Cobb

The Search Continues

Mother is not my mother. She is the mother of my best friend in high school, and she became one of the highest ranking women in her church. Not just in California, but nationwide. So I had a long talk with her the other night.

She's retired and lives in Washington DC, and today she will have gone to the funeral of Dorothy Height, whom I don't really know. She is running a small program for black boys in the District. She is quite and accomplished woman. I would probably like to have a correspondence with her, but I'm not sure it will yield what I'm trying to learn. Speaking to her helped me understand that. My desire is unusual. I'm going to have to find somebody else. Still, getting it out there helped me understand more of what I want to know, which is exactly how tightly wrapped things are. I think the answer is that they are not - except where they are which is fewer places than one would think.

The older I get, the more I think that perhaps Baldwin's warning is unavoidable. Baldwin warned that the price of being a professional, or mastering anything, is that you learn the locations of the compromises that invalidate the entire enterprise. You realize where things are finessed and how flimsy the excuses are after all. I think of this in terms of the social implications of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Any human endeavor cannot be effective and principled at the same time. So we talked about Church and State. Canon Law and Law.

Mother came genuinely from an Old School family and they were the class people I associated with and considered myself at one with. I forgot about Mother that she studied economics. I forgot that she knew Don Dyer who was the first black partner in Coopers and Lybrand. Just like I forgot that Dyer was a role model for me. Just as we all forget all sorts of things - or put them out of our minds. But I remember that she gave it up to become a priest back when such things were considered highly unusual and controversial, like black partners at the big accounting firms. It's never right to take such efforts for granted, but we owe it to ourselves to take such dreams for granted. We never had any right not to die trying. It was never a gift, and it still isn't. 

Today I see her defined by a struggle, the dimensions of which I do not quite fully appreciate. In the Church are politics I cannot see. Where I imagine a platonic world of theology are likely manifest corruptions and frailties. They don't like women bishops. There's always that 'they' and they are everywhere. I saved us from going down the rabbit hole of gay marriage. It is a conversation I'm needing to have with somebody know might better understand, and care to understand where I'm coming from and where I might be going. And so I'll search for that. Mother is rightfully tired, and so retired. 

---

I don't know why my hunger and thirst pushes me in this way. Even though I don't want to be, I should be more practical. Instead I cannot focus on what's in front of me. I write instead, and I live here in this abstract theoretical world of morals and logic and thought. And people are all just people trying to get along, and get me to go along too. Work and manners are quid pro quo. I can deal with that. I do. I make my living. But I have been too many places, I have lived too long. I have heard too many jokes and eaten too many lobsters. I must go towards a unified source of thought and spirit that doesn't keep multiplying in front of me on tangents that are missing the big picture. There's not enough time. 

I'm trying not to be distracted by life. 

My daughter can do her back handspring. She will either make the Varsity Cheer squad or be a Captain on the JVs. She busted a 3.6 this quarter and got of 90% on both her science and match midterms. She's not scientific or mathic, but she's disciplined to the work. She has learned how to learn. I stopped writing to tell her how wonderful that is. But at some point we all have to try to stop transcending and being platonic. The value of life is life, not our abstractions of it. Sometimes my brain hates my life, but I'm doing ok today.

Why It Means War

What nobody knows for sure is the question of when. Why is what I see now.

What I'm talking about is the default of Greece and the upcoming ripples. Now the first thing I'm thinking to counter the notion that I propose is that nobody in Argentina is thinking about kicking any ass these days. If they are, it doesn't show up on the radar - but perhaps they have their own brand of chaos down there that we're generally ignorant of. Perhaps they are accustomed to being broke and it doesn't matter. But somehow I think that won't be the case when the Eurozone starts crashing down. There will be the countries that make cars and the countries that don't. The countries that don't will go broke and their people will be stranded, frustrated and angry. So do they make weapons? Will they loot themselves? Will a strongman have to unite them politically? Yes. Yes. Yes. That means war war war.

Little war perhaps. Another 9/11. Nothing major. Another Iraq. Nothing that kills millions, but just enough to make a huge bloody scar. Just wait and see.

SIGTARP on AIG

I've learned, from ZeroHedge, the name of a possible hero in all of this financial mess. His name is Borofsky and he's the head of SIGTARP, the Special Inspector General for TARP. Here's what his office submitted to Congress on AIG in the first quarter.

AIG Counterparty Payments: On November 10, 2008, the Federal Reserve
and Treasury announced the restructuring of the Government’s financial support
to AIG. As part of this restructuring, a special purpose vehicle, Maiden
Lane III, purchased certain assets underlying AIGFP’s credit default swap
(“CDS”) contracts from its counterparties using $24.3 billion of FRBNY financing
in combination with a $5.0 billion equity investment from AIG. In exchange
for this payment and being permitted to retain $35 billion in collateral payments
already made (thus effectively being paid par or face value for the underlying
assets), the counterparties agreed to terminate their CDS contracts with AIGFP.
SIGTARP’s audit, which was issued on November 17, 2009, found, among
other things, that the terms of the original FRBNY financing did not result from
independent analysis, but were simply an adoption of the term sheet from an
aborted private financing discussion, and those terms, which included an onerous
effective interest rate of 11%, made modification of the terms and further
Government action inevitable. The audit also found that, in structuring Maiden
Lane III, FRBNY attempted to obtain concessions, or “haircuts” from the CDS
counterparties — and one counterparty was prepared to take a modest haircut
— but the FRBNY’s negotiating strategy was hampered by a series of policy
decisions that severely limited its ability to obtain concessions, including its
decision not to accept concessions unless concessions could be obtained from
all of the counterparties, its refusal to use its leverage as regulator to some of the
institutions involved, and its basic discomfort with interfering with the sanctity
of the counterparties’ contractual rights. These policy choices led directly to a
negotiating strategy with the counterparties that even then-FRBNY President
Geithner acknowledged had little likelihood of success. The audit further noted
that although Mr. Geithner has denied that his intent was to benefit the counterparties,
the overall structure of the AIG bailout resulted in AIG’s counterparties
receiving tens of billions of dollars they likely would not have otherwise
received had AIG gone into bankruptcy.

Nothing I heard yesterday in the Senate hearings on Goldman seems to be as heinous as this, not that I understand it perfectly well. I don't even think I know anyone who understands this perfectly well. But I'm watching.

The Intellectual Sandbox

The Intellectual Sandbox from Michael David Cobb Bowen on Vimeo.

It's not just intellect, it's politics, religion, everything.

Miracle at Sibley

I'm shocked.

This evening, I happened to be in an emergency room attending a friend. It was in a suburb of Washington DC. It was 6:30 pm. It was empty, it had free wifi. The wifi was faster than this one at the Marriott.

Maybe that's what makes these knuckleheads in DC think the way they do. Inside the Beltway.

Blankfein

I have been listening to Blankfein's testimony for the past 90 minutes or so. I don't know if anybody is liveblogging it, but it's fairly interesting stuff.

I have a fairly decent understanding, I think, of what's going on. How about you?

Loury & McWhorter Have Tea With Ellison, Moynihan & Wax

The Book Fair at UCLA was sponsored by the LATimes, an organization from which I feel I learn nothing. And on my way back home I overheard a kind of recital of facts that could only come from an older man who had spent a good deal of time learning facts in such a way as to teach them. And so it occurred to me having spent a couple hours browsing stuff of which had less interest and efficiency than a trip to Amazon.com that he was a walking dinosaur. There is a way he has come to be important that has everything to do with how people learned to learn in his day, that old man with the beard. And what did he know anyway?

McWhorter and Loury are too, stuck in amber. Nevertheless, it is a pleasant thing to witness the degree to which their chosen professions compel them to nail certain artifacts of knowledge with precision and alacrity. There is the necessity of mnemonic context - of intellectuality and facility in banter - a formalism/collegiality which is on display. But really, the core of what they're saying is practically binary. Moynihan was right. How many people are on the wrong side of that? Hard to know. But surely in 10 minutes you can get to the meat of that position. I know it, I get it. I figured it out. It took me forever because I didn't have access to such bloggingheads before bloggingheads. I couldn't leverage the pre-digested information they contain and absorbed over the course of their careers learning how to learn and meliorate. But now I'm at the same place, independently and I wonder how much time it's going to take.

So I am interested and find it curious to witness how much and from which directions we have such academics who have spent so much time absorbing what is necessary to know to make sense of American life. If I ever manage to get out my essay about my fatigue with urbanity perhaps the context will be complete. But I stand and watch these guys say with precision what those possessed with clear minds should have figured out for themselves. Are they a necessary antidote to noise pollution that is always with us, or are they part of the problem of overlearning?

At the end of my book "Up From Freedom" which I may never write, I will be watching the sun rise from my front porch. It will be an unobstructed view to the horizon over property which I own. I will be fighting back the tears that remind me how long it took me to get out of the shadow canyons of the Big City and all of those sociological Zagats. Facing the rising sun of that new day begun, I need none and heed no marching orders or anthems. That would be freedom, enjoyed.

So here's one final toast to that Tea Party madness. Speak on that if you must.

Fifty Thousand Apps

I came across that figure. The headline read that now that Android had 50K+ apps, they could be a serious challenge for the iPhone. It is impossible for a telephone to be that useful.

There are exactly 13 applications that make any reasonable sense for a handheld portable telephone and three of them have yet to be invented. Those three are telepresence, credit card and positive ID. The other ten are obvious because you already have them on your smartphone. The other umpdeumpthousand are inflation.

Steve Jobs is Tiffany. Once you understand that he is selling glamourous nothingness, you recognize how much time and money people have to waste. 

On the other hand, Steve Jobs is brilliant because he has found a way to make money by redefining talk. People don't talk to each other. They communicate via devices.

The Strangest Compliment

Last week, I received one of those life-affirming compliments. Its impact on me is going to determine a lot. It was delivered by one of the Laughing Happy Fishheads, my new moniker for a superb cadre of guys with whom I share a profession and much alcohol. I'll get into them later and where I think we're situated in the Slice. I can remember three or four such compliments in my life. One of them that I specifically recall was given to me at a meetup of the Cult of Brainstorms, the electronic community founded by Howard Rheingold.

The woman told me that I should always keep writing because you never know how your writing is going to affect someone. For her part, she had been profoundly affected. I didn't know her, recognize her face or remember her name. And yet there was that moment - one that made me a writer.

The Fishhead told me that what annoys him is that he's never going to catch up to me as an intellectual and that pisses him off. I could always throw a book at him that he's never going to read. It might sound backhanded but it impressed me greatly.

It does in a couple ways. Firstly, like all people who reckon with (the following is how I see my own brainyness) chronic curiosity, phenomenal memory, need for moral certainty and rapid logical skills, I have a sense of my own weakness. We're all familiar with the metaphor of men who are led around by their gonads and women by their emotions, but I am a victim of my mind. It must be satiated or numbed. (Hmm, I could be playing Mass Effect right now). But I am also accustomed to staring the myth of moral meritocracy in the face and watching it cross its eyes and stick out its tongue at me. So by force of habit and prejudice I am lazy. Why try? It's not that I want to be a waste case, and I'm certainly not a cynic. But I'll be damned if I'm going to pretend that trust funders don't have a leg up that I can overcome by sheer force of character and talent. To hell with that. This is Extremistan.

