Cobb

Black Cow

Long ago at Cobb I set a benchmark of seriousness on racial and other political issues to One Lynch Factor, which to my reckoning was 3000 deaths over 3 generations. If some people didn't suffer on that level or greater I feel free to mock their suffering. For the most part I honor that line, but I've been known to take some trivialties more serious than the Lynch filter would suggest.

I bring up this razor over the big blatherfest sparked off by, of all things, a bake sale at Cal Berkeley, affirmative action and the history of the oppression of the Negro. And in putting that matter in perspective, I am reminded of Marcus Garvey and other roughnecks who have had as their reputation, of giving no quarter to Whitey. In the end, as we all know, there was the Civil War, which from John Brown's most moral agitation almost got no proper subscribers. After which there was nothing else.

Before of course, what we celebrate was the great courage of those who ran the Underground Railroad, including John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and others less well known to me. And there was that matter of Nat Turner. But a little Googling shows us something called the Black Seminole Slave Revolt.

Below are the major American slave rebellions listed in chronological order.[3]

Year	Rebellion	Black Participants	White deaths	End result for the rebels
1712	New York City conspiracy	30-40	9	21 executed, 6 estimated suicides, 6 pardoned
1739	Stono rebellion	75-80	25	Estimated 50 killed & executed in suppression
1800	Gabriel Prosser's conspiracy	40[4]	0	35 executed, 4 escaped, 1 suicide
1811	Louisiana revolt	180-500	2	66 killed in battle, 16 executed, 17 escaped or dead
1822	Denmark Vesey's conspiracy	49[5]	0	49 condemned: 12 pardoned, 37 hanged
1831	Nat Turner's rebellion	70	57	20 conspirators executed including Turner, 100 or more blacks killed in mass reprisals
1835-38	Black Seminole rebellion, maroon & slave combined	935-1265	400[6]	500 emigrated west with Indians, 90 or more caught & re-enslaved, hundreds more surrendered to slavery, casualties unknown.
1835-38	Black Seminole rebellion, plantation slave only	385-465	N/A	90 or more caught & re-enslaved, hundreds surrendered and returned to slavery, uncertain number emigrated west with Black Seminoles.

At least three of these are often mentioned as the largest or most significant in U.S. history: Nat Turner's rebellion, Denmark Vesey's conspiracy, and the Louisiana slave revolt of 1811.

Now I'd say that about 1000 blacks tanning the hides of 400 whites over the course of three years is a fair amount of skirmishing. That there's a good piece of low intensity warfare. Unfortunately for the good guys (as we presume) the KKK and their unofficial affiliates more than made up for that in 1865-69 to the tune of about 1200.

So here's my little bit of speculation. Could it be argued that, aside from the huge disadvantage slaves would have against paddyrollers, bounty hunters and various armed militias even before the days of the Fugitive Slave Act, were the various Indian Wars sufficient to cow would be black rebels into submission?

I'm going to say yes.

The Cotton Gin Story

A dozen or so years ago, I attended a funeral in Louisiana for my last grandmother. One of the men told me a story one day not long after driving across the bridge of the Ouachita River. 

When he was a young man, he was enterprising. Like the others, he picked cotton and he picked plenty. He decided to organize some of the others and pick multiple fields. This was the way to make extra money, as the landowners only needed so much. He and his brother got the trucks together and picked one of the biggest loads anybody in the area had seen. He took it to the gin to be weighed and sold. The family that owned the gin was different from the family that owned the land. They controlled the wholesale market for the county. When the young man's cotton was weighed, the gin man said 1500 pounds. The scale said 1800 pounds. 

The young man considered his situation at length right there on the spot. He decided not to burn down the gin. He decided not to shoot the gin man. He would never pick cotton again. Instead he left for the city the next day and had not returned until the death of my last grandmother about forty years later. 

We drove by the gin several miles across the river. The man, no longer young, was wary of the local police. That seemed out of character for him. He was angry that the place still made him nervous and he didn't want to be around. He knew the whole county to be corrupt and there was the gin, just off the road still with the name of the gin family in white letters on the roof. His breathing became short and he told me the story as I sped up the car heading towards the airport. He couldn't be out of this place soon enough and hoped never to come again.

I've taken that story to be the story of many thousands of men. It is the story for me of the origins of the Great Migration, and it is the story of those who moved beyond and those who stayed behind. 

The Couple of the Year

Niall Ferguson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Two of my favorite minds on the planet. The awesomeness is practically unfathomable. 

Obama vs Clinton

Which President was more hated and persecuted by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy?

