serve some jail time, which made national headlines in the Rikki Lake Parallel Universe. In close proximity to that dimension of space-time, exist the the racial theorists who momentarily leaped for joy that some relative to The Man was getting stuck. However due to a high priced legal trick, Hilton was released from jail, chipped and put under house arrest instead. This, naturally tripped the Sharpton alert which resulted in a bloviate chorus of whines from here,here, here,here, and here.
Within a day or two, another judge sent her back to the slam, and at the current moment, I think she's out having served a total of three days. I can't be sure of this because I'm rather loathe to tune into the Entertainment Tonight Universe. But at long last, last night came a sentence of wisdom that puts all the blabber to rest - in theory anyway. You know how it is when little dogs start yapping and chasing their tails.
"We needed bed space for real criminals".
Well duh. Considering how many of the thousands of jail cells are occupied by illegal aliens, 34,000 at last count in California, this would seem to be a truism. So I'm please to offer the following counter-theory to shutup the mealy mouthed race chasers who seem so put out but this excess of 'white privilege'.
It ain't white privilege that busted Paris Hilton out of jail, it was citizenship privilege. If it weren't for all those illegal immigrants crowding up the California penal system, we would have plenty more room for petty offenders like Paris Hilton, and the the 'war on at-risk black youth' aka those named 'Shaniqua' who are otherwise presumed not to get a break because they're not blonde, rich and hot crotched.
I say deport all the illegals so we can throw more Americans in jail. Starting with everyone on Sharpton's side on this melodrama. They can't blog from jail can they?
I'm done in Houston. All good. Upside is 350k of new consulting, and they paid us 160k to figure it out. But that's the software consulting business. Still nothing compared to medicine. I do hope Boy becomes a surgeon.
As I was heading home on the renta-car shuttle, casual conversation was struck. A couple in their late 50s were jovially on their way to Las Vegas as the guy next to me chatted them up. The man, a deeply tanned and hearty guy with a gold watch, polo shirt and khaki shorts said he had just come back from M D Anderson and the results were good.
"God forbid that you should ever get cancer, but if you do, these guys are the best in the world." He said that he and his wife were from Boca Raton, FL. "When we asked the doctors there, they said it was inoperable - that I had one year to live. That was seven years ago. " He would have died if he stayed in Florida, but got a second opinion at MD Anderson. "We come back up here every year for a checkup, and after that we go to Vegas". The news has been good every year.
I know that MD Anderson as well as UPenn are building up their proton therapy practices. It's extraordinary stuff. As inveterate Cobblers know, Moms had renal cancer that I thought was going to take us all down a few years back. Thank God she made it and is doing perfectly well these days. The whole thing cost three quarters of a million bucks and I have no idea how health care funding works, but we didn't have to pay more than a tiny fraction of that. Proton therapy wasn't real then but thanks to the surgeons at the John Wayne here in Santa Monica.
It turns out that liver is just one of the nice places to operate on. You know the consistency when you eat it. It cuts well, and a piece of liver works as well as a whole one, unlike a heart. So you can cut out cancerous portions and recover well. God forbid you should ever get cancer, but hope you get it in the liver, and that you find your way to one of the top medical centers here in America.
I was going to write a longish piece on the mysteries of health care coverage in America vis a vis the marginal differences any of the candidates propose, but I do know a few things. One is that my mother didn't have a job when she was diagnosed, and I'm not exactly sure how she qualified for Medicare which took care of this huge expense. We had to do a lot of shopping and comparing of treatments which was frustrating but necessary work, but in the end it came down to filling out a lot of paperwork and having a lot of patience with a system that essentially works, and saves peoples lives that ordinarily would die. When it comes down to it, people will do what's necessary to live. It's how we do. But also people and families carry on after the death of a loved one. It's also what we do.
As a conservative, I looked at the very difficult question of what I would have to sacrifice for my own children if I had to somehow foot the bill for my mother's treatment. It's a dilemma as old as human history and I found myself agreeing with the age old solution. The old sacrifice for the young, because a life well-lived is its own reward. We all agreed that Moms did a bang-up job and that's a very tearful conversation to have in a hospital room days and weeks before surgery.
As it turned out, all of the unknowns became clearer and the proper actions were taken. The government had its part to play and performed perfunctorily. Unfortunately I am now armed with the experience of having lived through a very difficult time which strengthens my belief that family comes first and that families should bust their asses to get whatever benefits they can get from whatever sources are available. And that gives me the crusty attitude about what the have-nots ought to be busting their asses to have. And it makes me even more cynical about liberal attitudes towards the wishful thinking behind 100% guaranteed healthcare.
But I also know that in times of crisis, good people do the right thing with ever increasing faith and conviction in their principles. Tolerance for BS drops. I know Americans are, by and large, good people and that they often engage in wishful thinking but we do get real. We'll face our fate and find the best path and we'll survive, because among us are those who innovate and do the best that's possible despite mediocrity. The best solution is out there today in Houston. We get well and celebrate in Vegas then and go home to Boca Raton.
I have had the long standing position that one of the great things that GW Bush has done for America is to let its military out of the closet. In being boldly unilateral and stating a now seemingly cliched but Congressionally approved case for the use of the US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan he put Americas reputation in plain view. That was the right thing to do because it put all of the political opponents in plain view, domestically as well as internationally. People say that America is worse off for it. I disagree. This has been, by all measures, one of the most openly debated (though wrongheadedly for many) war in my life.