Still, as cliche as it gets, I am flattered and honored by the all of the peasants around me who give the high honors that peasants give one another, even while I pretend to be not one of us. Drunk or sober it's a compliment. Yes that and three bucks will get you a tall decaf cappuccino, but on the other hand, that's all we deserve. Or potatoes and gin.

The Red Pill

Today is one of those days. At the end of one of those weeks. You know.  When you ask yourself why oh why did I take the red pill.

I thought about Evie today. I used to hang out with Evie when she was on the verge of becoming a crackhead. She already did coke and she was my date for my drunkest night ever. I was about 26 and just left college and in the several months before I simplified and gained my focus, I was back home with Moms. We went out to the Centinela Drive In, but had a bottle of wine first. Then we drank some Bacardi and coke at the show. Then we drove to a party in Gardena and sucked up the punchbowl which I had spiked with some Smirnoff 100. In between 1986 and 1988 I always had a pocket of booze and a pocket of tobacco with me for the moment I got off work.

I thought about Evie because we lost her to crack, and the next time I asked around I heard that she had been in rehab and it was so bad that the cocaine was coming out of her pores. 'We' meaning society. She may or may not be alive today but she fell off the grid. Can't even find her on Facebook. I was talking to the Spousal Unit yesterday and asked her, she said no, if she had ever been tempted by crack.

When you take the red pill, you decide that life is not just a game. It happened to me in my childhood. I always wanted to be a grandfather because I felt that grandparents had earned the right to be arbitrary. Always and everywhere it seemed to me in my young life that people were being arbitrary before it was time. They didn't know the correct answers to life's questions and yet they expected me to respect their decisions. That's how I look at it. You have to earn it. That's why I like nuclear blackmail, but that's a different story. Life is just a game for those who cannot ascertain the dimensions of the sandbox in which they play. If you can't understand it all, you may as well be arbitrary. You may as well play life as if it has no rules, or as if the rules are always stacked against you. You may as well be drunk or licentious or violent or vacuous, because what does it matter?

So basically I've been thinking about the times when I had the chance to dance down the slippery slope and resisted. Bully for me.

Earth Day in Perspective

Thanks George Carlin, sometimes you actually did make sense.

The Sound Beyond Soul

You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind -- driving you mad. -- Morpheus

My life sometimes hates my brain. And it is for any number of complex reasons that it does. There is certainly a profound social reason, but since I am the sort who likes to believe my own actions matter I tend to take a responsibility which is perhaps larger in my head than in reality. I think my life hates my brain because I can't often get it to that place where it can breathe free and make the connections its hardware dreams of making. Connections between the abstract and the real, between the ideal and the practical, between God and man, man and woman, music and philosophy and a list that wants to go on down this page, but can't because I do have a life.

Between my brain and my life is therefore a compromised mind. A mind that bears up sometimes and wears down other times. That makes excuses and rationalizations and bridges the gap between the desires of my wetware to crank and the time I have on this planet to focus. It is the creature that must worldswap when I'm on a 6AM conference call with the practice manager on the East Coast and my 15 year old daughter knocks on the bedroom door. 

But there are times when I work out the three, the life, the mind, the brain. It is through nothing less than the tried and true - reading, writing, listening. A discipline of engagement one could almost call 'the life of the mind', where all parts are in harmony and mostly satisfied. It was once a journal. For a time it was performance poetry. A decade ago it was an online community or two or three. Since 2003 it has been this blog. I have a category in this blog called Mind Splinter, and I have another.

There is a sound I am searching for. 

Benzon reminded me this morning about the connection between Africa and Europe being played out in American music. Some of that was done and perfected and put down on wax. Wax doesn't last. But memories do, memories of music in my mind. My brain hungers for the things it might generate in the presence of such a sound. My mind could be put at ease in guiding my life and brain to that point of excitement. But I have a splinter. It is the inability to track down where that sound has been recorded. It is a problem of search, perhaps. But it is also a problem of context, because the thing that created that sound in the first place now has no place to go. And that is why I only know of two or three clips of it.

I call it Negro Operatic. And maybe it could be described as African spirit wearing a European Christian dress as Benzon describes the some fraction of that musical connection. But I know that it is close to my home. It is a kind of extremity of performance reaching beyond perfection in the hopes of attaining the practically transcendent. It is a creation of mind, coaxing the brain to achieve something that drags the life out of the dust to the mountaintop and beyond. It is like reaching up and trying to touch the face of God knowing you stand in robes on stage in front of people who may be merely entertained. You take off the robes and head out the back door into the streets. You live for the next moment of creating that sound and your brain hates your life, and your life hates your brain, and you employ your mind on the daily to keep them from snuffing each other out. 

For those who have been trained by it, no discipline seems pleasant at the time but painful. 

Robert McFerrin Sr. sung that kind of music. And I'd like to get my hands on some because I want to be put in that frame of mind. I want to drink from the well of spirit that created the sort of virtue that seems superfluous in today's market of music. I want to hear music that makes me cry - a crying of a different sort than is evoked by swelling violins and deep screen kisses. I want to hear it and I cannot find it. It sounds a little something like this:

Born In A Manger: Sounds of Blackness

Do you hear the perfect diction? Do you hear the perfect harmony? Do you follow the dynamic lead surrounded by the power of the chorale? Can you hear the contrast? Did you catch the off key denouement and diminuendo? Aren't you amazed all that could be done in 79 seconds? I play that album every year during the Holidays and have ever since I've been married. It is in may ways the single most profound piece of music I possess.

But I've heard the sound before. For a moment, Take 6 will go there as they did riffing 'Rock of Ages' on 'David and Goliath'. There is of course McFerrin's 'Discipline'. But that's it. That and the way I sung in the Gospel Choir at St. John's Episcopal Church in 1977. Alto. 

I'm going to start looking. And maybe you and Benzon can help. I fear we are losing some of the old world as everything goes to iPad. There is a sound beyond soul out there. And maybe it might never be recorded. Maybe it isn't a problem of search, but of something else entirely. But there you have my splinter. 

A Karl Popper Note

Popper, Karl Raimund, Sir [1902- ]

 1945 _THE POVERTY OF HISTORICISM_. Economica, N.S. 12 (46).

    1954 Tr. Milano.
    1956 Tr. Paris.
    1957 Revised edition. Boston: Beacon Press.

    "In memory of the countless men and women of all creeds or
    nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and
    communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Desti-
    ny." (p. v)

    "The fundamental thesis of this book--that the belief in
    historical destiny is sheer superstition, and that there
    can be no prediction of the course of human history by
    scientific or any other rational means--goes back to the
    winter of 1919-20." (p. vii)

    Holistic thought belongs to "a pre-scientific stage." (p.
    76)

    Whole: "(a) the totality of all the properties or aspects
    of a thing, and especially of all the relations holding
    between its constituent parts, and (b) certain special
    properties or aspects of the thing in question, namely
    those which make it appear an organized structure rather
    than a 'mere heap'." (p. 76)

    A whole in sense (a) is impossible to deal with. (p. 77)

    A craving for "concrete knowledge of 'reality itself'" or
    of the "whole" is "mysticism". (p. 78)

    "The evolution of life on earth, or of human society, is a
    unique historical process." (p. 108)

    The course of a unique process cannot be predicted from
    its past; the butterfly cannot be anticipated from obser-
    vation of a caterpillar. (p. 109)

    A 'static' social system corresonds to a stationary dynam-
    ic physical system; astronomy succeeds because the solar
    system is static. (pp. 112-113)

    The "central mistake of historicism" is its devotion to
    absolute trends, independent of initial conditions. From
    them flow "unconditional prophecies, as opposed to condi-
    tional scientific predictions." (p. 128)

    The premises of deductive systems are "tentative conjec-
    tures, or hypotheses." (p. 131)

    "historical sciences take all kinds of universal laws for
    granted and are mainly interested in finding and testing
    singular statements." (p. 144)

Kelsey Grammer on Hollywood

From PopEater.com

You're a Republican. What's easier in Hollywood -- being a Republican or a cocaine addict?
Yes, I am a Republican. And gosh, I don't think you can lose your job because you're addicted to cocaine.

Can you lose your job because you're a Republican?
I think you can. It can affect your livelihood. Drug use in Hollywood does not affect your livelihood. I clearly am in the minority, as a Republican. It's fine. There are some principles and issues for me that are worth claiming rather than pretending I'm something that I'm not.

Not surprised.

The New Savanna

Long ago, I was one of the New Savanna Stompers. We were an intellectually improvisational group headquartered on somebody's Mac. That somebody, Cuda Lee Brown has disappeared into the mists of time. But one of the central stompers, whose pseud I forget, Bill Benzon remains as he was, a musical shaman with that rare gift of extraordinary literacy. There are few I've ever known whose life of the mind was not squandered on tutoring undergrads or chasing the sinecures of academic departmentalism. In other words he is a scholar without being a scholar-squirrel, and he understands the joy of discovery.

Well, Bill, whose work with any luck will come to help us understand exactly what goes on inside the brain when we hear music, has picked up the old riff of the New Savanna. And he's started off with researching that little piece of music we all know that is the cliche whenever we see a snake charmer in a movie. You and I sung it on the school yard. In 90016, circa 1970 it went a little something like this:

There's a place in France
where the naked ladies dance
and the men wear bikinis
and the ladies suck their weenies.

Don't ask me how I know it or how I know it like that. It's a mystery. This version, which claims me, bears the telltale signature of that meme is a fifth grade memory. You know the tune too, probably. What were the lyrics in your case?

Now that I think about it, the riff came back in hiphop form with the song 'Egypt, Egypt' by the Egyptian Lover back when I was in college and nobody could think to do anything else with that electronic sound that came out much better than Newcleus' Cosmo D from outer space. Thought I do recall that the good Doctor Spence fondly recalls 'Space Cowboy' from the same period. Spence too was a Stomper.

So do check out Benzon. Now is a good time to return to the savanna.

Massive Banks

We have too many massive banks.

As I follow David Goldman I find something wrong with the banking industry. The fundamental problem is that they are held captive by the Administration policy of free money and 13% deficit. They therefore can make money on the spread between the prime rate and the treasury curve which is not very steep now, but probably will steepen if we inflate. But the effect is that business credit and loaning is dried up. Basically all of the big banks are making money like communist apparatchiks. Are there any that remain to serve capital?

Well it's hard to imagine there wouldn't be. The problem is that there aren't many left. When you look at bank acquisitions and mergers over the past 20 years, there seem to be few very large banks left and a half dozen massive banks are the American banking industry.

Recently, we know a bunch of mergers were forced. But long before that all through the 90s banks were piling on top of banks. I remember when NCNB, later NationsBank went on a tear through the South. Barnett Bank and hundreds of others got eaten. For the short time I lived in Atlanta, the banking scene was dramatically changed as FirstUnion grew.

Who's gone? Shawmut, Barnett, BayBank, Crocker, Security Pacific, First Chicago, First Boston, Valley National, First Interstate, FirstUnion, Great Western, FleetBoston, MBNA, Riggs, World Savings.

It's just astounding. All of these banks that might have failed, got swallowed up and made banks that were too big to fail because nothing has been spun off. The market for banking has shrunk and we are deep into oligopoly territory. It's bad, very bad.

