I don't have a category in my blog for art appreciation. That's because nobody, relatively speaking, appreciates art in American society. We consume creative products. It's a rather twisted set of affairs that I will investigate going forward.
My singular premise is this. We conservatives have overloaded the significance of politics and religion primarily because we have no expression in the art world which has been taken over even moreso than academia by relativists, subversives, and the Ironic Inquisition.
I have created the Ironic Inquisition as a foil to my earnest desire to elevate and protect the human soul by investing respect in the moral and intellectual capacity of the common man.
Of course I will try to be aware at all times of overproduction from my side of the equation. Since I am synthesizing a more or less conservative interpretation of the core values of Western Civilization I am often reductive. I recognize the extent to which, via Heidegger the reduction of complexity of life to a framework which is supported by a consistent set of principles negates the impulse toward discovery. While I recognize that 'life finds a way' by its inherent complexity and adaptability, I will nonetheless leave significant gaps in the discipline, building as it were a perfect castle, where rain gets in anyway.
With that caveat in mind, I am embarked on one project to create a mystery system (Allmuseri), and here at Cobb to investigate the influence and purposes of Art in contrast with the business of creative cultural production.
Hmm. Now who are the members at court of the Ironic Inquisition? I would suggest that one of the clown princes is Jon Stewart and his auxiliary Stephen Colbert. They are the amoral jesters who mock our society with only the capacity to injure and to send their audiences into paroxysms of snide laughter without engaging in them any significant emotions other than disgust and ridicule.
I am also particulary annoyed by the emergent class of 'reality' programming which invites us to make jest of other people's shortcomings and weaknesses. The great new offender in this genre is 'The Moment of Truth' whose aim is to demean people by putting to them in an ever more excruciating series of personal ethical questions. How could this begin to be entertaining if it involved men and women of strong character? Would you cheat on your wife? Of course not. What fun is that? Exactly. What a shameful exploitive exercise.
We in the Old School have our new enemies. They are the jesters of the Ironic Inquisition and disinterested doubt is their stock in trade. We will show their productions not to be as they claim, protected political speech or art, but sacrifices of human dignity and respect as burnt offerings and sacrifices to their god, Snark.
Google does a fair job of translating from French into English, but not for people's quotes. So we have this excerpt from a translated text. Google gives both the original and English . One of our readers compared Kelman and Obama. Here's a bit.
I have been shaped in Africa.Mais je suis de culture judéo-chrétienne”But I am of Judeo-Christian culture " Gaston Kelman, né à Douala, au Cameroun, il ya 52 ans, se résume ainsi. “Ce n’est pas un sujet de fierté ou de honte, c’est mon père qui me l’a appris, c’est tout. Gaston Kelman, born in Douala, Cameroon, 52 years ago, may be summarized as follows. "That is not a matter of pride or shame, it was my father who taught me, that's all.Je crois juste à la liberté de choisir ce que l’on garde d’une culture ou non” .I think just the freedom to choose what we care a culture or not. "Et aux esprits chagrins qui lui reprochent de repousser en bloc ses racines, il répond : “Ma fille apprend le bassa, la langue de sa grand-mère, avec laquelle elle communique. And the pessimists who criticise him en bloc to push his roots, he replies: "My daughter learns Basa, the language of her grandmother, with whom she communicates.Mais je dis aussi à mes enfants qu’en France, le racisme existe et qu’ils doivent se battre pour le combattre.”But I say to my children in France, racism existed and that they must fight to combat it. " La
problématique du racisme n’est pas indifférente à la lecture qu’il fait
des émeutes qui ont éclaté en banlieue, en novembre 2005 : “Ceux qui mettent le feu sont des enfants perdus qui appellent au secours. The problem of racism is not indifferent to the fact that reading of the riots that erupted in the suburbs, in November 2005: "Those who set fire are lost children who call for help.Ce
que moi j’ai entendu, c’est : nous ne voulons plus être des descendants
d’immigrés, nous voulons tout simplement être des Français.” Pour illustrer son propos, il évoque même le cas personnel du ministre de l’Intérieur : “Sarko n’est que de la deuxième génération d’immigrés mais, pour lui, il n’ya pas de visibilité physique.What I have heard is: we do not wish to be descendants of immigrants, we simply want to be French. "To illustrate his point, he mentions the case even staff of the Minister of Interior: "Sarko is that the second generation of immigrants, but for him, there is no physical visibility.On ne le renvoie pas sans cesse à ses origines.It does not refer constantly to its roots.Il faut sortir de cette logique coloniale, et que l’on rentre dans la logique migratoire.” Voilà le genre de vérité que l’auteur de Au-delà du noir et du blanc ( voir notre chronique ) entend marteler.We must emerge from this colonial logic, and that it falls within the logic of migration. "That's the kind of truth that the author of Beyond black and white(see our chronic) intends pounding. Si
son discours peut sembler différent de celui d’autres immigrés
africains, davantage tournés vers la préservation de leurs spécificités
culturelles, cela tient peut-être à la place à part qu’occupe, selon
lui, le Cameroun en Afrique : “Il n’ya pas plus français qu’un Camerounais en Afrique.
While his speech may seem different from other African immigrants, more
focused on the preservation of their cultural differences, it may be
due to the special place occupied, according to him, Cameroon in
Africa: "It 's there is no more that a french Cameroon in Africa.Là-bas, il ya deux cents langues, mais on communique tous en français, et peut-être à 25 % en anglais.Over there, there are two hundred languages, but we all communicate in french, and perhaps 25% in English.Et pour le reste, la vie des grandes villes est complètement occidentalisée.”And for the rest, the lives of large cities is completely Westernised. "
I read in a translation of the French Wikipedia entry that Kelman is considered the man whose voice updates Franz Fanon. This is significant of course, because Fanon was a Marxist. Are Africans in France less socialistic these days?
I've already said it. I trust McCain, and listening to him debate Romney at the Reagan Library, I still like him, despite Hugh Hewitt's shameless commentary. Hugh is still eating the 'conservative base' dog food. What he doesn't seem to recognize is that this is going to be a general election. The only candidate who has proven that he can work both sides of the aisle and succeed despite the conservative base is John McCain.
But I am listening to McCain have brain farts and it's annoying. I like the way he operates in that he's clearly not one to deal with a lot of hypothetical promises and his rhetoric shows that, whereas Romney gets cheeky when crossed and starts pointing out facts which lie in accord with stereotypical notions which fall onto his side. McCain has a much more reasonable leadership approach, whereas Romney is trying to prove that he's the proper inheritor of the conservative legacy. That makes Romney more brittle because he has to live down his flips. If McCain weren't so impatient, he could break Romney. Instead it's going to be a long slog.
McCain really incensed Hewitt by talking to the Global Warming trope. He emphasized American inventiveness and nuclear energy. Romney suggested that cap & trade will send domestic energy intensive businesses overseas. Huh? What? McCain should have really slammed him on that one. Are you going to let GM move to China? is what he should have said. Anyway, all this global warming crap will blow over, but green marketing is here to stay. McCain is wise not to dismiss the green economy. The real bottom line, it seems to me, is not a domestic cap and trade policy, but a global one. It's not clear to me yet that McCain is taking his regulatory cues from overseas.
Speaking of cues. I tried to find out who has actually endorsed Romney and could find nothing on his site. McCain has got some heavy hitters, including most of the moderate Republicans I've always liked, chief among them, the smartest man in the Reagan Administration, George P. Schultz. You may recall that Schultz ran Bechtel. I find it difficult to imagine that he would fall for any baloney about climate change. Now you should know, in case you don't, that Schultz is buddies with Warren Buffett and Arnold Schwartzeneggar. Arnold is scheduled to endorse McCain.
Also, you should know that Jack Kemp and Phil Gramm are both on board with McCain. I don't need to tell anybody that Jack Kemp was one of the first Republicans that I liked, and still do. And he's one of the centrist Republicans that got spit on by cranks like DeLay. Kemp's also on the board of Oracle. I didn't know that. Also Tom Ridge is a major figure on the McCain team. Now the Tom Ridge story, as you know, is very interesting. He was Colin Powell's choice to be SecDef. Then that wanker Gary Bauer spoiled it and we ended up with Rumsfeld. So after 9/11, Ridge got the consolation prize of running Homeland Security when it first started. Now he's in a prime spot.
So it's going to be very clear here that my gang of moderate conservatives is lining up behind McCain and the ideologues who are desperately seeking a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan are going to throw their weight behind Romney. What Huckabee is doing in there, I don't know.
McCain is the candidate I trust the most in the White House, and tonight he just thrashed Mitt Romney. The common wisdom says that Giuliani, who was arrogant enough to suggest that Iowa and New Hampshire don't count, is going to pull out of the race tomorrow and throw his support to back McCain. That makes sense, and I hope it goes that way.
Sen. John McCain is an American hero, a man of great personal integrity
and someone who has always stood strongly on the side of his country.
He often rubs conservatives the wrong way, and his “maverick” image
causes much consternation—however, when it comes right down to it a man
who agrees with us 80% of the time is better than a woman who
represents the worst of American politics and a man whose great
rhetoric is but a cover for a fundamental lack of real-world
experience. We may have our issues with John McCain, but when it comes
down to the basic principles of the party: fiscal conservatism, a
strong national defense and strengthening the family, McCain has his
heart in the right place.
I predict that it's what all Republicans are going to be saying in the coming months, as soon as they recognize two out of three things. 1. Perfect is the enemy of good, and 2. Time's up for the standard social conservative hardline. 3. McCain gets serious bills passed in a partisan Congress.
A McCain/Giuliani ticket can only be beaten by a Clinton/Obama ticket. And if Obama sells out to Clinton, well then he'll never get any respect around here any more, and shouldn't get any from any of his devotees to 'change' no matter how misled they already are. It seems to me that Obama only works in Obamavision, but I digress.
A McCain presidency ought to be a single-termer, and I think we'd all be happiest with that. He'll have the good sense to not run again, I think. But the real news here is what a Romney failure means in light of what social conservatives aim to do in the GOP. I think it means that we break from a full press to the right on every issue to a reasonable press on the issues that matter most, National Security and the Economy. If America goes Socialist, a lot of us won't want to have our babies born here. But I kid. The clear message that Florida has sent is that they want McCain, and it really starts to change from here on out, because it wasn't even close.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child A long long way from home A long long way from home -- Traditional Negro Spiritual
Fish and I debate the dependent relationship between the masses, entrepreneurs and capitalists.
We began this debate in the context of who needs whom with regard to electoral politics. I asserted that I'm not interested in getting out to vote 'for the people' because I don't believe that their candidates, namely Obama and Clinton have much respect or regard for principles of liberty.
Gray and Fish went back and forth about Jante and the rules of loyalty between black individuals and their race, with the bone of contention of whether or not independent minded blacks always end up being prodigal sons.
And it finally got here:
"When you are selling records, you
need 100,000 CD buyers that give you $10 worth of respect. Your compact
is with the masses. That's what you do. My compact is with the elite.
That's what I do."
Not exactly. I sold tickets and, most of my sales being in
Europe, my customers where 98-99%% "whites"., with the exception of the
UK where they were about 50% "black".
So, no, I didn't have compact with my customers. The only compact I had there was to deliver quality product.
My compact is, as I said, with the ones who opened the door for me
and did so with the understanding that I would open the doors for
others long after the ones who did this for me were dead and gone.