Jeff Jarvis & Famousity

Jeff Jarvis explores, in his new book, Public Parts, the dynamic I've called 'famousity', which is that amount of notoriety self-published authors in the new media are achieving by developing new kinds of intimate audiences. Famousity is the opposite of privacy. You court it and you work to get it. When you call it 'openness' or 'transparency' it takes on the veneer of a virtue, but I don't necessarily see it that way. I think the benefits of famousity are self-interested like most anything else. What you want is for people to know about you and you have to work to achieve this end. 

I've been thinking about the subject of 'famousity' for a while. Famousity is that status between anonymity and fame, where as a curator of something as a subject of interest not necessarily backstopped by a meatspace institution, you become well known. I think +Jeff Jarvis makes a good enough point about the dynamic of engaging your audience honestly and proactively, but I wonder about the crossover point at which the audience becomes proactive? When does famousity work for you?

My simple example is disappearance. 'We' all know about the story of Phil Agre who had a degree of famousity in the early internet. Phil was a broadsheet internet publisher of a libertarian conspiracy rag called the Red Rock Eater News Service. One day a few years ago, Agre, a UCLA professor dropped off the grid. Unprompted, his audience amped up the search for him. He had enough famousity to prompt that spontaneous action. In that way, being public is a boon. You are not likely to disappear without being missed. But could that be said of your Facebook friends list? If you stopped posting, would people come looking for you? 

Somewhere between that and being stalked by paparazzi is where we all might end up, but then what would that actually mean? I am curious about the real social currency of fame vis a vis this alternative medium. Perhaps, we are all just excited to have 'car phones' and this sort of social connectedness will become a commodity privilege in the near future, in which case actually dying of cancer with an audience of 10,000 is not significantly more interesting than dying of cancer with an audience of 50.

But today, within that margin of minor celebrity, is some coin of the realm to be useful for a wide variety of publicity ends. It is a matter of real privilige to be able to direct attention about oneself to a greater degree than one would get in the ordinary margins of professional reportage.

If I am able to generate direct sympathy, or even exemplify within myself some measure of virtue, then I can guarantee a greater benefit of the doubt should I fall into dubious circumstances. You cannot determine which archtypes or stereotypes are going to be used to describe you when you cannot speak for yourself. Having spoken for yourself in realtime gives one a different sort of credibility. One presumes, for example in reading a biography or autobiography of Dick Cheney, that various events can be colored in retrospect. The questions of who knew what and when - or what are the motivations of an individual can be much more sentimentally or sympathetically staged by those courting famousity. 

Again, famousity is different than fame. Famousity is about pre-empting anonymity, privacy and obscurity. It is about putting in place a first person narrative ahead of any act or event that would result in scrutiny. It sows seeds for present and future curiosity. It is self-promotion before the fact whatever that fact may be, and it's something we must hope we can do against the prefabricated notions of what we are 'supposed' to be as citizens in a free society that actually has some fairly rigid norms. 

I guess I am questioning the 'reasonable man' standard, neh? More on that next in Communicating vs Thinking.

Is That What You Want?

Campus Republicans at Cal Berkeley make a point. A good point.

Contagion

Contagion is a very good movie because of the way it sidesteps conventional drama. It's not bad science like 'The Day After Tomorrow', nor is it apocalyptic. It focuses in on one family tragedy without becoming overly sentimental or requiring extraordinary heroism. It shows a society coming apart in an almost offhanded way. It doesn't hurt to watch. Good flick.

Central Parking

It took me about three hours to appreciate Central Park in three ways I really never had before. It was a good day.

Item 1: Cycling & Benching
Just across from the Tavern on the Green the busy bike path has a great deal fewer rollerbladers than when I last got here on a regular basis, circa 1994. I cannot tell you what a singularly purifying impact that has on my estimate of Central Park. It is a treasure slightly beyond reckoning. It shows something about my twisted psyche that I think Osama would have been a damned sight more clever to hit the park than the towers. I took in a wash of humans and noticed several things about New York that seem new but that's just me.

First of all, I think NYC has become the capitol of Men Pushing Strollers. For the past ten years or so, I have been shouting out to dads anywhere out in the son walking with their offspring. Hey Dad! I know the joy of that exercise, but these newbs are a bit too much for me. A backpack or a frontpack? Yeah, that's the way to do it. And I can even go with the jogging deally with the three big pram wheels, but the standard stroller? Sorry, but the man card is called.  

And an equal percentage are walking the small dogs. Hoboken and the Upper West Side are pug central and miniature bulldog central. Just once I would have liked to have seen a Jack Russell, but no. So I'm just wondering what the hell is going on here, and I never got the answer. What I did get was the dude with both the stroller and the dog. Oh the humanity. 

