Cobb

A Few Notes on the GDZs

Not long ago, as I stood among some of the men I grew up with, including Steve Butler, I got encouragement that I may end up being the man to write whatever gets written about our cohort - The People of the Dons, The Babeless Crew, and GDZ Productions. It's a bit of a hairy predicament but I'll leave those fears aside and put in another brief installment. I do so at this particular moment because a Wombat asked me to, and plus I think it's a good moment post-Obama acceptance to look a bit closer at my generation of post-Civil Rights black men and women of moderate privilege.

GDZ stands for geographically desirable zipcode, and I think that I have to give props to a man I'll call Slim. Slim was a founding member of The Babeless Crew and we were a dozen or so young black professional men making our living in the South Bay of Los Angeles County during the 80s and enjoying the rich social scene. Slim was notoriously frugal and he had checked out all of the happy hours and scientifically determined which one gave the most food for the lowest prices. But when we weren't bargain hunting for free beer and hot babeage, our default hangout was The Golden Tale, a bar and nightclub in El Segundo on the bottom floor of a 15 story office building which was the headquarters for Xerox Systems Group. El Segundo was and remains a hub of aerospace and military contractors, Xerox, Hughes, Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, Aerospace, TRW and all the others. Most of the Crew worked in that area. The South Bay included the cities of El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Palos Verdes and Torrance - some of the hottest property in the country, not to mention the home of surfers and the beach volleyball capital of the world. Some of us grew up there, most of us were transplants, but a good number of us grew up in close proximity.

The Dons were and are a part of what has consistently been, since the 1960s, one of the most affluent concentrations of African Americans. That section of Southwest Los Angeles, home to several distinct black neighborhoods including the Dons has never had one overarching name, but 'Crenshaw' has come closest to that. Ladera, West Adams, View Park, Baldwin Hills, Leimert Park, The Dons, Ladera Heights, Morningside Park, The Jungle, The Village Green, Blair Hills, Jefferson Park all are part of a large area that has been a dynamic network of poor, middleclass and rich blacks for many years. There are churches, schools, streets, restaurants, clubs and people who form a rich tapestry of imagination defining the commonalities and the differences between hundreds of thousands of blackfolks who were and always have been more than just 'the black community'. Most of the Babeless Crew were from or near the Dons, one of the nicer neighborhoods.

I grew up in the area now called Jefferson Park in a residential neighborhood marked by large front and backyards, fruit trees and streets with names like Victoria, Somerset and Buckingham. When we first moved in around 1964, there were still a few whitefolks remaining. The elementary school, Virginia Road, was the main attraction - its principal Mrs. Edna Cohen was a prominent leader of that august organization known as The Links. Like most blackifying neighborhoods on the verge of their racial tipping points, black families were the first to own the houses and only certain companies would provide mortgages. The Lomas & Nettleton handled our three bedroom, two car garage house for $177 a month in 1966. Prior to that we rented a small apartment upstairs from the Martins one of the first black property owners on our street. Mr. Pickett owned three of the two story fourplex apartment buildings on our block. He was a slick haired man who drove a Cadillac and seemed meaner than he probably was. We couldn't wait to hang out on the slick surface of the red stoop he repainted every year to a slippery gloss.

Like most blackfolks, I looked up to the neighborhoods of View Park and Baldwin Hills with awe and pride. I could pick out Ray Charles' house on the days Pops would find some reason to drive through that way. Our friend Alan Ward still lives up that way as do many other families. If you were black in Los Angeles, it was always assumed that the ambitious would end up in that fine area. I'm sure Mr. Pickett lived up that way too, as did many of the owners of apartment buildings in Leimert Park. In LA, there were only one or two other places considered nicer for blacks to live, one was Beverly Hills and the other was Fremont Park. Muhammad Ali lived in Fremont Park, so you can figure how out of the question that was for most of us. So when I arrived finally at Loyola High and discovered other young black men as exceptional as I thought I was, it came as no surprise that a goodly percent were from those neighborhoods.

As my liberties increased, and when I finally got my own car, I found myself enjoying the social company of the black crowd from the hills. Jefferson Park was no ghetto, but it was no suburb either. It was the kind of neighborhood like Brooklyn was often romanticized by New York Jews as a mecca of stickball, open hydrants and city gardens, where kids play pick up sports all summer and where putting up your dukes was an occasional requirement. Those requirements had not escalated much until the invention of crack, but while I was still in my teens, there were sophisticated attractions to the Dons, not least of which were the ladies. So you might catch me as rowdy as Ice Cube and dusty as Spartacus on a summer afternoon of swimming and doing flipflops at Dorsey Pool, now walking home on the railroad tracks on Exposition Boulevard. But on Sunday morning at Church of the Advent, or Saturday night at a house party on Olympiad, I was as smooth as Billy Dee - no scratch that, make that Clifton Davis.

Eventually by the time I was done with college and decided where I would live, the South Bay became home. Of course there were challenges. Back in the pre-Cosby 80s, young black urban professionals were largely unknown to the public, and to police. If you were fortunate enough not to get the runaround from racist landlords and actually get an apartment near the beach, it took about six or seven traffic stops for the cops to finally figure out that you were one of the black people that belongs, sorta. I and my compatriots established ourselves firmly through a series of GDZ events including our beach parties which became semi-legendary in black LA social history.

There is a buried history of a generation growing up in an expanding social world of crossover and black pride, of conflict and contrast between rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, predator and prey, radical and conservative in black Los Angeles. But like many things in Los Angeles' great sprawl, it was marked by the lines of streets and territories, some geographically desirable and some geographically undesirable. This is part of my life story. It happened somewhere between the GU and the GDZs.

Burma, Sudan & Zimbabwe

Listen to John McCain all the way until he gets to Burma, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Unless you listen this long, you don't get it. OK, wait until he talks about excluding Russia from the G8 and including India and Brazil. The man is on it. Watch the whole thing. Well, up until the political ads.

In the Barbershop Today

Today's show was pretty fun and interesting. I said pretty much everything I wanted to. Any comments on the show?

From Hamer to Obama

I'm going to grab a big chunk of text whole hog from another blog. I'd like to use it to illustrate something that I've been saying for a long time. There is no turning back on the Civil Rights Movement, and black Americans have further solidified their positive social capital. After Obama's acceptance speech my father sent an email entitled: HNIC. His translation: He nailed it completely. For African Americans there is that double-entendre and extra measure of pride. I share in the acknowledgement that Obama's triumph is yet another high water mark for the progress Americans of color have been making in our self-determination for many generations.

At this moment, Barack Obama's nomination and moderate acceptance speech will inherit a place in American history, we can point to the enormity of the strides made by our generation whose parents were those of Fannie Lou Hamer's. It is more than audacity and it is more than hope. It is strength, courage and wisdom taken from the few and taken up by the many.

Mary Dudziak chronicles the testimony of Hamer to Democrats in '64 back when I was three years old, and makes some observations about today vs yesterday. Indeed we can be seen as a nation of whiners as compared to what Hamer went through.

To Dudziak's editorializing about post-racial politics. I think it is a bad name and a bad idea. There is no, and there will be no post-racial politics unless and until people actually forget what race means and we lose the ability to pass racial consciousness to our children. That's bloody unlikely for another 200 years. Race has its appeal and it is for us who recognize the errors and sins or racial prejudices and the temptations of racial identity to employ our moral energies to disable it as we encounter it. There will not be some golden day, it will always be disciplined work. Yet we are fortunate to know that for so many Americans it is an ingrained habit of discipline. Toto, I don't think we're in Jim Crow Mississippi any more.

The following is from Mary Dudziak at Balkanization:

McCain Palin: Open Thread

Palin as in Payday

Wow. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Let's get into it.

The first thing I thought was, OK it's just a rumor. I was driving home this morning from my latest NPR radio show that needed me to be there at 6:30am. The bottom line was this. If Obama hadn't done what he had done, which is pick Biden and come across totally moderate last night, Palin would have made a lot less sense that she does today.

Everybody on the Right loves Palin. She has no negatives, really, except the obvious which is that she is a woman - answer to Obama as minority. But let me go back to the other things I was thinking.

Last night I was thinking Ridge, just like I said, without realizing that he was pro-choice. So I went through the mental exercise of excusing that nit that went something like this. Tom Ridge may be pro-choice but he is not the VP of abortion, he works for the President and nobody, but nobody is going to invert the McCain ticket. Even with Romney, the strongest possible pick, it will clearly be John McCain in the driver's seat. When McCain said he was fit and ready to work 18 hour days for four years, he wasn't joking. So nobody should think otherwise.

This morning, the Spousal Unit, in a rare moment of head nodding said as she read the NYT headline on Palin's selection, and I quote "Smart. Very smart."

But instead of sit over here and cheerlead, I'm going to give you the full thing as I see it, because suddenly this has become a much more interesting race. First to Obama last night and before...

The one thing that Obama has accomplished, which I had some doubts he might do, is to bury the Clinton machine. By all outward appearances, the Democratic party is now consolidated around a ticket that walks and talks like a reasonably moderate duck. I have a continuing doubt that the back office is gelling, and I think the great thing that Biden gives Obama is the ability to wrangle Congressional Dems to his aid. I think Biden will be calling favors that he uniquely can do and that way gives Obama his own man to now handle the declining power of the Clintons. It's not just the 'gravitas' thing, it's the inside fixer thing. Obama could not get that without compromise from Hillary. As it stands, she was still talking about her loss.

See, Obama has been a surprise to his party. Admittedly, he's not cut from the cloth. He made the point himself - and thus it's not all about him. You have to do that when you're not the man. The coach of a football team can say it's not all about me, but not Brett Favre. It is all about the QB. But that's not Obama's forte or style. He needs Biden as his regent, for about two years, which is about how long it took Washington to deal with the twin tornadoes from Arkansas. Obama was Edwards (and lucky for the party it was Obama and not Edwards), the man just to the right of Kucinich, who deprived both men of the black vote they would have gotten. But nobody thought he would beat Clinton and when you look at the facts of the matter, they are still stunning.

These are the states that Obama lost to Hillary Clinton, and will still have a hard time winning in a general election against John McCain.

California, Florida, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Indiana, Tennessee, Oklahoma.  He split the vote in Connecticut, Texas, Missouri, Alabama. And this 'post-racial' candidate lost American Samoa and Puerto Rico.

So here is a man with a hard road ahead but who has very successfully created an environment where he can be seen as a moderate change agent. This was Obama's finest hour. In my view he has successfuly moderated his image and finally put all of his ducks in line. I think he has demonstrated that he can translate Obama mania into real power within his party. He didn't and he won't make Hillary Clinton shut up about herself, but he has destroyed her momentum. The script worked. Even Al Gore still couldn't shut up about himself eight years later, but he too now is Kerry. Obama is the man and he's got Biden to prove it. (And Biden's mother).

But Obama made some mistakes - omissions that leave a lot of questions unanswered, and to my mind makes clear that his team is nowhere near ready to put any rhetoric out there. The number one issue Obama failed to speak about last night was how on earth he was going to balance the Federal budget or fight the deficit. The number two issue Obama failed to speak about last night was immigration. The number three issue Obama failed to speak about was Congress' role in the problems that face America. The final big issue he overlooked was to have any soundbite that would characterize his foreign policy. Sure it pays for Democrats to see the world as a creation of the Bushies, but Democrats weren't the only people in the world watching Denver last night. Obama comes across as seeking national unity, a reasonable goal for someone determined, if not desparate, to show that he can lead.

Now it's time to talk about McCain and Palin. Because what makes sense to me is how McCain's choice of Palin stacks up against what Obama has to deal with considering his current lack of consolidation of Democratic power.

What is Palin? Palin is an outsider in an outlaw state. The state that wants to drill for oil over the objection of Washington based environmental lobbies. Palin is a working mother of five. Five! Palin is pro-life who gave birth to a Downs Syndrome child by choice. Palin is a cost-cutting reformer who spurns the perks of office. Palin plays hardball on immigration. Palin's oldest son is heading to Iraq.