It is something every successful group does. From Koreans to Itaians
to Jews to Germans. The concept is that one generation pays what it
owes to the previous generation to the next generation.
Actually it is a highly conservative concept. Those are the rules
of progress. You don't play by the rules, you ain't gonna have a chance
to be successful in the long run. That elite that you are speaking off,
Cobb, doesn't need you. You're a pet to them. I'm a pet to them.
Seriously. I know, I grew up among them, went to school with them, and
worked with them.
In any case, like I said, you don't play by the rules, don't expect
to get a helping hand when that "elite" kicks you to the curb.
--
First off, I don't expect a helping hand. Talking about me personally. I get unemployment insurance and I got family with property. If I have to go live in Bonifay Florida in a one room room, I got that room. Secondly, I'm perfectly confident that there aren't going to be any blackfolks (specifically) or people in the masses that are going to come to my economic rescue, and I certainly don't need their emotional rescue. I've been through several business cycles as an entrepreneur and I know how the hoi polloi laugh when you have to sell your BMW. Later for them suckers. They can't help me, they can't hurt me. But it's not about me.
This compact Fish speaks of is of enduring interest, however. Because it is explicit when it comes to contracts and I can expect results in court, but it is implicit between blackfolks and I don't believe anybody can bank on it. That's why sellouts sell out, because when it comes down to it, there are nothing but emotional and psychological bonds between African Americans, and love & hate don't pay the rent. It is my theory that (and I think it's pretty deep) only African Americans from dysfunctional families depend on that compact. De La Soul said it a decade ago - "I've got too much family to heed your threat". But those without family must heed all the threats. They are the permanent underclass, they are the permanently orphaned and they have to cling to dime store ideology because they don't have parents. They sing that old Negro spiritual with a deeper meaning.
I really want Nulan in on this because he has an evolved sense of black communion and I want to interrogate him on how he sees that dynamic at play with those of family values. Again, remember my fundamental rule about the difference between political conservatism and liberalism: Liberals guard against the dysfunctions of the family with the power of the state. Conservatives guard against the dysfunctions of the state with the power of family. These outline their priorities for public vs private action, and whose responsibility it is to do something when things fall apart. From my Old School perspective, I say a self-sufficient black family should be the locus of priorities and that is a simple conservative tenet. So naturally I diss bastards, just like Cosby. I would say that I am naturally fuedal as well, but that goes to contracts and compacts between people.
When I say that the black monolith is broken, it is not a myth. The monolith is broken because African Americans have in fact found compacts they have been able to sustain in the post-Jim Crow era more viable and profitable than those with the old black community. The aim of Black Power was to sustain them but Black Power failed, and it continues to fail primarily because it hasn't adopted, by and large, the benefits of corporate and global management. I take Fish to be an exception and the hiphop nation by extension. But Black Power of that sort is insufficient to handle DuBoisian imperatives. Still I digress.
What's of key interest is the extent to which the implicit and explicit social contracts by the rich and wealthy to the middle class and upper middle class are intact. Because this is precisely the intersection of contention when we speak of black prodigals. Example, OJ Simpson. Example, Michael Jackson.
[My first and only mistake in the aforementioned Email was misspelling 'Powder' when describing the Nesquik milk-flavoring]
I
did not, repeat, did not use the incorrect term to describe the hard
candy treats: Now And Laters. The vernacular used sounded like
'now-a-laters' for the simple reason that young persons of the Negro
persuasion residing in the Crenshaw District of South Central Los
Angeles in the period in question (circa 1974) were too lazy to
properly articulate the middle syllabic reference of said confectionery
item, thereby causing certain adults, similar to the one who raised
these baseless charges, to refer to the candies in question as 'Now Or
Laters', an egregious and unforgivable error that may subsequently
result in litigious action against said adult whose slanderous comments
were entirely without merit, or the result of one too many rendezvous
with alcoholic beverages.
I dispute that and henceforth suggest
you forward all future correspondence related to this matter to the
attorney I have on retainer to defend against such ludicrous charges
that I misrepresented said confectionery item, charges that never would
have seen the light of day had the inebriated individual visited candyfavorites.com or a host of related Internet sites.
Bryan Thomas (Sticking My Tongue Out At You) Bowen, Esq.
This is one of the most bizzare stories I've ever heard about electoral politics, and I want to keep it handy for all of the numbskulls who continue to bleat that black voters were screwed by the GOP.
When the Florida legislature voted last spring
to move up the Florida primary from March to Jan. 29th, in violation of
national party rules, the Democratic National Committee reacted
harshly.
To punish Florida, it stripped the state of all
210 of its convention delegates. In order to appease the four approved
earlier primary states, the Democratic presidential candidates pledged
not to campaign in Florida. All they were allowed to do here was to
quickly sneak in and out of private fund-raisers.
While the Republicans also punished Florida,
they were much gentler. The national GOP took away half the Florida
delegates – leaving a still generous 57 up for grabs – but allowed the
Republican candidates to campaign freely here, and as it turned out,
without opposition.
A lot of local Democrats thought allowing that
to happen was just plain nuts. And two very prominent Democrats even
hauled their own national party into federal court.
Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and Rep. Alcee
Hastings argued that in taking away Florida's delegates, and rendering
the primary election little more than a beauty contest, the Democratic
National Committee was disenfranchising Florida voters. Hastings
claimed the real victims are the people he calls "Joe and Jane Lunch
Bucket." Ultimately, they lost that federal case, but the bitter
sentiment still resonates.
So what does it mean? It means that the Democrats have 210 delegates in its pocket which it can arbitrarily use at its convention without any regard for the way people actually voted in Florida. Think about that for a while.
I'm 45 or 46, one. OK 46. So the Spousal Unit has been on my case about my health. What with all the salads she's serving me. But that's what she's supposed to do. Starting last summer, she has been hustling me to health fairs and the dentist and the gym. Nonstop. Well, this time I finally went to the doctor, and got the dreaded middle age man's prostate cancer exam. Plus, I got a colon cancer screening. Looks like my butt was front and center today.
So I'm going to cut to the chase because what everybody wants to know is what I've not seen written about appropriately. Which is to say, there's this episode of Family Guy:
And then there's this kind of clinical language, like you get from WebMD:
For a digital rectal exam, you will take off your
clothes below the waist. You will be given a gown to wear.
A man is often examined while he stands,
bending forward at the waist. A man can also be examined while lying on his
left side, with his knees bent toward his chest.
A woman is often
examined while lying on her back on an examination table, with her feet raised
and supported by stirrups. A
rectovaginal exam is often done for women so that
organs in the pelvic area can be checked.
Your health professional gently puts a lubricated, gloved finger
into the rectum. He or she may use the other hand to press on the lower
belly or pelvic area to feel for tenderness or problems, such as
enlargement, hardness, or growths.
It's somewhere in the middle.
My new doc, Dr. Matsuno is a slim guy about my age. I would describe his bedside manner as abstractly talkative. He was talking to me and to the computer at the same time, mostly because I was in my skivvies and socks. Not much direct eye contact.
Now I'm the kind of guy who, in high school, absolutely hated showers at PE. Primarily because I was little. In the 9th grade, since I had skipped a grade, I was 4 foot 8 and 88 pounds. I remember that very well, as you might imagine, me being smaller than a 98 pound weakling. My only consolation was that I could bench press 135, which gave me the second highest power to weight ratio in my class. Just like the geek I was, I would never let anyone forget it. But by the time I filled out my frame, and otherwise accepted my own greatness, I was very comfortable in showers and curious as to why other men might still not be. So, sitting in the doctor's office without the robe was no big deal, nor was the traditional hernia check.
Speaking of which, is it just me or are hernia checks a lot more light fingered and brief these days? When I was a teenager I remember coughing 4 and 6 times. Hmm. Maybe I just attracted the wrong kind of attention.
So Matsuno is monologuing about the things he's considering about my family health history and what I might need to expect between now and the big 50 (it's all good), and just matter of factly starts up with the rubber glove. "And now we're going to want to check the prostate. So go ahead and lean over the table and put your elbows on the paper."
OK it's like taking a reverse dookie except the dookie is cold. What I can tell is that there's some straight area and then the colon must take a turn down or something. Yes I did take a gulp of air and yes, my eyes did bug for a moment. Then I relaxed a bit and tried to figure out what was going on back there. He basically takes a swipe along the colon with his finger just like you would as if you were trying to get a hairball out of the drain in your sink. He was basically feeling for some lumps, and finding none, pulled out quick.
It's all very swift and simple of course. But to be honest, I was feeling it longer than the Tetanus booster or the blood sample. I could swear that he said, "there's going to be a little pressure" and I chuckled internally at that one. Doctors always call it 'pressure'. But this time it was pretty accurate. Nothing painful at all. Way easier to take than when you wipe your butt too many times with bad toilet paper.
Ten minutes later I was out of there and bought myself a nice salmon lunch at the pier. It's good to know you're healthy.
Pops went through the whole radiation therapy several years ago, so I knew that I was due to get my check sooner or later. Generally, as Matsuno said, men don't have to get checked until 50, but I'm going to be back every year from now on to make sure my family history doesn't catch up to me in a bad way. A small price to pay. So if you're about my age, you may as well get it over with.
Now as for the colon cancer screening, that was a bit more complicated. For that I had to bring three days of stool samples. That's one I'd rather describe in the abstract, because basically I haven't had the inclination to check my own turds since puberty, and quite frankly I don't think all the digestional microbes I'm hosting are on their j.o.b. But the kit consists of a set of six indentations under three flaps of a postcard sized flat cardboard package. In three successive days, you take three poops and dab two indentations a day with... well you know.. dookie. They provide the sticks. You need to get a piece from each end of the poop to insure a good sample.
The trickiest part of this exercise is to remember that you have to do it. So I found myself on the pot at 11pm the other night trying to get something useful out of the business end of my intestines. I already wasted some gems at the Hustler Casino in Gardena at 2am that morning and I hadn't eaten much all day. I didn't realize how difficult it can be to poop on demand. Matsuno took these and dropped a litmus into each of the indentations looking for blood. It was also done quickly. I thought there would be some really long and involved process in that and it turns out that's rather simple too.
The miracles of modern science and medicine have made this stuff easy enough to joke about. But my uncle died of colon cancer and my father survived prostate cancer after some very exhausting treatments. Even though radiation therapy is easier on the body than chemo and Pops used to run marathons - I'd never seen him so tired. So obviously these cancers are no laughing matter. But hey, this is America and we can cure anything that can be cured. Pretty lucky I'd say.
In his last speech, Martin Luther King Jr. gives us a final promise - that we will get to the promised land. I think I'm living there. I think that having gotten there, I have disappeared from the radar of the ghetto.
But seriously, what I'm going to do is have my own super exclusive club for one. I'm going to call it Allmuseri. Only people who understand Allmuseri can be in Allmuseri. It's not easy to explain, but I'm working on that piece today.
When I say that 'I got there', what I mean to suggest is that I let my natural curiosity and scientific bent, take me where all of my blackness studies led. By the time I finished reading all the books and listening to all the music, I ended up different.
People who knew me in LA before I moved to NYC may recall some of the beach parties I used to throw for the Urban League crowd of folks we used to be - paragons of thoughtful urban professionals. Then I started reading Toni Morrison and hanging out with history professors at UCLA and videotaping cops and listening to lectures with Michael Zinzun. I was never afraid to go there. Then I started performing at poetry slams and hanging out with Quincy Troupe and eating lunch with Michele Wallace and investigating the political origins of the Crips.