I guess I just have to give props to the old men (just 15 years my senior) sitting on the bench next to me reading the NYTimes old school style - the two of them sitting side by side open to the same page discussing the stories.  

Item 2: Vollyball & Sheep
The Sheep Meadow was right behind me, and across in the distance I could see volleyball courts. Since I was wearing shorts, I decided to see if the players had improved any since '94. What in fact has happened is that they have mutated the game. It's street volleyball of an odd variety.  

The ball is bouncy and since I could only get into one game, I didn't have enough time to adjust. My sets and serves were off. They play let serves and rally point scoring to 21. We played fours on the asphalt except there was me, the fifth. I never got a good hit, but punched a few tight balls and managed a number of fine digs, but my whole timing was off. Plus I was wearing my glasses and couldn't move quite as quickly as I wanted. It made me mad. I want to get into perfect shape just to show these cranks a few things. So I suppose I have that mission in front of me again.

Item 3: The Ramble
It's hard to imagine that I have never been, but it's true. Maybe it was closed when I first started coming. My favorite spot had been a rock outcropping over near the Belvedere Castle with a great view of the Beresford Building. But that has been replaced by all the simple wonderment the Ramble offers within a city of concrete canyons. Yes you've heard the metaphor before. It still functions, as an eternal human constant loves the garden near the bricks. 

What a perfect romance. Fountains, boats, paths. Aww.

 

Action Bias

Taleb has the quote of the day:

There’s something called action bias. People think that doing something is necessary. Like in medicine and a lot of places. Like every time I have an MBA—except those from Wharton, because they know what’s going on!—they tell me, “Give me something actionable.” And when I was telling them, “Don’t sell out-of-the-money options,” when I give them negative advice, they don’t think it’s actionable. So they say, “Tell me what to do.” All these guys are bust. They don’t understand: you live long by not dying, you win in chess by not losing—by letting the other person lose. So negative investment is not a sissy strategy. It is an active one.

The Debt

The Debt, starring Helen Mirren, is the sort of film that explores the animal side of our human nature and it reminds us that when we are pressed up against our ability to handle the truth we are likely to be faced with life or death situations. And so how many of us are prepared for that?

The story is that of a trio of Israeli war heroes who face the prospect of their world collapsing as the possibility of an ugly truth coming to light thirty years after the fact. Of the three, only the woman can rectify the problem. It's a very intriguing concept, and brilliantly handled by the film but the greatness of this story comes out in the terse dialogs between the three, but especially the woman, and the Nazi war criminal who is at the center of their heroic mission. 

There is, in this tale, the story of how much we become defined not so much by our aims, but our ability to accept that which it makes us in the process, whether we succeed or fail. The heroes must struggle through the taunts of their captive as they decide whether he should be tortured, killed or brought to trial. As they stuggle with that ethical matter of the way in which they will embody the spirit of their new nation, as agents / soldiers of that nation, they must sublimate their own personal desires and lives. They become tools of their ambitions, and ambitions are always thwarted, and so it leaves them with what? Desparate confusion.

In The Debt's magnificent scene, the Nazi illustrates his contempt for Jews as he characterizes their behavior as sheeplike weakness. How is it, he asks, that the Jews were led to slaughter that so many were shephered into their deaths by so few? They were, he concludes, too weak and unpossessed of the pride and will to survive to do anything but submit to the superior force of will of the German soldiers. 

I found this to be a riveting scene because from my perspective it distills the very essence of human survival. We may thrive in an absence of conflict as we uniquely social creatures do. But we are so easily pressed into enforcing the courage of our convictions as a matter of principle and as a matter of survival, and all of our institutions fail and our social graces crumble away. We must do what we must do, and for the sake of keeping a promise or fufilling a mission, that predicament most always demands that someone must pay with their life.

We go through our lives planning to fill them with purpose and meaning. In the end, it may be all we have and our only purpose, is to cause the deaths of others and try to give that meaning. 

News & Notes for a Lazy Sunday

There is so much to talk about, now that I have come back from Germany. But I'm taking it light this weekend whilst I get back on a normal schedule and unjetlag myself.

My General Impression of Europeans
Their Slice is much smaller. Their infrastructure for that Slice is very cozy, but the members of that Slice are prepared for the worst. However, they have no illusions about their ability to hole up and survive and are thus grasshoppers wishing fervently that their winters of war never come. So far, the wishful thinking is working. I think they think that they are very civilized to the point of decadence, and having survived that before, are not peculiarly hesitant to admit that decadence. But they perhaps make some mistake in assuming that the immigrant impulse is to become civilized, a mistake anyone in the first world is likely to make - after all, our lives are so sumptuous. 