What about the multitude of Islamist insurgencies, low-intensity
conflicts, and counter-terror operations the U.S. faces in the years
ahead? The U.S. will get the best results when it arranges a media
blackout of these conflicts. The U.S. government will arrange such a
blackout when it employs local proxies, militias, and tribes to do its
fighting. There will be few or no U.S. conventional units going to such
conflicts in the future with which reporters can embed. By contrast,
reporters are almost never allowed to cover current special operations
missions, such as those that would support such proxy wars. As for the
local proxy and militia allies of the U.S., they are unlikely to have
much sympathy for the needs and traditions of Fourth Estate.
A current example of these practices can be found in Somalia. There,
the U.S. intelligence community and special operating forces have
worked with the Ethiopian army and local Somali tribes to wage a
campaign against an Islamist movement that had previously gained power
in the country. There is virtually no Western news coverage from inside
Somalia. Western reporters are forced to cover the war as best as they
can from either Nairobi or Addis Ababa. Since the "common, everyman"
U.S. soldier is not present, the U.S. media has little interest in the
conflict. Few if any visual images of the Somali conflict make it to
Western news media. The U.S. can sustain a conflict on these terms for
a long time, far longer than the media-intensive war in Iraq.
If it was me in the White House, I'd use a mix of these 'open' and 'closed' theatres to prosecute wars in the future. There will be plenty of resources available to spin the spinnable war and win the winnable. But keeping them separate will probably be the best idea.
Something popped up on the Medved show the other day which was the anniversary of the 6 Day War. He handled the caller nicely when asked about the fragging of the USS Liberty. I don't think he handled the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy very well.
Here's the Old School position.
I make a distinction between homosexuality and a gay lifestyle. One is manufacturing the other is marketing. As I said before, I'm not gay-friendly, but I'm not anti-homosexuality. The difficulty this presents of course is with regard to gay activism which is not so concerned with the rights of homosexuals as they are with socially engineering the nation towards becoming gay-friendly. I think the country is friendly enough.
The problem with being a social conservative is really the same as being a gay activist, you employ clever rhetoric to convince people who ought not to care, to care too much - so that the question of caring becomes political. Since I am neither I rather enjoy bashing their overproductions, and naturally they say something's wrong with me. But there's nothing wrong with me, I simply don't believe in re-engineering social standing through political activism. It always makes for bad law.
On the morning of September 1, 2006, three nooses dangled from a tree
in the High School square in Jena, Louisiana. The day before, at a
school assembly, black students had asked the vice principal if they
could sit under that tree.
Characterizing
the noose incident as an innocent prank, a discipline committee meted
out a few days of in-school suspension and declared the matter settled.
As you might imagine, it all went downhill from there. The picture above is what remains of parts of that high school.
What we have here is a problem and the problem has everything to do with a black middle class that is able to see, but not do. We are able to express concern but we are unable to make change. What you need for making change is insight, wisdom, discipline & power. Having read some of the ugly details from this episode out in Sherwood Forest, I can see that it's not something I want to burn a lot of cycles on. By definition, this is the kind of crap that happens in the boonies. But I think the concern of the folks in AfroSpear is appropriate, I wonder if they are able to roundup the resources. They've got the insight, and probably the wisdom, but the last two requirements are probably missing.
See the merits of kind of stuff is not an issue - that is to say there's nothing here that the appropriate folks cannot adjudicate. The problem is that we give license to inappropriate folks, and expect the proper results when using alternative means. What's going to happen is a lot of well-intentioned folks are going to get exercised over a moral situation over which they have no legal jurisdiction in it's going to end up being a political embarrassment. It's this kind of cycle of frustration that begets and sustains Al Sharpton, who functions as a traveling media courtroom. You would think someone would find an attorney.
Retaining an attorney is a middle class effort, and you know that whenever 3 or more black partisan activists are gathered, at least one of them is extremely uncomfortable with Middle America. This in time will pass, but certainly more slowly for those who see the face of black America in places like Jena.
· The response of school administrators to a flagrant hate crime was
radically insufficient. According to The Jena Times, the noose incident
was officially characterized as a harmless prank in which white
students were merely imitating the actions of cowboy vigilantes in the
television mini-series, 'Lonesome Dove' with no intent to intimidate
the black students who had expressed a desire to sit under the tree.
This construal of the noose incident is so unconvincing that the
objectivity of anyone who accepts it must be questioned by any
reasonable observer.
As long as it is that easy to spark blackfolks to irrational behavior, this kind of childish back and forth is inevitable. This reasonable observer says that insults should not rise to the level of provoking criminal reprisal. If there is black rage buried beneath a patina of civility, whose fault is it and what is to be done?
Here's a town with a white tree. Here are blacks who want to sit there. Here are whites who don't want them to and make threats. The results are inevitable because nobody is stepping out of the racial roles that are 200 years old. I think that's because there's nothing else to do in Jena.
Barack Obama may or may not be getting props for stating the obvious, but it appears that he's now manipulating another issue into his court. In other word's he's engaging in rhetorical patronage.
What he did say:
"If you had gone to any street corner in Chicago or Baton Rouge or
Hampton -- you would have found the same young men and women without
hope, without miracles and without a sense of destiny other than life
on the edge."
What he didn't say:
I want those people to be my constituency and I want to fight for them. I pledge to do something about that.
What he can't say but implies
My candidacy represents, hope, miracles and a sense of destiny for black other than life on the edge.
This is rhetorical patronage, and black partisans have a habit of falling over themselves to get big heaping helpings of it. Obama is not just smart, he's brilliant and crafty as hell. This is the moment he has stolen the spot from Howard Dean.