I did all that stuff before I went to NY, after Rodney King but before the Riots, it's just that when I broke up with my old girlfriend and shaved off my Ron Brown look, I disappeared from the social scene we used to share.
I liked race raising and how I got from the LA Council of Black Professional Engineers to the Brooklyn Moon Poetry Collective is an interesting story. Maybe there's an autobiography in me after all. But I never backtracked, and I never will. Everything I know comes from knowing, trying, testing, checking, spewing, listening, re-integrating. I don't expect that it's all going to make sense until they're teaching my book at the college level.
I won't be the first to say that the new horror flick 'Cloverfield' is a cross between Godzilla and The Blair Witch Project because that just about sums it up. It's an enormously interesting concept that works about as well as can be expected. It could have been a lot better. In fact, it should have been a lot better. Unfortunately they just used one camera.
I'm going to have to save my enthusiasm for a multi-perspective drama up for Vantage Point which looks much more like an adult drama. The twentysomethings in Coverfield are unbearably vapid and crippled to the point at which I'm considering whether or not J J Abrams himself has any real sense of transcendent courage beyond that which is motivated for people at arms reach. In his increasingly claustrophobic 'Lost' series, everything becomes more and more like a soap opera and less and less like any survival drama. Then again perhaps he has reached the limit at which survival drama remains interesting. Survival for what? Survival of what? Everything is all very highschool - nobody seems to get beyond their friends and their parents and their own philosophy of life. Isn't it odd that what has evolved on Lost's island never goes beyond the conspiracy? JJ Abrams people never strive to form a more perfect union, establish justice or insure domestic tranquility for posterity, only for themselves.
That is why it occurs to me that nobody in Cloverfield ever weeps for the city. That the protagonist of this flick only discovers that he is in love (because of what, a trip to Coney Island?) when buildings start collapsing. How could we ever expect such an empty suit to do anything but run and sweat and thoughtlessly drag his equally flummoxed pals through mortal danger for the possibility of a last kiss?
Somewhere in our literature there must be a devastating critique of the romantic fool who barely understands his own passions and mindlessly walks through a menagerie-life until he stubs his toe upon reality. Then facing that, dives directly with passion for the very first time into the full flame of his romantic fantasy. Until such time as that passage is discovered, you have Cloverfield and this review.
Sixteen years ago, me and my boy Charles Isbell met Henry Louis Gates, Jr on a street in Cambridge MA. We were encouraged by his open and friendly attitude when we told him that we were putting together a black history database online. He didn't know anything about the technology but he would put us in touch with somebody who was working on a similar project. It turned out that project was the multimedia package Encarta Africana. I have the CDs around here somewhere.
Of course Charles and I were a bit dismissive. CDs could never be as interesting, exciting and expansive as online precisely because online is interactive. The black history database we made didn't make us rich or famous, but we did have the distinction of being first.
Way back in those days a number of us on the cutting edge of black cultural production were greatly enthused about such projects, the most significant of which was the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. But while we were, it seemed, in accord with the value of authoritative historical information and its salutary effect on the mass of blackfolks, we were not in accord with regard to the prospects for online. It doesn't take much of a stretch for you to presume that I was very frustrated with the attitude of black academics with regard to their dismissal of online and their insistence on the impermeability of the so-called 'digital divide'. So please forgive me if I now consider the introduction of Gates' new website 'The Root' with something less than a standing ovation.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Washington Post Co. (WPO) (WPO) launched a new online magazine Monday aimed at a black audience, featuring commentary from leading black writers, along with information on genealogy.
Called "The Root," the Web site is the brain child of Post Co. Chairman Donald Graham and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, serves as editor in chief of The Root. Lynette Clemetson, a former New York Times reporter, is the magazine's managing editor. Jacob Weisberg, editor of the online magazine Slate, also owned by the Post Co., helped develop The Root.
"We see ourselves as a daily black newspaper in a magazine format with three channels - news, views, and roots," Gates told The Associated Press. "And it's the roots channel that ... makes us completely unique.
I have practically exhausted every amount of critical theory about black culture and politics that I have been able to muster online over the past 15 years since I began pontificating on the Web, and five years prior to that in proto-web online bulletin boards. So while I wonder if there is anything to say to the new Root folks that won't bore me to tears, I still think I may be able to muster some enthusiasm. At least I can point a new aggregation of readers to the content of Cobb, and by extension, the Race Man's Home Companion, Boohab's Factotum, the Cool Zone, Cobb Vision, Vision Circle, The Conservative Brotherhood and the rest of my collected online creations. I suppose that could yield some sense of satisfaction. But I know the real deal is going to be interactive, not just linking. So you'll see me trackbacking as well as mouthing off in the fora for some time.
As for the genealogical stuff, well. Let's hope that it's more than just a marketing honeypot for the DNA industry. We've been over that scandal before. But they're going to have McWhorter and Gladwell onboard so it can't be all that bad. In fact, appropos Gates' signature and style, The Root is guaranteed some measure of respectability in that it will stir any number of progressives to a higher pitch. Gates is so very PBS and you know how that drives some people crazy.
If you don't know, now you know. The Root is online.
I am close to coming to a comprehensive understanding of what I want to do in closing Cobb and moving to the next project, and so I am taking the moment to share.
Those of you who have followed Cobb know that my greatest ambition is to be the Kung Fu Santa Claus - to be engaged in the world bearing gifts and kicking ass. This is a matter of interest due to the nature of my personality. I am compelled to free people to be as egotistical as I am, to reach their potential and live more fully. Simultaneously, I am rather held in thrall to the concept of a philosophical round-table. There are few things as enjoyable to me as meeting people over meals to discuss weighty or funny issues. It is a passion I share with the Spousal Unit who is perfectly skilled in providing the home economics for any such gathering. It is my desire that at some appropriately wizened period in my life I will be able to host just such a parlor, and so perhaps I ought to begin reading of Dorothy Parker and Carl Van Vechten.
I realize that such dreams cannot be materialized out of thin air. There is some manner of need in order to finance such basics as a house suitable for the luminaries I expect. I've got the ideas and I know how to get things going but I need fuel. So part of this project is to teach me how to become a fundraiser.
So the Allmuseri Project, will have three components and several long-term benefits. The first is to design a mystery system. I have become convinced that in order to accomplish some Drop Squad level deprogramming, something on the order of Kwanzaa needs to be invented. My aim is to do that. I cannot see that politics will accomplish that because I have been persuaded that the people who most need some head work are only token participants in this superpower's political processes. Once again, the power of media, old or new, to engage the masses requires the kind of work that is not being done for this demographic. I struggle to show that - but what is necessary are some sort of counter- Willie Lynch documents. Plus, I want to lob a spear at the black liberal professoriate, a spear of the sort they'd have pick up and chuck back, thus demonstrating their misuse of their own tools.
The second leg of the Allmuseri Project is The Brother's Cup, which I mentioned previously. That is basically about me being a man about town and getting in old men's grilles. It is about barroom conversations and golf outings, seminar and townhalls. I want to get back over to Ofari's joint and spend more time at Magic Johnson's Fridays.
The third leg is the online component which will consist of the online expression of the mystery system.
What I'd like to do at this point is go highbrow on books and literature and see if black art, or any art is truly and honestly serving society or if it is a distraction in the way Puritans might suggest. I'm going to start that here and now at Cobb, and see if it works here. If not then it will bleed over into Allmuseri. I hope I can keep that here.
I've been tagged by The Anchoress on this clever little meme.
Karen spells out the rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
OK. It just so turns out that I am in a very literary mood these days and have been scouring patiently to get some new materials. My latest purchase however is an audiobook - Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia. But just last night I picked up an old Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters, off the shelf to read once again my favorite of his short stories: The Little Puppy That Could. Coincidentally, page 123 is about right in the middle of that very story:
By Monday afternoon they had swelled outlandishly in the belly and sprouted course hair on their backs and buttocks. All three died during the night in speechless horror. On Wednesday it was reported that seven spare husbands who had merely come in contact with the dog's coat had developed cutaneous conditions of incredible virulence; they too, passed away in a frothing nightmare of serpigo and yaws.
The Little Puppy That Could is an allegory about a society at the end of manhood, as you might guess from the term 'spare husbands'.
I have spent the past five years working in the New York City public
schools and have three teenage children of my own. There is a
generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and
imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and
disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children
to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future.
Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with
that sense of possibility.
...I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me
that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have
found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a
new generation of Americans.
As you know, I happen to think that in many ways the comparison is apt. That puts me in the class of fuddy-duddies who would have said that Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to run this nation. But you can't deny that he appeals to the young - just like the Beatles.
You know what scares the bejeesus out of me? Not that Obama wins, but that he wins and gets assassinated, just like JFK. This country would go completely bananas. Absolutely, positively apeshit. The level of domestic chaos following the untimely death of President Obama would make me want to pack my stuff and move to...hmmm... Omaha to wait it out with the guys at Berkshire Hathaway.
I should be kicking myself in the head for taking Dick Morris' bait. But I'm not going to give the Clinton machine that much credit. Neither should you.
The news is that Obama won South Carolina. OK that's nice. Pretty much people were expecting that because the swing vote is black in South Carolina. That is to say the swing vote is black this time around because everybody says so. And so to hedge bets, Morris predicted that white voters will take offense to this presumed racial voting bloc and deliver the rest of the South to Clinton. It was a crusty enterprise, but it's the kind of thing we've seen before. Karl Rove was the master and you've seen me excoriate him for it in these pages, even though we're on the same team.
Anybody who votes can be a swing voter, it just depends on what message makes you change your mind from apathy to voting or voting one way to voting another way. It's the job of campaign managers to figure out what that message is, identify the constituency for it and convince them that they are the agents of change. Every little percentage counts as you approach the tipping point whatever that tipping point might be. Let's do some math in our heads.
Imagine that I'm running for office in the state of Tennessee and I discover that 3% of the voters are pickle farmers. It's a close race, so I need every vote. My campaign boss tells me that traditionally pickle farmers vote for the other party, because they've traditionally been in the pocket of the salt brine lobby. But I notice that my opponent has not talked about the price of salt brine. So I have an opportunity to speak in Barrelville TN which is pickle central. My opponent is only going to Memphis (because he's appealing to the urban demographic and knows people at FedEx). In Barrelville, I give a rousing speech which is peppered with references to the cost of salt brine and its effect on the small farmer. I throw some extra money and sure enough, the pickle farmers show up in droves for me. I win the state and I say it's all because of pickles. In fact, I did this kind of micromanagement in each of four campaign stops in Tennessee, but take the pickle message nationally. Why? Because I think there are more pickle voters I can energize and steal from the other party. They are my new 'core' constituents.
As president I go to war with Bosnia, people who hate pickles, and everybody says it a clash of civilizations. Why? Because I pimped the pickle vote. Now substitute 'Christian Right' for 'pickle farmer' and you now understand the genius of Karl Rove, and the game that everybody is playing here. It doesn't matter what I stand for, it matters if I am electable, and that depends on money for hitting four towns instead of just Memphis, and polling research that tells me whether to talk about salt-brine or vouchers or partial birth abortions or single payer health plans or whatever unsophisticated buzzword the people can grab onto.
The thing is, it works. Why does it work? Because only about 17-20% of American voters cannot be bullshitted by campaign speeches, polling numbers, negative campaign ads and endless punditry. Those are the people who actually study the candidate positions and/or are basically in the business of electioneering. The rest of us are actually listening to the stupid debates, watching the insulting commercials, consuming the vapid commentary and waiting to see what our idiot friends are doing before we make up our tiny minds. How do I know that percentage is true? A campaign guru told me.