What does this say about John McCain? It says that when he comes to the Washington agenda, his VP in the Congress is going to take no excuses for fiscal conservatism. McCain always had the upper hand when talking about bi-partisan leadership on legislation, now he has upped the ante. Will Palin be as effective as Biden? Nope. But what's Biden's approval rating? What's Pelosi's?

Palin's following has been out there during the primaries, and they are very enthusiastic. Every time I've seen her, I've nodded. She's a straight shooter, really. But I don't think anybody honestly believed that McCain would take such a chance. The very fact of the surprise is energizing.

Today is a very big day in American politics, and suddenly a lot more interesting to all of us.

Tuesday Fragments

I have been wasting an hour or so since I got up rambling through a number of thoughts which led to some interesting places. All in service of my Barbershop trip tomorrow morning.

Pix
It starts with a photo gallery on Obama from the NYT. I sent a copy of the URL to my daughter who is quite comfy, thank you, with taking 100 photos a day, even if it's just of herself. She's going to make something of that, I think, and is getting better at composition every day.

Drama & Entertainments
I then considered why I've been getting most of my info second-hand on the Denver fracas. Fact is, I'd rather watch the new Don Cheadle movie, speaking of triumphant black men. Instead I watched David Lynch's Dune with Boy. The book itself was one of his summer reading projects, and so now we're enjoying the flick. It's fascinating how so much of it holds together visually despite the level of (now) cheese, and the absurdly bad dialog. Also I'm watching Spartacus for the first time, recovering the name of that oddly familiar tune, and various unsophisticated stereotypes of Rome and Romans. These dramas can at least be entertaining and instructive, but I cannot be entertained by the Democrats, although I've heard good things about Michelle.

A New Paradigm of Political Speech
Still, it was Kucinich that got my goat up, but we hashed through that mash yesterday. I'll certainly watch and read Obama's speech today. I'm certain it will be a magic moment. Speaking of which, I've always thought, though never said, that his stadium address is an excellent idea, and I think it is perfectly in keeping with an age old tradition. We all could use more of that, epic sized events that are more than just entertainments. If the trend in megachurches was right, why should preachers have all the fun? I expect that the occasion will be wonderful, but I also expect that we will learn nothing worth turning a decision, as has been the case all week thus far. Obama would do well to stay very, very large and speak a good distance away from hot button issues and policy. This must be his finest hour. He has the ego for it. What did LaShawn Barber say about Obama's interpretation of Matthew? Let's hope it doesn't sound too socialist, but anything to change the paradigm away from the likes of Chris Matthews and Jon Stewart.

In reviewing what I've said already before I go to the next fragment let me add this new summary observation. Barack Obama has done something fabulous to American politics, which is that he has given us a taste of what is to come. He has broken something that needed breaking (aside from the Clinton stranglehold) which was the expectation of the ordinary. He has done so with forces that still need a lot of explaining because nobody was quite prepared for it. I think that 12 years from now, we will be able to look back and recognize what he started, but now that we're in the middle of it, it all feels odd.

In a way (and this is going to sound crazy, but I mean it in a positive way) Obama is to politics what Janet Jackson has been to pop music. Or maybe he is Michael Jackson and the Janet has yet to come. But when I think of Janet, she made her breakout with Janet in 1993. Obama is still at Rhythm Nation, dynamic, forceful, clunky, dependent, corny on the verge of sublime with a beat you cannot forget. Almost but not quite. What Janet finally did in 1993 did was edgy and classy all at once, and no female pop artist has been able to handle that mix ever since - they all crashed and burned. But she changed everything. Obama is changing everything, the pace, the venues, the distribution channels, the center, the style, the attitude. It's not Obama's world, but you can see it spinning in the direction he is defining.

I was at the LA Coliseum when Nelson Mandela came to speak. Mandela never did a thing in American politics - he never handled the reins of power, but he filled that stadium in June of 1990. I kept the red black and green black power flag I got on that day for many years. I cannot remember what he said there, and of course nothing that he did made any difference in the affairs of Americans, but it was nevertheless a very powerful affair. We remember how he made us feel, what he inspired in us.

It doesn't take much imagination to see that Obama is an inspiration to millions of Americans, but we have no purchase on the content of their dreams, and I suspect that Obama himself is no more clued in than any of us. His ambition is clear, ours are our own. I have no doubts that the machinations of the Democrat party will limit, as would the office of President were he to achieve that, will limit what dreams can be made possible. The business of running the Executive Branch is a discipline that owns its driver, especially a government this size. We don't need the kind of catastrophe that loosens any grip on that discipline and lets imagination loose - well, Leftist imagination. So what I'm saying is that while I can appreciate the sort of conversation we are having as it evolves out of the tired old mainstream media's structure and rhythm, as practical matter I cannot and will not vote in favor of the one who represents the sort of change Obama has given us to consider. Would that he were the one to make our government as nimble as he himself has been.

So I take consolation in the pace and dimensions of the new political conversation despite its old harangues and misrepresentations a la Kucinich.

Obama Like Who
Someone asked who Obama was most like between Jack Kennedy, Jackie Robinson, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and a few others who made no sense at all - Colin Powell and maybe one other. I thought maybe Kennedy but then dismissed the idea because of the huge differences in background. In the end I thought Jimmy Carter because he came out of nowhere and took over before anybody realized what he might do. Carter in the end, thought wrong. He was an engineer who though he might be able to control all sorts of things, but a nation is too stochastic to engineer - you have to leave it be. How ironic that the man who at his highest point of credibility, when he calmed the nation's fears over the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, left as a legacy the changes in standards that killed that industry - regulated into improbability. Now 30 years later we stand a generation behind.

Nobody knows if Obama would be like Carter. He's young enough to throw us a wildcard. But it's obvious that he is trying to be like Kennedy and King all wrapped together. Meanwhile, those of us who loved those two have grown old and cynical. It's not worth the risk says this old man, exactly as old as Obama.

Inflation
About Carter there is no doubt that inflation was his legacy. It destroyed all sense of proportion for me as a young man who loved cars growing up. When I entered high school in 1974, a brand new Mustang cost 3500. By the time I would have graduated from college in 8 years, the price had doubled, the car performed more poorly and looked uglier. In California, the price of houses doubled too. We had to find a new way out of this mess. Reagan started it. For me the IT revolution finished it. Now the things I love get cheaper, better looking and perform better over time.

But there's still that energy crisis staring at us once again.

Wankels
Once upon a time, just before the Arab Oil Embargo, Detroit was thinking about putting rotary engines in the new Corvette. Guess what. They're simpler, smaller and more powerful than piston engines. If you read on about their engineering, as I did this morning, you'll discover that they can burn hydrogen. They also have problems with detonation, so they generally run richer than ordinary engines, which means more unburned hydrocarbons get out and mileage is worse. So while they could get 400hp out of 2 liters, the Crisis brought all that investment to a halt. So today it's a technology that's just laying around being only innovated at Mazda and basically nowhere else.

If you look at the amount of horsepower and fuel efficiency we've gotten out of piston engines over the past generation, it's very impressive. Imagine where we could be if we got with the Wankel program. The RX-8 is our first clue, plus the fact that Le Mans has basically outlawed rotaries from their competitions. The next generation Renesis engine from Mazda is on the drawing boards. It could be fabulous. BTW, we use rotary engines in UAVs and very small ones have many applications too.

Jobs is Not Dead
Yes he has been battling pancreatic cancer, but he's not dead. Bloomberg accidently published its ever-handy obituary. Hmm.

Last But Not Least
I'm looking for the name of a song, a slamming sparse hiphop cut that Cinemax is using to advertise their new HD channel MaxHD coming September 1. That's what hiphop used to sound like.

Watchmen: Hire a Woman!

Everybody is on pins and needles worrying about if the director of 300 is going to ruin the upcoming movie version of Watchmen. Well, somebody may already have. It's not a good sign. Whatever they were thinking, they didn't think long enough. OK. Here's the deal. You take Watchmen, arguably the greatest comic ever, and you animate it in a kind of noir fashion. You distribute it in segments on iTunes and charge 2 bucks an episode.

Brilliant.

Except this. They only hired one guy to do every voice in the book. I understand the concept, and it works for audiobooks, but it crashes and burns like Slim Pickens on a nuke for an animated comic. It is the creepiest sensation, I tell ya, to hear a dude's voice while you're watching a chick's body, especially when the chick is telling that same dude why good times aren't the same any more.

It's an astonishing psychological effect to recognize this particular cognitive dissonance. For all of the audiobooks I've consumed, at least a dozen including several Harry Potters, a number of Jeeves and Woosters and most recently a John Sandford mystery having a single narrator has never been a problem. In my imagination, it works just fine, whether the character be male or female, young or old, good or bad. I've been very impressed by most of the voice talent - even the guy who did Marley and Me. But for Watchmen, it's just not working at all. And it all kind of hit at once in a particular scene where I just stopped and said whoa!

I'm still jazzed about the upcoming movie even though the fanboys are freaking about Sony's legal chicanery. I'm certain it's going to be a big hit; the buzz is unstoppable. But these guys at Warner Premier Motion Comics need to do a serious bit of thinking before they add the next ep to iTunes. For the love of rationality, hire a woman.

Disavowal of the Pursuit

Following JB White who is following Jonah Goldberg who is following Michelle Obama, I found the following interesting little segment over at the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Disavowal of  the Pursuit of “Middleclassness.” Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.

                Those  so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:

1. Killing  them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to  kill off one another.
2. Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.
3. Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us.”
4. So, while it is permissible to chase “middleclassness” with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method – the psychological entrapment of Black “middleclassness.”  If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our “voluntary” contributions to methods A and B.  And more importantly, Black people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons.

                                                  

Goldberg's point which JB echoes is that Michelle Obama spent an admirable eight minutes showing herself to be in love with the American middle class. That, for all its value, seems incongruous to conservatives put off by the excesses of Trinity and its associated splatter onto the Obamas.

I think that I have been consistent in my suggestion that Obama never took this sort of blather seriously - certainly not as his own doctrine. Rather he saw it as a necessary bodewash for poor suffering souls who needed their own worldview. Here's what I wrote when the whole shouting match was over:

I am convinced that Obama is pursuing a sort of liberal radical chic acceptance. That this half-black Harvard grad has gone all Patty Hearst on us. That he deliberately chose the most distressed blackfolks in his ambit to align himself with their desperate hopes in a paternalistic way in order to develop the kind of credibility and ‘authenticity’ he believes that he needs as a politician.

Both he and Michelle are very clueless as to what their privileges in America mean, and the fact that they keep bringing up the “He could have had a Wall Street job but instead came to work in the projects” is their story and they’re sticking to it, like missionaries in the jungle trying to convince themselves of the righteousness of their mission. They expect to be respected as long suffering souls who have made their sacrifices for the most noble of causes, and believe me they want the rest of us to sacrifice too - they’re after that tax.

Black politicians have accused Obama of cherry picking, and that is what I take to be his career. He was made by an old school first generation black pol, and took all the glory.

Yes, there is a fraction of the desperate black electorate who are in a strange psychological state and who need ‘get whitey’ to get through their day. I think Obama has taken 20 years to ‘feel their pain’ and speak their language and understand their frustration and that this is very deeply his connection to his blackness - that ultimately he is alienated from both communities he straddles and does not truly believe in either.

And as you might expect, I was quick to point out the growing line of knuckleheads that got flattened by the Obama bus as he disowned them one by one. Obama has apparently at this point, successfully triangulated himself into a comfortable spot. It's one not very far from where I've always expected that he lives, but all it really says is that he's not living the radical chic suit that he'd been wearing before.

At any rate, I give a lot more credibility to the things he's said at Saddleback and to what he will say in Denver and in the subsequent debates. It's interesting to note in passing that he very well may be done with erasing all aspects of Trinity from his jacket. Does that make him less black? Of course not. Trinity never owned black.

Dennis Kucinich's Wake Up Call

If you've seen Dennis Kucinich's wildly enthusiastic speech in Denver, you've seen it all. A logical individual would tell you that everything the Democrats want to say, in fact all they have been saying for the past 18 months could be summed up in those brief five minutes. This is the populist message that, from my ears, reeks of everything that leads to idiocracy. It is both indictment and incitement with zero enlightenment.