Everybody speaks English. But suggesting that's extraordinary is a mistake. After all, every contemporary operating system speaks FAT. 

Don't Call It Ground Zero
I wasn't really prepared to come up the PATH train at the WTC and have the emotional thing happen to me on the way to work. But there is something about the huge amount of air and light in the middle of Lower Manhattan, filled with the noise of construction that threw me a one-two punch Friday morning. I returned yesterday to take a few photos, and try to get closer, but half of that task was impossible. A stream of pilgrims will be making this journey for decades to come and there is no way to jump the lines. 

What's going up is much greater than what fell down, and the bulk of the new 1 WTC, now over 80 stories tall and still under construction, has begun to dominate the skyline. What surprised me more than anything is how clearly and singularly it will stand and be seen straight down the axis of Washington Square Park so many miles away. 

I see the new World Trade Center in my mind's future eye, and I don't think I can ever look at it backwards again.

Molecular Gastronomy at wd-50

There's only one problem with New American - which is that they tend to assume that everyone is on a diet. It's a fair assumption because most people who can afford to blow 100 bucks on a meal are probably that fastidious. Me? I just like to eat good food and tell off-color jokes. Since I had the private dining experience at wd-50, I could laugh as loud as I wanted.

Even for jaded road warriors like me who are apt to say about different food combinations - it all goes down the same hole - I have never seen such a variety of ingredients combined. Dude must be back there with a Kabbalah random number generator to come up with these. Two words, tobasco & caviar. I didn't try that one, but that's your first clue.

What I did have was an amazingly poofy foie gras with beets and sweets that made me hungry for more wine and thirsty for the main course which was a multitextured sea bass.  It  seemed almost engineered to have a marvelously crispy skin outside of the moist meat - like they cooked them in separate heats or methods and then stitched them together for presentation. 

Maybe I'm thinking about Molecular Gastronomy, which is what Chef D is pioneering out here. Don't ask me about the details, but the results are kinda fascinating. 

Service is the new world class, in the way that Steve Jobs makes business casual. You get the best, but it's all dressed in soft cotton, not starched. Or maybe it's something about the best New York waitstaff that don't need to be actors and thus puff up their presentation. Every motion spoiled us and the surprises kept coming.

So here's the thing that makes the rank of the fifth star, which as my readers know, is only given when I get something I have never gotten before. This time that magic word is dirt. Yes dirt.

Have you ever been in the open air after a summer shower and you smell the fresh dirt? If you know that experience, you know how wonderful it is to be alive. But have you ever thought for a moment how somebody might translate that into something edible? That's what I experienced last night. I don't know how, but there was this crumbly stuff in my palate cleanser after the main course, presaging something in my desert that was like eating earth. It was such a magnificent surprise that it completely blew away my fat gutted snark about the minimalist California portion trend in New American. (Especially considering my recent trip to JacquesImo in New Orleans). Maybe that was the Forbidden Rice or one of the other exotic ingredients for which I have only the slimmest vocab, but it was a sock knocker. 

They say that the job of the best restaurant is to delight, which is a tall order for us rich, jaded, spoiled, loud mouthed Americains. How do you provide such a casual luxury? I only know it when I see it, and that's what wd-50 did.

 

Quote of the Day

It doesn’t occur to liberals that there are problems for which solutions might not exist; the notion that cultures and countries may suffer from tragic flaws does not enter into consideration, because if that were true, there would be no need for liberals.
-- Spengler

Back in the USA

Whispered Words of Wisdom

When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, 
speaking words of wisdom, let it be. 
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me, 
speaking words of wisdom, let it be. 

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. 
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be. 

And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree, 
there will be an answer, let it be. 
For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see, 
there will be an answer. let it be. 

Let it be, let it be, ..... 

And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light, that shines on me, 
shine until tomorrow, let it be. 
I wake up to the sound of music, mother Mary comes to me, 
speaking words of wisdom, let it be. 

--

I've been hearing that Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a stupid question. Now you know the answer they all got, but this is the way to think about it, that is if you're a liberal and don't want to be accused of hatefulness.

Zurich Ramble

I'm wide awake at four in the morning here in southwest Germany. I had an extraordinary day yesterday in Zurich, and it has biased me in an interesting way about Europe. Here's what I think of the place. It's already paid for. 