Once you understand how this kind of marginal majority cobbling works, it doesn't take much to work the angles. The real work comes in accurately tagging voter interest to cognizable chunks and hoping they stand still long enough. Just because pickle farmers went for salt brine this year in Tennessee doesn't mean it'll work next year in Minnesota. If it was easy, anybody could do it. If it was easy, New Hampshire would have done what the experts predicted. But Dewey did not defeat Truman and Colin Powell didn't even run. There are no slam dunks in this business. But that doesn't mean people aren't willing to believe that there are.
Enter 'Hillary Clinton's Southern Strategy'. Now everybody is an expert at predicting exactly what black voters are going to do, right? Shay Riley takes the hook and swims deep:
I noticed the coded language that President Bill Clinton — who got
my vote twice, so I don't despise him the way Rush Limbaugh does — used
in arguing that Sen. Obama was expected to win in South Carolina. Days
before the South Carolina primary, President Clinton said that blacks
would vote for Sen. Obama and women for Sen. Clinton (I guess the
concept of black women,
who are at least a quarter of Democratic voters in South Carolina don't
exist). Following up that comment with the Election Day comment that
Rev. Jesse Jackson won South Carolina (which is Rev. Jackson's native
state, but President Clinton didn't note that fact) in 1984 and 1988.
That quote served to tie Obama to Rev. Jackson in white voters' minds.
This is part of the growing Clinton strategy since days before New
Hampshire to "ghettoize" Sen. Obama's candidacy, by tagging Obama as
solely the "black candidate". It attempts to undermine Obama's claim
that he is a transcendent candidate.
This racially coded language
worked in New Hampshire and Nevada. It will succeed after South
Carolina, even though Sen. Obama won there. Sure, Sen. Obama was
expected to win...but not by the 30-point margin ass whupping that he
put on Sen. Clinton.. President Clinton ignores the fact that until
some weeks ago, his wife was in the lead in South Carolina....even
among black voters. Never mind that Sen. Obama won the majority of the
vote in a state, which Sen. Clinton has yet to do. However, President
Clinton sought to downplay Sen. Obama's achievement in order to
increase anxiety among white voters that Sen. Obama is merely a younger
and more attractive version of the dreaded Rev. Jackson.
It is
intriguing, although not surprising, that the mainstream media has not
zeroed in on this neo-Southern Strategy to appeal to latent racism
among white Democrats. However, it has been picked up by some black
commentators, such as liberal Michael Dyson. Apparently
black liberal commentator Roland Martin agrees with me about the
strategy. He accuses President Clinton of stoking racial fires:
"Tapper said no one asked about Jackson. His name never came up. Yet
Clinton had no problem invoking it. Isn't the reason obvious? The
ridiculously called first black president didn't mention his win in
1992. Or that of Vice President Al Gore in 2000, or even then-Sen. John
Edwards' win in 2004. He decided to bypass all of these gents and link
Obama with Jackson, who is beloved in black America but stirs hatred
among many whites."
And it goes on.
So instead of salt-brine prices motivating pickle farmers, it's latent racism motivating white Democrats. And we're sure because we know the numbers, right? Of course we don't. Those are some of the many motivations that we don't poll for, although the chunk of 'white Democrats' seems to be a fairly persistent one.
We went through this circus not long ago with the theory that the entire political career of Harold Ford Jr was derailed by three words in a 'racist' commercial featuring a blonde bimbo saying "Harold, call me". Then again I'm one of the 17-20% who can't possibly take such stuff seriously.
It seems to me that it will remain mostly impossible for the swill-swallowing 80% of American voters to avoid being manipulated by these kinds of seductions which reduce them to Pavlovian voting blocs whose knees jerk exactly on cue. So if Dick Morris says it's race, then it must be, and therefore all the white voters will play their zombie role and all the black voters will do likewise.
What's really going on is that people are seeing exactly what they want to see on this racial angle. What annoys me about it is that it's being called a strategy. Aggregating marginal voting blocs may be hard work, but it's not predictive genius. It's tactical reaction to ever-changing polls. Oh sure, the candidates and campaign managers will say they vibe with the people and that they always knew exactly how - but only the winners can say that with any credibility. We ought to know better than to give these shallow tactics any more credit than they're due, which ain't much.
This observation comes unprovoked from any events in the news. Last night I heard a name that I haven't heard in a very long time. It is the name of Charles Stuart. Along with about a half-dozen others, he is responsible for the kind of crime I haven't heard in a long time. Murder a family member and blame the black man.
It's not the end of racism, but... I don't see this kind of story any longer. I would bet that there are none like it on the docket of the ACLU or any other watchdog group. Why? We obviously don't have so many racists in the police department and prosecutors offices that can sustain this kind of fiction. It's almost difficult for me to believe that 1990 was 18 years ago, but that's how old this story is. My boy brought it up in the old joke conversation about how bad Boston was for black men. "Ten years of my life that I'll never get back". Yeah, I wasted a couple there too.
So I'm prepared to chalk one up to progress, and take another shot at the Coalition of the Damned. As far as I know, there's only Mumia Abu Jamal who has retained any political cred in this game of representing the criminal justice system's categorical unfairness to blackfolks.
So it occurs to me, in response to YouTubers like Infamous Chris, that there may be an entire generation of black kids out there who find of the execution of Tookie Willims, the Jena debacle as well as that involving Shaquanda Cotton as the great racial controversies of their lifetime. Arguably there was prosecutorial misconduct in both situations, but at least they didn't go around arresting the wrong people. There's no other way to describe that but progress.
There is something and practically everything about this video, it's energy and style, which captures and characterizes the zeal of my youth. From the very beginning, Nile and Bernard were aesthetic heroes of mine. And although I had been and continue to be a devotee of the funk in whose ultimate expression, existentially speaking, is found in the personna of Larry Blackmon; I still prefer, overall, the Chic vibe.
As with En Vogue and Sade, I am wont to give these images to my daughters and I will.
An old story I used to tell regards my move to New York and looking for peers in the Big Apple. I asked about to find the equivalent of View Park there - a fairly exclusive enclave of the African American privileged class. Landing in blue collar Brooklyn I asked where are all the bourgie women at? They said, "long Island." OK which part of Long Island, and they said everywhere. In 1992 I was unable to find 'the' spot - word was that all the blackfolks who got above the grind, just integrated and disappeared. There was no equivalent, in New York according to my sources, of Atlanta's Nisky Lake. I wasn't looking for, as one might imagine, some ultra-exclusive sort of clubbiness. Or perhaps I was, so that I could hang snidely at its periphery. You know how the saying goes - don't marry for money, just hang around rich folks and marry for love. I only occasionally bumped into outliers of that crowd. Once on Martha's Vineyard I met descendants of the original black servants of the Vanderbilts. I never quite found my peeps, and my aims as an artist and scientist troubled the entire process. I eventually married and found myself somewhat estranged from my old Talented Tenth coterie.
Occasionally, although I think it would be more frequently had my children not achieved leadership and recognition within this largely white community, I find it regrettable that my kids had not grown up in the tradition of the black bourgeoisie. There have been occasions when my wife and I consider joining Mocha Moms, 100 Black Men, The Links and various other social organizations with auxiliaries nearby. Somehow we never get around to it, we find excuses not to spend the money or make the effort.
Theoretically, I assert that black culture is transparent. There are no black things that other non-blacks cannot understand. Last evening as I went to hang with my best buddy and some friends, one from out of the country, remarked how fascinating it was that we mixed in such a range of Ebonics in our speech. We were kidding around and faking any number of accents (my favorite being a tech support guy from Mumbai named 'Chad' trying to get jiggy upon discovery that his white-sounding customer is actually African American) and granted her an honorary black status, which is a great deal more subtle than I'm making it sound for the sake of brevity. Theory and practice are two very different things, and the camaraderie of deep natives in the soul cannot be approximated by any other social interaction.
I may satisfy myself that my children need only the cream of my old blackness, and certainly that's all they're likely to get in the house, outside of the cautionary tales I may tell from time to time bringing up hoodrat archetypes. I don't need them to be little clones or concerned about the fate of the identity of my generation. They have the rhythms of the Isley Brothers songs and have been baptized. The Chic Mystique is YouTubed. It may not be so hard after all.
Dan Carlin continues to intrigue me as I roll through his historical and 'common sense' podcasts. In one of his, he speaks of WW1 as the birth of the modern era and that all of us were, before our understanding of what a meat grinder modern warfare is, brainwashed and naive about the romance of battle. I only buy that halfway.
What I tend to believe these days is that human beings invent conflict and that we do so as a socially constructive thing. Along the lines of 'constructive chaos' and 'purification by fire' human beings naturally inject dissonance into harmonious situations. We get bored of peace. We want to advocate. We need contrast.
Nulan has found research:
New research from Vanderbilt University shows for the first time that the brain processes aggression as a reward
– much like sex, food and drugs – offering insights into our propensity
to fight and our fascination with violent sports like boxing and
football.
Yeah football!
Fistfights One of the fascinating things I learned from Doc as he was going through LAPD training is that men generally fight with their fists as a result of a kind of evolution. That is to say we have evolved to naturally engage in non-lethal combat. A punch in the nose stings much more than it injures. To really hurt somebody, to deliver a deadly blow or to knowingly pull the trigger, you need to be trained. Otherwise, the way men fight naturally, they will inflict pain but exhaust each other long before any permanent damage is done. As a method of conflict resolution what I will term dueling or chivalrous battle is a kind of naturally rewarded kind of thing. There is a difference.
Martial Arts Even martial arts of the sort with which we have been entertained over the years in my generation is, upon closer inspection, nowhere near as deadly as it appears. They are, in my estimation, primarily ritualized exercises after a style of combat.
Fight Club I won't belabor the point, but I will note that there are some indications that we've engendered a new popular wave of interest in 'fight club'. In my neighborhood and surely elsewhere, boxing gyms have become increasingly common. There are a few new films coming out this year with such brawling as their vehicle, a clear indication that more Americans are paying attention to such matters.
-- It has long been my assertion that we'd be better off in society if we were less litigious and more chivalric. There is some level of small claims court we should be able to obviate, were we to have some ritualized code of 'taking it outside'. When I grew up, conflict resolution via fisticuffs was understood and implicit. No man was a man merely through possession of the truth, he was required the courage of his convictions. Somehow I think we ingested a bit too much of MLK's highminded pacifism for our own good and now a generation of passive-aggressives have had us compartmentalize aggressive violence outside of the realm of actual personal justice. The man who throws a punch today is considered always wrong. His reasons are always considered irrational but not actually considered. He has breached the artificial line of rational conflict resolution, which is to negotiate without dignity, to connive a solution, to make whatever deal can be made. This is the sad, subversive nature of our society today.
As such it seems to me that we have the presence of injustice, and as I started writing this piece several days ago without the benefit of several books of Plato's Republic fresh in mind, I was on a tack to show how we are by nature restless with peace. But it is not so much an innate restlessness I think, but that we do not trust the conditions under which our restfulness was achieved. We perceive in the order of things a lack of controlling virtue as well as a stifling of change. This particularly in our personal lives and by extension in the life of the nation. It doesn't take much insight to perceive Obama's presidential campaign as yet another example of a populist appeal to those within our society adjudged permanently dissatisfied and ready for some sort of change-y revolution. But whether or not he or any other such candidate is prepared to offer change is beside the point. Can he offer justice? Can he or anyone undo the conditions which support those whose connivance gives us lax ease? I doubt it. I think rather that this is something which must emanate from people who are prepared to seek justice in themselves and locally in their daily affairs. The nation will be saved by righteous men punching wicked men in the nose and by judges who are inevitably buoyed by and approving of such just actions as litigations inevitably ensue.