I may be finding five dozen ways to repeat myself, but that very message is exactly why I cannot vote for Democrats.

Odd Out the Bunch

The other day Max Taves from the LA Weekly gave me a brief interview and asked the question of whether it's difficult to be a black guy who doesn't support Obama. I took this be something of an existential question, and I had to chuckle, because as a 'first black', I don't think there's anything I can't handle.

I was, after all, the black kid on the prep school swim team back in 74. I played soccer in high school every day at lunch, not basketball. I chose computers when nobody thought you could make any money in that area of endeavor. I'm an Episcopalian, not a Baptist. Nobody in my family is from the South - you can't call New Orleans 'The South'. New Orleans is New Orleans. But these are not excuses for distance from the black mainstream, they are simple matters of fact, most by choice. I follow my passion.

Whenever you're different, you have some 'splaining to do, because the difference of dissonance makes things difficult. In the end, you simply must accept your strengths and assume others will inevitably. I remember being 4 foot 8 as a high school freshman. My 13 year old daughter who is petite was larger than I was when I was 14. My father was 6 foot 4, and so I reasonably assumed that I would inevitably be tall, and dealt with other things. But that didn't change the difficulty my difference made. Like most adolescents, I thought I was going to lose my mind. But I held it together. In the end, through high school, I only grew a foot, not one and a half; I accepted my difference through the necessity of self-respect. I always had to fight for me, or accept the reduced expectations of my shallow peers.

I grew into a bad habit though, now that I think of it. It took most of my life to get out of it. It was the arrogant habit of expecting to be misunderstood and discounting everyone else's opinion. I had developed so much self-respect and confidence that I didn't bother correcting people who were wrong, assuming that they could never understand what I was on about. So all of my diaries were private, all of my cryptic ideas never explained twice. I developed a skin, a personality with it's own diction as an interface to the rest of the world, rather like Cobb is. A way to relate which isn't really the small and vulnerable me. So amongst the fair haired boys, I was nobody's fair haired boy. Just a short tough kid from the 'hood with a reputation for brains, and long hair.

I wrote my way out of the problem, eventually, having abandoned several layers of pure geek motivation. I care what people think, I make every effort to interact and listen. Maybe I'm overkill on the other side - well, I was until about three years ago when I said I was sick of programming and didn't care if I wrote another line of code. I really started to care about managing the business and shaping the industry. Part of that started five years ago with my conversion to conservatism. The business of the ordinary middle class started to become very, very important to me having learned (finally) the lessons of Stalinism. See, when you 'are' smarter than everyone else around you, you discount their ideas and you do what's righteous no matter how much they complain - because they couldn't possibly know better considering how they misjudge you. Scientists, evangelists, tyrants all have this trait in common. We put on skins and develop a rhetorical distance from the ordinary Joe. It's a consequence of dealing with your oddness, and it becomes a powerful conceit. You have to work your way out of the problem abandoning your abstract motivations. You have to deal with people as they are, giving them every benefit of the doubt because dissonance isn't always difference. It takes courage and honesty. Always courage and honesty.

Then being odd out of the bunch hopefully becomes, as it has for me, merely the confusion of youth. That feeling of being completely isolated even though you listen to the same music, dress in the same fashions, follow the same trends of expression as everybody you know, which aint many people from a few neighborhoods where you live, school, church and work.

It is a youth many people don't need to outgrow. As a writer with a national audience, as a worker in just about every state, I've had to outgrow it. It's a humbling growth for sure. I try not to overly romanticize my originating differences - I come from a small town called black upscale Los Angeles on the Catholic side. My ideas about the perfect woman are still shaped by that, about how a gentleman should act, about achievement, excellence, discipline, responsibility, deportment and propriety. All very Old School. It was the last place that fit me in every way - it was my original home. Every place else has been strange by comparison, and yet I am home in every place because I have worked it all out, where I come from and what that means.

As a writer, I have the good fortune to have records of how I think and feel about things, now going back over 20 years to the edges of that youth along with vivid memories of that youth itself. I probably know how odd I am out of the bunch better than most folks. It's a blessing, a blessing I worked for because I was a bit odder back in the day. I come back to Baldwin.

All you are ever told in this country about being black is that it is a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now, in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and re-create yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America. You have to impose, in fact - this may sound very strange - you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.

Sometimes when you get to that point of forcing the world to deal with you, well it gets a little tiring. I think maybe that's where I am - not particularly interested in whether the world respects all of my well-documented, logical oddness. I have been an unbelievable black man before. So have most of my existential partners, like Joe Phillips. You get used to it.

So like that old funky-ish song, "You can call it what you want to". I don't mind the explaining, but it's a long story. I'd rather just tell the happy ending.

Hot Button Politics

When I first converted to conservatism, one of the people I was 'responsible for' was Phyllis Schafly. People would ask me how I could possibly stand behind this excreble woman. I had no idea what or who they were talking about.

So I did a little research and found what she was all about. Apparently, she had a big part in writing the official platform for the GOP at that year's convention, and she had complete control of the abortion plank. Well it turns out that like most Republicans I had not read the platform and like most Republicans the detailed wording of one plank vs another made very little real difference, only symbolic difference. Not long afterwards, I found myself reading the platform of Texas Republicans. It was painful. I had already decided to become a Republican and perhaps even move to Texas. What was I getting myself into?

These days I am very wobbly on politics itself. I have been thoroughly disgusted with the pettiness of the 08 campaigns and exhausted by their length. As I'm going through this process of trying to de-politicize myself and my writing I'm getting a handle on what, in particular, is annoying me. Hot button politics.

You see most people don't require 18 months to decide anything. And it's truly ridiculous to think that one needs that long to decide something that only lasts 4 years. The worst marriages in the world are about that bad, I think. It doesn't take 18 months to decide which house or apartment to live in. It doesn't take 18 months to make a baby. It doesn't take 18 months to pick a college or buy a car. Why should it take that much thought to vote? The fact of the matter is that it simply doesn't. There is excess information being splattered out there which is totally irrelevant to an honest decision making process. So this week we are talking about how many houses.

Even when you take a reasonable period of time on big issues, you'll find that few of them change much over the course of a presidency. Take abortion for example. People will talk about it to death - all kinds of nuance all kinds of fire and passion, but what really changes? How about the death penalty? There are clear positions that can be summed up in 20 minutes - not that you're likely to get such clarity at such a length in the broadcast media - on both sides. Yet people will talk for months about giving their proxy to something with which they have no experience or judgment. The insanity of this appears to me in the following way. You have 100 million voters energized to pick a candidate who is for or against the death penalty and they debate this hot button issue (among a dozen others) for months and yet the chances that they themselves will be involved in a capital crime is 1 in 500,000. It's not really the vote or any government action that determines capital crime in America, it's what we citizens do in our own lives.

There's another way of looking at this which I considered even when I was Progressive. We all know about expensive hammers and toilet seats in military procurement. These are legendary pork barrel topics. I worked out some math way back when to calculate how much people spend debating the cost in tax dollars vs their proportionate share of the tax burden. People would almost always want to debate the issue more that it was worth. For example, let's say you think that the Department of Education should be eliminated and its budget is 2% of the Federal Budget. If you were being proportionate in your tax anxiety you would realize that 2% of your, say 15,000 annual Federal tax bill - basically 300 bucks is 'wasted' on that entire enterprise. So how long would you argue over $300? Now you have the formula, try to figure out how much money you would save extracting gays from the military or how much more you would pay to mandate pre-school. Not bloody much, and yet we suffer the cost of mass bloviation on these subjects day in and day out, and very little changes in the bureacracy.

Now there is some comfort to be taken in the understanding that Americans overthink all of the political issues and that some permanent fraction of our population is clinically wonky. But the ability for all that fresh wonky goodness to remain distilled and get distributed is way beyond our collective means. There is way too much noise in our national communications and the signal to noise ratio shows no signs of increasing. In any case, what is required is some quiet hard thinking done by citizens which is unabetted by an economy of blather consumption brought to you by... There is an entire class or two of talk radio and talk television that never gets to the point, that entertains for the entire season of 18 nerve grinding, mind-numbing months. Nothing speaks to the enormity of this noise machine than the amount of dollars candidates must raise in order to spin it in their direction.

But you know this.

The solution is actually rather simple, which is to spend your hours and make up your mind firmly, then shutup. I can't do it, but I try. I think we all feel an obligation to come up with 100 reasons rather than simply a dozen, because everybody else is doing it. Besides, it's still going on and we still haven't heard debates. (I'll process transcripts of Saddleback today).

Obama vs McCain: The Analogy Video

Pazo Restaurant

There have been several drunks in my life that I have lived to regret. I know them each by name. I'm not talking about other people, I'm talking about me. There were exactly 3 until I got to Pazo and now there are 4.

The reason is threefold. The first is that I didn't have any breakfast or lunch that day. The second was that I was in stellar company and feeling extraordinarily loquacious and friendly. The third was my bartender's invention - the Prairie Fire Martini.

I am sad to inform you that I cannot recall the name of my bartender, although he did an excellent job of serving up the fire. The tapas on tap was superb, and although Baltos(?) may find Pazo a bit pretentious and expensive, I was rather impressed by the very idea of dinner on big fluffy couches.

I was a bit surprised that the joint closed down at 10pm because I needed another hour to de-libate, and I wasn't about to go about it the bulemic way. But I was forced into the street much to my compatriot's chagrin. I managed to get back to where I once belonged without incident, though it took the better part of 90 minutes and a stop at Burger King, but the Pazo experience was still fondly remembered through the purple haze.

My Choices For McCain's VP

I've heard rumors and I've heard fables. Basically I'm just going to put my foot in it and say whom I think McCain should choose.

1. Tom Ridge
Ridge has been stuck in neutral politically for a long time, but this guy has all the right credentials and brings all the right personality to the ticket. He's the former Gov. of Penna and ran Homeland Security at the outset. All concerned say if it weren't for 9/11 he would have been a top candidate for '04. I've seen him. I like him. I say he's McCain's best choice.

2. Michael Steele
Only because I've heard a rumor do I say Steele. He is my model moderate Republican and he has a real touch of class. I think of him particularly as the head of the Congress - he would do a selfless and honorable job, and he's the perfect Old School demographic. I think the GOP is looking for the right place to put him.

3. Mitt Romney
Mitt was my number one choice at the outset for the nominee, but he personally rubs me the wrong way. He's super impressive and probably the smartest candidate out there, but his advantages were canceled out by two groups of wingnuts in our party who had a jones for Ron Paul or Huckabee. Unfortunately, the wingnuts all think that the GOP is just an organ of their moral evangelism, not a party for all Americans so they spoiled things. Bringing Mitt back could put everything in place.

On Sara Palin. Whatever. It's obvious to me that she's a demographic gimme. Not that she's not a good sharp stick in the eye of the Democrats being a sharp character herself, but I say she needs a bit more aging in the cellar. Besides, there's scandal afoot in Alaska and now is not the time.

On Condi Rice. I think she's way too tired to do anything more. There's no question that as an insider she could really do excellent things to coordinate policy. She's seen Cheney in action and I'm sure she took notes. But quite frankly I think she's burned out. We have lived through several massive geopolitical headaches - doesn't she deserve a vacation?

On Bobby Jindal. He's more obvious than Palin as a gimme. Everybody loves Jindal. He needs a lot more time in the cellar. Let him finish the job he started.

On Petraeus. No. Leave him where he can do the most good. CENTCOM.

On Giuliani. No. How could he possibly play second fiddle?

4. John Kyl
It'll never happen of course. Double AZ? But I love Kyl.

5. Duncan Hunter.
Outside chance. Hunter is great.

Obama + Biden

I got my face shaved today. Barbershop time. My barber, definitely old school, but a supporter of Obama, is now showing some more doubts. Obama's triangulation is fairly complete, and he has all the attributes of a mainstream Democrat candidate but none of the bona fides. Reverse the ticket and it's just what you would expect of a fairly good choice. If I were a democrat, I think I might pick Biden Obama. Biden Obama makes sense theoretically but Obama Biden?  If you were to be one of those people who voted for Obama during the primaries, Obama Biden would not *even* be on your mind.