But let me just remind you of what's real and what's not as I said four years ago:
Rhetorical Patronage
I challenge anyone to show exactly what it is that the Democrats have
done for African Americans that they haven't done for everyone else.
Whatever you find, I will bet my nickel that it doesn't get any larger
than a quarter of a billion in any one program out of the Federal
budget. But what the Democrats do that the Republicans don't is insure
that they say a lot of nice things about blackfolks. The dirty little
secret is that this covers a lot of what the black electorate will
settle for. If
you ask someone who hates the idea of Black Republicans what it is that
the Democrats will give blacks that the Republicans won't, it will all
come down to warm and fuzzies. Try it. Get them to name programs
when they disagree. Materially, most folks are hard pressed to talk
about black patronage in dollars and cents. But they know what kind of
rhetoric they like. Ask how much federal money goes to support HBCUs.
Nobody knows. Ask what kind of support Affirmative Action should get
and you'll hear a litany of legalese words, qualifications, provisos,
tests, and other verbal requirements. What a twist of fate! It's not
all about the Benjamins.
I haven't heard from Kevin Drum or any of the thoughtful lefties and progressives I read where Obama has scored any home runs with his ideas on Education and Health Care. So far, there is no there there. He is just spewing generality and basking in the rare glow of black electability. Sooner or later he's going to have to put some oomph behind that rhetoric.
But wait, I almost forgot. Nobody on the street corners of Chicago, Baton Rouge or Hampton has any wherewithal to hold Obama's feet to the fire. Besides, he didn't offer hope or miracles, he's just feeling people's pain.
(a) having all the money you needed to do everything you and your family could ever dream of doing for yourselves, or
(b) every person in the world having adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, and educational opportunities.
In the real world, A happens all the time. B has never happened, that's because attempts at B always come at the expense of A. I don't know why black partisans ignore this reality. Perhaps because there are so many examples of 'black leaders' who get to do the decisions required for B.
It has been done multiple ways, but I think finally it's going to be done in the way it needs to be done. What's that? Aggregation of black blogs, that's what's that.
Once upon a time Ric Landers blew up the spot, now his spot has been blown up.
BlackElectorate is a fairly good aggregation but it's not really blog oriented.
BookerRising is my favorite, but it's more of a community unto itself than a pure aggregator.
So here we go again. This time with a pure aggregator called Rsspect. It might even last. If not, then I'll do something with Google. Matter of fact, I know exactly what to do and I'm going to do it anyway.
On the news that I've been attached to the Rsspect Project, I found some interesting new blackified blogs. In Black in Business (hmm, why do you think I went there first?) we encounter the old Loving question:
He somehow felt this black white talk was upsetting because he married
white. Now we are brothers and have always been close but I have to
stop being my self because he has a white wife? This point to the
tension black-white marriages can cause in families. It is becoming
more and more normal. I found a site that puts humor in it. Check it
out. To my little brother, I love you but that will not stop me from
kicking your ass is you get upset over nothing again.
'Married White', now that's a phrase with legs.
Here in the Old School we have no particular difficulty with jungle fever. We neither encourage or discourage it. We only note with raised eyebrows that it takes a little extra gumption to handle the raised eyebrows.
Coming up in California, I never thought that the big deal was such a big deal. I basically had my first white girlfriend about the very same year I went to my first white school, so the question was pretty much settled in 1974 as to capability. But there is certainly an aesthetic debate which is worth engaging at the level of 'boys & girls', ie dating and sex.
As a rule, I don't much talk about dating and sex, and generally regard the entire dating and sex industry to be a huge luxurious waste of time. To the extent that America retains an ample sample of hardheaded highly functional individuals and collectives which attend to the business of the nation, and they are not falling off, by and large, then we can afford that huge luxurious waste of time. You won't catch me holding a picket sign outside of MTV headquarters but I don't let my kids watch it. So I basically don't care about people's dating and sex issues and problems and trends and all that rot. Let us recall Cobb's rule #2:
There is Marriage and there is everything else.
So how much does the color inflect the trajectory of the marriage. Well that depends entirely upon whether it is a good marriage. People try to knock the institution simply because they are incapable of handling its demands. That's kinda funny now that I think about it. How many people think that their college degrees are more important than their marital status. Damn, this is a big society. We can afford that too. Of course we conservatives remain amazed that things hold together, that's why we defend core principles to the bone. If we lost every university, we'd be better off than if we lost every marriage. The loss of the latter would send us more quickly to ape-like status than the loss of the former. But let me not rag on higher education. The point is that a good marriage can survive what have now become the trifles of class three racism.
I think it's important to recognize that the most essential principle that enabled the greatest threat to black progress and freedom has been eliminated. The phrase "We don't want them in our schools" has no social resonance today. The idea that blacks and whites shouldn't marry is essentially the complaint of (ahem) unattractive people who are looking for a racial lock on some quarter of the dating scene. Them and the Klan are equally weak. Even so, I don't think that there is anything socially superior or significant about an interracial marriage. I don't look at a black and white couple and say, my my how far we've come. It's a trailing indicator.
There are class issues and religious issues and regional issues, but these have always been the case in marriage since the days of King Arthur and before. Nothing new in that.
Literally a punch in the nose. Black Informant brings us a similar case from Mobile Alabama.
The two students — 16-year-old Randolph Parker, and 17-year-old
Dominick Harris — are being held as adults on felony assault charges in
the May 18th attack that prosecutors allege could be gang-related.