Marriott Bag Service

Dear Sirs,

I have an idea that I think will allow you to add value to your customers. It is a bag check & laundry service.

As a frequent business traveler I am subject to the enhanced security procedures at all the airports, and for this I suffer not being able to carry my favorite toiletries etc. Now that the airlines have started charging for checking a single bag, it is now more expensive and inconvenient than ever. For a simple flat rate I would gladly have Marriott keep an extra bag over the weekend (when I fly home) and provide a laundry fee. I think $30 is a fair price.

If I have a six week consulting engagement out of town, it would cost me $50 a week to check a second bag to and fro. It would be so much more convenient to have Marriott keep that bag for me and provide cleaning at a discount to this rate. Even at the same price, I would rather have Marriott take care of my bag at the hotel of my choice rather than to lug it back and forth to the airport and then do my own laundry at home. For longer term engagements, the advantage is even greater. I would pay cash or miles for this kind of convenience.

Many of your better hotels are already providing some of this service. Checking my bag at the front desk over the weekend is something I have done from time to time. But the real added value, and very likely source of profit for you, is to process the laundry. 

Please consider this business. I think it would be a big differentiation for Marriott in a competitive market. All of my colleagues are ready for this service now.

LAPD Puts .50 Caliber Rifle in Black Man's Face

So he can use it.

It has been a couple interesting weeks as we dipped into the race pool for a few moments. I haven't thought about it for a couple days, especially after my great day with my son at the Long Beach Grand Prix - another one of those things that are supposed to be impossible for black men to enjoy.

But it occurred to me today that I may have witnessed over that period another instance of a specific kind of black on black criticism, which I've been getting since day one of outing myself. It's the somewhat reasonable and somewhat paranoid inquiry into the question of whether or not I'm an idiot or have lost my moral compass (as a black man). With the subtext of Conservatism, the foreground of Republican and the obsession over the press double whammy over Tea Party activism and Confederate history, the subject of the actual racist history of Conservatism got lost. What I started off as an investigation of history ended up as an investigation of me. That is, of course, the very stuff of bigotry, but since I'm a hardcase, it doesn't bother me much. It's not about me, even when it somehow becomes about me. And so much for that.

Still, one has to recognize that despite my temptation to put 'black' in quotes, there are some fairly hard social constructions we all have to deal with. And since I come from one of those crazy families full of non-dysfunction and genuine authenticalness I take it upon myself to suggest that we're all Bowen first, and black somewhere down the line, whatever black means in the end. But I think I'm not stretching the definition too much when I suggest that if we took a poll, most Americans would find the picture below roughly impossible. It is the picture of a black man who has been given a .50 caliber rifle by the LAPD so he can get good at shooting it.  That black man is my brother Doc, that's Officer Bowen to you, the pictures you don't see are him with the AR and the 308. But all that's rather redundant, and I think you get my point.

Now I really want you to check yourself, honestly. Does it freak you out somewhere in the back of your mind when you put black man and LAPD together?  Are you tempted to draw inferences from the positions of the white hands in the photo? Are you thinking maybe Doc isn't what you really mean by black? Or can you just take the picture at face value? 

He's just another American who refuses to be disarmed, and he's me brudda!

Guru: Dead

If you ask me, there have been fewer travesties to the majesty of the blues than the lyrics penned by Guru. One thing anyone should insist on is grammar. Guru gets a fifty fifty. Listening to Jazzmatazz was like living on the border of sun and shadow on Mercury. It's never as comfortable as it should be.

On the one hand, when Guru put the gangsta in GangStarr, it was righteously good rap. 'Sights in the City' has to be his best cut ever, and it bordered on great. No anthology of Acid Jazz would be complete without Guru. But then when he approached jazz standards, it puts a hole so deep in your heart that it's hard to forgive. Somewhere in that hole is the memory of what he has done, and I have practiced the dissociation long enough to have forgotten the damage done. So I'm cool and I don't want to remember. Still, a cut like 'Loungin' is just methodically wrong.

According to the people I used to hang with and do the hiphop hermeneutic thang, all props went to DJ Premier for arranging the coolest cuts ever, and then some more for putting up with Guru's lyrics and diction. The thing was, as an innovator, there was nowhere else to go. Nobody knows the names of the rappers of Buckshot LeFonque and so nobody could approach what Guru was up to, nobody except Lucien and MC Solaar and that angle of the Native Tongues. Asking for another Guru was like asking for a second 'A Different World'. (I was going to say Cosby Show, but that would be doing Guru too much of a favor). The connoisseurs would demand it, but the broader market (according to the producers) wouldn't support it.

My remedy was going towards French Rap, something of a guilty pleasure, because I knew some of it was gangsta. Nevertheless, Lucien was all that, bi-lingually.

You could say that Acid Jazz survived. You had the Brand New Heavies and others. Certainly The Roots came up behind Guru, vulgar as they were. The best of that lot were the one hit wonders who worked as Metrics with Steve Coleman. A lot of R&B got hiphop/jazzified starting with (ick) Erika Badu and on down the line to John Legend (finally) and the lost, forgotten and nevertheless magnificent and as far as I'm concerned the greatest talent of them all Frank McComb. And we should not forget India Arie or D'Angelo. But on the pure hiphop side, it kinda all began and kinda all ended in the English language with Guru. He ran it like a rapper should, even he never consummated his own skills up to par with what he would have had to if he was more mainstream.

What saved him of course was the music, and for that he is forgiven, and will also not be forgotten. Guru was the closest that mainstream rap music got to permanently edifying itself for the better and properly taking on the mantle and responsibility of jazz. That was a lot to swallow and it has never really been done. But the elements are all there.

The Three Treasons

Politics and War. Business & Science. Art & Philosophy. When I think of what the son inherits from the father, I think in these terms. The father who is successful in politics and war can have his son work for business and science.  That father, if successful will have his son work for the higher sensibilities of art and philosophy. My mother on the other hand said, don't lie. If you lie then you will steal. If you steal then you will kill. My brother is a cop and he knows that it takes a lot more nerve to steal than to lie. And killing is a lot harder than stealing.  At dinner this evening, over sushi and wine, I put together my family of ambition and treachery. Each level has it's own extreme. 

It thus occurs to me that in art and philosophy, the great crime is the falsehood. Neither art nor philosophy nor religion can sustain a lie, for these pursuits above all have truth as their goal. To lie about god or beauty or meaning is to destroy the very perfection of the seeking.

But in the professions, a lie is something to be dealt with. It may corrupt, it may mislead, and it may be overlooked, but the creations of engineering and of economics can survive a mere lie. But all the competence of a businessman is brought to naught if at bottom he is a thief. All the greatness of any engineering genius is squandered if it enslaves. Theft destroys the genius of creation.

War, one might think, is the art of killing. No. That is slaughter and it separates the general from the butcher. The warrior knows above all that life is most precious, because his calculations are at all times that of life and limb. When he crosses the line of nobility, he becomes a murderer. And what is the meaning of political ambition if it must serve murder? Nothing.

These are the three treasons, and they represent the final temptation of the three ambitions.

The Planet Ignores You

Vocabularies: All About Not About Bobby

Bobby McFerrin has done something that impresses me as both majestic and simple which is that he has begun to be iconographic. I'm likening his musical genius now to that of Thelonius Monk in that there are a few signature melodies which will be forever his legacy. Monk was a great deal more prolific than McFerrin of course and one could argue that Monk was more innovative, but when it comes to the actual genius of Monk's melodies it's difficult for me to say he had all that much over McFerrin.

When I first downloaded Vocabularies, his latest release, I immediately recognized three tunes; Baby, The Garden and He Ran To The Train. I was immediately disappointed because I wanted to hear something new. I always wonder where he's going to go next. And since Medicine Music, BangZoom and Beyond Words, I think I have found the golden age of Bobby. But now I hear in Vocabularies some of the very best of that orchestrated with instruments and a chorale group that fulfills much of the unknown promise in those extraordinary songs. McFerrin is an extraordinarily gifted vocalist, but now what he has done is realized to an extent never before possible with his single voice. These vocal arrangements are some of the most profoundly beautiful and dynamically striking I've ever heard. It's no longer just Bobby, it's something much more.

My favorite is now 'Train' and as I hear it I imagine myself transported to the day Bobby fell across some Southern African traditional singing in his travels - something he captured and distilled to his own signature and presented to us without a real spoken language but with sophisticated vocalizations like American jazz scatting taken to the next level. It could have been that or it could have been the simple melody Bobby invented scaled up and given all it needed to realize all that was embedded. Either way it establishes the songs I've been grooving to for the past 15 years over and over as McFerrin's own standards. There is nothing in my library which is not an acknowledged classical or jazz standard that is so listenable and fresh as these songs. 

McFerrin has a popular video going around my circles from TED. In his own trademark and inimitable way he communicates human musical fundamentals to the audience with wit and humor. He is maturing into a realm of serious play in a way that speaks to the sort of living musical legend he is in his blood, spirit and character.

Fabulous.

But what stands out here is how in his work he has sublimated himself to the art in a dramatic way. McFerrin is now establishing himself as one beyond mastery. He is a literal and figurative conductor of music that engages us.

There is something I am trying to understand about the positive and creative spirit in the essence of Pop. If there was an exuberance enjoined by Pop creativity in the 60s which led artists to believe in a new world of conveying the essentials of the human spirit in an open and engaging way, then McFerrin has some of that in his work. What's wrong with Pop is that it has become something other than that people's music - it belongs to stars. McFerrin has brought something back down from the firmament that requires talent and craft beyond that which fuels today's pop recording artists. You know it. You know where the music is going and where it is coming from. It is the power of the human voice and this is what it supposed to sound like.

Daryl Gates: Dead

They say that if you can't say anything good about somebody, you shouldn't say anything at all. This may be a short entry.

Yet I don't have any words to malign Daryl Gates. He stood in opposition to a lot of his peers who came down on him hard in the wake of his oversight of the police beating heard around the world. Rodney King and Daryl Gates are a pair whose lives are intertwined in the public consciousness - a consciousness which has slept for quite a while. After Gates came Williams. After Williams came Parks after Parks came Bratton. There's a new guy in charge today since Bratton left, and I don't even know his name.

But Gates' LAPD is the LAPD of the Batterram, of SWAT, of DARE, of CRASH.  Before Gates modernized and started recruiting from all around the country, including for God knows what reason, Alabama. The LAPD lived under Ed Davis. Davis was easy to hate. Davis could easily substitute in my mind for any irrational defender of Dixie, but then again I was a kid. Gates was rational. Gates was disciplined. Gates was a hardnose and Gates had black cops. Not a huge amount, and famously, many of them were meter maids under a new recruitment program. But no matter what the weather, Gates had a program.

Sometime his program didn't work. Sometimes it worked to a scary degree. The LAPD as everyone knows it, paramilitary was created by Gates. He got the hardware out there, including most notoriously, the Batterram. But for me it was Blue Thunder that most characterized the sort of feelings I got most viscerally.