That is the miraculous thing about Western Europe. It is fabulously liveable and lush. The Rhineland is actually worth fighting several wars over. There's no way not to want to covet these hills and lands and forests and farms. You look, you see, you want, and you realize that you can sustain property disputes for hundreds and hundreds of years, and then you're certain that is what is going on. What is so amazing is the quiet. Zurich airport was as quiet as a tomb when I arrived on the red-eye. It's new, fresh and clean, and the huge panes of glass frosted with the Camel cigarette adds clearly warn in Helvetica that Smoking Seriously Damages Health. On an impossibly beautiful September 11th, I walked off my plane knowing exactly what else can kill me.

I walked down the Bahnhofstrasse and there is closed beautiful jewelry store after closed luxury clothier. It's just that there's no Sunday business, but I imagine when they all could go out of business. When will people tire of jewelry?  Middle aged and elderly Swiss couples walk hand in hand dressed impeccably. You look at them and know they never came up with a new idea in their life - they never had to. They just inherited some fraction of this civilized world quietly or bloodily. It almost makes no difference because they are quiet and are enjoying the moment with as much dignity as they can possibly muster.

Lake Zurich will always be here, and the real estate business will always be more or less good.

There's not a lot of traffic here. The whole place seems to have that kind of pacifist order that you can maintain when all the cranes in town are restoring old buildings, and there are more of them than homeless beggars in the streets. And thirsty tourists pay CHF 4,50 for a plastic bottle of water just to take a little boat ride on this old lake. There are sunburnt old men in 13 foot boats with eight horsepower Honda outboards and one line over the side. They're going to be here all day.

Everything that's new here is an expensive public accomodation, and that makes sense in Europe because everything that's old here is never going on the market for the middle class. The middle class pay their dues and push their prams. The youth are nowhere to be seen. There are no skateboarders in Zurich. I actually did go to the biergarten and listened to a 20 piece oompah band for about 3 embarassing minutes. I already ate on the boat and blew my CHF 60. I'm saving my time of beer and music for company.

The Hauptbahnhof is everything a neoliberal would want it to be. Everything in every language, perfectly sensible iconography that is universal, people waiting for trains that run on schedule to everyplace on the map. A grand old restored building mixing the old and the new and people of every imaginable size, shape and color (almost) behaving in a busy, semi-purposeful and uncannily civil manner. All the culture, ie flyers and posters announcing various sorts of performance art, are vaguely rebellious like an old school hiphop or nerdily sentimental like a Sunday quiz show on NPR.

Scads of people in flipflops sip coffee and blithely blather in massive sidewalk cafes that never overcrowd. I keep thinking that this exactly would New Orleans would look like if it weren't so affordable to so many low class American tourists with money. This part of Europe is all sorted out, you see. There's nothing left to chance and no dynamism of millions to upset any expectations. All that is quietly priced out of the system. Zurich simply doesn't generate enough of the right kind of traffic. The place has evolved fully, so all the energy you have for the new is satisfied by enough solar powered public toilets and hybrid electric bicycles, which are used by all of the youngish middle agers. It's a wonderful place to be predictable.

It it just me or are people obsessed with shoes here? Every other tiny tiny shop is a shoe store. Oh and by the way, the new Apple Store is the biggest brightest thing on the Bahnhofstrasse, it too was closed on Sunday.

 

Geek Humor

Thinking Too Much About Europe

This time next week, I will be in the town of Freiburg in the Baden-Württemberg state of Germany. I'm there on business to learn a new suite of software that our team will be selling, but I'm a bit overwhelmed about going. It has been quite some time since I've been over to Europe and it strikes me that I'm obsessing a bit.

One reason is that I am going to have to take a train from Zurich over to Freiburg, and I always feel awkward on trains when I'm ecumbered by baggage. Nothing spells tourist like luggage on a commuter train. I have no idea how many people commute this route, and then again it will be on a Sunday... OMG do they even run on Sundays?

The problem is, ich matte gern ein Gepackschliessfach. Well now that I can say it, it doesn't seem so bad. And I'm going to be trying to get this locker for my huge bag on 11.09.11. It's freaking me out. 

Anyway I keep thinking about how much German I should bother to learn, what to where, what to eat, what to say about Angela Merkel, what to say about football, Greece, Obama.. But the thing that's freaking me out the most is that I'm not going to have much connectivity. AT&T is going to bone me to the tune of 50 bucks for 125MB of data. 

Was kann ich tun?

 

Key Faith

James Key:

Still, even though the demands of war have put a strain on many families, our troops continue to pull from the same side of the rope as one cohesive body. When Hurricane Irene recently threatened the East Coast, including Washington, D.C., the sentinels at Arlington cemetery's Tomb of the Unknowns refused to leave their posts. Their willingness to look beyond personal comfort for the greater good is something from which we all can learn.