This is the aggression of truth. The righteous man must be vigorously inspired by it and the wicked must be intimidated by its presence in righteous vigor. To abandon this passion is to prepare for the grave.
I take this evidence of natural aggression to be a sign that we must find a virtuous expression of it. If we cannot, then we are doomed to hatred of our very nature. So aggression in defense of righteousness is, to my way of thinking, the proper course.
This movie brings back the trope of honor, of good vs evil, to the Western, and the Western back to contemporary audiences. What a lucky break for all of us.
Somebody smacked me about the fact that I enjoyed 'Transformers' this year, and I did so for a couple of reasons. The first was that from the perspective of a gamer and a patriot, I really dug how the infantry squad tactics were highlighted in the film. It's something that hasn't been done well since 'Blackhawk Down'. Whereas that was something of a downer of a film, this one was nicely heroic. Of course you can smack me for liking 'nice' heroes, but I never pretended that Transformers was a grownup movie. The other reason was for the various faces and exuberence of actor Shia Laboef. Sue me for spelling his name wrong but the dumbass should change it anyway. He wants to be a movie star doesn't he? Because he's not a kid. Nor is the little girl in Disney's "Game Plan". Their little smart-mouthed grownups, as contrasted to adults.
The kid in 3:10 is a kid, and you know it because he knows what he can and cannot say and he doesn't say much when it comes to adult situations, which is not only realistic but as it should be. A kid who runs away from space aliens that tranform themselves into hot cars demonstrates nothing about courage or character. The kid whose trembling hand holds a gun to the head of a man who holds a gun to the head of his father, that's a decidedly deep moment.
It's not much of a stretch to see how 3:10 works and might have happened. You have a bad man who has the jump on most everyone - who takes what he wants at all times, who lives by his wits and reputation and who keeps a motley crew of killers in tow. He's Ben Wade, and he thinks on his feet, swimming like a shark through the dusty old West preying on Pinkerton stages. He comes across an onery cuss who, motivated by the last shred of decency he has and a bit of desparation, joins a posse to deliver the killer to a prison train.
It's a father and son film and also about how men alone make law in their ethics out in the wilds. It serves to remind us how little moral thinking we are called to do in our conventions. I hear there's a new game show which will reveal that very shallowness called 'The Moment of Truth'. That's why we need more Westerns.
This is something I needed just for my records. From Marginal Revolution, my new favorite blog:
The effective tax rate is higher on the rich and the rich
have more money – put these two things together and we can calculate who pays
for the federal government. The final
column in the table shows the share of the 2.4 trillion in federal tax
revenues that is paid for by each income category. The remarkable finding is that the rich and
especially the very rich bear by far the largest share of the federal tax
liability. The top 10% of households by
income, for example, pay more than half of all federal taxes and the top 1% alone pay over a quarter of all federal taxes.
Mickey Kaus says that Obama has been effectively ghettoized by the Clinton forces. Let's see if this meme has legs. Essentially, it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy if Obama wins South Carolina, as far as the Clintonistas like Dick Morris are concerned and depending on how many of us in the 'sphere echo it, it can grow like cancer. Look at how Kaus sidles up to the conclusions by quoting around:
lost
the essence of his candidacy as the first black man to run as himself.
Once the race card is on the table, no matter who puts it there, it's
impossible to put it back up anyone's sleeve. Obama may look back on
the first two weeks of 2008 as the time when he lost the nomination to
Clinton.
[w]atching
blacks block vote for Obama will trigger a white backlash that will
help Hillary win Florida and to prevail the week after.
Here
we thought we were getting the Mondale/Hart campaign of 1984--without
Mondale's pleasantness or Hart's weirdness--and instead we get the
Dukakis campaign of 1988, in which a slightly tedious,
marginally likeable elite liberal established his mainstream (white)
bona fides by running around the country thumping Jesse Jackson.
There is only one way out for Obama which is to do an Eminem.
In the film 'Eight Mile', Eminem, "the best white rapper, ever" has to prove his skills in the black ghettoes and 'hoods of Detroit. On top of all the ordinary stress of the underground rap game and the in-your-face confrontations he has with his own trailer trash family, Eminem's character 'Rabbit' has to face some racial hateration. In one of the climactic scenes of the movie, he executes a verbal rope a dope, copping to all of the insults, calling himself every racial epithet he can think of, dissing himself so low into the ground, and with such style, that all his competitor can do is say 'yeah and you're white too'.
This is, in my humble opinion, the path that Barack Obama is going to have to go, if and when Kaus' ghettoization meme takes hold. He's going to have to do something he hasn't been able to do well, given the 45 minute interview I just saw of him. And that is he is going to have to talk about all of his weaknesses in foreign policy and in military affairs and in executive ability and put it all on the table. He's going to have to come clean about what he doesn't know, about his lack of experience, about his shortcomings, fears and self-doubts. He's going to have to bomb himself into submission.
By executing this maneuver, which needs to be perfectly timed, Obama gives all of his critics an opportunity to say everything they always wanted to say, and then he'll be able to say 'Still I Rise'. Basically, Americans will still love him, he'll still be the candidate for 'change' and his message doesn't have to change one iota. That is how he gets a teflon coat. It has to be forged in fire. He has to go there.
What he is starting to realize and starting to publicize is that he has a better chance getting Republican votes than Hillary or Edwards. If he's smart, he's going to start triangulating and giving a bit more rhetorical space to ex-Thompson supporters. If Giuliani washes out... that's the ticket.
I suppose I should make a small bit of noise about this being the new Southern Strategy, or more specifically Clinton's South Carolina Strategy. Let's see if it backfires.
It took me a long time to track this down - it has been difficult to find the quote in context, but I trust this is the whole thing:
I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different.
I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.
I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
I think Kennedy, twenty years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.
I think we’re in one of those times right now. Where people feel like things as they are going aren’t working. We’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having, and they’re not useful.
And, you know, the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out.
I think it’s fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.
Janks Morton made a public service announcement a year ago. It was rather cool, and in fact I made a response to that video. It turns out that Morton has made an entire film. The premise is simple. There is a war of disinformation out there in the mediasphere, and one example of it is that blackfolks believe lies about blackfolks which has undermined their ability to sustain healthy relationships, and most importantly, marriage. Far too many have bought into a simple lie and that demonstrates their vulnerability to a host of stereotypes. Yet another generation is deaf to the sound of the drum. Janks Morton bangs out a rhythm of truth in his independent film 'What Black Men Think'. Nice going.
Going behind the scenes in an interview with Brian Lamb, you get to see a couple extraordinary things. Firstly, Morton demonstrates that a little bit of initiative can go a long way. He was simply inspired to do the right thing and address a complicated question head on. He has done so in a way that shames big media and all of their attempts to deal with issue of interest to African Americans. He was able to take a simple misrepresentation of fact, discover how that myth was promulgated through society, and demonstrate how thoroughly brainwashed so many Americans are.
Secondly, as a filmmaker you're tempted to say that he's the rebirth of Michael Moore, except that he's an order of magnitude more intelligent and one eighth as shameless. By using the power of technologies once only available to pros, he has put together an excellent piece of work single-handedly. He shot a very sweet rip of Morpheus, and of course he was smart enough not to say anything like that, just to set up the red pill of an investigation he was ready to throw down.
Morton strikes me as a guy from my generation who just simply knows too much to stay shut up. He did the math and couldn't let the myth stand. If you're like me, you wonder how it is that we manage in this society of ours to pay millions to Heath Ledger and not get much to a man with a simple question who has a simple answer. Are there more black men in jail or in college? It may not take much to answer that question, but at least the answer takes us somewhere away from dangerous fictions. What good does it do our society to ask if Batman can beat The Joker and provide that answer? Spending on mindless fictions and sustaining dangerous fictions undermines the social contract. We all pay sooner or later.
James Burke says that we are perhaps on the very brink of a revolution of knowing. He has an XRepublic-ish linking factotum he speaks about to Dan Carlin. When enough of these are built, we will come to discover what Burke already knows: our system of education is truly outdated, and extraordinarily inefficient way of getting the billions of minds in our world working with the right set of ideas and facts. It will start with texts and audio and video, and some of us 'amateurs' are going to be stars for asking the right questions and giving memorable, reasonable answers. Janks Morton is one of those stars.
As for the controversy itself, I'm somewhat addressed to it and somewhat beyond it. It is a horrible shame that so many African Americans are not proponents of strong black families. On the other hand, I'm just as likely to buy more Wynton and not give a rat's about who's buying Tupac, if you catch my drift. I'm not sure which is best. Saving the 'black' race from itself is a matter of soul conservation, but I cannot assume that what I'm doing and where I'm doing it is inaccessible and beyond 'their' consideration. I just have to keep writing that which compels me. Begging the question of whether black families are coming apart also begs the question of exactly whom is susceptible to statistical morality BS game that Janks deconstructs. If you will believe the hype, how long should I cry about your ignorance?
But perhaps what Carlin said in another podcast is the right way to go about thinking, and that ties us in with Nulan. Carlin asks with his liberal brain, who is is looking out for the losers? How many losers can our society sustain until they drag us all down too? Put economically, if we do fine with 8% unemployment OK, but what happens when it gets to 16%?, 24%? Sooner or later the whole economy crashes. When African Americans are born 70% without two parent households, some tipping point for the entire nation is imminent. I know it sounds callous to put it in national terms, where is the black love? But black love is already in survival mode. We're already fighting the orientation that challenges the premise of married families. What am I talking about? We're already past the national tipping point. We're already thinking of a National Defense of Marriage Amendment. We're already fighting the Unmarriage Revolution. Sometimes I forget.
This ties us in with Nulan because he's sniffing the air for moments and inflections that signal the collapse of Western Civ, and now that I'm getting more world historical and less political, I'm inclined to hear more of that out, especially given my focus on Plato and other ancient history this month.
Anyway, Janks was over at Booker Rising today and I'm going to add his blog to the roll. He's clear, he's present and he's dangerous to ignorance. I'm on board for sustaining the dialog, of course, and it's always good to welcome another mind into the meld.
I think the columnist for the New York Times, Bob Herbert must be almost 65 years old. That's a good thing, because when I was a kid the national life expectancy was 72. You might expect that that was the guess for a middle class white man and that for a black man it would be significantly lower, what with all our defects. Nevertheless, Herbert is still running strong. He's old enough to be my father meaning he probably went to college in the days when, in certain cities, you could get beat with a baseball bat for walking on the wrong side of a Jim Crow street.
Last week I hung out with an old black man at Magic Johnson Friday's over in Ladera Heights. I really enjoy hanging out with old men, in fact, it's rather my new favorite pastime. The man I shared drinks with was an old Air Force guy and the reason I bring that up is because black men in the military are the ones who are most consistently conservative like me. Interestingly enough, this particular gent spent a lot of time defending George W. Bush because of his personal experience with pilots the fascinating details of which I won't go into. His bottom line, everybody who thinks that Bush is stupid is stupid. You cannot fly jets without being the best of the best. You can't be a drunk.