Almost every weekend, where I grew up in 90016, it seemed like there would be some kind of robbery and police action on Saturday night. Ice Cube wrote a rap song called Ghetto Bird that described the situation. Gates ran the helicopters with their powerful spotlights out to crime scenes like there was no tomorrow. Being under the huge kleiglights of the modern helos gave one the kind of Big Brother feeling that had no equal. You were the target. The helicopters were loud and they flew low. They rattled windows and woke children from sleep. When they flashed on your house you knew that a foot pursuit was in progress. The public transit bus had a number on its roof. Your neighborhood was a sector on a grid for air surveillance.

We used to pretend to have guns in those Bruce Lee days. We would aim and shoot with broomsticks at the police helicopters flying over us in the daytime. They would circle, looking for somebody. We could see them looking at us. Yeah. We hated the pigs. They wouldn't let us ride our minibikes on the street. They took our nunchucks and threatened us with juvy. 

If you can unseal my juvenile record, you'd find that. I was told by my parents in no uncertain terms not to ask the judge why Pep Boys could sell minibikes if they were illegal to ride on the street. They were obviously too fast to ride on the sidewalk. Who did they think we were, suicidal? So I shut up and was forgiven.

Gates had his own adjective. It was 'embattled'. It seemed like there was nothing he could do without raising the ire of my fraction of the public. He initiated the chokehold in response to his claim that suspects on PCP were immune to pain. Somebody died, or at least that's what I remember. Some wrongful death suits went on for years in our political memory. Gates gave no quarter to gangbangers. Whole neighborhoods became unsafe for civilians due to the battles between Gates' cops and those perceived to be gang members and affiliates. He initiated sweeps where your hangout became no-man's land, sweeps with arrest percentages in the 2s and 3s. You'd get in the system simply for being there, detained and let go - like human fly fishing. It earned him no sympathy,  no friends and no cooperation. Everything Gates did was by the book, with no room for warm and fluffy. LA had no beat cops, no friendly cops, because there was no way on earth he could hire enough for them to leave their squad cars. 

Every criticism of Gates ultimately came down to that controversial and unavoidable calculation. LA taxpayers would never spend enough on hiring officers such that the ratio of cops to people would be comparable to other big cities in the East and Midwest. We joke about donuts, but there were no fat cops in LA. They were soldiers in patrol cars, and they didn't get out of those cars in 'hostile territory' for no good reason. There was never a friendly Irish 'top o' the marnin t ye laddie'. It was 'put your hands where I can see them, sir'. Sir with a sneer. 

I've often told folks that I had been detained something on the order of 27 times between the time I was 15 and 30 in LA. I was cited 3 or 4 of those times. I came to know the excuses by rote. Well I'm running a check on you because there's a Michael Bowen who just escaped from jail in Chino. Gee officer, this is the third time. Then the look that says, OK you know the drill don't you wiseguy. They hold up their maglites and check out my forearms for jailhouse tattoos, and let me drive away with a warning. 

Back in my post-buppie politically radical days, I would sit in my beater in Beverly Hills parked on a side street and wait to see how long it would take some cop to tell me that I was in the wrong neighborhood and should go home. I do those kind of things, you know. I don't take anybody's word for it. I recognized the difference between the LAPD and the Beverly Hills cops, and the Sheriff's Deputies and California Highway Patrol as well. The LAPD was on a mission. The BHPD was legendarily polite. The CHP actually cared about your safety. The Sheriff's deputies were not to be trifled with, but encounters were rare. None of them were the cowboys of the notorious Hawthorne PD. Whatever could be said about Gates, he tolerated no rogues. 

Hawthorne, back when I was growing up, was from my perspective, a 'white trash border zone'. Between the 'hood where I grew up and quiet upscale beach cities where I live now were two towns where our very own rednecks lived, Hawthorne and Lawndale. If I remember correctly, Torrance, immediately south of Hawthorne was one of the last places where racially restrictive covenants were defeated during the Civil Rights Movement here on the West Coast. It might have been Hawthorne, but who wants to live in Hawthorne? Lawndale is still living down its reputation. Hawthorne has since been overrun by blacks and latinos of all sorts. Legendarily Don Jackson, a black officer in the Hawthorne PD who has since changed his name to Diop Kamau organized stings once he was run off the force. This crusader has since dropped racial revenge from his agenda and serves the public trust in what I consider to be more honorable manner. But everybody has got to get through their rage. Jackson had plenty good reasons.

After Rodney King, I chased down reality with the same vigor as I loitered in Beverly Hills. I found cops doing their jobs. Good, important jobs. Long before Gates stepped down and Williams took over, I paid more attention to the politics of policing and I recognized the distance between public opinion and police policy - I recognized how race blurred the picture and ultimately served to make the police a proxy between people who didn't know each other, but trusted in stereotypes to hate each other. Gates didn't care about being the politician who could smooth things out, and so there was never any such thing as community policing under his rule. That is something that had to evolve and could only do so after Gates was out on his ear.

Daryl Gates is dead and has been politically dead for a long time, to the benefit of LA politics. I missed the Riots and what Reardon did to fix things. But today I see a much less tense Los Angeles over his dead body.

Shay Goes to Tea

Shay Riley of the Conservative Brotherhood attends a Tea Party Rally in Chicago:

One of the rally speakers, John Arrington (who asked me earlier if I could sign his ballot petition, but I don’t live in suburban Cook County), is a black Republican running for suburban Cook County regional school superintendent. He was introduced as a “Harvard-educated community organizer from Chicago’s South Side”, with a joke about U.S. President Barack Obama. Mr. Arrington said (and I’m paraphrasing here): “You’ve been called hatemongers, and now I see why. You hate high taxes, loss of liberty, and government intrusion….You’ve been called bigots, and now I see why. You hate black lies, white lies, fat lies, all lies…” He was one of two speakers who kept my attention, because the others were insufficiently charismatic, good speakers, or whatever to maintain my attention.

I didn’t see any foulness from tea party activists (e.g., I saw no racist signs or witnessed racist behavior). Nor did I see the counter-protesters act foul. The only problem that I experienced was a white guy in his early 20s, in a red shirt, who kept staring me down for about five minutes. Possibly in a leering way, but I wasn’t sure. He struck me as “special”, given how his mother was interacting with him. However, he was making me feel uncomfortable, so I actually moved to another spot (with a better view).

A Quick Sketch: Black Cultural Antidisestablishmentarianism

There is a difference between the aims and gains of the Civil Rights Movement and the problems that black Americans have with family.

Black Conservatives recognize, as do most Black Nationalists, that the white liberals who supported the CRM were often also counter-culturalists who rejected EVERYTHING they believed their parents and America stood for. 

It has always been possible to accept King's rhetoric of delivering on the promise of liberty for black America without being a free-love hippie, bra-burning feminist, pot-smoking dropout, or anti-Vietnam peacenik. All of that gets mushed up into "The Sixties" as if the only way to be against Jim Crow was to be all of those things like so much of liberal white America was. Nixon knew this which was why he won with his Silent Majority which was none of all that radicalness.

Black cultural nationalism, however slept tight with white liberal radical chic. Just ask David Horowitz. But not everybody believed that black freedom had to come with all the radical left trimmings. So people who sought to reject traditional family values were very influential in black political circles, and African Americans - buying into the myth that EVERYTHING was wrong with America, felt at liberty to reject the conservative message of the black Christian church. 

That was the beginning of the end

Something Wonderful: New Bobby McFerrin

Borrowing from my favorite editor, I celebrate my favorite living musical artist's new album. His work is always something wonderful. I picked up his latest work, VOCAbuLarieS, from Amazon today. I'll write a review after I let it bake in my head for a bit. I'm hoping that the pop media pick up on this single. Bobby has been pigeonholed for too many years.

New Sade and new McFerrin in the same quarter. This is a great time to be alive.

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

It's coming.

I'm just not sure if it's a good thing or not.

Rude Questions About the Catholic Priesthood

I just ran across a phrase that stuck in my head which is that celibacy does not cause child abuse. It was made in the context of the latent controversy that the Catholic Church has found itself in regarding its perceived intransigence in handing over criminal perverts to the law. I also found myself listening to a rather intelligent fellow who is in command of many facts ridiculed by Adam Curry and John C Dvorak in their No Agenda podcast.

In the podcast, the man defending the Church against none other than anti-Papist 80s punk rocker Sinaed O'Connor. They got wrapped around the axle over his use of the word 'pre-pubescent'. His point being that the majority of the cases were not technically child molestation cases, rather they were homosexual rapes. He didn't use that term, I do.

For one thing, I think the gentleman defender makes an important point when he tells us that the Church has stemmed the tide - put the epidemic back in the box. There is something to it that other global institutions could learn. As he says, this was a global tragedy two decades ago and it has all but ceased. But my judgment is reserved for understanding the scope of that tragedy and the swiftness of its attenuation. 

Here's what puzzles and somewhat intrigues me. Presuming that something other than just 'evil' is what causes priests to rape, what should we assume are proximate causes? Is this kind of psychological profile available on those cases that have been prosecuted? I think it matters.

Is there a kind of down-low silence that the Church condoned? Isn't that a kind of tolerance? Let us suggest as a mind experiment that we are not talking about child molestation.

On a scale of 1 to 20 of sin according to the Catholic Church, let us put homosexual acts of any sort at 10. Let us put homosexual rape = to any other sort of rape at 13, and let us put child molestation at 15, just a few clicks shy of murder at 17, torture at 18, serial killing at 19 and genocide up at 20. This is totally a wild guess. I don't know, nor does anyone really, what the Church's Depravity Scale is, nor most anyone's for that matter. The research is incomplete.

If you born/raised homosexual and Catholic, you are in a pickle. You must know that the gratification of your sexual desire in any way is sinful. What then is the additional burden of that sin with a young man, or an adolescent if you are on the border between Hell and Purgatory no matter what? In an environment where there is no way to be 'clean' what is a little more dirt?

I'm thinking of this in the context of the opportunity the Church gives a man who is, as a homosexual, outcast from society, and I wonder if the Church interprets whatever tolerance it gives to homosexuals in the laity and the priesthood as part of its duty and if it perceives that much of this scandal is hypocrisy. What if the Catholic Church just said our homosexuals are less sinful on the whole than secular homosexuals, because since all homosexuality is sinful, at least our sinners are doing God's work. Is it blind to the distinction between extra-marital straight sex and all homosexuality? Might it not justify its lenience in the same way some people justify gay marriage?

This is another way of asking whether or not homosexual priests might be better protected in a gay friendly community given their proclivity for X, Y or Z, again relative to that community's depravity scale. 

I ask this question without prejudice to the Church or priests. Because if you say that they should be held to a higher standard, then you are admitting to the depravity of homosexuality. Again, I don't mean to suggest that a priest is not an authority figure and therefore the potential for abuse should not have greater consequences. But there surely cannot only be aggravating factors but mitigating factors as well. I suspect that there is something fundamentally different about male on male sexuality in the shadows and margins of society that is given some implicit tolerance. What are the norms of homosexual behavior in the context of extra-maritalism?  I suppose I'm also asking whether or not in our permissive society it is reasonable to find some equality or standard in the age of consent? If you distribute condoms in because you 'just know' sex is going to happen, why should we be surprised about alter boys? Is that indeed an international standard, and what should be expected of such a global institution as the Catholic Church?

Lotta questions in there. 