As the U.S. works her way out of today's economic turmoil, our nation's leaders and the public should follow the lead of our men and women in uniform: Attack this challenge head-on, but as one. The unified spirit in the aftermath of 9/11 could guide us through the troubled waters we're navigating today.

Jim and I are frat. He and my brother went to middle school together. He has always been one of the most destiny bound men I have known, never questioning his duty to do good. It's good to know he's out there, fighting the good fight.

Milton Friedman

A reminder of where we've come from.

Interesting that he talks about conservative economist but not political Hayekian conservative, which he would be. Again note the difficulty with which the host grapples with the distinction between the aim of the people and the agency of government programs. Friedman doesn't do a good job pointing this out, jousting as he does which makes it appear that he is fatalist. It would be useful to determine exactly in which ways Friedman would direct government policy given what Bernanke had to face, or if he's just being facile in assigning blame to the government for the Great Depression.

The associated YouTubes are also very good. I will always remember his snappy comeback when asked if he ever was poor to which he replied 'If you had cancer, would you only accept treatment from a doctor who had cancer?'

Why Race Talk Is Pointless

McWhorter's over at the Root today on this subject. This video I cut in the Spring of 2008 is a bit more sympathetic to the race-talkers than I am today, but there's not much in it I would contradict. I'll probably go make the dinger point that race-talk among blacks empowers blacks over in the Root's comment section...

Most recently I noted that race talkers generally want to empower their own race and have a racial answer to the race questions, but never want to leave race out of the question. And of course my greatest argument against post-racism is that racism is sin and unless and until people are ready to eradicate sin, then the racial manifestation will always be there.

Thinking Too Much About America

I was going to write a 9/11 piece and I haven't really thought of what I wanted to say. But now I see in my periphery a host of productions now starting to pile up. It's almost as if, having done one dastardly deed, Osama has created a new American holiday. Walk it off America, walk it off.

Dennis Miller is the smartest conservative on the radio because he reads people very well. He is one of those rare individuals who can talk with the ordinary Joes and understand how they're twisting themselves up to be something they aren't in the presence of celebrity. It's a sense that I think all stars get, but few handle well. His lesson to me is to go home. When you start getting emotionally involved in something over which you have absolutely no control, go home.

There is something about American democracy that has been tweaked a little too much - given too much attention in the abstract and not enough direct focus. We all feel that we have some right or duty or function in standing up on our hind legs and barking at the moon of America. There's always some pundit that nobody in any American highschool has ever heard of who can, in his market segement of the long tail, go on about 'the problem with American x'. It brings to mind a conversation I had with a psychologist who said that people overuse their strengths in a crisis. When the crapstorm begins, singers will sing, bloggers will blog, complainers will complain, presidents will preside. Except for those at ground zero whose lives are directly affected, we knit up the metathreads into some narrative tapestry whose patterns need to be familiar. Something about our history keeps reminding us that we the people are supposed to be involved in our little part of history.

I don't think so.

I don't want to be harsh, but I think we are bearing burdens our shoulders weren't meant to carry. It has to do with our judgment in the details of things - details we don't care to know and wouldn't make sense of if we were presented with them. And I think we believe a bit too strongly that our positioning is all that significant. It's easy for me to say that we are all peasants and nothing peasants say matters, although what it is we do is the basis of the entire economy. That should be, in it's own way, self-evident.

But what is not self-evident is the extent to which we are actually not getting added value from adding our voices to the democratic end of our national governance. Mind you I see this in more and more things these days. Are newspapers really improving because they have comment sections? Is there really something to be appreciably gained by reading through all that? I'm tending to think not. Rather I think we're all a bit neurotic about describing what's going wrong in America.

The worst part is that all of this is a function of who we are, that is to say, Americans love America but hate the other-Americans polluting this place. What's emerging is all of that literate discontent in e-text.

En Passant: Gloria Molina, as tenured a pol as can possibly exist, is proposing creating a second Hispanic majority minority district.

 

Are You Ready For Some Football?

Randy sez:

Jebus Cobbers, what kind of black man allows football season to start without comment? Even those fairies in the Ivy League have football. It's the American passion, where we can violently disagree, yet stop short of blood letting, at least everywhere except a Raiders game.

Oh. The last time I cared about football on a consistent basis was when Bob Griese had a perfect season. I was ruined for football by growing up in Los Angeles and watching Dallas win the division every freaking year. As a kid, I slept under football blankets, but by the time I was in high school.. well it was over because I was no longer big enough to play.