The reason I bring up the military black man is because he seems to be along with the rich black man, the only type who has benefited from the kind of life-altering experience more powerful than the caste definitions of race, and the passionate rage such role-playing fuels. Sure, there are other exceptions I can think of, the black man who specializes in bedding Becky, the black man who grows to be a spiritual leader across racial lines, the exceptional author or intellectual who decolonizes his own mind, the black athlete or musician unapologetically cheered from all directions, but there is something about the intensity of leading men which singularly obliterates the claim of racial victimization from the black man's mind. It's something Herbert doesn't seem to get. There seems in his latest editorial an obdurate need to dig deep and find a nugget of racial animus to keep our optimism at bay.
“We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”
Herbert won't give us an exact date on that quote, but Tillman was certainly dead before Herbert was born, and probably before Herbert's own father was born. And while we are in mind of Martin Luther King, yet another dead man, is it not for us the living to be dedicated to unfinished work? But it hardly seems proper that we speak about lynching. It is no more. So we only speak about people who find comfort in the words of people who threatened lynching.
We seem ever mindful of Southern Strategies and Beer Hall Putsches that might signal some charismatic who stirs racial fires and hopes that could awaken a populist fascism. There is some righteousness in that inclination. But are we so eager to forget what happened just a year ago in the South to the candidacy of George Allen? As tangential as any segregationist agenda or racist philosophy was to his candidacy, it was summarily the reason he failed the ethical sniff test America and the Republican Party have defacto initiated. But it is Barack Obama today who is the charismatic who invokes the implicit racial messages Americans most want to see expressed. We want to show and prove that an African American can be elected President., and we want that to be our enduring symbol of race in America. This is not new. America wanted it for Colin Powell as well. And the next highly outstanding African American who considers the job will be two or three times removed from 'first black'. All things considered, the trend is positive.
Those who agitate vigorously against racial impropriety have found themselves uncomfortably overwhelmed by a surfeit of common sense on racial progress. Instead of exhorting and excoriating intransigent majorities, as was the case when Bob Herbert was young, they must go further into nooks and crannies of America, and back through time in order to find examples that justify their exclamations. And even now it has to be a part-time profession toted to the front on MLK day, as if neo-confederates only care about their battle flag a few days of the year.
So Herbert's history lesson may be useful. We have come to the moment in the sun at which point 'toxic layers of bigotry' are all we have to contend with, and we go to the ends of American society to flush them out for public shame and humiliation. Herbert does so at the paper of record with all the combative metaphors at his disposal as well as a well-trained audience who condescend appropriately. Mister Tibbs would be proud. I am not under any illusion that history does not ebb and flow which is why the moment is celebrated for what it is, where we can reminisce about the bad old days and still find living remnants of the decadent society that was. I'd say that's a pretty good battle for a man Herbert's age.
We often speculate about what King would be doing right about now, had he lived so long. For one, it's rather a good think King himself who would be 79 this year was spared this petty level of oration taken up by time-travelers and trekkers to American backwaters. But I think he'd be doing rather the same thing as Elie Weisel who is the same age. And since there would be no King holiday, he'd probably be playing second fiddle to Weisel on the lecture circuit on his way towards the obscurity of Tutu and Solzhenitsyn. Still, it would be nice to see Dr King throwing verbal harpoons at today's mediocre moralizers. It would be pleasant to see him having written books and gaining some endowed chair at Harvard - no doubt he would have gotten there before West and Gates. It would have been great to see him embraced by Mandela, writing the preface to Roots, hanging out with Oprah, giving Abernathy his props and media attention, praying over the disgraced mayor of Washington, holding Harold Washington's mayoral hand high. Yes, he would have been at the top of any number of notable agendas and thus devalued by familiarity.
But I think of all possible outcomes, Dr King would be most like who Dr James Cone and Dr John Hope Franklin are today. Exactly.
I lost a lot of dogs as a kid. We were roughnecks and played street football. So it was a common occurrence for us to know kids that got hit by cars and even more that dogs got hit by cars. We grew up in the pre-airbag society.
Nubbin got a hernia in a dog fight. Shaka got run over by the number nine bus. My mother took some of our dogs and even more puppies to the pound. She had no patience for dog mess, even in parts of the backyard she never visited. We did a lot of crying as kids, and knowing a lot of ghetto dogs - many with the dispositions of junkyard bitches, somehow the death of dogs has never smacked me in the gut as an adult.
I can remember walking down 7th Avenue in Park Slope back in '92 when I first saw Iams. I was so impressed by the packaging that I became convinced that I could eat the stuff, and being an organic, started down the road to being the kind of callous crank I am today. How could people have dog walkers? We lived on Cragmont pop and Springfield Corn Flakes. My dogs never ate Dr. Ross or Alpo, they got one can of 10 cent plainwrap dog food on the daily.
I like Cesar Milan and though I haven't watched him on the regular for about a year, I like his attitude for what it was. He helped people understand animal things, like what dominance means. So I always wonder if people who baby their animals or who actually love them are indulging human feelings rather than animal instincts. You know the old expression - the more people I meet, the more I love my dogs. That's devolution. Dogs in their social role, I think, should remind us of base instincts. At the very least the expression 'die like a dog' should remind us of the distance between civil men and dumb animals. And so dogs should continue to die like dogs whereas humans never should. Every inch of respect that goes to dogs, I think comes out of our respect for humanity. Dog health care? Dog diets? I can't do it.
I have a lot of 'hood feelings associated with dogs. I never understood how there could be such a thing as an 'inside dog'. It never seemed right to me. The right dog always seem to me do be a hunting dog, a mountain hiking dog, a dog that chased cats, not a dog that would roll over or shake hands. The perfect dog to me was a police dog, a trained German Shepherd. As kids, we always made the distinction between an ordinary German Shepherd and a police dog. A fierce, large dog that obeyed its master. A dog that could pull you out of a rushing stream if you had a broken leg. A dog who never barked at night unless the threat was real. Balto. Rin Tin Tin. White Fang. A noble dog.
I couldn't understand how the President of the United States could have a dog like Checkers. It stood in complete contrast to what I expected the First Dog to be. There was something wrong with Nixon, I knew that. Sure Snoopy was cool, but mostly when he was chasing down the Red Baron. Lassie? No, I'd rather have Flipper.
A dog to me was like a horse, a working companion in whose character yours was reflected as a boy and as a man. To train a dog, to tame a horse, these were fundamentals of American boyhood. See me? I've got a pair of jeans on, a t-shirt, a ball cap and a walking stick. There's a bunch of marbles in my front pocket and a slingshot hanging out my back. That there beside me is Rusty. Or Bullet or Spike, or King. We're both tough, big pawed and dirty. I'm squinting at the camera and I'm an American kid. Now we're taking off running somewhere at full speed in a cloud of dust.
It has been more than 20 years since I've had a dog. I think about it from time to time. What kind I should get - what's right for my personality. I don't know if I'm capable of thinking about life with a dog as an adult. Amy at work has one. A little tiny one, smaller than a football. It's got the nerve to bark and somehow it just doesn't register as a dog in my heart. Cognitively I know it, I recognize the motions and behaviors. I know how it plays, how it explores, what its emotions are. I know dog. I am drawn to its dogness, repelled by its tiny stature, its irresistible cuteness. I want to give it to my 10 year old daughter, the one who loves the planet. I want to see how far I could kick it. I refuse to let it lick my face. I'd rather have a cat.
I'm a dog wrestler. I like dogs who can pull me on a skateboard. I like the dog who leaps to attention at the sound. I hate dumb dogs, unless they are big old lazy dumb dogs.
Beck bit me straight on the nose when I stuck my face in the hole in the fence. Some crazy dog bit my ankle as I rode my dirtbike through the alley over near Dorsey High School. I couldn't say anything about Beck, I was just being stupid because everybody knew Beck hated everything and everyone. Still, he didn't bite Rabo and I couldn't let Rabo outdo me. But I was mad as hell about that other dog. If his owner hadn't come out all apologetic I would have gone back and beat the shit out of it. I think it was T. Boyle who wrote the story about the kid whose father forced him to kill a vicious bulldog with his bare hands as a right of passage. I always thought that was cruel fathering, but some dogs deserve to die.
M is all broken up.
Her dog went nutty in old age, was too cantankerous to be sheltered by any of the new age pounds, and had to be put down. I wondered if she might have been spared some grief if he had simply wandered off. We lost dogs. We put up signs. Nobody called. I think that if I had a dog so close to me that had to die I might want to hire somebody to walk it over a slow rising hill into the sunset. But there's no good way to lose a dog.
Buster took a rattlesnake bite in the face for Pops on a hiking trail on the way to Josephine Peak. The dog's head swelled up like a watermelon. Buster almost died but did not. It would have been a heroic way to go out, the perfect death for a dog I think. Dogs are faithful companions, always at the ready, reminding us in their own doggy way how human we are. We attach narratives to their ways which tell us who we are, and in no greater way than when they die. I'm tempted to say that every dog's death diminishes me but I know better.
Eastern Promises is a dreary film about a depressing set of circumstances that befall a young female doctor when she delivers a baby from a 14 year old girl who dies on the operating table. The diary of the mother leads this doctor to a Russian crime family. The story takes place in London.
It is a Cronenberg film with eerie implications underlying many scenes. It is rather uniquely lit with many night scenes given a small touch of warmth in cold, damp surroundings. The actors do very good deadpan and all the joy in the film is strangely staged, as if every character, save the doctor, lives in well-adjusted fear of the truth. It comprises a cold calculation of modern society where few can afford to be innocent of life and death.
About halfway through, I thought, what a depressing movie. From the very beginning, I thought it was filmed in Prague. It's claustrophobic enough to make one think so for a time - very focused on the characters and not the times. Even as the plot worked its way into somewhat predictable twists, I couldn't think any goodness could come of it, nor much entertainment for me. And yet Eastern Promises inexorably delivered a bit of hope and concluded on that up note while the deception of the entire modern world continues.
It's a good movie to watch if you are drunk and wish to watch other drunks, or if you believe in pluck. There's a decent enough surprise in the middle as well as some very ugly knife fighting. Dark, sad, tragic with a baby's chance.
I propose the following psychological misdirection. "Blacks will overcome as a people".
I began to think about this last week, and the origins of the idea are a bit deeper still. Not long ago I began to suspect sociology. I have a problem with sociology in that I wonder if its analyses can ever be disassociated from socialist government intervention. I wonder if the politics of viewing the quality of life of people can be divorced from the appeal of programmatic solutions. And thusly I wonder if black politics itself can ever be driven from any other sort of appeal.
Obviously, I have a beef with statisticalmorality. There is something fundamentally slanted about the use of sociological observations which drive inquiries into the ways blackfolks live. My beef goes way back to 'Angry White Math' and was supported by Ellis Cose' argument about black responsibility in his Rage of a Privileged Class.
So the other day I put together four answer videos for a young guy named Chris who has got the fever for black unity. Unfortunately only one of the recordings worked, and I rather rushed through it so as to get it under the ten minute rule of YouTube. It's here:
It occurred to me that I might put together a new version of a Black Mental Liberation radio show. I'm rather convinced that Afronerd might be up for such an endeavor. That would be to disabuse folks of the political fantasies anchored on the prospects for black social and political unity towards the purposes of economic uplift. I certainly don't want to give folks the impression that economic uplift is a bad idea or that there is something fundamentally wrong with black self-love, but I would like to save people the grief of trying to get a grip on the politics of unity. I do so especially because I keep coming back to its failures and the anguish it puts folks through, as well as the lies that quest supports.