==

OK here's what some numbers suggest to me.  In Los Angeles and Orange Counties, 42 cases are or have gone to trial covering 150 litigants. 598 cases have been settled out of court. It's difficult to read the proper interpretation of the account from Wikipedia. But they give some sense that 22 priests were involved over 40 years. If that is indeed correct, then there seems like there can hardly be a broad case made as I suggest that the priesthood takes in homosexuals with some quid pro quo.I suppose all this speculation is indeed rude.

A Disposable Economy

I love digital cameras. Because they enable you to reminisce immediately. Oh. Look at us. We were so young. Standing right there, wow. Where does the minute go?
-- Demetri Martin

According to somebody I'm related to in a Tweeterverse, Microsoft has come up with a new consumer product called Kin. It's a phone.

But of course it's more than that. It's a lifestyle phone. It's a way to communicate non-verbally (which is what's happening with phones as cameras). And the non-verbal lifestyle is an increasingly marketable business. It's social. It's a thing you gotta have.

I have an annoying itch, and that itch says who do they think we are? How long can this kind of market be sustained?

I went to Best Buy the other day. It has changed. All of the appliances that used to be on the side of the store have been pushed to the back. Their CD and DVD (and now Blu Ray) section has tripled in size. And I saw some working class folks poring over the iPad. I recall when the sociologists talked about cocooning, and I like the promise of mobile as a counter to that, but all this consumption of all this self-obsessed goo. Look at me, I'm happy. I'm taking a picture of myself happy.

Grumpy old man talk. I admit. But my real concern is how much of this is necessary, and how much of it will last? Is this fundamental or flippant? I don't know. I don't know what constitutes reasonable social skills. It's all a mysterious blur. But back when I was growing up, we used to say that love was free. Now apparently, you can't get to love without an IP connection. 

Is This Sign Racist?

Yes or no?

What is He Doing Here?

This is a man wearing chinos and a polo shirt. He is a catalog model for Eddie Bauer. Eddie Bauer is where I buy most of my clothes. The other significant and smaller portions come from Target on the low end and Johnston and Murphy on the high end. But I almost never wear chinos or polo shirts. The combination is almost unthinkable.

My casual is an evolution of California casual, which for me is a combination of beach, backpack, tactical and boho. It won't help if I explain it. Suffice it to say that this dude is wearing duds that are entirely too Connecticut for me, despite the fact that my father's side family is from Connecticut. 

However when it comes to the kind of gear I wear to work, Eddie Bauer has got me nailed. There is no other catalog that works as well, and I'm something of a clotheshorse. EB is right where I am now, although in the past I have done Jos A. Bank, Nordstrom, and a host of others.. whatever. My point is that I don't just throw on clothes. I think about them and I want them to say something about me.

I'm old enough to remember when Suzette Charles became the first black model for the JC Penney catalog. It's a rather odd sort of thing to think about and I'm not exactly sure how to think about it. On the one hand, I could call myself petty and self-absorbed to consider that such a thing as having a black Miss America working for JC Penney to be a significant milestone in the socialization of African America. It is generally what I do to people carrying the torch of black political partisanship. Or I could wonder about the sort of society that is so racially sick and twisted that it took X years to finally put a black woman in its pages.

There's a third option. That is to consider what it is that Miss Suzette Charles had going for her that nobody previously had. That maybe in her small way she *was* exceptional enough to merit her achievement. After all, she was Miss America, you know, after the 'right stuff' chick defaulted. But then you have to consider that Charles jumped the shark and that Vanessa Williams really did have the right stuff.

So, what of homeboy? He's a model. What are we to make of a model of color working for Eddie Bauer? Are there hermeneutics worthy of pursuing? 

Well, according to my worldview there are. Because I'm hedging my bets on the prospects of modernity in Western Civ. Which is to say that I perceive Europe to be in a state of cultural implosion and since we've elected Obama, it's catching. So to the extent that this Western Oriental Gentleman is supposed to represent something, he may actually represent nothing worth defending in the eyes of the next generation, should the Obama genre become more ascendant than Clinton. Now I know this isn't the sort of perfect symbolism. It is not, after all, LL Bean and this guy is two tones lighter than I, but at least it's personal. So those who are attracted to this sort of Uncle Tom flogging can have their opportunity to bash.

Surely there are NUDnicks around still.

Is Barack Obama Black Power?

Let us presume that there is a difference between Black Power and the power that Barack Obama has as a black man. Is it a distinction without a difference? Let us presume also that there is a difference between Black Power and the power that Colin Powell had as a black man? Is that closer or further away? Should we not care so long as they're both black? Or is one more or less black than the other?

The point of this rhetorical exercise is to examine what I call the Black End Game. Which is to say, how long in America should anybody care which avenues black men decide to take? At what point should the average black American stop caring about whether or not there should be an asterisk on all the advice they get throughout their lives - should they look for a black version? And I'm not talking about simpleminded flavors of life, I'm talking about substantial life skills. For example:

It's hard to imagine anyone saying that 'the black community' would cease to exist, but in many ways it already has. It just depends on which black community you're talking about. My aunt was born at home. Who is born at home? I haven't asked about it but there was probably a time in my grandparents' generation when it was just unthinkable for blackfolks to go to hospitals to have babies delivered by doctors. And I'm quite sure that there were many black midwives who handled the business of birthing babies just fine. I, for one, know zero about that culture. All I know about hot water and lots of towels I learned from old black and white TV shows and movies.

If Barack Obama or Colin Powell is black power then what can be said about their avenues? That is to say is that all just individual achievement or is there some social path we should identify such that the black ways and means have some orthodoxy or identifiable traits? If your kid grows up digging Justin Timberlake but not knowing anything about Michael Jackson is it still black music? If they don't go to a black Church with a black Jesus is Christianity still appropriate? How much black-orientation is sufficient? Is it like oxygen?

An assumption behind all this is that there is some way to be demonstrably pro-black through black achievement and such achievement naturally accrues benefits to black communities. Maybe it's osmosis. Maybe it's Osmosis Jones. Maybe it's role modeling. Maybe it's reparations. Whatever it is, it should get the Good Blackkeeping Seal of Approval and all those in places of responsibility to oversee such matters, Stuart Hall, for example, would readily acknowledge with the proper brownie points.

Are we to acknowledge that nobody scores a run until the entire lineup has circled the bases, or does it count to be Reggie Jackson hitting a solo shot to deep right center?

We should also presume that 'equality' in other words keeping up with Becky's Mum and Daddy, is a worthwhile goal. That there is only one American dream and by gum you had better be dreaming it, Pookie. That you can't be holding us back with your intransigent anti-Progressive Aunt Jemimism or whatever other throwback symptoms you display. Respectable Negroes won't put up with it, and we have the power to shun.

In summary. What is the great arc of Black history and what is it bending to? And how long (not long?) do we have to pay strict attention?

The 'Racist' History of Conservatism

CD. Him say:

[T]he claim is not per se that racists are attracted to conservativism--although quite clearly they are. It is that racism and racial animus are central to Conservative belief systems. A subtle but different distinction. I am more interested in how you reconcile it with your claim about an ideology as it stands apart from your claim. Could it be that conservative thought is more amenable to racism? What then do we do with black conservatives who would self identify with a philosophy that is hostile to them as a category of people? That is always the mystery to me for how folks could so proudly claim company with an ideology whose adherents and intellectual foundations have little to no use for them.

And yes we could debate the aims of Conservative politics as "sinful" or not. But that may take more space and time than is feasible.

First of all, I wonder if those of CD's persuasion bother to go tell it on the mountain, or on conservative blogs that their 'belief system' is racist. Perhaps ole Cobb is considered to have a soft spot for the old race card as explained by my betters that it's in my interest and thus the argument doesn't have to be so explicit. Well, I've read Howard Zinn too, and so I'm not particularly surprised that everybody gets to have their own version of history in this crazy mixed up society. Nevertheless we can duel and pretend to come up with a mutually satisfactory version.

I expect that at the very least that we won't be reduced to name-calling.

So here's my thing. In 1924, according to Wikipedia there were something on the order of 6 million Klan members in the United States. Six years later they were busted down to 30,000. In the 50s the White Citizens Councils had 50,000 members. Where did they all go? To the Republican Party?

The John Birch Society was dismissed as kooks by William F. Buckley when they suggested that Eisenhower was a godless commie. Why was anybody ever afraid of them?

Where are all the racists and what are they really trying to do in America? How did we get from there to here? What is an accurate rendition of the history and intent of Conservatism in Western Political Philosophy and the Conservative Movement in America and Great Britain since the Goldwater era?

More specifically, who is the standard bearer of racism in America and how does the Right deal with that person / entity? What is the fundamental interest in racism in politics? What does it accomplish? Where's the money? What is the legislation?

I think about this rather like I think of Bigfoot or the Kraken from Clash of the Titans. If it's real, then it has got to exist in an ecosystem. It has to live and breathe and eat and mate and grow. If it's carnivorous then its got to kill and leave bones behind. It had to evolve from something and it has to become something.

My belief is that there is an interest on the Left which is a species of populist identity politics that keeps alive the specter of the great racist Kraken that the Right can summon at will to devour and destroy any black man who sticks his head above a certain level. That said black men best serve the interests of the collective because a diversion from it is suicidal in one of two forms. One: There will not be enough cultural black oxygen and he will asphyxiate in whiteness. or Two. He will be castrated.

In order to sustain this grip, the Left has invented a political mythology through a class of historical revisionists who were the scion of Black Studies departments which came about largely through political activism rather than scholastic acumen. Now that we have a second generation of these real PhDs, they consider themselves invincible - well within their domain if they have tenure.

So here will be a mix of what I believe vs what CD might like me to believe in what may actually not become a case of special pleading for people of color. We'll try to get some facts and some speculations straight.

I will play a race card first. My race card begins with Leo Strauss. He is the father of all Conservatives who recognize that what the Nazis and Commies were doing in Europe was evil and wrong. Strauss was a Jew. And so let's replace 'Jew' with 'people of color' and via the work of Strauss talk about what anybody (of color) should read into history and take Conservatism seriously as an antidote to genocidal xenophobia.

J.A. Rogers' Facebook

   1. The Gbe speakers of Togo, Ghana and Benin (Adja, Mina, Ewe, Fon)
   2. The Akan of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire
   3. The Mbundu of Angola (includes Ovimbundu)
   4. The BaKongo of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola
   5. The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria
   6. The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria
   7. The Mandé of Upper Guinea
   8. The Wolof of Senegal and The Gambia
   9. The Chamba of Cameroon
  10. The Makua of Mozambique

According to Wikipedia, these are the tribes that exported the great numbers of men and women into the Atlantic Slave Trade. It was the term 'Wolof' that got my attention as I was reading through that material tangential to some other thinking I've been doing on the blog.

I seem to recall that it was J.A. Rogers who gave in his books some accounting of those tribes and gave pictures of the facial features of all of them. Sadly, I can't recall if it was specifically Rogers or which book it might have been, though pops had three or four of his best sellers. But I do recall taking in material as a pre-teen that helped imprint in my mind that we black Americans were different. The Wolof was tall and bearded, he had a thin face. There was some friend of the family that I immediately recognized as Wolof.

As for us, I fancied that we would be considered Akan. My favorite book at the time on the subject was Kwaku, A Boy of Ghana. It's on one of my shelves somewhere.