So basically all of the principled Leftists and Progressives get to downplay the VP position. The only consistency here is a dogged determinism against Bush's foreign policy. That's what Biden cements. It's really the last thing Obama should do - campaign on a primarily foreign policy platform, but it does moderate the whole look and feel of the OBandwagon.

Like most reasonably sound people, I made my mind up a long time ago. It didn't take me as long as this campaign has gone to pick my wife of 15 years, so I really don't understand how it is people can keep talking about it this long. No wonder we've gotten into the weeds of dueling assets.

I think the entire thing with the text message is emblematic of Obama-ness. He promises to avoid the MSM and be all young and fresh with his text message delivery of the news. Then his organization leaks it out to the MSM anyway, and the whole text message network never works, and the actual news is not groundbreaking at all, but a safe triangulated thing.

Just premature.

In The Stone

The Devil in the Deep Blue Sea

This is a titanium semisphere in a clean welding facility. It is part of the construction of the sort of sphere required to handle the pressures of deep sea exploration. There have been, to date, according to open sources, only about a half dozen watercraft capable of diving below 20,000 feet. It's a rather astonishing fact considering how much of 'the planet' mankind has supposedly spoiled.

I got a chance to play volleyball on the beach yesterday evening and having been away from my hometown for 8 weeks, I was a bit overwhelmed by the opportunity to sit and stare at the ocean for a while. As I sat, I was singly impressed by the utter perfection of the horizon line, how flat it seems, how crisply it differentiated the pale blue sky from the deep green sea. A thought crossed my mind about the limits of mankind. If God wanted man to fly, some said, he would have given us wings. If God had not wanted us to fly, replied the engineer, he would have made gravity way stronger.

God does not want us to chop off half the moon and throw it at Mars. God does not want us to breathe chlorine instead of oxygen. But God might not mind us drinking the oceans dry. But could we do that? Every time I see commercials about the preciousness of water I merely think that water is uneconomical, not scarce. The oceans are there for the draining, if only we had the tools. Nobody is building them - nobody is even thinking about building them, that we know.

It has been years since I've last seen anything about the Cousteaus and decades since I last heard tell of Alvin, grandson of the Trieste bathyscaphe. There has been a bit of drama around this or that Russian sub drowning in the Barents, a sea we never heard of before and thought nothing of since. But there isn't much imagination over here about the depths of the ocean, not really.

So it occurs to me that those depths might very well be the safest places to store this or that on the planet. I wouldn't suggest nuclear waste or anything of that nature, but if you really wanted to put something away for a while, it wouldn't be too difficult to put it inside a cast-iron ball and drop it into the Atlantic, or the North Sea for that matter. You might know exactly where it is - hide it in plain sight, but it would take quite an effort to get it back. Dropping things into the deep is rather like a very cool and cheap one-way algorithm.

Georgia: Scrap Metal, Fruits & Nuts

Call it confirmation bias or whatever. I have been looking for a way to not get too excited about this whole Georgian thing. Spengler gives me ammo:

Forget the Kosovo Albanians, the South Ossetians, the Abkhazians, Saakashvili and the Dalai Lama. These are relics of an older world that might deserve their own theme park, but not their own state. Precisely what are 3.8 million freedom-loving Georgians supposed to contribute to American strategic interests with its US$2 billion a year of exports consisting (according to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook) of "scrap metal, wine, mineral water, ores, vehicles, fruits and nuts"? Georgia's hope was to lever its geographical position on the Russia border by making itself useful to the American military.

From a purely moral perspective, there is something to be said about Putin's aggression. But something kept itching me about Beslan. Wasn't it those pesky Ossetians that started that whole mess back in the day? I found myself in the dubious position of not wanting to be Putin, but wanting to give them the smackdown. And now Georgia plays a fledgling democracy hand, but clearly the EU wanted nothing to do with them. Further, we know we really wouldn't have gone ballistic for Georgia. So we didn't need them in NATO either. For chrissake they can't even field a two man volleyball team without Brazil.

So I am rather content to just think about as much of Georgia as I had previously, which is not much at all.

Two Aphorisms

I heard a couple things this weekend that stuck with me. Both turned some old chestnuts on their head, both came from a couple of guys I knew form way back.

When the tough get going, the going gets tough.
That's from Steve and Steve is back. The brash energy was on full display. What people have been saying about Michael Phelps is that he's not satisfied just winning, he wants the other competitors to lose, and feel the sting. True competitors make it tough for the other guys. That's the kind of attitude that makes a difference.

Forget the Talented Tenth, make everybody give Ten percent more Talent.
I know that LB reads Cobb, and like a lot of friends, family and associates he's said that "I disagree with most of what you say, but I see the logic in it." So I can't tell if he was riffing directly off the Error of My Boohabian Ways, the conversation was light anyway. But I think he has a strong point. I very much like the idea of an aristocracy of merit, not one of inheritance, and I have to say that I get the distinct feeling (or at least I used to when I paid more attention) that the Talented Tenth is a bit more on the inherited side.

I think that one of the great misunderstandings I get is that people think I'm on a mission. The fact of the matter is that I enjoy open-source information for people who care. And to have all the arguments out there and free from left to right, I think serves everyone who takes the time to think through politics. I don't think that the Talented Tenth is busted, speaking of the people, I think that the idea is weak and generally inapplicable to much more than middle-class and upper middle class aspiration. But considering what DuBois had in mind, that's all it was ever intended to be. I'm probably not the first and won't be the last person to think that there was more gold at the end of that rainbow than Lifestyles of the Dentist, namely that wealth-creation and black nationalist goals could be managed by a black managerial class.

So I dig LB's vibe for the general health and welfare of the black middle class and all aspirants to achievement. Interestingly, I do so more now than I did when I was a Progressive, because I've been in the position to pay salaries, which I think is a responsibility and a privilege not many Progressives relate to directly.

The Society

The Society met again for the first time Saturday. There were a lot of hugs going around.

I couldn't predict, but I would make a fair guess that something of import is going to come from the collected efforts of this group. Things are just getting started, and the lead dogs have a great deal of enthusiasm. We'll see.

Me, I'm just really glad to get in personal touch with folks I've always gave the benefit of every doubt. I tend to think more about myself as measured by them as anything else in that way we always feel about our hometown.

Among others who showed up (a lot more than I expected) were Jackson, Butler, Pugh, Shields, McKinley, Gabriel, Davis, Martin, Shepherd, Harvey, Houze, Meredith, Thompson, Walker, Sanford, Vicknair, Stewart and Baptiste. I wish I had more time to talk about the present with folks I didn't know very well but I had other commitments that day.

State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas dropped by to say a few words as well. A key group to be sure. Go Cubs!

It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time

There's something about soccer that best captures the spirit of HD television. But I have to tell you that a lot of sports is looking really good this season. I've been watching and recording the HD broadcasts on Universal HD and they are spectacular. Until I speed them up, and then I realize I don't know what I'm watching.

For a moment this morning I had an insight about machine intelligence from the Culture. I was fast forwarding through a bunch of commercials and then through some of the soccer game, and I realized that I was catching a bit more information on HD than I used to on the standard definition Tivo I used to own. But I was surely at the limits of human comprehensibility - there was no way possible for me to make sense of the soccer game itself. I could only recognize that it was a soccer game and nothing more, even though it was not literally a blur - several images were clear as stills - I couldn't process it with my organic brain as fast as the DVR could play it.

Suddenly I remembered a conversation between ships from 'The Excession' in which they had decided to take some action after a discussion that went for several pages in the book. But one of the ships suggested that before they do, that they ask their passengers what they thought, after all things had changed. One ship objected saying that it had polled the passengers 2 minutes ago and they had assented to go. The other said, well you know how long it takes them to decide things. You have to give them time to think.

A comic routine I heard on XM 150 the other day made a running joke about the common excuse 'It seemed like a good idea at the time'. It is the ultimate excuse. There are a lot of reasons that our human psychology makes the decisions it does, we are subject to certain inevitable biases, not the least of which is that we often make patterns that don't exist. We make errors in cognition due to a lack of time or focus or based on irrelevant data that somehow seems relevant at the time. For example, this very blog piece started off as something about the Olympics, but it is actually more interesting (now) as a thought piece on human vs machine cognition.

Being in the BI community, it is my job to see how machines can help humans make better decisions. The better I understand the business, the better I can tailor the system I'm building to assist the a limited scope of decisions to be made by the audience. When I described my gig to Unk last week, I got down to a specific job that I'm doing for a specific customer. It turned out that he had a similar issue during his days shuffling budgets as an administrator - and so he actually repeated that case back to me flawlessly.

There are lots of reasons we decide poorly, but when we are under time pressure, I think that is the reason we make the most mistakes. I'd make a final observation which is that some folks decide forcefully but then are amended quickly. That tends to be my decision making style - to set up a framework in which a good number of choices can be taken (in a fast OODA loop context) and harness as many observers in the process as possible. The quick decision coupled with authoritarian style can be very effective within organizations, but also dead wrong. In a proper framework, quickly wrong, might not be so bad.

Speed is key.

Lightning Bolt

It had always seemed to me, having grown up watching Carl Lewis battle Linford Christie in the 100 meters, that there was something unusual about the super muscular guys who followed. Burrell, Johnson, Greene, were all fast, but they seemed to muscle their way down the track. And Michael Johnson looked like he had invented a new kind of running, unnaturally technical. 

All that changed this weekend. Usian Bolt has changed the style of fast and he made it look easy.

It was one of those moments, as much as I admire the other greats of the sport, that I had to stop and think about what we've been seeing all these years. It was somewhat reminiscent of how I looked at the final failure of Mike Tyson. What kind of short heavywweight was he, when he finally got boxed into the ground? And what kind of sprinters are these who chased after Bolt? They all seemed to be too short and way too slow.

As soon as the real video is released to YouTube and everybody else, you'll be seeing this one for a while.

Walmart in 08

In the news, Walmart is being accused of telling employees that they shouldn't vote for Obama, because Obama is in favor of an act that changes the rules for unionization of non-union shops, like Walmart. CNN essentially droned on the innuendo until their expert essentially said that Walmart was doing nothing illegal, but simply discussing the pros and cons.

But it does bring up the interesting question as to whether or not Americans are digging Walmart a bit more in these slow economic times, and if Barry is likely to put some more gas into the anti-Walmart bandwagon. Up until this moment, Walmart has been off my radar for a while. What's up?

Putin Blowback?

Although I was sorely tempted, I resisted the opportunity to hear out Georgian president S. on Glenn Beck's show last night. I've got my mind made up already and with few exceptions I don't need any emotional pleas. I'm convinced that Putin / Medvedev are getting away with murder, and that this move, as far as the American Left and Right are concerned is moving rather like last summer's Israeli/Hezbollah conflict.

The odd thing is that the American peaceniks are basically silent in their criticism of Putin and instead are blaming Bush for setting up a 'world' where this kind of aggression is acceptable. Rather than dignify that logic, I'd like for those who read here to say such things in their own words in the proper context, instead of sideways like this:

Also we don't have the moral authority to say a damn thing to anyone anymore after invading Iraq on false pretenses, and have been mumbling about doing the same to Iran. Period, end of story.

Because if 'we' don't have the moral authority to say a damn thing, what exact kind of moral authority do we get for being first to commit ships and planes towards humanitarian assistance to Georgia, as we have? It's not as if the Left is even backing up their own candidate's denunciation on this, but expect to get some political traction out of saying stuff like:

The current administration is scratching its head and stumbling and fumbling for a coherent response. Bubba McCain is rootin and tootin with a full chaw of wikipedia powering his foreign policy and national security pronouncements.

It doesn't take more than a few ounces of brain to see that Russia has failed to create a commonwealth in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has been rattling sabers for several months. But it is interesting that Putin has suggested that we Americans have it backwards, that they Russia are the good guys and the Georgians are the bad guys. The only reason I give a moment's pause on that is because of the horror of Beslan four years ago.