I was fast. Of course I played wide receiver and safety in street games. But all that ended somewhere around 1974. I started skateboarding, body surfing, springboard diving. My real thing was gymnastics and I had just about all the street cred a tumbler could have, I could do fronts and I had a full twisting back. I could not imagine possibly getting better without formal instruction, which I couldn't find, nor having found it, could afford. So I became a diver - as my high school had neither gymnastics nor wrestling, the things in which I could kick ass. And judo. Odd that.

Every Friday I go to my kids' highschool games. This week, in which we lost the most bizzare football game I think I have ever seen, in an overtime tie-breaker, I realized that not once did I ever attend my own highschool's football game. Not even the year we won the 4A CIF title. My daughter is a cheerleader. My son is lead trumpet in the marching band. The football team sucks, but the cheeseburgers are perfect.

I like USC but I don't love them. I hate Ohio State. I hate both Florida and Florida State. Any team that beats any of those three is alright with me. I have a small soft spot in my heart for the Georgia Bulldogs, but not big enough to check out how they're doing during the season. I used to root for Navy in the Army Navy game. I used to root for Yale (of course), and between the Sooners and the Razorbacks, I take the Razorbacks. I don't watch until the playoffs for the most part, and now don't bother to watch the bowl games.

As for the Pros. Well, I did care for the Bears when McMahon was QB. Only because he had a hiphop attitude. I cared for San Diego when Fouts was almost the man he was supposed to be. But that's the most modern times. I lived on the east coast for most of the time the Raiders were in LA, but I was completely fed up with LA when I left, so the hell with them and Ice Cube.

In the game it came down to the men I thought were all that. That would include Roman Gabriel - Jack Snow, Daryl Lamonica, Gene Washington, Billy Whiteshoes Johnson, Mercury Morris, Walter Payton, Lawrence McCutcheon, Jerry Rice, Bo Jackson, Emmit Smith, and because I had to play center in peewee league, Jim Otto. Like most young men of my generation, I thought that Vince Lombardi was, next to my favorite astronaut Michael Collins and my all time hero Matt Henson, the epitome of American manhood. But these are things from the days before shaving.

These days I watch football like an Alzheimer's patient. It's all in the present tense. I have no anticipation of the games before they air, and no memory of them after. There are times when I watch that I wonder if others are experiencing the same emotions as I am. I love the beauty of the game - the speed and the impact. I hate quarterbacks with too much time in the pocket. I love a good bootleg play every once in a while. I admire running backs who bull down the field 4 yards at a time, play after play after play. I love a good pass rush and a cornerback who can read the offense. There's nothing like a fast tight end who step back, catch a screen then switch direction and run back to the inside. But the greatest play in football will always be the simple down and in. The receiver who has the balls to cut to the middle, the QB who can land the bullet through zone coverage. That's fucking football.

I don't care who lands the plays. The announcers talk too much anyway. Just give me the high definition and the instant replay. I don't care who wins the Super Bowl or who goes to Disneyland. I watch with my daughter the cheerleader. My son played second string freshmen ball. I could not possibly obsess over the sport enough to support him - besides, he's a band geek. The Spousal Unit is still a Michigan fan.

Let me see, what have I not covered? I hate corporate bowls. That there is something called the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl is evidence of the most bold faced whoring in the world of sport, well next to Nascar and Premier League Footy. And yes, the NCAA should find a way to pay college athletes real salaries.

But to answer the question directly, I am the kind of black man who writes an 800 word essay so I never have to answer the question again.

Outlawed Sharia vs Your Sharia

From Tennessee:

This bill defines "sharia" as the set of rules, precepts, instructions, or edicts which are said to emanate directly or indirectly from the god of Allah or the prophet Mohammed and which include directly or indirectly the encouragement of any person to support the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the United States or Tennessee Constitutions, or the destruction of the national existence of the United States or the sovereignty of this state, and which includes among other methods to achieve these ends, the likely use of imminent violence. Under this bill, any rule, precept, instruction, or edict arising directly from the extant rulings of any of the authoritative schools of Islamic jurisprudence of Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali, Ja'afariya, or Salafi, as those terms are used by sharia adherents, is prima facie sharia without any further evidentiary showing.

So what's wrong with that?

Boko Haram: The Nigerian Taliban?