I wonder where I might come to find that stuff again. I'll make sure to look it up the next time I get back to that portion of the Bowen Library chez Pops.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Spontaneous flick. No clue. Had free passes. Went to see it. Boot to the head.

I don't like foreign films. Most of the time they are a pretense for Americans to be somebody else that they don't generally have the courage to be f2f. Foreign films are like Cancun, exotic for the sake of providing a jumping-out-of-one's-own-skin experience - letting something all hang out. That's most of the time. Everybody who watches foreign films knows this - they are the kinds of flicks that the Hollywood crowd does not, and mostly cannot make. They thus become the generic 'alternative', and alternative is not always good. So I'm skeptical of foreign films that make it to our screens, and I sorta wish that especially for the genre of short films of exceptional quality, Netflix or somebody ought to have a subscription service. But all that's another subject.

There was a time, of course, when anything by Tarkovsky, Almodovar or Kurosawa would have me running to the box office at breakneck speed. So my impressions are not just armchair.

Dragon Tattoo is a drastic and superb film that is like  'The Sacrifice' meets 'La Femme Nikita' meets 'Seven'. It is bleak and bloodlessly acted. It is not entertaining, rather it is crafted to be one of those oddly compelling and disturbing experiences that serve to remind you of how awful men can be. In particular it's men because there are no villainous women here. There are only the three types of women in the film. Those who are destroyed by men and run away. Those who are destroyed by men and lose their minds, and those who are destroyed by men, refuse to be destroyed and take their revenge. The Girl is a victim of the third kind in a world where justice is an illusion and the righteous have no quarter.

To take it as a premise that you need some extraordinary kind of Girl to be the protagonist in this modern thriller, much of that subtle posturing can be de-emphasized. For this Girl is a new kind of heroine, a combination I've not seen. She is one who, like an extreme version of Batman, is an emotional black hole, presenting an impenetrable mask which accentuates her black leather and steel exterior. She is an extraordinary hacker, and finds her way, almost reluctantly into a mystery of epic proportions. 

In an extraordinary way, this Girl is the answer to what I despised about The Constant Gardener's female protagonist whose civilized charms made her duplicitous seductions merely inconvenient. The Girl doesn't 'suit up' for Mata Hari work. She keeps her distance. The distance has been overcome by a number of brutes, and she shows the pain of it, but she has no intention to use any feminine wiles with anyone but the female of the species. 

The story is that of a crusading journalist who is to be jailed for libel against the CEO of a global conglomerate. His muckraking magazine must live down its failure as he awaits his prison sentence. He is contacted by the aging patriarch of another powerful family concern who is trying a last desperate attempt to solve the mysterious disappearance of his favorite niece 35 years ago. He suspects foul play and any and all of his heirs are suspects. They are the scions of old money and they have become a pack of inheritance hyena. 

The Girl works as a cyber private eye. She is punk and slim. Not enough meat on her bones to be an uberchick like Trinity. Not enough trust in her heart to be a rescuer/defender like Angela Bassett in Strange Days. But more than enough steel in her spine and ice in her gaze to use her tools for vengeance. She was previously contracted by the global conglomerate to hack the journalist. She knows he was setup. Now she follows his computer as he gets his new assignment - the assignment of finding the lost niece. In a single act of charity she breaks the firewall, revealing the fact that she has hacked him, in order to send him the answer to a clue he found in the lost girl's diary. The two become partners in solving a mystery that gets deeper and darker.

Dragon Tattoo has something of a cruel and sadistic eye. Few details are spared. As we come to know the Girl, that which would in any American film be understood as a dirty arrangement would be understated. She has something in her past which her parole officer exploits for the sake of his own sexual gratification. But instead of insinuation, we are treated to the full brutality of rape. There are multiple rapes in this film, but we come to know that the Girl meets fury with fury in a revenge scene so vicious that it squeezes all of the delight out of the rapist's just deserts. It feels like something out of the pages of Dick Marcinko, a heavy dose of Old Testament justice.

Old Testament justice is what's going on. Epic retribution. And looking at this Swedish film, I can't help but wonder if it says something enduring about the Swedes and the way they look at themselves. Moreover I take it that this film says a lot about Europe's current crisis of confidence. Let's be clear about it. There are old Nazis in this powerful family and the disappearance of the patriarch's niece turns out to be connected to a string of brutal murders of women over several decades. This is the a story built against subtext of European money and power - an almost untouchable display of power and privilege that protects some people whose moral integrity has the consistency and flavor of a bag of pig intestines. You cannot watch Dragon Tattoo and not feel that sense that nothing about the civilization can stand the sort of corruption it bears - that if this is what goes on behind the scenes, no one is safe.

This movie is only satisfying at a distance, for once you get away from the hideousness of its explicitly graphic scenes, its matter of fact approach to such grisly subjects gives it the weight of literature. It is not an entertainment. It is an intervention, a brusque lecture, it is a fire you are not pulled from.

Greatly, the Girl, at the age of 24 uses the tool of the 21st Century to expose the crimes of the 20th. There is a collaboration between the magazine man and the cybergirl that neither of them singly could have handled. Theirs is an unlikely alliance, but there's something fabulous about it that doesn't need explaining.  I highly recommend this film for the not-squeamish. Now is a good time to think about how Europeans think about themselves.

Apology Time

Yesterday, I dipped my big toe in a shark pool. It's the kind of thing that made me selfishly turn off comments - when people go on tangents I don't want to be bothered with or obsess over details I think are irrelevant. Then a thoughtful reader and friend said the following:

I could care less about the whole confederate thing Michael, but you would have to be blind not to notice the hatred and vitriol at those meetings. Yeah you are right, anyone can say anything they want, but as a Black Man, I have more respect for myself than to be involved with an organization that I have YET to see condemn the racist acts at those rallies. Use another 10 minutes to prove me wrong on that. Also while you are at it, aren't the Republicans and Conservatives the ones who are always demanding that Democrats condemn and repudiate anyone who says ANYTHING controversial, even if it is only controversial to the hypocrites making it up. At the same time, people on the conservative side can do all manner of ridiculous, decisive BS and standard bearers want to pooh pooh, blame the media for having the audacity to cover the rally and film the lunatics who forgot their sheets but not their rhetoric.... The same people would have an issue if the media was NOT there. Cant have it both ways.... You are an intelligent man, and someone I happen to respect. But you are out on a limb here, defending the indefensible. I have to wonder what some of your Progressive APHIA brothers would say to this. Plain and simple. I think Black People who stand shoulder to shoulder with people who are racist, are themselves at best delusional and at worst self hating black people.

I believe there is a place for Black Conservatives, but I think part of the responsibility of being a black conservative is to demand respect, rather than playing the "intellectual" racially ambiguous role so many conservatives play. I believe that Black Conservatives are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history. Maligned by fellow black people, disrespected by the party they support, and missing a great opportunity to be part of History. Lets say Obama becomes a great president. One day our great grandchildren will ask did we vote for the first black president. I will be proud to say yes, that I helped close the circle started by our ancestors free and slave.... How tragic that some of my Brothers and Sisters missed that opportunity, and more tragic that they continue to wipe the spit off their face, from the very people that they so virulently support."

I know that all some people want are apologies. But I'm not going there. I apologize when I mislead people in something that I said, but I don't apologize for other people's actions.

I guess that one of the key takeaways I want people to understand is that here is the falseness of 'unity' being exemplified. And what I'm saying in particular is that the people who are saying that the Tea Party is essentially racist is saying in fact that this is the most important thing about it. Because you can't take any racist politics seriously. Americans won't stand for it.

So that's all for today. I found some cool podcast tools and I'm going to bone up on that - yes at the expense of my technical stuff. But I need some clarity expressed here. 

Tea Party Rabbit Hole

Nobody knows what the Tea Party stands for except the participants, but nobody knows what the Tea Party officially stands for except the organizers. The organizers depend on the participants and the participants are drawn by media interpretations. And it gets more fuzzy. This is why I'm glad I make my money in the systems business. I couldn't possibly feel that I had any integrity if my money came from the ability to convince people through rhetoric. A part of me would die doing that.

Anyway, here's the news that I should just throw into the mix. It's interesting because there are charges and counter-charges. According to some Freepers, who are just about as manic as any activists get, there's a dude named Jason Levin from Portland who owns a domain and website called Crash the Tea Party. 

Their aim is to infiltrate and subvert the Tea Party:

In an effort to propagate their pre-existing propensity for paranoia and suspicion... We have already sat quietly in their meetings, and observed their rallies.

Whenever possible we will act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate their least appealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc) to further distance them from mainstream  America and damage the public's opinion of them. We will also use the inside information that we have gained to disrupt and derail their plans.

Classic espionage.

It's not a joke. The bulletin board is slashdotted half the time. According to what I can figure out, there are 1200 users doing stuff at any one time. I got that from the error messages I received after timing out a couple times.

I have to say that this is precisely the kind of stuff that sometimes makes me worry about American society in the digital age. I say sometimes because people have to eat, and that's something that really can't be faked. But people also have to think and that's something that's easily fraudulent - this level of deception and fakery is likely to propagate and such propaganda poisons the public sphere. As it is, normally rational people have abandoned the sense God gave them in order to shout into the windstorms of political frenzy. I'm wasting a perfectly good Sunday morning commenting on the madness.

But I do want to draw attention to the fundamental deception at the heart of any system that does not employ the discipline of a sacred oath. Instead, we see the exploitive nature of undermining the opposition by any means necessary.

Who's for real? What if this is actually a Tea Party member's way of justifying what they do by propping up some non-existing front?  What if it's an anti-Tea Party conspiracy to suggest the lengths to which Tea Partiers will go to accuse the Left of skullduggery? What if...  And there you have it. The infinite regress of what you believe the others believe. All based on getting a sign smaller than a Tweet shown on television. This is the democracy of illiterates.

Obligatory Seriousness on Confederate History Month

When I was a kid, I always wished that I could live in Florida or Georgia so that I could have the day off of school for my birthday which is June Third, aka Jefferson Davis Day. Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederate States of America. My parents thought I was crazy. I don't think that either Florida or Georgia have that as a state holiday any longer, and thanks to socialist reforms of capitalism, I have floating holidays in my employment arrangements. So I get the day off no matter what. Is it more important that I have the day off or that I owe it to some historical movement? Hell, I don't care. It's my birthday. Now you can think I'm crazy.

Whenever people start getting the squirts over neo-confederates and battle flags and all that, I immediately think of two things. Maybe three. 

Item One: Buy a Gun and STFU
 The first is an old screed called 'The Racist Roots of Gun Control'. Your basic deal is this. What are Confederates going to do besides make a big fat hairy deal over something that happened 150 years ago. They are, in many ways, exactly like Afrocentrics - trying to pull glory from the grave. The question is whether or not a person feels threatened by history. Bottom line - what are they using their interpretation and celebration of history to assert today, and are you prepared to pick up a gun and defend yourself if it comes to that?  It seems to me that people who call themselves Americans should recognize that the chances of gunfights going the way of the Confederates the second time around are very very slim. So just buy a gun and stay out of the media and out of my head, freakin' whiner.