I'm still not fooled by Putin's fake cease fire, any more than anyone should be fooled by the fact that there's a lot of 'trust but verify' in the American humanitarian response. Not to mention the fact that it's already public knowledge that columns of Russian armor has changed directions. We can be sure that the NRO is all over this and we know more than we say about troop movements in Georgia every hour.

The world is getting more interesting day by day, but spare me arguments that this is Bush's doing.

Clarity on Obama's Tax Plan

It doesn't get much plainer than this from Greg Mankiw.

Ouch.

The Error of My Boohabian Ways

Several years ago, I adopted a personality called 'Boohab'. Some of you may know this dude. He was a literary creation of mine. It seemed like a good idea at the time. BTW, I'm not Boohab, nor am I Cobb. I'm Michael David Cobb Bowen, an online writer indulging his intellectual avocations. It's not about me, per se, it's about the ideas I convey as a first-person writer. Who I am is the man who carries on his family name, which is really none of your business.

Like most thoughtful people, I had come to the conclusion that blackness was not monolithic. Like a few that weren't satisfied with that simple statement, I concluded that blackness had become post-modern - that it was largely a cultural state of mind, a choice of flavor which was not determined by inevitable circumstance, but a political and cultural identity that could be nurtured at one's own discretion, or not. If you'd like to weigh in on that bit, please do so below in the comment section. But I say, blackness is a human choice and that anybody who thinks otherwise is a racialist like my man Michael Fisher. You might want to go give him a pound and spare me your bleatings if you're not ready to debate.

Understanding that I had made some distance between myself and the black masses, I recognized with the quickness that 90% of the debates that began "How come black people can't.." didn't apply to me. So I made a concerted effort to focus on the common 10%, which essentially boiled down to anti-racist politics. So like a good Nationalist, I joined identity and politics together in this creation called Boohab, and became overtly, provocatively, and persistently black. Online. Every day for years. Where angels feared to tread. And guess what? I learned something. Among other things, I got props from liberal online establishments and was promoted to Society conference host at the Utne Reader. For someone who doesn't make his livelihood writing, I would consider that a coup. Your interpretation might vary. For example, you might think that I was just selling out to a bunch of radical Jews, rather like some people think I'm selling out to a bunch of rightwing honkies. I can't say that I get the pejoratives right all the time, but I do get the message, beware of non-black allies. The problem of course was loss of a shared black vision.

The loss of -- It would be more fair to say the lack of, to reiterate the common knowledge that there is no black monolith of politics or culture -- a shared black vision is at the heart of a great deal of anxiety that African Americans feel from time to time. Since this is, for me, self-evident and not entirely problematic, I tend to get grief because it has traditionally been part of my duty as a member of the Talented Tenth, to find, defend and promote a shared black vision. I feel that I must remind people that if there is no monolith, that if black diversity of opinion is indeed a healthy thing, then logically there can be no betrayal of black people on the whole - because there are no black people 'on the whole'. There are a wide variety of blackfolks with an equally wide set of opinions. Yeah that may be true demographically, but there is a political center of black Americans who chose to be political, especially those of the Talented Tenth whose political prerogatives I have more or less abandoned, yet whose social significance I still talk about. It puts me in an odd, and sometimes uncomfortable position.

You see if there is no blackness, if blackness has fallen apart, and you could fix it by degrees and yet chose not to.. well, you get the picture. This place I occupy gets me in trouble. It is precisely why I don't trust it - why I think I would never in a thousand years want to be known as the black writer, or the black political leader. I grew up thinking that was the place to be, and have grown to discover it to be shaky ground. From Higher Ground to Shaky Ground: The Dissolution of the Talented Tenth, by Michael DC Bowen.

Today, I don't feel at all uncomfortable in declaring that the direction of blackness has fallen into the singularity that is Barack Obama, from which nothing emerges in recognizable shape. If you ask me if Barack Obama is the end of black politics, I say no. If you say he is the end of black politics as we know it, then I think you are stating the obvious. What is stunningly provocative about that is that when I was writing as Boohab, nobody could predict that anti-racist politics would fail so dramatically and that the focus of blackness would fall so far from where it had been. Just like 9/11 destroyed the Reparations Movement, Barack Obama has destroyed anti-racism as the gravitational center of black politics - not that it was going anywhere. It's something I believe many black partisans are loathe to admit, but it's true.

Speaking of which, there is an important, blazingly obvious fact about Barack Obama that nobody ever talks about, and that is that he has entirely dismissed and therefore disemboweled the Congressional Black Caucus. So let us ignore Jesse and Al for a moment and talk about the political center of the CBC asking about its relevance. There's really not much to say, but I'd like to hear Spence's angle on it anyway. You put the entire CBC on one side of the seesaw and Barack on the other, and the CBC is getting nosebleeds, if not orbital escape velocity.

My mistake, my Boohabian error, was to believe that at the end of the quest for middle-class status, the job of the Talented Tenth was to make anti-racism their political focus. I knew that at some point years ago, or else I would still be writing as Boohab, but I think it's appropriate for me to come out very straight and say so. It was a mistake to use the devices of Black Nationalism to present an identity as a political vehicle. It was a essentially dishonest to appropriate the prerogatives of the Talented Tenth and direct them in a vanguardish fashion having actually lost faith in the ability of the Talented Tenth. In other words, if I can shame myself any further, it was wrong to believe Gwaltney on the one hand and determine never to second-guess blackfolks, and then make efforts on the other hand at recovering some Movement politics in any direction. I think I may have over-slammed myself but I think trying to be more precise would be cheesy. So perhaps it is best for me to suggest that I have been a contrarian thinking myself part of something larger.

I think I have avoided that error since stopping calling myself a black Republican and simply identifying as moderate-conservative Republican. I don't particularly care if moderate-conservatives are black, just that they gain a majority.

That's all I'm going to say now. I'm heading to Pazo for snacks and alcohol. Depending on how well the conversation goes, I'll be up blogging all night.

Hot Chicks Disappear

Well it looks like McCain has blinked.

On my way out the door I wanted to check any last minute news and Google found 'Hot Chicks Dig Obama'. So I clicked around and I can see that the video over which I was going to get a good chuckle has disappeared. Hmm.

The Diggiest blog to find the clip put it in a line of racist appeals as long as your arm, or FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF OPPRESSION, which ever is longer. But alas the point can't be made. In a rabid conspiracy, the butt boys at YouTube have made this video an un-video. It has been confiscated in a puff of Orwellian smoke. Awww.

I was hoping to counterpunch on the silliness of this, reminiscing as I am about the extent to which a screaming Cramer is now considering himself to be a truth-teller of the highest order. Was he right about Bear Stearns or not? Who cares, he was TELLING THE TRUTH THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO HEAR. And so gets props in this semiotic swamp of what Green Day calls Idiot America. I'm not conceding Green Day's point, mind you, but we do have our share, and we somehow manage to respect their sensitivities at our own risk.

Bottom line. The only people who aren't inevitably offensive aren't people, which is why Google is the most trusted man in America.  Except now, Google can only point to where the video used to be.

Cobb Meat in Baltimore: Pazo

OK It's official. I'm going to be at Pazo Restaurant this evening from about 7:00 pm on. I hope to see friends and readers and stalkers and whomever. I should be looking as I do, fully bearded with Dickensian reading glasses and some book or iTouch capturing my attention at the bar. Walk up. Touch me on the shoulder and ask a rude question or tell me a joke. If it's good enough, I might buy you a drink.

Two in Passing

Bernie Mac was never so much Bernie Mac on television. TV wasn't ready for his genius. Because Bernie Mac was one thing that we have never heard, a brilliant and extraordinarily well-informed sports authority who cursed like a sailor. I've seen his brilliance twice, once in that form with Bryant Gumbel on his HBO show Real Sports and the other time in Spike Lee's film 'Get on the Bus'.

Get on the Bus was Bernie Mac's debut to a big audience, and he still had that raw edge of a black man not sufficiently appreciated. Ask me and I'll say the phrase 'grown ass man' started then and there with Bernie Mac. Bernie Mac was conservative. People tend to act as if they don't understand what black conservatives are like - as we remember Bernie Mac, keep that in mind.

--

Issac Hayes was a lyrical man in a big black man suit. Somehow he always seemed heavier to me than he actually was. He never managed to convert his intimidating largeness in the way James Brown (the sportscaster) or Geoffrey Holder did. So I am particularly aware of how he generated an elaborate sort of music on the edge of orchestral. His voice was uniquely earthy and passionate in a way so many of us wanted to be known in the 70s - Soulful with a capital S. But unlike a load of other singers, Hayes didn't spend a lot of time saying 'Huh!' like the chorus of Kool and the Gang's Jungle Boogie, so popular in those days.

All of these thoughts on Hayes are new for me and gotten in the past year. Some NPR show hipped me to him and I listened seriously for a short time. That's what I got. I'm sure we've lost all that and more.

As a side note, when I was in Cleveland a few short weeks ago, I had lunch in the Galleria and the jazzy joint there. One of the waitresses flirted with me saying that I reminded her of Issac Hayes, it was one of the few times in life I was too taken aback not to have a sweet rejoinder. I could only blush and smile. I think Issac would have wanted it that way.

White Jazz At UConn

Unk always has a good story to tell over bourbon. I was in Baltimore and he was glad to see me, so one thing led to another. There are few things so satisfying as hanging out with grumpy old men with nothing to prove, and it's even better when they are not fools. Unk is all that and then some.

As we sat and talked over the hours in a kind of spontaneous back and forth, we got around to history and his old college days. It turned out that he and my father went to UConn Stearns Storrs back when it was about hmm, let me do the math 1/4 of 1% black. This is one of the reasons I didn't know much about black fraternities and sororities growing up. Theirs was not. In fact, they pledged Beta Sig which was purposefully the first integrated fraternity at the university. The Beta Sigs became a big hit socially and they had the ultimate parties.

Have you ever asked somebody who the greatest jazz players were and they started off with Stan Getz?  Nothing wrong with Getz of course, he is a great. But when the list gets into Gerry Mulligan ahead of Miles Davis, then you are clearly dealing with white jazz. You know the drill. Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Bix Biederbeck, Cal Tjader - like the guy you are asking is making a studied effort to avoid naming the first black jazz musician. It may be that they're gaming you, or it might turn out that they are on the cutting edge for a dude their age. You see, the Beta Sigs had the greatest parties because halfway between Boston and NY was UConn, and one of the Beta Sigs was some of these white jazz musicians' manager. So every once in a while they found themselves crashing at the Beta Sig house with all the booze they could handle, provided they play a short set.

This moment in the history of integration is brought to you by the Bowen Family Trust.

Literate Expectations

There was this movie once. I can't remember the name of it - about a kid in a writing program. It had a big old house, a bunch of smart, good looking students, a brilliant, intimidating professor and the world of English Lit. For me at the time, that was a guaranteed hit. I have been, at many points in my life, very introspective. I expect that's one of the reasons I write.

I was talking literature with my boy Jimi the other day and I was struck by how much time has gone by since I was deeply motivated to write in other ways and forms than I do now with my blogging and whatnot. The same conversation made me think about what I read as well. And with specific regard to my attitude on black cultural production, an attitude I adopted at the very beginning of the 90s, I am a bit surprised to see how much I have changed. What are my expectations of literature and how have they changed?

I can remember something that marked me back in the day which had everything to do with being wrapped up in a black world. I have always been very pro-integration, because it had always seemed to me that unless and until there was a critical mass of blackfolks present, I couldn't fully be myself. It was something of a contradiction at the time, I now recognize, because most of the time I wanted to stand out in the black crowd in a classic Talented Tenth fashion. I suppose it was mostly a matter of comfort, but it might have been something less innocent. Today, I have no problem being the singleton black, and it's often the case. Then I wanted more blackfolks to represent even, and probably especially if they were different kinds of blackfolks than me.