For about the fourth time, I have put together a PGP arrangement. As usual, I wonder if there is anything at all that I know which is worth protecting and communicating. I know that there is, the problem is that there is nobody worth communicating it to.
I confess that I am drawn to spies and, to a lesser extent, priests.
They hold in their heads ideas that are worth killing and dying for,
and yet unlike writers and intellectuals of other sorts, they are
restrained by ethical virtues from gaining any notoriety, wealth or
respect from the dissemination of said ideas. Anyone can blurt the
beautiful and be blessed, but there is nothing so frighteningly
powerful, I think, as an idea whose time may very well never come. They
are the reverse of us who clamour for glory and vindication.
The other day, NPR was interviewing a physicist who had recently become curator of the LA Natural History Museum. I think she is bound to turn that stately place into another popular, bright something-a-torium with a McDonalds. But I tend to think she is not the proper physicist. That is to say, nuclear secrets are the most haunting creation of the last 100 years. They are obscured by their own inherent complexity and by extraordinarily well-funded aparatuses of security. I would think that a proper physicist would spend as much time as possible in close proximity to those touchstones. But she struck me as a pure scientist in search of order and wonder and discovery. I might be defective in my attraction to the forbidden fruits of the world's most highly guarded mysteries.
In my own profession I have been astounded by the lack of security. I basically have had access to the financial data for every company I've worked for for the past 20 years. None of them have ever employed a system to keep that data out of the hands of IT personnel. It's a strange thing when you think about it, you trust the implementation of security to people who should actually never have access to the thing which you are securing. It's a small problem that might have been addressed somewhere but not often, and maybe not well.
So I conclude that I don't know jack.
There is no inherent value in anything. Somebody has to desire it. Then that means somebody has to be aware of it. Part of the difficulty in security is that people have to recognize that something is of value to someone else before it is secured. And unless there is some kind of healthy market for contraband, most valuables are not really valuable. It's the old paradox which is that it's much harder to get 50K in cash than it is to get 5 million in bonds, because everybody knows what to do with 50k in cash but only a few know what to do with 5 million in bonds. The bond market may have high barriers to entry, but I seriously doubt that bond traders are scrutinized as thoroughly as people asking for a second on their house. But what do I know, I can't get either. The point stands however, I'll use a different example. It's easier for me to bum 20 for lunch off a colleague than for an actual bum to get spare change. It's all about the exchange.
So what might be secured is not secured because nobody understands the value. Conversely some things that are obviously valuable and secured are difficult to sell because markets are small and illicit. How might one go about selling corporate secrets, for example? I think it's something that perhaps only attorneys understand, living as closely as they do to what is and is not prosecutable.
There's another interesting twist on this subject which is the value of knowledge. That has to do with the ability of a resume to convey what is true about one's experience and knowledge, versus what is valuable about one's experience and knowledge. My current resume only goes back to 1988, but it could go back to 78. I can't know what I might gain or lose by exposing that part of my life. Indeed how much of one's life is for sale in a resume? I think I lack the one thing that would make some of the details irrelevant, which is a Summa from an Ivy League. That kind of BA would be just fine for my temperament.
There's a fundamental aspect of intelligence and privilege which defines our meritocracy and corrupts it. That is that smart people get to do what they want to do. They don't get proper scrutiny. And yet when they do, we kind of hate it don't we? It didn't matter how qualified Paul Wolfowitz' girlfriend was, nor how much money she could have objectively made with her skills anywhere in the world. Everybody got to have a turn at bat when she became a political pinata.
They say it's not what you know but who you know. The problem is that when you get to know a lot about something, there are fewer and fewer 'whos' to know. It's easy to get trapped in a hierarchy of knowledge that restricts your ability to cash in on your knowledge. Often it's necessary. You must build value into something by keeping everybody in the loop at a low cost with low liquidity until it's time to sell.
I've been traveling again - basically all this year. And so I am missing community. More particularly, I am missing excellent company. I've been thinking about doing things to make myself a better friend, and as far as that is concerned I've been thinking about the kind of men I seem to instantly bond with. The first kind of man I think of are retired first responders. Old cops, old soldiers, like the one guy who's a scoutmaster in Boy's troop. I also get along great with most guys who drive BMWs, and just about every guy in IT with gray hair.
Shortly before landing, Bob Hayden and a flight attendant had agreed on a signal: When she waved the plastic handcuffs, he would discreetly leave his seat and restrain an unruly passenger who had frightened some of the 150 people on board a Minneapolis-to-Boston flight Saturday night with erratic behavior.
Hayden, a 65-year-old former police commander, had enlisted a gray-haired gentleman sitting next to him to assist. The man turned out to be a former US Marine.
"I had looked around the plane for help, and all the younger guys had averted their eyes. When I asked the guy next to me if he was up to it, all he said was, 'Retired captain. USMC.' I said, 'You'll do,' " Hayden recalled. "So, basically, a couple of grandfathers took care of the situation."
Damn.
Days like this make me mad that I'm so white collar. But I'm still gray.
I think I am a fairly keen observer of human behavior. If I weren't, I probably wouldn't write as much as I do, finding nothing of interest worth commenting. Sometimes I'm in alien observer mode, other times I'm in old boy bonhomie mode. Last night, as I attended the Court of Honor for my son's Scout troop, I was in a combination of both.
There is nothing quite as telling to me about someone's character as the way they walk. It's something I simply can't avoid scrutinizing. I think I can tell a huge amount about a woman by her walk, it's how I've judged them as worthy of romantic attention all my life. But watching Boy Scouts walk as an insight to their potential as men is a relatively new angle for me.