Item Two: Self-Hatred
While I'm at it, I'd like to take a swipe at the zero-tolerance crowd who are bleating about the ignoramus factor in the Tea Party Movement. It's directed specifically at black Americans who whip out the old uncle tom argument at their earliest convenience. You know who you are, oh vaunted guardian of blackness. I ask you where you live. Huh? What? Do you live in Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia? Do you live in Virginia, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma or Tennessee? Do you live in the Carolinas, Louisiana or Florida? Answer the question. You mean to tell me that after all these years you live in the Confederate States? And you have the nerve to associate ME with racists? And you call those places your home? Let me ask you this. Right now, are you wearing cotton? Yeah that's what I said, cotton. How can you call yourself black and wear cotton? 

This is the game you are playing. If you want to get down to zero-tolerance for racists and their legacies, you're going to have to do a lot of explaining yourself. And don't get me started on racial purity, because a lot of you African Americans don't look so African to me. You've got white blood in you. That's right. I said it. You are just picking on your own cousins.

Just in case you are unclear, my family is three generations out of the plantation South and I can trace some of us back to James Alexander Curtis who fought for the Union Army. And on the New Orleans side of the family, none of us were ever in bondage. Yeah we passed, some of us. But none of that should concern you because that's just racial bloodlines and stuff, and you don't care about that right?

Item Three: Symbols & Substance
A couple of years ago, we conservatives in LA got our panties out of joint over a blatantly PC act by the godless commies of removing the cross from the Seal of the City and County of Los Angeles. But they didn't close one church. Secularists doom themselves when it comes down to it. There's a long and interesting essay in there somewhere, but I don't have time for that now. 

==

So there's my initial theoretical framework from which I will observe this story which has now entered my periphery. Now let's look at the facts and see what the deal is. Outrage me. I dare you.

 

A Good Thing in Full Swing

The great thing about greatness is how it gets sampled. Third generation standard from Steely by way of De La.

The Failure Nobody Wants To Talk About

When 9/11 occurred. I didn't have a blog. I wasn't familiar with the technology, but I followed some dotted lines and made my predictions. The biggest thematic prediction I made was that we were witnessing the end of the nation-state as we now know it. I had read a bit too much into the possible goodness of phyles via Neal Stephenson, and I thought they might be a good idea. But I wasn't truly prepared for the consequences of the loss of the nation-state. Neither are you.

And yet I cannot help but think about the privatization of civics and the pollution of the public square. What's the end game? Where is the tectonic shift? We've fallen off the cliff. How long we freefall painlessly until we smack a ledge that wakes us into grabbing for vines and branches? Or do we go to the bottom?

I want to know the financial meltdown scenario that makes us vulnerable to conventional war.

Back in 2007 before Bear Stearns collapsed, we knew that the default rate was up. I can recall it being said that Wall Street would lose maybe 600 Billion of market capitalization. So I said wake me when Citibank is hurt. Two years later Citibank became a zombie bank and the first TARP bailout was bigger than 600 Billion. But still nobody talks aloud about the full faith and credit of the US. The retard in the Oval Office expects us to run on hope, and he hopes we don't mind paying for whatever his minions think it too big to fail - like healthcare systems that haven't even been built yet. He sells this manure based on 10 year projections.

I'm thinking that maybe Americans will organize a tax strike. I have a feeling something like that will materialize. That is, unless somebody is ready to fire five million bureaucrats and flatten the tax code.

I want to know the financial meltdown scenario that makes domestic politics turn violent.

What do you think? Why is nobody thinking the unthinkable?

Multicultural Foreign Policy

From Spengler:

Obama wants to remove Israel’s nuclear capability while permitting Iran to acquire one. He told George Stephanopolous April 9 that the sanctions may fail to change Iranian behavior, just as they failed in the case of North Korea:

If the question is do we have a guarantee as to the sanctions we are able to institute at this stage are automatically going to change Iranian behavior, of course we don’t. The history of the Iranian regime, like the North Korean regime is that, you know, you apply international pressure on these countries, sometimes they choose to change behavior, sometimes they don’t.

We end up with a nuclear-armed Iran to which both Afghanistan and Iraq orient. It’s astonishing. Why did America care about central Asian Muslims to begin with? We had an interest in Persian Gulf oil. Then we decided to “democratize” Iraq and Afghanistan and deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Now we supposedly have to appease Iran in order to protect the soldiers who were there to democratize Iraq because we had an interest in the oil — and we end up with Iranian nuclear weapons controlling the Persian Gulf! It is as insane a progression as ever has been presented in political logic.

I’ve been screaming about this for more than two years: Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

Just astonishing. All nukes are equally bad, all foreigners are equally good, therefore let us level the playing field and believe in our negotiations. Forget history. That's the Obama way.

The Drunken Truth

There are few things more enjoyable to me than conversations that go late into the night, and the only thing that makes them more enjoyable are wine, women and song. We had booze, rock and well... not much else, but the conversation was very good.

One of the odd things about me, among the many dozens, is that my roommate The Spy said something way back when we were in college that never left me. It was about the difference between white parties and black parties. In black parties you style, dance and sweat. In white parties you drink, blab and stumble. If either party gets good enough, there's a fight. But what Spy said was hilarious - which was that the white kids drank to get drunk and then they stood around telling each other how f*king drunk they were. Then that becomes the legend of the party - I remember when I got so loaded/plastered/pissed/sot/drunk/wasted/blasted. Yeah whatever.

I'm  long way from my days of alien observation mode. I'm a happy guy and loads of people don't disgust me like they used to. I can just enjoy them for who they are or whatever it is they are doing. One of the great advantages of knowing the secret of life is that you don't get pissed off at the masses for not helping you find it. Which is how I used to leave a lot of parties - having got neither styly, sweaty, blabby or stumbly.

So tonight, the Laughing Happy Fishheads found their way to the Georgetown Waterfront for tequila shots and various other truth serums. And try as I might to recall what we left dangling as the conversation swung towards my favorite subjects, only a few of them surface through my groggy consciousness at this hour.

I forget, and sometimes don't pay attention to the numbers of folks that read me at Cobb, and I especially make no assumptions for my workmates, but this morning I'll give it a try. Especially because we actually have some multicultural stuff going on that's fairly interesting.

The first subject that piqued my interest was the nature of the informal rights of passage among American youth. Why do we leave home when we do and why do our parents kick us out? Why does college become such a besotted party anyway? Is it because of our emphasis on individuality? I mean do we ever, in this trope of American culture, ever actually make decent and well-informed decisions about our lives? How many of us, as an expression of our independence and individuality end up drinking from the same damned keg?

You know who showed up. It was the boob spilling drunk girl in the black dress. It was the semi-hotties dancing with each other. It was the dude wearing sunglasses at night trying to cadge a cig. It was the crew cut conservative kid with the nose like Matt Damon. It was the girl who tried to tell us she was 16. It was the loud boor who almost got decked for poking somebody in the chest. It was the dude in the cornrows poking his cell phone. It was the chicks who might have been. It was the dude who would have liked them to be. It was the crowd. All socially dysfunctional on a Wednesday night by the river's edge. Yes, I'm cruel. I have the writer's cruel eye.

I'm trying to get used to being the old man. I enjoy being the old man, but every once in a while I talk too much. But there's something about the intimate honesty of men who get to know each other's taste in women, and limits at the bar. It takes a long time to get to know the ins and outs of life - to share those histories without being too judgmental - to speculate about the unfolding meaning of things and the reconciliation of things once believed, but now not so much as contrasted with new hopes and dreams. I'm still playing big brother. I still want to be useful in that way. I try to not make it all about me.

As it stands, there's not much else to recall except the good time, which it was.

What all did we talk about? Saudi Arabia, Cabernet, cardamom and car bombs, S&Ls vs Glass-Steagell, abusive relationships, eating with fingers, corporate espionage, the regionalization of the GSEs, the detriments of 'black' culture, three specific action flicks, Marine One, being an only child, parents' porno stash, that wild looking girl over there, Stoli vs Patron, architectural similarities between NY and DC, pronunciation of cab driver's names, belly dancer muscle control, Argentinian food, sushi in Texas, feral dogs, Persian beverages, semi-automatic rifles, drivers license rules in various states, ATM limits & the ethics of expense accounts, class, Punjabi music and dance, Sikh jokes, bouncers and fighting drunks, Irish temper, the Taint, Japanese perverts, Chinese hackers, India vs Pakistan, American Military University, the Iranian Revolution, secretive fathers, dual citizenship, arranged marriages, marathon sex, Ayn Rand, death & wisdom and French cuisine.

I don't think we talked about the iPad once, but I could be wrong.

We talked a lot about political philosophy, but that takes lots of time, and evidently lots of OH. I could probably do just fine after one Jack & Coke, but that's not quite enough for my compatriots. I find it queer, but I recognize the inhibitions of conscientious people and the Fishheads are conscientious in various ways. Myself, I've always been the quiet one who would talk about anything - I'm just waiting for the subject of actual pique, and then for people to reveal their motivations, which is one of the things I love best about conversational intimacy.

For most of my early life I heard many confessions. I was like Judd Hirsch's character from Taxi, Alex Rieger. The kind, patient and compassionate soul. Overbrained for my circumstances but resigned to it. Then I got selfish and decided to kick ass, the pendulum swung opposite. And in my 20s most people knew me as an arrogant, opinionated prick - a searcher for profound truths and methods to capitalize on them - seeing the rest of the species as lazy, stupid, ugly and poor. How did that work out for me? Well, I actually didn't move to Paris and marry that Nigerian law student, nor did I hang out in the Hamptons with the White House staffer, and I never got a second date with scioness on Martha's Vineyard. (Don't marry for money, hang out with rich chicks and marry for love). Funny this particular axis of success and failure I pick. Well it was a dude's night out. And of course I have no regrets. Heh. My middle name is 'no regrets'. And now I am getting to be the greybeard, finally slowing down and waiting for the young folks to eat first - and hearing confessions again.

There are a hundred drunken truths about me, but I'm trying to suppress my prior life and its volume. I appreciate the circumspection of spies and priests. I love handling the truth, it is one of the great rewards of life to hear it from friends and strangers.

Tuesday Fragments

Wretchard Fernandez
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and assuming that such a policy enhances US security one would expect other countries to adopt similar policies. It will be interesting to see whether the other nuclear powers follow suit. After all if something is delicious other people will want to eat it. If President Obama remains the only person to gnaw on this bone then it only may cater to his own peculiar tastes.

Richard Branson
A self-disciplined employee will have the patience to conduct routine business routinely, the talent to respond exceptionally to exceptional circumstances, and the wisdom to know the difference.

What Black Privilege Sounds Like

If you haven't already, check out this article in the AJC. It illiustrates perfectly what America's twisted racial ethics allow black Americans to do that white Americans cannot - which is to state without compunction or qualification a racial criticism of black Americans they disagree with.

http://bit.ly/bx6FnS 

Michael Steele is an affirmative action hire gone bad. He was voted in as head of the Republican National Committee because the party wanted to increase its appeal among voters of color. With the first black president elected on the Democratic ticket, Republicans needed to show America that they, too, wanted to promote diversity (without having policies that actually appeal to people of color.)

Call it the UncleTom Rule. Know that and then judge accordingly.

Found Writings, Liberal Narratives & A Strange Realization

I found my writings.