Despite an early and well beaten-into-me understanding that there was no black American monolith in class or values, I did expect and still do expect certain fundaments to be shared amongst all. I have grown to call that thing, 'the sound of the drum' and in literary form it begins with Carter G. Woodson's 'The Miseducation of the Negro'. Oddly enough, I never read the book - I understood it implicitly by the way I was explicitly raised. I have thus never had the identity crisis I think most average blackfolks have to deal with which in any way gives white supremacy charge over their soul. While I can remember avoiding looking into the eyes of whites as a young child, it is a distant memory. I retain therefore a kind of skepticism of those who complain about black images in new and old media. (Apropos of those now raising a fuss over some Japanese cell phone commercial). Interestingly enough, I can remember when AT&T made a similar error back in 1993. We had a big hash about that in the good old days. I wouldn't go as far as boycott, and that was directly related to the extent to which:

1. Blacks had achieved enough righteous identity not to be insulted.
2. Blacks had recognized how insignificant such publications were.
3. Blacks had their own [counter-]narrative of positive identity.

This is primarily leveraged by item three, and thus black literature was key. But beyond that was and still is the problem of media representations. Despite the fact that such retarded messages should not disable us personally, there is nevertheless, power in their distribution. I liken it to the fact of Gilligan's Island. Sure there's Shakespeare out there, but Shakespeare doesn't move the crowd like the Professor and Mary Ann. What's real about shady stereotypes is that they move the crowd and relatively few of us can move in a straight line against the mob. During my upbringing, I was still very close to the initial establishment of a proper study of African Americans in higher education, and so black cultural production was a very serious consideration for me.

As Cobb readers know, my expectations were rather dashed by the rise of vulgar hiphop and the failure of writers in my generation to capture the American imagination as had Wright and Baldwin, et al in prior generations. In a certain way, that should have been expected. The invention of the black man, beyond the New Negro, was a fait accompli. What more did that black man need? An entire blackity black world? I think not. But one cannot *ever*, I think, dismiss the strength of the optimism and energy brought to America by the confidence of the first post-Civil Rights generation, my peers and cohort. And out of the despair of 1968, a few years later we were a new America, and it surely wasn't all Reagan's doing. I think of the film Fame as the symbolic turning point and emblematic of my generation. It became and enduring theme of hard work, creative energy and optimism. We were going to live forever. That was good. We embraced America as a land of opportunity, and yet so many turned so sour so soon afterwards. One decade later Irene Cara was broke and Ice Cube was getting rich.

At that moment in my life when I felt that the popular culture was going bad, I looked for the highbrow to save us. I was guided by several literate threads. One of the critical race theorists, primarily Derrick Bell, Toni Morrison, bell hooks and Cornel West. One by the Culturalists on both sides of E. D. Hisrch. One by the IT revolution and my industrial peers as led by the Wellperns and the doyennes of Wired Magazine and panix.com. I was halfway right and gave up the Left half of those threads after spending more energy on them than I care to admit. But while I was in the middle of it, I had set out to write my great American novel, and it was one that presumed the success of my generation's exuberance, leavened by the choices of many factions within us and its cost to the unity that once was blackness. Unfortunately for me, it happened just before the LA Riots - which essentially destroyed all prior buoyant fictions and generated its own hegemony of doom. As I think about it now, I'm in a much better position to write that old book but I perish the thought.

In the post apocalyptic mindstate of the emergent Gangsta I felt a smaller part of a sane generation of black creatives who still needed a great deal of exposure. It was at that moment I expected to find some coterie of similar souls. It was at that moment when I began to approach the edge of merging my avocation and vocation - of using what technological skills I had gained to date and plunge them all into the service of a new media literature. I looked to pioneers at Voyager, and revered the new PowerMacs and looked for a multimedia escape from the increasingly dank dungeons of hiphop. For some reason, I thought the world was waiting for that. Living in NY can skew one's sense of perspective in that regard. Ultimately, I found little more than the same ex-drug dealer producers and the sorts at MTV who would make Kevin Powell a star.

Not to say there weren't bright spots. They were only pinpricks in the heavens when I expected kleig lights in the cities. High Cotton was the autobiography that felt closest to the flavor of my life, and it still continues to astonish me at how individual I have become. The amount of dissonance that has snuck in stolen away the easy existential partnership of the Talented Tenth - those expected to take from the literate treasure and meliorate glibly to the masses. A million grunts and 'uh' to the beat has become signal. The last time I hung out with Trey Ellis and Ishmael Reed in Boston, they didn't even know we were brothers. The last time I spoke to Charles Johnson in Brooklyn he assumed I wouldn't be interested in reading what he was reading. The last time I rapped with Haile Gerima we were a covey of 12 and he was waxing rhapsodic about opening night for Sankofa in Berlin. The first time I met Cornel West, he was astonished that I would bother to read all his stuff. I have a feeling that we're all shy, disarmed and dissembling in the street - we intellectual types have been housed on academic and media plantations and the only place we feel comfy to speak plainly as equals are still in blue light basement parties and bought out convention centers. God bless Jeremiah Wright. God bless Angela Davis. God bless Clarence Thomas. They never cared who you thought you might be - it was never in play for them. They have their vectors.

It's a young writer's dream to come correct with a cadre. Now I only try to insure that I don't get polluted by ambition that's not quite mine. Not that I have such a well crafted idea of what all my writing is supposed to mean in the end. I'm unlucky that way, in the same way that Wynton Marsalis is lucky. The last time I shook his hand, he was at ease and cordial. He and blown his horn and the evanescence of the performance was said and done, forever evaporated into the space time continuum, never to be spat back inquisition-like with a who knew what and when. You either got it in the moment or you didn't. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do blogging every day. To write in the moment.

If literature is to stand the test of time, then perhaps being true to the moment is good for a history. But I started thinking that I was to extend the sound of the drum. That I would teach and lead. And that is the great deception of the prerogatives of the Talented Tenth. They were crafted in an age less fully mobile and modern than ours, when the majority of the society available to an educated black man was not only degenerate but mostly indigent and left outside of the mainstream to rot. But now black women in plastic shoes fly thousands of miles for a week's salary.

I cannot forget and we cannot forget we are literate. And we cannot presume that what has been written has not been read. Nor can we presume that the desire to know is destroyed by some existential hunger or oppression. We find out what we want to find out, and we find ourselves there. Those who won't reach out and those who don't speak out - well we can only assume it is their choice to not communicate. I feel the need for a directive slipping away, because in fact life is simple and good. The sound of the drum is out there - if you don't understand me, it's your fault.

I have, we all have, dozens of generations of English literature with which to inform our world, 1000 channel on TV and a couple hundred more on satellite radio. We have a culture which is advancing toward multi-lingual pan literacy, global in nature because the smart money is already there. I have ceased looking blackwards towards the same 30 ideas, men and women. And I have stopped believing that those needing work are going to get worked so very well. That is, I think, a boat whose crew and passengers will have to work that out for themselves. I have taken a lifeboat and wished them well because I have become convinced they are sailing in circles and will never purchase land. In the meantime is the moment. I'm living in the moment.

Literature is not a means to a collective end. That's entertainment or propaganda. The rest is all on you.

The Nation's Capitol: Day One

It wasn't until I had a quiet moment after all the bustle of yesterday that I remembered that I had been to the Lincoln Monument before. The first time, it was at night. And for some reason, in all those many years since, I had forgotten the scale and majesty of this city that is our nation's capitol.  On this day, events conspired to make the experience truly unforgettable.

I come from a small town in America. It has never been truly represented. It is variously known as Crenshaw, South Central, South LA, Baldwin Hills. Wanda Coleman is its poet. Jervey Tervalon captures the energy of its youth, I understand these things. I would like to think that I tell part of its tale although it has been many years since I've lived there. Every American comes from a small place,  but what they should come to is the Capitol. And walk it.

Coming to the Capitol means that you leave something behind. That for a moment, especially in the presence of the war memorials, you think about not only the current nation of millions, but generations of millions and what they did to contribute to the great commons. It is at once humbling and empowering.

We followed an exuberant and loud tourguide around the mall to the usual places, hearing both the expected and unexpected historical details. It all stayed light and buoyant until we got to the Vietnam Memorial, at which point the people got more serious. There are about 10,000 folks who come by on a daily basis, and the interesting tidbit is that all kinds of gifts and artifacts are left there. And it was at that moment, especially as I heard a Park Service employee explaining in hushed tones, how many moods and how many attitudes people bring to the Capitol. The monuments are silent and not to be worshiped. They are not idols, they are themselves artifacts of compromise as anything in a democratic country must be. And they therefore live in us and we in them.

What strikes me most about the great Mall is how much of it is grass, and how that speaks of us as a free society. Not like Tienanmen. Nothing like St. Peter's. Far from Red Square. We are to feel not intimidated, but welcome in our Capitol. Not intimidated but intimate, a grand intimacy with great ideas. 

This end of the Mall has Lincoln, and on this stage was the greatest march. A reminder of the millions engaged in the ever-renewing struggle for freedom. A reminder of the triumph and victory among ourselves. After the 600,000s dead in our own Civil War, it only took a few dozens more against the 17 year backdrop of Vietnam to emerge from our own domestic diffidence to strike into law and defend with honor and might that which stands to defend domestic freedom and justice for all. And standing on the Mall with Lincoln at our back and the solid ground of Martin under our feet the view is unobstructed into the clear blue sky with the greatness of Washington all around us.

My oldest daughter has bright yellow shoes and Bootsy glasses. And she skipped through the grasses after our Coneys towards the WW2 Memorial. We could take pictures by the fountain and I know she would know nothing of the bridge at Remagen, considering what little she knew of King's own speech. And I thought a silent prayer of thanks for the enjoyment of our strength and our relative peace. I told her that we were extremely fortunate that we lived in a time when the entire nation wasn't faced with war and that I didn't have to be sent. I mumbled it sorta sheepishly knowing my own personal proclivity to break up fights. I would go. She heard me immediately and deeply saying "Yes, sir."

We stand in the continuity of struggle to keep liberty alive and healthy in the straight and narrow greenfields between Independence and Constitution.

Sammy

All evening I've been looking at the talented entertainers coming to the end of their careers during the 70s. There are still a lot of clips from the celebrity roasts on YouTube. When you see the likes of Red Skelton, Rich Little, Ruth Buzzi, Frank Gorshin, Foster Brooks, Phyllis Diller, Slappy White, the Rat Pack (of course), Kirk Douglas, Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye... Ah. You'd think our best is behind us. It was a golden age.

I started looking at impressions, and then I realized that it is becoming a lost art here. Sammy can even sing impressions, and he could dance them too.

Quote of the Month

From my boy Jimi:

Marriage is like playing hacky-sack: if you are not good at it, you look like a fool trying to do it over and over again.

BTW I'm in Baltimore, headed for Rockville.

Six Great Car Chases

Hey. I'm on vacation. I know. But I deserve it.

So I'm thinking car chases. Which are the best? Well, there's easily a top twenty but I'm going to go straight for the top 6. Why six? Because it just has to be these six for these six reasons, but I'm not going to number them because they are all great in my mind for different reasons.

We start with Ronin. There are so many car chases in this movie to choose from, and yet it is still a highly intelligent film. You've got to hand it to Robert DeNiro for driving like he's actually scared, which is unusual for car chase drivers. But what is great about Ronin is the sheer number of angles from which the car chases are filmed. First person, at the driver through the windshield, at bumper level from a car in front, in profile from outside the passenger door, low angle third person, first person from the back seat. Just amazing.

Next is a classic favorite of mine from To Live and Die in LA. What's great about this car chase is that it was done with big hunking ugly sedans that really couldn't go that fast. That's what made it so dramatic. It has a classic tribute to the old movies in which a car challenges a train and wins. Then, I'm fairly sure it was innovative in that it was the first LA River car chase, to be replicated again and again, but also the first wrong way on the freeway car chase. But my favorite part of this is right at minute 8 where you can really see how squirrelly and out of control this old Chevy Caprice Classic is.

No top list would be complete without The Matrix Reloaded. From the moment that Trinity smashes through the chain link fence until Neo rescues Morpheus and the Keymaker, this is non-stop action. Of course the Agent who leaps from car to car and rips the roof off and Trinity's wrong-way motorcycle action are classics likely never to be repeated. Not to mention just having a samurai sword. Truly great.