But the trope that has got my attention now is the idea that DuBois, MLK and Booker T all had a common fantasy in mind which was that the improvement of the Negro would ultimately be a group endeavor and that it would not involve war.
I start with the Frayser Conjecture which is this. Nobody took Japan seriously and there was probably no greater racial animus sustained by America than that against the 'Jap'. It wasn't until the Japanese started killing white Americans that white Americans began to respect them. Now we're great friends. There are a number of shortcuts in this conjecture but it does stand to reason. I once wrote:
All I've been saying, for years now, is that the reason black
politics is stagnant is because they girded up for war and got peace,
and now all they know is the rhetoric of conflict, but not the
subtleties of social power. Today, all black partisans can do is yelp
about the past and injustices that they have no intention of dealing
with, not only because they lack the capability of bringing their foes
to heel, but primarily because they are incapable of rallying any
significant black majorities or non-black coalitions to their cause. If
the cause of African Americans were so desperate, it would be
recognized as such by human beings everywhere. But it cannot be sold
because the situation is not dire.
So the question facing black politics is whether it can survive the change.
There is no revolution to be had. There are no black politics of
war. There are only black bourgie complaints which are insufficient to
arise any passions save those whose stock in trade is bamboozlement.
There are no black soldiers. There is no black war. There are only
black politicians on black soapboxes praying for both.
But there is no war to be had, really. There is only a kind of self-defeating anger and subversion, a low level roar that distracts many African Americans from participation in their elevation within the nation. Elevation is, of course, a relative value. Nobody's soul is going to be blemished because they do not rise in society so long as they don't corrupt themselves. But it seems to me that it is ultimately a kind of vain self-sacrifice to don the garb of righteousness and make oneself a foil for the entire nation. Surely MLK was able to do it once upon a time, but I'm afraid those are the wrong footsteps.
If anyone asked me, prior to about 20 years ago what MLKs greatest flaw was, I'd wonder where they were coming from. What a strange question to ask. But having read Malcolm X, I discovered the answer. King mistook non-violence as a tactic for non-violence as a strategy. Indeed, James Farmer's now immortalized paen to civil disobedience in a theatre near you makes it clear that the human choice always includes violence. One wonders if the damage to black humanity done by slavery has dehumanized a fraction of us to the point of the inability to grasp the scope of human choice.
So it seems to me that the question me must be asking ourselves at this particular moment in history is not whether or not Dr King's Dream is proceeding apace, but whether or not Americans are experiencing the presence of justice and securing the blessings of liberty. The eyes have been on small prizes, namely ethnic voting blocs, for too long. This focus has dominated and inverted political priorities - it has always given scheming campaigners and pollsters and pundits opportunities to be clever. "What do you people want?" should never be a question with any currency to students of human nature. And it should never be answered by anyone claiming to be an authority on the African American experience. To play that game is to enter a hall of mirrors where blackness echoes and it ultimately divorces the perception of the needs and desires of a caste from that of humanity.
There is no separate destiny for Americans. We are a nation. We are united states.
This iPod Touch that I've gotten is actually changing my life. It is making me think about how I spend my time, and that is because it has freed up a substantial amount.
I am no longer in the CD burning business, and my iTunes playlists can now be larger than 13 or 14 songs. I just bring my Touch to the Transporter and plug it in. There's nothing quite like having 98 different De La Soul songs immediately at your fingertips. I am no longer using the Treo for its Treo-ness. And I think I am realizing of how little use carrying around 6500 contacts are as compared to 12 short films and 500 photographs.
To all you Mac people. I apologize. I get it. Finally.
The most important thing our computers do for us is keep rich media handy. But they never really have, until now. The simple idea of having notes handy is good. I have a list of things to get at the store, my list of favorite wines, exactly which Indian dishes I actually like on the rare occasions I eat Indian. But that's just the beginning. I'd much rather have clips from movies that help me explain things I'm always eager to explain, like what surface computing ought to look like (The Island). Or my son playing volleyball, or my daughter explaining her concept of the Universe.
All this is not in a database. It's the way I've organized my own mind, which is richer in links, and besides I already know my own keywords. I've been writing a blog for five years and they're all here. All of my blogs, I'll have and then some. I'll have my history just as soon as I can get the right editing tools to convert what needs converting.
I've been down the Apple path before, but now that it's Unix and Intel based, I'm a great deal more confident in it. For my own home, I'm glad all of the non-industrial goofiness of the Apple of the 90s appears to be gone. User friendly is one thing, user stupid I cannot abide. I'd much rather have something inelegant and complicated that is robust and powerful than something designed for my ease which accomplishes little. While I expect to keep my Wintel boxen around, it will be pleasant to keep my media in Apple.
But what brings me to this break is the fact that now podcasts are genuinely useful and interesting to me now, despite the fact that I might have used them with my Treo. But the ease of browing iTunes has led me to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, and I'm enjoying it immensely. I am pleased to find that History has the same effect on him as it does on me - it liberates me from the tyranny of the present and gives me friends through time who consider those things I do - or have acted in such a way as to provide and example to me the lightens my burden.
I started this last year for the first time with Dr. Larry Arnn provided through Hugh Hewitt and continued through 2007 to add a little Shakespeare to my DVD collection. The greatest of these classics I have found in 'A Man for All Seasons'. And while I still got my fill of action and adventure, I did manage to keep a mature balance. Still it must be said that the new executive gig took over my mind and gave me relatively little respite for undertaking a heavier diet of serious reading. But one consistency has become my dissatisfaction for the arcanities of programming and configuring systems which suits my new admiration for the Mac just fine. Maybe, perhaps just maybe I'm beginning to age well.
So this morning I've downloaded and listened to two audio chapters from Plato's Republic which I have found very entertaining. It prompted me to take a long walk just listening.
In Carlin, especially in his descriptions of WW1 and of the life of Churchill, I am finding the perfect companion for my mind which has become weary of the horse race punditry of this election season. I have gotten only a small bit of consolation in being a Conservative by adjusting my level of concern for the inevitable winner of this contest by noting what little difference it should ultimately mean for one who cares little for government such as I should be. And yet it is tiresome to hear the fever of ordinarily calm men when they describe the faults of the candidates they oppose. Whatever government we get might be just wrong, or wrongish. While I retain some of my humor, I cannot find pleasure in perverse irony and snark. I cannot manage to take it all lightly. And so the rescue of historical perspective is welcome.
I'd also welcome some catalogue of books worthy of my attention. Histories, I'd imagine. But nothing from the iTunes catalog seems to be anything less than fabulous. Howard Zinn and Thomas Friedman dominate the charts, and even though I'd like Imperial Grunts by Kaplan, it's still just a little bit too close. Perhaps it's time to revisit UCLA.
In either case, I'm bound to change the way I think this year by spending more time communicating visually and more time reading the classics (or having them read to me by professionals). I will be rearranging my mind.
There are moments in my life when I go off on tangents and let my mind wander. I'm in one such moment now. Interestingly, at this particular moment I haven't wandered much. I got a short burst of creativity and made a half dozen comics and then I crashed back to practicality.
One of the reasons I think this way, and write this way can be attributed to a brief and friendly encounter with Kevin Brooks from MIT. At that particular moment in my life, circa 1993, I was deeply considering multimedia possibilities. I was a bit fed up with the poetry performance scene and looked to digitize the kinds of narratives that I found lacking in what we now call derisively the 'mainstream media'.
Kevin Brooks was all over that and I knew it within 20 minutes of meeting him:
My academic research evolved over the years into the area new media.
I wanted to synthesize a dream out
of fragments of memory, pieces of beliefs, sections of personal
mythology and theology, and parts of me which I delight in discovering
anew. It represents a period of my life during which I irreversibly
changed, evolved, improved and deteriorated - all at the same
time. But such is the life of a storyteller.
As an undergraduate and masters student I studied traditional linear written
and cinematic narrative. The bulk of my doctoral work focused on non-linear
narrative and evolved into what I eventually referred
to as metalinear story systems. My major research project,
entitled Agent
Stories, is a story design and presentation environment
for metalinear, multiple point-of-view cinematic stories. A metalinear narrative
is a collection of small related story pieces designed to be arranged in many
different ways, to
tell many different linear stories from different points of view, with the aid
of
a story
engine which sequences the story pieces. Thus, a metalinear story is not
one story, but a a collection – a community of stories designed to be recombined
from
different
points of view. The
Agent
Stories
research
endeavored
to
find
new
ways
in
which computational processes can assist in the development and presentation
of stories
and how user input can feed into these processes. Designed
for the writer interested in building stories of multi-variant
cinematic playout, the Agent Stories tool promoted the structuring
and rewriting of metalinear narratives before and as they are
realized in video and audio. My dissertation entitled Metalinear
Cinematic Narrative: Theory, Process, and Tool, was completed
in May of 1999.
I wrote a paper on the project called Do Agent Stories Use
Rocking Chairs: The Theory and Implementation of One Model for
Computational Narrative (pdf).It is published in the proceedings for ACM
Multimedia '96 and won best student paper.
I have applied to a gig at Google, trying at last to get my ultimate systems built by some sort of collaborative (and I may end up open sourcing some of it) and I found myself in my retrospective speaking about Kevin. I had no idea that I would mention him directly when I began recording this longish video, but he came up in the story.
Check out his site. He has an enormous amount of reference material to the uses of narrative. Very impressive.
Since I'm preparing to follow Apple's implementations of multi-touch with bated breath over the next year, I won't feel guilty about this post in which I ask Steve Jobs what the hell he was thinking inviting Randy Newman to editorialize after his keynote address. I used to think Bootsy Collins was crazy.
It's hard not to be formulaic when it comes to dealing with the plot of Rob Reiner's latest film. Given that, The Bucket List does a pretty good job of riding the wave as far as it needs to go and then cutting into territory that is unusual enough to satisfy sophisticated moviegoers. Notice I said moviegoers. If you still call them movies, and not 'film' or 'cinema', then The Bucket List is for you.
It's a swell entertainment, but it's rather and underpowered script for two such massive actors. Oh sure there's good stuff, a couple belly laughs, several tears and a clever insight or two, but nothing earthshattering. It's rather a film for old folks.
But I liked it too. It's exactly what you expect it to be, and just a tad bit better.
I recorded Blazing Saddles on the Tivo this weekend and then sat down on the couch to watch it after I put the little Bowens down to bed last night. AMC bleeped 'nigger', 'shit' and 'asshole' but it was fairly obvious when they were being used. None of that could stop this movie from being horrendously insipid. It's one of those many 'classic' movies that I still have yet to see. (On the burner are 'The French Connection' and 'Serpico')
One part of me wants to take the opportunity to suggest how obvious it must be that the social standing of blackfolks has risen since the time when Blazing Saddles was made. But I even had a hard time managing the mental gymnastics of putting myself in the frame of mind of guessing what might have been or might not have been appropriate for the time. Some jokes, which dragged on forever were just horrid. OK two black guys are sent out to find quicksand in the railroad right of way. Finding them floating in the muck, the white bosses lasso the handcar out of the pit but not the black guys. Ha ha very funny, about 20 seconds worth of funny, not half of the opening.