CFR Senior Fellow John Campbell notes that "the context of Boko Haram is easier to talk about than Boko Haram itself." Injustice and poverty, as well as the belief that the West is a corrupting influence in governance, are root causes of both the desire to implement sharia and Boko Haram's pursuit of an Islamic state, say experts. "The emergence of Boko Haram signifies the maturation of long festering extremist impulses that run deep in the social reality of northern Nigeria," writes Nigerian analyst Chris Ngwodo. "But the group itself is an effect and not a cause; it is a symptom of decades of failed government and elite delinquency finally ripening into social chaos."

What Is The New Negro?

I think I could best answer that question by saying first that the New Negro is a person with a new sense of dignity and destiny. With a new self-respect. Along with that is lack of fear, which once characterized the Negro. This willingness to stand up courageously for what he feels is just and what he feels he deserves on the basis of the laws of the land. -- MLK

 

Watch the full episode. See more The Open Mind.

Well, he's not the Old Negro.

Andre Carson: Strike Two

Well, now I know the dude who has been making the noise about the Tea Party being racist. He might not have been the dude last week, but he's The Dude now. It's Andre Carson, Dem rep from Indiana. And doubleplus this. He's a muslim. Wait. That's not all. His grandmother had his seat before - he's a legacy. And of course he's the reason that Allen West is considering dropping out of the CBC.

First of all, West should stay in the CBC and take Carson down. IE he should make the CBC choose between the two of them. 

Now what is Carson doing that's so outre? He's amping up his claim that the Tea Party's politics are racially motivated using incendiary language. If it weren't for Breitbart and West, this would go on like the Monty Python witch trial, full of sound, fury and absurity. But now the stakes are put up or shutup. That's because this is #2 for Carson.

It turns out that Andre Carson was the individual personally responsible for the claim that he was called a nigger fifteen times at a Tea Party rally last April. Breitbart offered anybody $100K to prove it, and Carson backed down. 

I suspect that Carson will get another chance before some child along the parade route points out that he's naked and all the people say, oh yeah he actually is naked. Still, there are already 2033 comments at Politico.com. 

My, aren't we racealicious this week?

The Negro Motorist Green Book

from the WaPo:

With a quotation from Mark Twain - "Travel is fatal to prejudice" - on its cover, the guidebook was published annually from 1936 until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rendered it obsolete. The book, inspired by guides that told Jewish travelers which hotels and restaurants were restricted, covered places from Mexico to Montreal, identifying restaurants, service stations, hotels, "tourist homes," taverns, liquor stores, beauty parlors, nightclubs, drugstores and tailors that catered to blacks who'd grown weary of wandering into "whites-only" establishments.

Download 1949GreenBook

UPDATE: The Root published an interesting relevant article.Download Root_green_book

Back on the Block - The Gospel of 1989

An everlasting omnipresence is my present
State of being, seeing the unpleasant
Sight of righteous souls live like peasants
The mind stunts growth in adolescence
My insight enables me to enlight
The weakest of minds, and I put em in flight
As I transcend, a-scend or de-scend
Re-create, re-incarnate and re-send
The powerful spirits of our ancestors
For those that don't know how God blessed us
Because man messed up, the media dressed up
Lies perpetrated as truth, and it left us
Confused, but I've seen it all before
From Babylon to the Third World War
I'm more than a man, I'm more like an entity
Back on the block, and this time my identity
Is the Dude

I'm listening to this album and it strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that somebody like me took just a bit too seriously. Yeah I knew it was fun. Fun like coming out a Spike Lee movie and fronting. At this distance it marks the era properly - just a few years after the invention of the term 'African American' at the birth of multiculturalism and Afrocentrism and the death of Soul. Mark Anthony Neal writes of the Post-Soul Generation. I mark Back on the Block as the divider.

As a milestone this Quincy Jones album cannot be denied and I'm coming to think of it as the last 'black cast' event. The moment at which the baton was passed from the elders of the prior forms to the new jacks. The title track could stand as the last time that Jesse Jackson was literally given the last word. The album won album of the year and seven Grammys, reprised some popular cuts redone in the double cut percussion of the new jack swing.

I can remember the end of the Apartheid Era and the beginning of American gospel choirs singing as if they were in the cast of Sarafina! There is that bold new confidence in this album, this becoming emblematic of the potential of that thing we called the New World Afrikan Diaspora. I can remember wincing at the possible mispronounciation of Dizzy Gillespie's name by Big Daddy Kane in his introduction to the cover of Zawinul's Birdland, did he or did he not drop the baton? It had to have that iconic perfection. 

Alas poor Tevin Campbell. It was impossible for the kid to compete with the big boys in the market. It's a joy to hear that innocence, but despite the superstar backing, he couldn't compete with the new jacks coming out of Philly, the East Coast Family. 

But what an album.

Cheney Biography