Now I'm saying that the coolest car chase ever was from Against All Odds. No crashes, no scratches. No guns, just a pure ego driven race. On Sunset Boulevard in LA. Between two convertibles. A Ferarri and a Porsche. It doesn't get much cooler than that.

In terms of pure awesome radical destruction, I'm going to have to give it up to Michael Bay. The problem is that it's hard to know whether to give it to Bad Boys 2 or to The Island. On the one hand, Bad Boys 2 has a car on a chain, upside down and on fire dragged behind a truck at 70 mph, and then a boat spinning in the middle of the freeway. But The Island has train axles pitched off a truck that just demolishes cars and trucks speeding behind. It's really annoying to suspend disbelief as you must in The Island, so I'll give it to Bad Boys.

'Three men. 254 kilos. That was the deal.' The opening scene of The Transporter is all about the car. You know what's coming, a great car chase. With a nice tribute to the Keystone Cops,this chase has got humor and thrills.

So That's Paris?

I took 30 seconds out of my busy day to watch the McCain ad that calls Obama a celebrity. So? Isn't he the biggest celebrity in the world? Of course he is. I think it was a well done ad. What's funny is that I didn't know ahead of time that he was comparing Obama to Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, I'd have to ask what's with the chicks? Obviously, it's not my demographic.

Goolsbee Bends Space and Time

Austan Goolsbee, Obama's head economic guy, sits up there on CNBC this morning giggling his way through a semi-serious interview with the Squawk Box crew who chuckled along with him. The tough questions were asked in a more or less straightforward manner and Goolsbee did a number of dodges worthy of Hillary Clinton. This is the kind of intellectual dishonesty that makes me cringe, and it should make you cringe as well. Goolsbee is a perfect Bobo.

If you pay enough attention to Hillary Clinton, you recognize a pattern in how she answers tough questions whose answers are embarrassing. She gives a neat clipped answer with a kind of reverse palliative and then runs right into another term. It works something like this. If you ask what time Disneyland closes, you don't get a straight answer like, 'We close at 8.' You get an answer like this: 'Disneyland is open until 8. How did you enjoy your day?' Notice that the answer was given in a kind of affirmative - that's the reverse palliative, and then a second leading question deflects consideration of the negative implications of the first answer. Clinton is especially good at stretching out the answer to the question she wasn't asked and ending it with something people can clap about. That's how Goolsbee was answering questions about Obama's windfall profits tax this morning. It was an astonishing display.

The guys at ClusterStock have a transcript:

Joe Kernen: HERE NOW OUR OLD FRIEND AUSTAN GOOLSBEE WHO IS OBAMA'S ECONOMIC ADVISER. GOOD MORNING, AUSTAN... YOU'RE GOING TO TAKE WINDFALL PROMPT PROFITS FROM THE OIL COMPANIES AND GIVE OUT $1,000 TO EACH PERSON? IS THIS YOUR IDEA?

Goolsbee: HEY, LOOK, I -- IF YOU LOOK AT THE OIL INDUSTRY, THESE GUYS ARE NOT JUST A RANDOM INDUSTRY THAT WAS ON LEVEL FOOTING WITH EVERYBODY ELSE. THESE GUYS HAVE GOTTEN TENS, EVEN HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF SUBSIDIES OVER THE LAST 20, 30 YEARS. SO IF YOU'RE GOING TO PUT A WINDFALL PROFIT TAX ON GUYS THAT HAVE BEEN GETTING FREE GIFTS FOR DECADES, I DON'T SEE ANY PROBLEM WITH THAT.

Kernen: FOR DECADES, THEY WEREN'T DOING NEARLY AS WELL. THEIR PROFIT MARGINS ARE RUNNING 8%, 9%. ARE YOU GOING TO GO AFTER COMPUTER COMPANIES THAT HAVE A 20% PROFIT MARGIN OR FREDDIE THAT HAD A MUCH HIGHER STAKE? WHERE DOES IT STOP?

Goolsbee: COMPUTER COMPANIES NEVER GOT BILLIONS OF SUBSIDIES FROM THE GOVERNMENT.   

[Our aside: If subsidies are the objection, then eliminate the subsidies. But let's be serious--they aren't.]

Kernen: DRUG COMPANIES GOT SOME SUBSIDIES. IT'S GOING TO BE WHO QUALIFIES FOR WINDFALL PROFIT -- YOU HAVE TO LOOK BACK AND SEE WHO EVER GOT SUBSIDIES --

Gollsbee: IT'S ABOUT THE OIL MARKET. IT'S NOT COMPLICATED. IT'S ABOUT OIL.

Kernen: BUT AUSTAN, IS IT WORTH THE POPULIST BOUNCE YOU GET FROM A PROPOSAL LIKE THAT, IS THAT WORTH ALIENATING ANYBODY WHO REALLY REALIZES HOW THIS WORKS? WINDFALL PROFITS JUST HURT THE PRODUCTION OF OIL AND GAS. IT DIDN'T WORK IN THE '70s. IT WON'T WORK AGAIN. YOU'RE A STRAIGHT SHOOTER --

Gollsbee: YOU'RE MIXING A COUPLE THINGS THERE. YOU'RE HUNG UP ON THE NAME. YOU SAY YOU DON'T LIKE PROFITS BEING CALLED WINDFALL.

So within a few days, I'm going figure out just the right caption for this kind of populist pandering. We already know it is condescending and disingenuous, the problem is that the proper media isn't quite in the right place to give such nonsense what for. I know the underlying threat that Kernen posed which was his polite invitation to reinvite Goolsbee up against his peers who would not let him get away with such nonsense, so I'm not too mad at CNBC. They offered him the spotlight. Still, this was pretty transparent.

I was thinking it interesting that they chose Exxon-Mobil for their example. Why not BP? Why not Shell?  Well, maybe because those companies don't or didn't get US government subsidies, not being US companies. So now we're hobbling American companies who have to compete with these other oil companies who do business in America? Why would that not surprise me coming from Obama?

Here are some fact-pages regarding who's the boss of whom when it comes to oil.

• PetroStrategies Largest Oil & Gas Companies
• Popular Geology - Largest Oil Companies

Friedman vs Pausch

One of my team is challenging me to read more stuff directly tangential to my work. I suppose that's fair but I think 90% of business writing is marketing and 70% of marketing is happy talk. Still, I would have never watched Seinfeld back in the 90s had my staff not talked about every episode at work. Sometimes just knowing what a soup Nazi is goes a long way. And so I have made the concession to read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World is Flat' even though I generally don't like Friedman and that book is so 2005. But anyway, here goes.

I bought the Audible last week and started to listen to it this evening on the road from Dayton to West Chester. I even hate the voice of the guy they have reading it. So I switched to the other Audible I bought: The Last Lecture.

I've heard that Pausch died within the past few weeks and people have been lauding. He was on my list and so I've stepped things up a bit now listening to his four hours ahead of Friedman's nine. By this weekend I should be done with both. Especially if I have another travel day like today (and I finish the latest Banks). I'm digging his last lecture, but...

Pausch reminds me of the me I might have been if I had gone straight through school. In many ways we were raised similarly and had some of the same simple but honest values of people I call Second Worlders. (Wow, I haven't talked about the Second World in a long time). I have a lot of respect for 2W and I feel that it's my duty to guarantee its integrity... well let me go on about that for a moment.

First of all, I have an oversized ego, and some of it is natural, some of it is nurtured and some of it is inevitable. The inevitable stuff comes from reading history, becoming jaded and understanding that injunction of Hillel's. But deep down I am reserved and private and really like connecting with people in their work and lives. I have a great deal of respect for people who do their work expertly and cheerfully, and I noted that the other day of the woman who prepared my sandwich at Quizno's - her economy of motion, swift precision and expert timing in her task. I noted the same kinds of things in more people oriented work, especially with the dozens of travel and security related hands I pass through on a weekly basis. My point is that even though Pausch's work is very corny from one perspective, it is exactly the right kind of corn. There is, from my West Coast upbringing a goodly amount of HBO snark reaction to any popular Tuesdays with Morrie kind of non-fiction. And on the surface, I can be violently dismissive of those who don't address the kinds of questions of life beyond the fun storytelling of the Marley & Me sort. That's what it's like to grow up a black nationalist with the dangerous assumptions inherent in such a radical political life - you dismiss the childhood dreams of middle class suburban kids as naive fairytales in a corrupt system. Just breathe deeply at Nulan's joint or P6 for a few to see what I mean. Brains from the hood, man we caustic. But I have grown reasons to support all of the mediocrities and even the semiotic swamps of ordinary ambition. And so I am respectful of the light disciplines of geekery, cookery, shrubbery. Whatever. I want to hear Pausch out, like Seinfeld.

I'd much rather hear that than Friedman. Why? Because Friedman is a megatrender. I don't know how to describe the intelligencia of pseudo-liberty except that I hear it in his pretenses to New World trends. I need a Niall Ferguson to remind everybody that human history is ugly and vicious in the main and that the geekery manages to keep heads in low profile - the same heads which trumpeting world flatness too loudly would get flattened. Empowerment isn't a verb, it's a state of being tricked. When I hear Freidman explain how flattening (although I'm barely through 30 minutes of intro) makes us all somethingier, it's like he's congratulating a swimmer inside one of the locks of the Panama Canal for treading water and raising his own elevation. We're all swimming in this tide, but we're not the moon. I think Friedman, at best, will describe globalism's effect on the ordinary worker, but I think his and his readers conceits are that they're talking about anything other than the ordinary worker. And quite frankly I'd rather hear the story of the ordinary worker, like Pausch whose humanity becomes transcendent because even through his mediocre geekery, he has become wise and overcome death. I expect no such transcendence in Friedman. 20 years from now, we'll be teaching Pausch's lessons, and Friedman will be as useless as John Naisbitt.

Meanwhile, I'm almost done with 'The Use of Weapons' and I'm thinking that perhaps this is Banks' finest work. A full review and cycle back on my state of change by this weekend.

One more thing. I'm thinking about the effect of gospel music on the shaping of black political thought vis a vis Pausch's corny thesis of realizing childhood dreams. Didn't you dream of having a very long funeral procession with at least four motorcycles and ten Cadillacs? Oh no I know it was not just me...

Disorientation

I'm a little off balance these days, having spent a few too many days in a few too many cities. It's not that I mind travel at all, it's just the completely retarded unexpected bodewash travel that messes with my khi.

I haven't been diarizing, nor much blogging in this period, but a lot of things are happening. If I could have a week at home, I'd be back on track. And I suspect I'll get that soon, but at the moment, I'm power-relaxing which means I don't leave the couch for anything but biological basics, and if I must, it freaks me out. Such behavior leads to 8 hours of Halo at a time, pizza crusts and bad breath. Very untidy.

However life moves on interestingly. The huge news is that my employer has been surgically split in two and the part I occupy grafted into the service of a burgeoning Indian defense contractor. The company is Rolta, and we have been encouraged to think of it as the Lockheed of India. Not the Lockheed-Martin mind you, that would be too ambitious. But suffice it to say that this is the engineering services company that stands to profit very mightily should India accept the 123 Treaty, because they help build nuclear power plants. We are the global IT for this company, Rolta, which has been listed as a global challenger, one of only two midcaps from India which is poised to break into the global 1000 in the next five years. Considering the case presented last week, it's not a slam dunk, but it's very likely.

It brings up the BRIC idea again, and another personal turn. All the time I spent learning Mandarin, I would have been better off learning Hindi. Maybe I'll have to pay attention to all the marketing by Rosetta Stone after all. But it is true that in my industry I meet a whole lot more Indians than Chinese - therein lies an apparent contradiction, because over the past six months I have been particularly angry at Indians. Why? Because of their body shops and staff augmentation and outsourcing. It's an odd way to view a people, but then again, those are 80% of the Indians that I communicate with. The new Rolta officers (the Yanks among them) spent a fair amount of face time assuring us that Rolta is different. I buy it, and not only out of necessity. Nuclear engineering is nuclear engineering. I'm reaching the Holy Grail.