I'm aware that Richard Pryor was one of the writers of the script, sharing the credit with three others for this Mel Brooks slapstick vehicle. They should have let him write the whole thing. I'm also aware that there was one scene, between Cleavon Little and some hooker in the dark, where the punchline is "That's my arm", but I simply couldn't hold out that long. The Hanging Ogre? Not funny. The scatterbrain Governor? Not funny. The plotting Attorney General? Not funny. Just stupid, stupid, stoopid.
Mel Brooks. What can I say? His taste for the absurd is really very seventies. It just doesn't work now, and I'm hard pressed to say that it ever did for anybody but a PG13 audience. Why is it that I always think of Blazing Saddles in the same breath as the Kentucky Fried Movie? We know that Zucker went on to make Airplane which became the progenitor of today's full-on movie parody movies. What are we up to now? Date Movie? Scary Movie 5? Meet the Spartans?
Brooks seems to me the useful idiot of the movie industry, rather like Cindy Sheehan in politics. We need complete cut-ups like them to prove without a doubt that we do enjoy free speech. Except you just wish they would say something enduring. In the meanwhile, I'll stick with Monty Python.
Is Dr, King a major deity or merely a stellar figure? If this is a matter of some controversy to you, then I suppose you might be one of the members of the community of folks whose hands are trembling over the latest Obama-Clinton cat fight.
This unbearably shallow debate is the kind of racial shadowboxing that Democrats specialize in. Clearly, Clinton has offended some Civil Rights fashionistas by wearing her King Legacy Pin slightly askew. Obama has made it clear that he recognizes the opportunity for what it is, a chance to say he's more right by not having made any such fashion faux pas.
There's really not much else to it but that, although I imagine many commentators will ride the tangents into the depths of space. There's only one way this can get better, which is if the candidates 'go there'. But of course they won't - they can't. There is no real debate on race because there is no real controversy on race. There is no real racial policy in America, there are only people with good manners and common sense and there are people with bigotry in their hearts and minds. The latter group makes life tedious and outre for the majority of us, and occasionally unbearable for a few of us, but nobody should expect any candidate to do more than hire or fire a few attorneys at the EEOC, and then life goes on. You can bet neither of them will even say anything that specific. Instead we are all to imply that somebody is 'playing a race card' which essentially means nothing.
Now I know that as a black man, I am presumed to be extraordinarily sensitive to any racial impropriety. That's because I am heir to generations of victims and am thus some sort of victim myself. So goes the common wisdom. In America, I have the exclusive privilege to generate some extra measure of sympathy because of this. However, I personally choose not to exercise this privilege although I reserve the right to do anything that I deem appropriate to my character and reputation. For those black men who rise in social prominence in America, we are aware of the tradeoff. All Americans are invested in one way or another to whether or not such a privilege is invoked. Some want to see a certain amount of obeisance to the tradition of complaint as the politics of civil disobedience are invoked. Others want to see a certain amount of disregard to that tradition as demonstrative of a more powerful sort of agency. I make the distinction between the politics of civil rights and those of social power. Nobody should ever give up civil rights, but the agency of establishing and maintaining social power requires different tactics than those most familiar to Americans when they think of black politics, ie sit-ins, marches, and stentorian race baiting rhetoric.
Barack Obama cannot be unaware of this. If anyone wants a clue to understand how he is likely to react, then let this be a clue. He will assert his personal character and reputation according to assumed social power. In other words, he will do exactly what he did in Iowa - he will act presidential. He will not, under any circumstances be pulled in the direction which would intimate any extraordinary sensitivity or victim status. He will be a wall, and anyone thinking they can prick him into flinching will find their strategies backfiring. But such pricking, should it continue, will be met by a clench-jawed fury. Think Denzel Washington in 'Man on Fire'.
This is what I know about my generation of black men of substance. It applies to Obama in a particularly unique way because he does inherit another privilege of the common American wisdom. That is, as a black man with power in the Democrat Party, he has no explaining to do. As a Senator for Illinois, it is likely that he got more black votes to get him in office than did Michael Steele in Maryland as Lt. Governor, but not many more. Nevertheless it is presumed that simply because he is a Democrat he is the de facto leader of the black electorate. Given the chance, blacks would anoint him The One. In some ways, he walks in the shoes of Ron Brown, except that Obama is that much further along the curve, a cabinet post could be considered beneath him in America's mind. Any black Republican in an equivalent elected position would would have more explaining to do, although by the very same token of social power, they generally have not.
Aside from all that, an Obama Clinton catfight is entertaining for this Republican, and I'm hoping it becomes more vicious as time goes on. So here's to hoping they stop clawing and pull out more dangerous weapons that cut deeper into fleshy issues. There will be blood, I hope Obama doesn't get too much on his suits.
This has got to be one of the purest and simplest sword and sorcery movies I've ever seen. It's got a great balance of non-epic cheese, completely reasonable plot, unseriously fine acting and action, action, action. It's got ugly beastial hordes commanded by an evil wizard, man-hating tree nymphs with amazonian skills, flaming arrows, a wise and dying king, a reluctant hero, a scheming prince, a headstrong daughter who can fight. It's even got ninjas.
Everything, everything everything you want in a feel-good, non-self-important movie you get in this one. Pure fun. Great casting. Just do it.
Several weeks ago, I challenged the Field Negro blog to find racist supporters of the Republican Party in the blogosphere. It didn't go very well. Only one or two people bit my provocative worm. I was fishing for a blogswarm and also chastising FN folks for being asleep at the wheel. These days I'll think better of engaging the 'sphere on any level.
In the days and weeks that have followed, however, several of the blogs I read and those within a degree of separation have boiled over on the candidacy of Ron Paul. I think he's a crackpot for a number of reasons and first sniffed out something fishy months ago. But, like most people who are not cicada-like on politics, I ignored his appeals. Now it is pretty much a matter of blogified record that Paul doesn't seem to mind at all the company of Neo-Confederates. That of all the candidates from either party in this presidential race, it is Ron Paul who gets the dubious distinction of being the most probable racist of the bunch.
It's an interesting set of circumstances. Paul, through all this, tends to not disassociate and so therefore some of the racist stink attaches to him. On the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that Paul is of the same mind, right thinking Republicans must be of him, which is that such associations are too unimportant to matter. In other words his attitude towards the real racists in his constituency are that they are such a small fraction that it's not worth it to diss them. And my attitude in July was that Paul was such a small candidate that it wasn't worth it to concern myself that he might have a racist agenda. Similarly, I take it that the Field Negro took my challenge to be so obdurate that for whatever racism they might find it wasn't worth it to march under my banner.
So there you have a bunch of more or less reasonable people not finding it worth the trouble to suss out racists in the Republican Party. Is this as deep as it gets?
My answer is, oddly, yes. In this country, symbols of racism are more important than 'real' racism. That is because some broadly assume that the truly ugly stuff is suppressed in the media and every Shaquanda Cotton is only the tip of the iceberg. Some others assume that Cotton is the entire Atlantic Ocean of racism and there is nothing else to see. I'm somewhere in the middle, but only looking through a telescope in Hawaii.
It seems as only the obsessives are going to be on the case 24/7 meaning Sharpton.com. agggregator of all virtual racism with no brick and mortar offices anywhere in America. And since symbols will be endlessly manipulated, that makes things all the more dangerous, especially for real victims of first class racism who will not get the support and defense they deserve while media hogs suck up the oxygen and people pose for pictures. It also adds to the wishful thinking about the candidacy of Barack Obama, because all of us are secretly or openly hoping that his success will fundamentally change the nature of the symbolic medal count in the Olympics of racial tea leaf reading.
if indeed there is a Bradley Effect, then the direct opposite of it must also be in operation which is the Magic Negro Effect. Some people will claim to vote for Obama to prove they are not racist when they actually vote for someone else. That would be the Bradley Effect. But is the opposite any better? Clearly some people will actually vote for Obama thinking that actually proves they are not and America is not racist. You'll hear it 40 years from now like "I marched with Dr. King", I voted for Obama. Alternatively, it was my party that floated Obama. One way or the other, it's still tokenism. It's still manipulation of a symbol that has very little to do with actual anti-racist combat.
I know that nobody is going to investigate Obama supporters to determine if they are only voting for them because he's black. It's ridiculous on its face, despite the fact that the common wisdom is that he's going to sweep North Carolina. Blackfolks don't vote for candidates simply because they're black, nor do whitefolks. Racial determinism in electioneering is overblown despite the numbers of real bigots in the electorate and their dog-whistle politics.
One of these days, like maybe never, I'm going to get over my lament on the failure of anti-racist politics. Only because I have spent so much time of my own focused on its perfection. I could have been a much better bass guitar player by now, but something down within me thought the world was hostile to the funk. That something, as small as it may be, is always a factor albeit small. We all have our racial insecurities and they always influence us in some way. But when it comes to real work dedicated to identify, isolate and put insidious influence on the spot, the overwhelming majority of us take a pass or wish somebody else would do it, or blame somebody else. It is our luxury to have such ease due to an infrastructural improvement provided by heavy lifting done by a prior generation. I'm perfectly happy to debate Bradley Effects and Magic Negro bounces in the blogosphere. Sure beats working.
Hugh Hewitt has gone from blameless to shameless in 2 years flat. It's hard for me to imagine that I've been listening to him for that long, but that's about right. Hewitt's head is about 180 centimeters up Mitt Romney's anal orifice, and disappearing fast.
I know that I have been terribly unfair to Mitt Romney. There is basically nothing I like about the man, except his rhetoric on policy. But then only when I read it, never when I hear it coming out of his piehole. He hasn't said the thing, he hasn't pounded the fist, he hasn't made the gesture. He's a suit. Not an empty suit, just a suit. I can't figure out a way to like him.
And yet Hewitt is talking about him as if there were no way the Party could survive unless Planet GOP starts revolving around Romney's star. He can't stand McCain, over the bleating protestations of Michael Medved, who makes sterling points about dragging up old stuff that people with more intellectual bandwidth than a squirrel shouldn't nitpick. So today Hewitt drags in Santorum to crap all over McCain on immigration.
Hewitt freaking out is just another symptom of the deeper problem Republicans have, which is the death of the significance of Karl Rove. There is no other political master operative and the GOP is out of ideas with regard to how they can keep all the big tent poles standing. Everyone, it seems, is dumbstruck by the fact that there is no Reagan. There is no 'true' conservative to the rescue. Instead the are lame-duck hacks who led by strongarm, not by inspiration. The fact the Republican Party is suffering from a complete lack of personality is echoed every day by Republicans everywhere who find something admirable to say about the true charisma of Barack Obama. It's undeniable. None of us Republicans are madly in love with any of our candidates. There are only the Ron Paul obsessives. The rest of us are holding out for a hero who simply doesn't exist.
The Hewitt freak out, and by extension the Republican freak out is going to remain the status quo until one of these guys gets inspirational. It ain't likely, but stranger things have happened. What are the chances that Hillary Clinton will do something to finally appear charming and sympathetic? That's about the same chance as we have of finding another Gipper.
So really the best thing that can happen on the Right is that the gloves come off and Rudy, Fred, John and Mike start cracking on each other and the fur flies. It's something we'll respond to. But better yet, it will give these stiffs some life. It's easy to know we cannot stand Hillary, it's harder to know what we won't allow McCain to stand for. But Romney has to instigate it. He can't be afraid of somebody wagging about 'negative campaing ads'. That's what politics is all about, bashing your opponent and then bludgeoning him into submission such that the public loses all confidence in him. None of the GOP has really even gone after Ron Paul.
Recent Comments