During a Court of Honor, scouts, parents and troop leaders assemble to recognize the achievements of the boys in a formal ceremony. Our troop has these quarterly, others might have them semi-annually or only once a year. We have over 100 boys, so a lot goes on. Last night was a fairly light affair with only about 100 awards handed out. After summer camps where a lot of merit badge activity goes on, Courts of Honor can stretch out into very lengthy ordeals. These generally involve calling boys to the front for rank promotions in which they pin medals on their parents and repeated calls to please hold your applause to the end. But it wasn't that boisterous last evening and not all of the scouts to be recognized showed up, and it made for a somewhat more leisurely pace than normal. It was during this slow ambles to the stage of the United Methodist Church that I observed various boys styles of self-presentation as they were recognized for their accomplishments.
In the chatting classes, we often remark with disdain about the character of many aspects of our nation. More often than not we indict institutions: the Government, the Mainstream Media, public education, big corporations. Just as often we blame ideas: liberalism, fundamentalism, capitalism, socialism, religion. But all of these isms are rather nothing but those things that fill the empty spaces in men's heads, the spaces left over between them and the pursuit of their desires. Nothing illustrates this quite like the faces of boys because boys are mostly oblivious to institutions and ideas but rather slaves to their passions, hopes and fears. Even as they march somewhat in step to the lofty ideals and principles, even as they recite and salute, we know that they are yet boys and lacking a full grasp of the importance of these ideas and institutions.
There were new scouts. Young kids in short pants with skinny legs and wide-eyed expressions who walked up fairly quickly and failed to assemble in anything resembling order. They stood on different steps faced at various angles and stood frozen as they were given their first red berets. None spoke or much grinned.
As they received their honors for such achievements as merit badges as 'Citizenship in the World', 'Family Life', 'Personal Fitness', 'First Aid', 'Fishing' and 'Communications', various boys ambled up to the stage. Many wore fat laced skateboard shoes and walked slowly. One thin kid in shorts with white calf length socks had a sash full of merit badges, but seemed to be the most shy and retiring type you'd ever meet. One kid in the older Venture group actually seemed to be wearing saggy pants, but it was actually the way he was built, in a bowed over shape he loped up with a smirk, receiving a fairly high honor. One of the kids I drove last summer to a fishing trip had a vacant sort of attention. I like that kid a lot, but this evening he seemed robotic - just the kind of drone reactionary lefties stereotype scouts as. One of the senior leaders of the troop had, as usual his affable casual style of leadership. Though he's a physically imposing young man, I've seen him quiet the troop by doing magic tricks with fire instead of shouting. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't even imagine when you talk about disciplining 3 dozen adolescents.
But these boys are all different. They seem curiously empty of the kind of swagger you might expect, at least during the ceremony there was very little hamming it up. There seems to be very little else in them during the ceremony except for a kind of bored and absent-minded humility and reverence. Their receipt of acknowledgment was routine. Their acceptance with the right hand of the envelope and the left-handshake was casually practiced. They looked nothing at all like the marines you see on the television commercials, and for all the time I had wondered if their dressing up in uniforms might be nothing else but a preliminary setup for military careers, there is nothing really like that here.
The BSA does not crank out robots. It creates community around simple yet meaningful values.
On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.
The military creed is there close at hand in defense of what a nation should bring about in its boys. But it is not explicit. It's what I see as a man in the community. It's what I know as a father. It comes down to creating this space and defending it. If the boys are empty and oblivious, they most certainly know that in this room, in this Court of Honor, it is about their works, their families, their friends and the states of being they approach as they rise in rank, age and stature.
A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.
Think about the last time you could say that about anyone you know. It almost seem anachronistic in these times when we decry whatever it is that we decry in our society, that in the faces of boys, lost as they might be to the goings on of the world, that they are these very things. They have the voices of boys. They don't proclaim loudly. They don't act defensively against threats. They are just making their way through school, football practice, Sunday School, Scouting, and family life. They're trying not to be dorks. And as tall and straight as they can be when prompted, they still walk like boys.
Fifteen minutes later when the Court of Honor is adjourned and Taps has been played and it's time for ice cream, they run like boys. The noise comes and you begin to appreciate the awkward humility of the ceremony.
There remains something pure in American boyhood which has not been lost to the destructive nature of the evils of the world. It's not the mainstream media, or big corporations or socialism that have gotten us in trouble with ourselves and our neighbors. It has been our inability to focus on some simple values we possess, but let get drowned out by the contemptible noises in our society. Exemplified in Boy Scouts, these values don't appear very powerful, they seem wobbly, thin, corny and weak. They seem out of touch with a 'greater' reality. But we have the ability to focus on them for what they are and as we recognize them in our sons, we may come to find them in our men as well. We may not recognize such values marching with vigor but ambling in silence. It's a good thing to see.
Several years ago, we bought a book called 'Step It Down' which was a collection of African American jump rope and game rhymes but most of the material was foreign to me. It turns out that this is something that the web can do something about. Having gone back to my old neighborhood, I'm thinking about the things that made it what it was and trying to recover what was there. So I'm going to establish the tag 'foot rhymes' in Technorati so that perhaps over time we can get some traction over that.
I think the most popular of all of them is Bubblegum Bubblegum in a Dish which you'll see in the video.
So the drill went a little something like this. Whenever teams were to be chosen, somebody would call out "Put your feets in!", and if they were quick enough (but it was a little bit rude to), they would call out "Saying it". Whoever said 'saying it' first got to call out the rhymes until all the teams were chosen. I was being generous by letting somebody else say it.