Rolta is a new breed of company that understands that there is mastery in service. Perhaps the Hindi translation of 'The Power of Empowerment' doesn't sound so ironically corny, but think about it for a moment. Digitization of knowledge and making it rapid is where the new productivity is going to come from, for centuries. It should be obvious but it isn't. More on that later.

There has always been, in the back of my head, three magically symbolic places which represent to me a sort of excellence I would love to experience. The first is the Philosophy department at Harvard. The second is some IT department at Goldman Sachs or Bloomberg. The third is any nuclear facility employing a Swearingen Seal. This magical intellectual triangle defines part of my ultimate career 'thing', not that I've pursued it forcefully. But approaching all those from different directions, I think I'm doing OK. In BPM, there is this irony. Companies that haven't already thought about their future aren't likely to make investments in the IT for managing it, we consultants arrive at the moment of change - when we're lucky. Sure Northeast Utilities had regulatory requirements to INPO that made monitoring of hundreds of metrics a necessity, we didn't have to convince them that KPIs were an advantage. The smarter the business, the more they understand that. So what have I been doing at joints like S, K and U all these years? Biding my time, perhaps. Now it's time for big multiyear contracts. I'm ready.

Hooking up with Kevin Ross has raised my profile significantly, and so now I have three new political entities to deal with. The first is Ross himself, who is a whirlwind of energy exploding in several different directions at once. I cannot plumb all those, but he's sure to strike gold, or stub his toe, one. Either way, one can never have enough political allies. The second is Boston Patriot who I'm proud to drop a name one - she's interviewed John Bolton. Of the many folks I've met who comprise this new media, she is the one whom I sense goes towards the deepest principles. I find it very attractive that she's what I consider a true Constitutional Nationalist - it's an important distinction that often gets blithely overlooked or casually assumed in blather about the Second Amendment or Abortion. The way I see it, there is something implacably fundamental about what America means to the West and how our Constitution has provided a backbone of liberty for us and for others. These two are nominees for the Conservative Brotherhood, because I just said so.

On the heels of Boston Patriot's nomination, the Grizzly Groundswell's head honcho gave me a call last week. l must confess that I've been too swept up by this merger to pay quite enough attention, but when I checked out their website, it was love at first sight.

Well now it's almost Summer Vacation time, meaning my family is in several different states. Usually this is a great time for me because the house becomes mine. No such luck. I'm working in Ohio and the Spousal Unit and the girls are in Detroit and Boy is usually in Brooklyn or Bermuda or with the Scouts somewheres. We're trying to get to be 100% family this time in Washington DC which should be a great trip if the temperature stays in the 80s (yeah right). But I'm looking forward to that new logicstical nightmare bearing down on my quickly - like Thursday. I'm flying in, they're driving in, we meet at a place to be determined near a cousin yet to be named. Plus I'm trying to hookup with Tooley and some other of my e-pen pals. Oh the chaos.

Speaking of hookups. It turns out that people I haven't seen since college have found pictures of me during college, which are in fact very rare. There is a rumor that before I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha that my hairstyle was reminiscent of Jessie Johnson. I can neither confirm nor deny such rumors, and would only defer to proof admissible in a court of law. That being the case, it's great fun to see old frat online.

It turns out that Moms has decided to move to Ohio. There is no stopping this woman and I've long stopped trying to predict where she would be doing what next. Last time I checked, she was in the most luxurious trailer park I'd ever seen, assisting a sweetheart of an old man who became paralyzed as the result of an act of heroism. Her new mission I don't know, but it's just another person to keep in the loop. Funny we think of old Jewish and Italian mothers who nag us about not calling on the telephone. My mother reads my blog. Perhaps we should follow each other on Twitter. I can already see the Spousal Unit asking our kids, "What, you can't IM, you can't Tweet?"

Finally, I think I'm giving up Eddie Bauer for Johnston & Murphy. Eddie Bauer is so... Seattle and Microsofty.

Not Even Lenin Had This

Ivins, Finally?

So, it turns out to be this Bruce Ivins character. Maybe. Almost seven years later, there is still mystery surrounding the case of the Anthrax Killer, who never really had a name. But the FBI was dogged in their pursuit too late to be called swift, and too uncertain to be called justice. If the chapter is closed, then it goes oddly I think.

I've said that in the end, all of human history is attributed to war. That's because we're not meticulous enough to know the real reasons, and war itself is too bloody and messy to account for much more than winners, losers and borders.

A String of Sorry Sistah Souljahs

I've said it before but I'll focus on it this time. Barack Obama is the first and last of his kind: the politician who is ambiguously black. It's not that he is not solidly within the mainstream of black culture, rather that his ascendancy marks divisions within black politics. It is an evolution and it is a good thing, but it will leave a trail of blind, crippled and crazy pseudo-politicos in its wake.

I predicted with some ease that Obama's association with Rev. Wright would end in tears for Wright. What I expected was some deep investigation of black liberation theology. What I found in short order was that the theology itself wasn't quite deep enough to withstand a deep investigation. Obama is doing what a lot of smart black individuals do when people come at him with stereotypes and half-considered notions, he takes a bucket of water to the body and then he shakes it all off like a short haired dog. He may drip briefly, but two minutes later you can't imagine he was soaking. Now wary, he's far from your bucket and won't be fooled again. There have been many such buckets of cold water waiting for the multiple strands of black protest politics that have never been fully tested by the attention of the mainstream. And as Obama shakes them off, one by one, so too are dying various places for radical black politicos to expect influence.

Who was Sistah Souljah in the first place? She became, all of 25 years or so, a symbol of black grass roots gripes with the American system. An enfant terrible her cause was briefly celebrated when the 'black president' Bill Clinton kicked her and her inflammatory rhetoric to the curb. But more importantly, Souljah represented a segment of black politics that thinks it deserves power if it does right by the aspirations of at-risk youth. So hiphop often represents itself as a political demographic worthy of attention. Attention can be bought and paid for in the entertainment industry but too many folks confuse fame and renown. In the end, a nation of millions of head bobbing kids in the streets or in their parents' basements is not a nation at all.

Obama is a significant departure for such grassroots attempts to co-opt the famous and loud because he has given every indication that he belongs to everybody except for the traditions of power in America. But while he may be somewhat new, he knows what does and does not work in the horse-trading and sausage-making that is the powerball of American democratic politics. It has not, does not and will not belong to those without money, influence and organization. This is where the hopes and dreams and shouts and callouts all claiming to be black politics fall flat. And as the Obama train moves on by a lot of people are going to spend a lot of time looking at their own holey sneakers.  If any comparison of symbols is most apt in describing this difference, it would be Obama in Germany vs Sharpton in Jena.

There once was a time when black protest meant something in the world. I remember reading about the Bandung Conference, and I read its procedings. But nobody remembers what was said because nothing was done. There was a time when Jesse Jackson could go different places in the world and do. Now he is as impotent as any Hollywood celebrity.

So it comes as no surprise that Obama has dismissed the support of Ludacris, the rapper whose pretensions to political lyricism lives up to his moniker, finally. One can only hope that the magentism Obama singularly presents to black politicos draws them all into the light so they can have their moment of fame. All of the identity politics that has attached itself loosely to the black race can now be exposed if Obama's principles hold up. This is the fork in the road for all of the umanned, unfunded mandate of the black voice on the street.   It's Obama's way or the highway.

And yet, Obama is quite unbaked enough for masses of unsure Americans to poke at Bush. He can do this one time while America actually deals with the reality of race in a presidential campaign. Next time it will be a lot simpler, we will have done it. And so the next nominee of African American descent won't be able to play sentiments so easily - he'll have to show and prove without the wiggle room jungle fever gives. Thus all those Sistah Souljahs who think they can be one-man megaphones of the black street, or black political anything will get even shorter shrift. Amen to that.

The Sybaritic Side of The Culture

I have been reading Iain M. Banks Culture series, about a half-dozen now, science-fiction novels as part of the New Curiosity. I am attempting to wean myself of a decade's worth of melioration of the cultural and political sensibilities and ideas of my generation of black Americans. Not that I have any shame in that work, rather that ultimately it defies my orientation as a scientist, or as I would rather put it, as a natural man. In that aim, having also contemporaneously consumed a fair amount from The Long Now, and TED symposia, I am getting a grasp on the future of technology and its implications. At the same time, having spent a fairly productive professional career building expensive and sophisticated applications of our highest information technology I am self-interested as an American upper-middleclassman in the preservation of the impetus to innovate as a cultural value. Moreover as a conservative and a Christian, I am quite interested in the inherent philosophical conflicts between Western values and those which oppose them. I must therefore be bound to test whether my concepts of liberty, which I have politically defended and justified the intervening and deadly forces of the American military, are worthy of defending to that extreme. I seriously doubt that I'll be found wrong, but stranger things have happened.

Iain Banks proposes implicitly and modestly a Culture ruled by super-intelligences which have evolved to the point of a super infrastructure which delivers justice on a galactic scale. In doing so he has, more than any writer I've encountered, established a sort of God which requires no worship or attending. It is almost a perfect libertarian society, one whose energies are sufficient to render a certain branch of human endeavor moot and useless - which is the endeavor of politics.

The ethos of the Culture is never explicitly spelled out, but it is certainly palpable and at this point in my reading, I know it when I see it. One might best describe it as a super liberal who is actually right 99.999 percent of the time. The Culture lets you do what you want to do and obviates the need for most dirty deeds. The exception to this is the dramatic force from which Banks books become compelling - Special Circumstances. In this galaxy, all are not citizens of the Culture and the Culture takes pride, like those who set the price for tickets at the greatest symphony orchestra performances, which civilizations should be privy to the delights of Culture'd life. The Culture has mastered weaponry and human physiology. Should Special Circumstances deem it required, they could equip a single human with enough power to take over a primitive civilization like our modern-day Earth. But if it were not your job or desire to fulfill such missions for the Culture, which resembles few things more than the Navy of Imperial Great Britain, you're much more likely to spend your three hundred odd years of life pursuing happiness.

It is expressed through machine intelligences. Imagine you had a cell phone that talks back to you and lets you know when you might be about to break a rule (of which there are very few). It is your designated driver, your bodyguard, your attorney, your accountant, you analyst, your priest, your physician, your factotum - a perfect servant and mechanical friend. Not there to control you, but to mind you and your best interests, even as you see them.

Does then the human nature instantly and automatically go towards sin? Or perhaps the better term is vice? How 'dirty' is our nature? Absent the restraints of scarcity, drawing firm but bouncy boundaries around law, where would we go? I have to imagine that in most cases, we would go towards the way of spoiled children, and I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. Perhaps our very nature has not yet been discovered - only our tenacity and adaptability. Because surely a man who lives on the Steppe and tends horses from his yurt most think a man like me to be pampered to the point of uselessness. And in his environment I surely would be. But does that make me further or closer to the true nature of human beings? Perhaps there is no singular, true nature.

In Banks' Culture, there is more drug-enchanced mood alteration than we have colors of scarves. And the use of these, in various combinations is no more unusual than dressing up.

Sex of all sorts for all sorts of reasons is entirely de riguer, and one generally expects, since it is easily accomplished, for individuals to change gender at least once during their very long lives.

If these are vices, they are vices because we subordinate various aspects of our bodily functions to economic constraints. In a society of manual labor, the man who writes poetry indulges his brain in defiance of the normal order of being useful. In a culture where lifespan is limited to 45 years old, the woman who doesn't bear children before the age of 25 is considered negatively. When work is required and health is threatened, the man who lies about stoned on marijuana is in moral disrepute. These values and behaviors, I say, are tied to the economics of the culture. In a post-scarcity society, such indulgences are not problematic.

One wonders whether or not Star Trek isn't a bit too martial. I think that if we paid attention to the lives of ordinary humans in the Star Trek universe if we would not be put off by their recreations. After all, when Federation planets are not under threat only Vulcans and Klingons be considered serious. Given Kirk's proclivities, you can imagine what a swordsman he'd be in peacetime.

Ambition. What is it really?