I'm putting together a screed against modernity. You see, I hate current events and current politics and the serious effluvia that we consume on a daily basis to maintain our standing in our semiotic meritocracy. It reduces us to presentism. It flattens history and scientific discovery. The proof of it is how valuable, yet worthless are the presumptions behind the Green Movement - basically that we can control the weather and that there is virtue (and economic growth) in the attempt. Ironic that scientific discovery is natural philosophy and that greenism is antisocial as well as anti-nature. But more on that later. My point is that I was looking for a poem that I wrote to describe my own documented feelings of anomie, trapped in a modern pod, and I finally found it.

Along with a half finished novel, 6 dozen other poems, writings from The Well, rap lyrics, standup comedy routines, socratic trialog, and free-associative verse. It's a bit much to take. As it stands, Cobb has over 7500 entries. I've burned at least 12,000 hours around this blog. Finding my writing reminds me that I was doing the same thing during my 30s and late 20s as well. And I knew so much less. I stand in awe of my longing, of my desperate need to make sense of everything that passed through my head. And so I have volumes and volumes of observations, rationalizations & articulations. It all makes sense to me, but I pity the fool who must spelunk it should I find my place in history of English literature. It makes sense to me because I know now what must be, in this great opus, minimized, emphasized, ignored, expanded or taken as sarcasm. I only hope my writing gets better as time goes on.

A liberal intellect is the only intellect I was able to know. That is because it is that great liberal hand that lifts the modern man from the dust of peasantry and gives him a pod-place in our expansive meritocracy. There is implied a pledge of allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the non-God of the humanitarian ways of equality
and to the regimes under which they are administered
one people, disarmed and loving, multicultural
with standing and decency for all

The liberal intellect owned all intelligence so far as I could imagine. So what I discovered in all of my discovery was yet another way to underline its premises. And my every fear, shame and failure bolstered the liberal narrative. If I was unhappy it was because I lived in a world polluted by diversion from the pod-place of my citizenship. It was them, the non-believers in the humanitarian ways of equality, that poisoned my environment.

For me it was racialized, culturalized, economically specified. 'They' were fouling the box. So everything I wrote (and why should a computer programmer be bothered with writing anything other than code for machines) reinforced that worldview. I wanted to get smarter and figure a way out, but I kept looking for liberation in all the wrong theologies.

It wasn't until I was self-employed, taking a day off because I felt like it, wearing a suit and tie, walking around downtown Atlanta with a hefty five figures of cash in the bank that I realized I was becoming something else. I could engage in business with anyone I wanted to. A lightbulb flashed. It was a different kind of freedom than I had ever known or expected. And suddenly I knew something was up. I never wrote the same kind of poetry again. I was a married father of three. There would be no dreams of poetic stardom for me. I lived in the South and I bought flannel shirts. The last book of that old progressive sort I purchased was 'Pushed Back to Strength'. I bought it at the same time I bought 'We Are Overcome'. And I couldn't eat it any longer. No more of the narrative. That was 1996.

Next for me was the pursuit of money and career - and during all that time I suppressed all the urges to show off my verbal acuity except for the ends of selling software. And so I did for the next five years. And then there was the custody battle and the tax fight and then the job loss and 9/11. And I suffered and thought about death and finally climbed back to a reasonable perch in 2002, or thereabouts, when I finally came to epiphany. It took six years of hustling until I got back to five figures of cash and then I got fired in Houston while reading Koba The Dread and experiencing the meltdown of Enron. The other shoe fell. I realized that the capitalist was vulnerable - that risk was our business in a world of peasants and commies who wanted guarantees. I realized that trust was our currency in a world of libertine cynics who only knew the discomfort of their pod-place  - the same kind of clever ass clown poet I had been back when making 50K and having a two-bedroom flat in Brooklyn was all any single bohemian could expect or desire.

In my writings of 1992. Before family. Before independence. I wrote an essay that I could never finish or publish called 'White Flight Friday'. It was about, essentially, the ineffable nature of watching outsiders react to the world that became Los Angeles during the riots. It was about my attempt to play my part and marching in the streets of New York City with William Kunstler. It was about realizing finally that whole thing about 'voice' and the ability to communicate something about community was practically impossible. All that and I couldn't get it to say what I wanted, and it was 'too long' and so nobody would publish it. That was back in the days when we all wanted Spike Lee to tell it like it is, but he didn't quite answer all the questions and if he did the studios would manipulate his box-office figures, or so went the conspiracy theories. 

Yeah. I found all of those writings. And in them I see that which was me, and that which was trying to be intellectual but couldn't be because I had not yet had my fill of the rhetoric. I hadn't disproven it myself. I had faith in certain human powers - powers of dissent and complaint. Powers of intellectual insurgency. And I kept wondering why it took so long for me to explain my position. Well, that's because I was trying to deal with the whole truth. The whole truth doesn't fit into the narrative. I kept reading The Nation and realizing I kept reading the same four or five dudes. I kept reading the Village Voice and realizing that Greg Tate and Lisa Jones weren't going to get to be editors. I started to sense the dimensions of the industry and the word 'cultural production' became part of my vocabulary.  I went with it for a short time and then I realized who the producers were. And Umberto Eco was the smartest kid on the block and I finally realized that Foucault's Pendulum wasn't so fictional as it seemed.

That's when I stopped using my own name. I stopped using capital letters. I stopped hoping to get into the New Yorker. I stopped pretending that hiphop was more than it was. I started reading James Baldwin so I could get love in my head and venom out of my blood. Cultural production was just another hustle with little patience for the whole truth. Now six years out of college I realized what the BA students were doing - they were learning the rules of that hustle.

--

Today's strange realization is that all of my desire to be a serious and important writer is challenged by the fact that it is my avocation and not my vocation. I write very much like the first essayists. It is not a profession, I don't need the money for doing it. It makes me more truthful in some ways, and more lackadaisical in others. Beyond my own peace of mind, I can't really suggest what all of these thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of words mean on their own. It's all just effort. What it accomplishes is a puzzle I have no editors or researchers to help me sort out. I just know what creative engine I have and what I blurt is writing, and what you are doing is reading it and hearing my unique style and tenor.

I will never put the entirety of my writing into context. I just put it out there. I'm a writer.

You're Nobody til Somebody Loves You

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.
(That was about 'racism' in the Tea Party)

Consume Cooly Anywhere

I touched an iPad today. It wasn't a big deal.

I navigated to the NYTimes app and it didn't work. It painted into a box the size of an iPhone in the middle of the screen, and it was a total dud. Neither that nor the vaunted email application were impressive. I watched that new TV show 'Modern Family' with the lame episode about the lame father and his lame family buying an iPad for his lame birthday. At the end, he sat curled up on the sofa touching it. And now something is beginning to dawn on me, especially now that I just read this excerpt from another Day One review:

To be honest, I haven’t spent much time creating content — instead I have been consuming content voraciously. I have downloaded about 25 apps so far and most of them are oriented around reading, watching and entertainment. The vivid colors of the gorgeous 9.7-inch screen do actually make a lot of difference and make consuming content more enjoyable. 

The iPad is as big as the internet. But the internet doesn't make people read Shakespeare. The iPad instead, will make lame content interesting, because you can touch it.

It's going to be a while before some really interesting applications come out for this device. But the lames will make it commercially viable for a good long time. Watch them consume, with cool, conspicuously.

Introducing Post Boohabia

gangsta gangsta

what do you know?

gangsta gangsta 

where will you go?

gangsta gangsta

who'll be your ho?

when death entertainment dollars don't flow?

Once upon a time I was a poet. A twisted poet, I think. Poetry was the right length for incomplete thoughts and brief, illogical impressions and moods. It was a way of cleverly expressing that which could hold its own weight said without hedging or irony. 

It turns out that I have a lot more than a little poetry. Maybe 100 maybe more. But I couldn't put it here because that's Cobb all out of context. So I've created a new site called Post Boohabia. I'm likely to tweak them, some of them as I post them from the archives. Some of it is actually good. Most of it is unfinished. Poems are almost never finished. 

So. Check it out. Post Boohabia.

The Journalism Problem

Last night I listened to the NPR reporter interview the director from the service organization that just got dropped after a foster child was murdered here in LA. They guy took his time and explained patiently how his organization, which had been consistently rated in the top 10% of such providers to the government offices whose business is foster children and adoption got puked on for no good reasons.

It struck me that this was a no-win situation, especially as he mentioned that there is an ongoing investigation. An ongoing investigation means that somebody knows, its just that a bigger somebody with authority doesn't know yet and so officially nothing can be said. But that's somebody still knows. The problem is getting to that somebody is what makes for sensationalism. It is journalism and communications in a nutshell.

The NPR journalist took calls after the director of the service organization finished his statements. A woman from Orange County wanted to know the demographics of foster children and how it was that a family that keeps pit bulls can be approved as foster parents and potential adoptive parents. She wants blood. The LATimes journalist breaking the story is up next. I got out of my car and turned of the radio in disgust.

What's going on here is that the radio station and the newspaper, as part of their business model, need to highlight what's potentially wrong, which is by definition sensational. There's nothing wrong with that, it's important. What's wrong is that the newspaper cannot own that audience because the real audience for this story is longitudinal. The kind of outrage and blood the caller expressed is like an online flamewar with a newb. She obviously knows nothing about the subcontracting details and the authority delegated between the full-time bureacrats in the child welfare department, the care-giving subcontractors and the board of supervisors. None of us do. All we know is a two year old kid was murdered and the system didn't protect her.

The director mentioned the scorecarding system that the County uses to rate its subcontractors as well as the three government officials who would have to be involved in the approval of transfer from foster parentage to adoptive parentage. What we don't know is how well the system works so much of the time that we pay no attention to it. And if we are genuinely interested, where would we look? Most importantly how could we use a different form of communication to translate the energy of outrage which is currently owned by the radio station and the print media journalists into the energy of responsibility owned by the director's care-giving organization?

You see? The length of the attention span of the media in its current instantiation does a disservice to every organization that gets scandalized because the energy of the anti-scandal owned by the media outweighs the energy of reform.

Part of this imbalance is inevitable and cannot be fixed. Consumers cannot be producers. Anybody can enjoy listening to music, but only a few can play it, and only fewer still can compose it. We have a faux system of journalism that promises to enable democracy in conflict with this fundamental human fact. Everybody can be outraged at the death of a two year old, but only a very few of us can prevent it. The Director did not, and maybe he could not. However consumers can become prosumers if they are informed in the right ways. And so voters can become reformers if they are given the proper background. But this is not a job for journalism as it is currently constructed - it is more a job for the communications directors of such agency's as the one now under fire.

If this story generated 50,000 hits at the LATimes, how long with those same eyeballs stay glued? How long can the investigating journalist on the story write about it and follow up? How can those eyeballs be moved to a longer attention span with a prosumer / reformer / watchdog capacity that is credible even in the eyes of the Board of Supervisors, the child welfare agency and the subcontractors kiretsu? This is the problem to be solved in all of journalism and in all of communications. Journalism has to itself move from pique to education or the burden needs to be gracefully transitioned to the communications abilities of the first parties. When the care-giver's agency can take those 50,000 hits and disseminate on a long term basis, then we have a win.

Until then it will be outrage as usual and frustration with the system. This is what the current media generates.

I'm A Pissed-Off Democrat

I hate politics, but I love history.