For more important games, and to be more fair, sometimes you would put both feet in. That worked especially when people had counted into the rhymes and knew which number to pick (or not to pick) in order to get on the team they wanted. In order to hedge this multiple ways, whoever was saying it could decide to use a rhyme that didn't have a user-supplied component. Also he could use alternative endings like "You are out" or "You are not it" or "You are not the one to be it".
The
trip to my old neighborhood was just great. We started out over at
Virginia Road where all of us went to elementary school. Sat down,
had a picnic. Freaked people out, I think to see the lot of us all
camped out on the front lawn. Of course when we were kids, the front
lawn of the school was always the place to be, this was where we had
the big football games. It's kinda crazy when you think of it, that we
actually generated an NFL quality player playing as we did in this
little narrow patch of grass and on the front yards and streets of my
old neighborhood. Of course everything looks smaller than it used to.
The kids had a ball, running and chasing each other around before we got a real football game going. D.
was the star and even though she already had her wrist in a cast, she
burned everybody in the secondary and caught the first long bomb of the
game. Previous to that our rush had caught Deet five yards behind
scrimmage. I only wish I had audio of that trash talk. But he was
redeemed by the bomb, except that D tripped over her own large feet as
if she were in a horror flick and banged up her knee on the sidewalk.
Game over. She walked it off in ten minutes but had everyone shaking
their heads and sucking their teeth. She's got grit, and when the
football got stuck in the tree before the game, she was the first one
up the tree. We got us some women in our family.
They managed to surprise me with a birthday cake served out of the bed
of Pop's truck. It was lemon, my favorite. Well, lemon banana creme is
my favorite but nobody makes that kind of cake. Then we started our
trivia questions and headed to the old block, which was two blocks
away. It looked like a pilgramage. Doc was the first one to see
somebody we recognized. It was Beverly. Beverly was the first person I
ever knew from outside of my family. She adopted me when I was just a
little guy and we lived upstairs in the back apartment at 3013. So she
was just shocked to see all of us together.
We had to line up and show whose kids belonged to whom. It turned out
that when her folks died, she sold that house and then bought old Mr.
Green's house. Mr. Green was the meanest man in creation and if you
ever walked on his grass he'd get after you with a pitchfork. I think I
might have tried to make a friend of Mr. Green just to prove it
couldn't be done, but the details of that story elude me. I'll make one
up that I can tell when I'm 60. She's getting ready to head out to the
Antelope Valley. A lot of folks from the old neighborhood went that
way, and some to other parts of Central California like Camarillo. We
got the phone numbers for her two daughters too. Deet and Doc remember
them better than me. See the neighborhood was packed with kids back in
the day and everyone had at least 4 friends in their age bracket, so
those were central.
We walked back across the street to the Ivory's old house and I stood
on my favorite rock. It was the first thing I played on when I was a
kid. I wonder if I could buy it off of those folks. My rock. Wow.
Next thing you know we find Ray. Man where has he been? He came down
for the Dorsey 70th anniversary just like Doc and Deet. Susan Miller
Dorsey was the first female superintendent of schools for Los Angeles.
They built the school in 1934 and designed it to look like an airport -
very streamlined and industrial. Paula, one of our first babysitters
showed up. She graduated in 1960. Deet was in the class of 84, I think.
Ray was '82.
What trip to Wellington would be complete without Mrs. Stanley?
Somebody ranked on her saying that Pops should take a picture of her
peeking out between her window shades. She was the neighborhood
busybody but got much love from all of us. Well, now. She has the most
unforgettable voice and like many of the folks from the old 'hood, came
out here from Dallas. Her husband Ocell died about 20 years ago.
Couldn't tell him nothing about football as the Cowboys would smash the
Rams every year, but at least we could beat him in basketball. He got
to talk smack, we got to beat him on the court. Lilly slammed Doc by
telling him that both Deet and I scored homeruns in our marriages and
ahem... Had us all bustin' up. Some things never change.
Right about now the kids were getting restless, as kids do when the
adults start telling jokes about things that happened before they were
born.
Over at the school I kept their attention talking about how we used to
rock-climb the brick walls up to the second storey and how to properly
hop a chainlink fence, but now they were starting to get weary.
I can't believe they even took the boombox back and put it in the
minivan. We were jammin' some ConFunkShun and Bar Kays. Oh well, by the
time we started talking with the old neighbors it was a distraction
anyway. Dorothy Arnold showed up as we looked at 3026 and described the
way to climb up the chinaberry trees. Big hugs all around. None of the
Arnolds were around but Deet said he ran into Teresa a couple months
ago. It turns out that the guy who owns our old house is some kind of
actor. He was on The Shield last season, but I haven't seen him in
anything else. But the old house looks like it's doing OK. I mean
nobody kept it up as well as we did, and I can see that some of the
tiles on the roof need painting, and the old gate needs a lot of work,
but at least they've got the plants doing ok.
Next on the list was the Myers house. Last stop actually. Rosetta
was there and so was Burt. Burt and his brothers were the oldest kids
on the block. Burt is now 54, and he's still cut. That's him in the
tank top third from the left. Burt taught me how to slapbox. I always
did want to play with the big kids. He's a personal trainer down in
Laguna and a vegetarian. What? And there's Ronnie Woods. He came down
for the Dorsey reunion too. Man he looks exactly the same. I asked
about his sister Terry. I haven't seen them in decades. I heard Donny
was coming by too. I completely forgot about Hazel and Audrey. Ebon was
my friend. I wonder where he is now. I gotta catch up more often.
So needless to say the trip was a huge success and we caught up with
a lot more folks than we expected to, even though 'Lonzo wasn't there.
Oh well. One day we'll get the word out and have everybody come down.
That would be very special. This is a birthday to remember.
I just checked out the online presentation for the Foleo device which is basically a human factored companion for small mobile devices. It's a keyboard and a screen with some software and bluetooth that synchs to your Treo, if you have one. But Hawkins' idea is pretty powerful and it makes sense to me.
I can't really get behind one as a first generation device and that's primarily because Palm hasn't done what I wanted them to do which is make the Life Drive manage 50GB of stuff. This suggests to me that they have always hedged their bets against laptops and the iPod. So in between having a personal infrastructure out on the web and everything that's on my laptop, there was no middle ground between the Treo and the ultralite laptops. Notice that the OQO didn't go anywhere either, so maybe it was a smart decision.
Still, for people like me who have industrial strength laptops which are too cumbersome and power-hungry to lug casually, there is no $600 device that combines everything I need for mobility. I can live with the Treo, but I do wish it would stream music or have an AM/FM radio and be able to read USB.
If it ends up being that there is no such single gadget, it would be cool for Bluetooth to grow up and allow interesting low-priced peripheral component products to proliferate. So in my backpack I could have a Foleo, a 100GB disk component and a phone which is essentially a broadband gateway. It lets the disk guys be disk guys, the phone people stick to their domain and the human factors geniuses to do what they do. Let's not forget cameras. A bluetooth enabled disk brick would be extra cool. Come on, somebody surely must have thought of this already. What's taking so long?
Did I mention that this Foleo should integrate with Surface computing's bluetooth ideas? It needs to.
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.
At one time I claimed a sort of organic polytheism. It was after the fashion of Ishmael Reed in the prototypical theory of multiculturalism. The basic idea still works which is that one must have a certain amount of respect for the disciplined pedagogies embedded in the various ways religions and cultures evolved.
But of course by accepting that premise, one must of consequence reserve the greatest amount of respect for those religions and cultures which have evolved the furthest. This is where I part company with multiculturalists and polytheists who seek to promote and elevate alternatives at the express expense of that which is Christianity and American culture. As usual, they fail to dig with any specificity into a true comparitive discipline, so long as you can trash America, whatever culture or rite is vindicated.
That said, there is some value to a disciplined expression. What would English be without French idioms? It would certainly lack a certain je ne sais quoi. But I wonder what we might get from Voodoo.
I hereby coin a new phrase: Voodoo Metrics. My inspiration is Jimmy Carter and Norway.
The Global Peace Indexendorsed by former President Jimmy Carter,
which ranks "countries around the world according to their peacefulness
and the drivers that create and sustain their peace" has the US in 96th
place. Zambia is in 53, Syria in 77, Cambodia in 85 and Iran in 97th.
Once again Norway is if first place. You've always got to acknowledge thatlittle slice of Scandinavian heaven on earth, right? We have the following clues as to how this Global Peace Index was slapped together.
-- Peace is correlated to indicators such as income, schooling and the level of regional integration -- Peaceful countries often shared high levels of transparency of government and low corruption -- Small, stable countries which are part of regional blocs are most likely to get a higher ranking
Aside from the fact that 'peace' cannot be measured with a number and the very idea almost silly, the originators of the GPI have made something only a pacifist could love which is completely ignore the reasons behind violent action. The net result is that you have a metric which is just about as good as waving a dead chicken over a country's constitution. Note that the ranking makes no distinction between countries with or without a constitution.
Some of their essays show a notable distaste for nationalism and common sense, like this one entitled 'Mediators without Borders' . Dig the first paragraph:
When listening to
news about the latest disasters from wars and terrorist attacks around
the globe, I sometimes fantasize what would happen if, instead of
dropping bombs on civilian populations, mediators by the tens of
thousands were parachuted into war zones to create conversations across
battle lines; if, instead of shooting bullets, mediators organized
public dialogues and shot questions at both sides; and if, instead of
mourning the loss of children’s lives by visiting equal or greater
losses on the children belonging to the other side, mediators became
mutual mourners, turning every lost life into the name of a school,
hospital, library, road, or olive grove that would be open and
dedicated to those who died because we lacked the skills to get along.
I realize this is wishful fantasy, yet within the dream lies a truth:
that it is possible for mediators to have an impact on the willingness,
even of embittered, intransigent opponents, to participate in war or
terrorism, by organizing alternative ways of expressing, negotiating,
and resolving their differences. I call this idea “Mediators Without
Borders.
There's really nothing stopping anyone from actually doing this save one thing, the survival instinct. Mediators by the tens of thousands would be shot just like innocents by the tens of thousands. In a pacifist world where such mouths like Jimmy Carter can't even get journalists by the hundreds into Al Anbar, the farcical nature of this proposal is patently clear. And yet knowing this, as any twelve year old kid would, they go ahead and try to speak in tones of 'hope' and 'optimism'.
I can't help but think that such Voodoo is little more than a ponzi scheme to bilk rich people out of their money. But there must be a certain class of wealthy naifs this appeals to besides the Laurie Davids of the world. I'm thinking of people who like Elton John's Candle in the Wind (is that the name of it?) or John Lennon's 'Imagine' as their favorite songs. Sting fans who drive Volvos are a likely candidate - a flabby lot with an easy live and disposable income. May as well dispose of it on global indulgences for 'peace' and 'sustainability'. I'm sure most of them reside here in the States and in Europe. And so, to the extent that I am read or might be possibly passed on to such folks, I dedicate my skepticism.
I am so empty and lazy today. It's my birthday and I am obligated to do nothing but enjoy the indulgences heading my way. But I still feel like I have to return several shouts that are long overdue.
The first go to two young men, both from Texas, who have called me on the phone telling me in some detail about their various skills. Some time ago I was looking for some technical people to hire. It was two years ago, and somehow they just got the blog post. I didn't know what to make of it at first, but I never like to leave people hanging even if I can't do much to help. So they'll be getting phone calls too.
The next few go to some bloggers and emailers who have taken the time out to acknowledge me personally and so I return.
1. Prose Before Hos. This is an interesting piece of work by a creative hive mind who is getting busy. I can smell the energy and planning behind A. Baldwin, who thinks in terms of projects. I seriously wanted to bite a couple photos from the site but I'll leave them with all that credit.
2. Reality Check 08 Ever wish you had an ability to check every lie a politician makes? These blokes do it for you. Nicely styled, compact and to the point.
3. Neocon Hell First of all, how can you resist anyone with the nerve to write under the pseud of H. Roark? I've been looking for the perfect hamburger stand in a valley shielded by electronic countermeasures for 20 years. Plus there's stuff like this:
"We, on the other hand, have become so “advanced” that we can no longer
pinpoint where the connection between modern human and ancient man
snapped. Collectively, as a race, we hold our noses high and scoff
at archaic notions such as gender and genetics, parental roles and
family structures, and protecting the most sacred and important
ingredient to our success and future.
Today I'm going back to my old neighborhood. It was Deet's idea and we tried to do it last year, but nobody's schedule worked out. This time we're all going to have a picnic at Virginia Road School and then walk around the place where we grew up. There should be at least a dozen of us walking around like we belong there. I was back around the way a couple of weeks ago when I took Boy for his haircut, a pastrami and the drum circle at Liemert Park. But it has been a year since I spoke to anyone over in 90016.
I burned a CD full of funky music to remind us of the Ffun we used to have. Deet collected about 70 trivia questions from all of us about the old days. This is going to be great. Damn, now I have to wash the car.
School Boy Crush - AWB Jungle Boogie - Kool & The Gang Ffun - Confunkshun Indian Summer Love - Confunkshun I Got My Mind Made Up - Instant Funk It's All the Way Live - Lakeside Wide Receiver - Michael Henderson Skin Tight - Ohio Players Mega Medly - Zapp & Roger Slide - Slave Tak Your Time - SOS Band Thank You - Sly & The Family Stone Thighs High - Tom Browne (he's one ordinary guy) Watching You - Steve Arrington
That should be funky enough for one afternoon.
The pace is slow around the house. I've been gaming like a teenager and I finally OD'd last night, but I did rank up several times in Big Team Battle. I hooked up my wheel and started driving on Forza 2, but in my first online game I got into a huge pissing match with some bitter old 'grown ass man' who felt it necessary to tell me that if he'd kill for Uncle Sam he'd surely kill for himself. Sounds like a DD to me. Strange that some people get more aggro in racing games than in shooting games.
We still have some BBQ left over from Monday, but I think we killed the last of it last night. I brought the First Daughter a quill pen & ink set back from Houston. I know it's cliche, Dad bringing back presents from out of town, but I miss the family. Just the smell of them. LA is my home town, it's a funky town, and the Baby Girl, with the Morris Day expression on her face, has completed her California project. You've got to admit it's a change from Missions. Yes of course she got an A. She always gets As. I'm recognizing how brittle it makes her. See she has no musical talent, so she needs a very strong rationalization for that. She used to cry when people wouldn't play with her, now the only reason she cries is if she discovers there's something she can't master. Fortunately, she's goofy and doesn't get stressed out over such matters
I keep fighting the idea of moving to cheaper digs. I keep wondering what exactly it is that Los Angeles gives me. All I can think of are schools. Oh yeah and this recruiter who keeps calling me about a job around here. It has been hanging over my head for months now, but it's such a huge job that it has got me all crazy. I shouldn't even talk about it. This is what happened with the China deal. I talked too much about it and people started giving me the distant eye which didn't draw nearer when the deal fell through.
But I must confess that people have been saying good things about me at LinkedIn. Yeah I do know a thing or two about Managerial Computing. I'm a little weary of being a practitioner, though. I need to consume an industry vertical or two. I'm thinking energy or biotech. Biotech means that I stay in California. Energy means I go back to Houston. A colleague and several other offhand comments tend to highly recommend The Woodlands. I am forever moving in my head. Too much of my life is contingent. I should have been a surgeon. I could have focused on one part of the body that never changes and carved my way to riches. But no, I had to harness reality through philosophizing and computing. Somebody told me that I was a generalist last month. I didn't know how to take it. I thought that being a Renaissance Man was a good thing. I need to see what C.S. Lewis has to say about that.
I've had a choice between Lewis and John Standford and I keep picking up the murder mysteries. My new indulgence. I'm doing a lot more reading of, how shall I say, more disciplined writers than those in the blogosphere. It makes me want to read more books and fewer blogs. That's what's going on vis a vis blog volume.
Tomorrow is my birthday, for which I am prepared to make absolutely no preparations or big deal. A weird thing happened though. I suddenly realized that I don't own any cowboy boots. Every American man should have a pair of cowboy boots, Levi's and a leather jacket. The ones I liked in the Houston Airport cost 450 bucks. It's way down the list. Daughter needs to go to camp.
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