“Dude, My Party Sucked...Mind If I Crash Yours?” (Photo of Bob Barr at Netroots Nation—Sat. July 19, 2008 by LowerManhattanite)
While hustling back from a run across the street to the hotel for a left-behind power cable, I was jogging through the Austin Convention center, where I noticed a man being interviewed by several people with mics and cameras.
The gentleman was dapped out in that crisp, bad-ass, Southern style. Blue and white striped shirt, creases starched hard enough to peel carrots, a light-weight blue blazer with brass buttons, perfect dry-cleaned jeans, also creased with diamond hardness, and a pair of chestnut colored leather boots, buffed to a high shine—no scuffs—and a nifty cuban heel.
Homeboy was dap as hell. But as I motored past...I noted how familiar he looked.
And when I suddenly realized who he was, I of course caught a sneaker tread on the carpet and nearly fell on my ass in shock.
It was former Georgia GOP Rep. Bob Barr, one of former President Clinton's most memorable beté noirs of “MonicaGate”—at Netroots Nation. What...in the Wide World of Sports was going on here?
So, I now sprinted over to where I'd left Doc Wendel and my laptop and grabbed my camera, hoping to capture the dap little pimp before he “bamfed” away in a cloud of ash and brimstone. Luckily, he was still holding court and I managed to get a few shots of him—the one running here being the best one. The reason for that is that every time I tried to hold the camera still, I started to chuckle to myself and shake the damned thing.
You see, Bob Barr has long been the butt of many jokes in my family since the ugly winter of 1998. He was such a annoying, little pit bull against Clinton, you just wanted to smack him...but...
There was something odd about him. Something that was “off”.
Media people have noted that “offness” of late, but I will tell you that this has been long discussed in other more insular circles.
Bob Barr, um...well...as my mother said it “Looks a little 'funny' 'round the mouth”.
If he doesn't have some immediate African American lineage somewhere in his blood, then I'm the first cousin of Edgar-fucking-Winter.
My brothers and sisters...take a peek below, and as they used to say in that old commercial during NFL games “You...make the call...
Dig the lips, folks...That ain't collagen...that's collards and Coltrane.
Funny-ass hair texture too—particularly on the 'stache. “Rev. Al's shit is straighter than Barr's is.” one friend loves to note frequently.
But there Barr was, in all his dap-tastic glory, in the lobby of the Convention Center hosting a gathering of people absolutely four-square against the party he's identified with for the last forever. Why was he here? To be the fly in the ointment for us progresives? That stray “chip” in the sugar cookie? (Kind of a butterscotch chip, if not an all-chocolate accident)
Nah. He just wanted to be where the action was. Because across town where he gangsta-leaned over from is where it clearly wasn't.
AUSTIN — Conservative bloggers are holding their own mini-conference across town in the northern part of this city. And while some have bashed the left and the liberal blogosphere, several are taking cues from the successes of the online left and building out from them.
The Americans for Prosperity Foundation decided to concentrate part of its Texas conference on new media here, (RightOnline.com) and while planning this event, decided to hold it at the same time as the much larger Netroots Nation convention.
That apparently worried a few of the more powerful bloggers on the right, writers who didn’t want comparisons to be made in terms of size and scope, we’re told. And it is much smaller in attendance and even in focus, (with a decidedly libertarian bent to some degree). But the organizers said they never wanted to go “toe-to-toe” – or, perhaps, we’d say from down here, it would be “boot-to-boot” with the Netroots conference.
On the left, the netroots sessions are chock-full of heavy online hitters and the chairman of the Democratic party as well as the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives are among its keynote guest speakers.
For the right, tonight’s main speakers are columnist Bob Novak and Barry Goldwater Jr.
Um. Yeah. And their heaviest hitters of all were such superstars as RedState's Erick (“Der Banhammer”) Erickson and keynote screecher speaker Michelle Malkin, whose stirring speechifying probably caused the majestic bronze Barbara Jordan statue at the Austin airport to slowly close its eyes and go to sleep.
So, instead of hanging around the coffee urn in the hotel lounge a little ways north where all 19 of the GOP gathering's attendees caucused such issues as the depth of the anti-immigrant wall at the border (“Five inches! No! Seven! They have claws and can rip through five, easy!”), Barr instead came where the party was poppin' on the day of his big speech before that other “throng”.
Sad, really.
But there Barr was, in all of his decidedly questionable ethnicity glory. Cameras a' clickin'—including mine, and recorders a' rollin' away as he held court where somebody actually gave a rat's ass about him.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008, 09:39 AM The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
While a poll released late Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg showed Libertarian Party presidential nominee Bob Barr drawing only 3 percent support, the data show that much of that is coming at the expense of Republican candidate John McCain.
The new national poll shows McCain trailing Democrat Barack Obama 37 percent to 49 percent when the race is just between the two major party candidates. But when Barr, a former Georgia congressman, and independent candidate Ralph Nader are added to the mix, Obama’s margin jumps to 15 percentage points, 48 percent to 33 percent.
Seems there's a good chance my dear ol' Uncle Bobbeh (That's what us folks call him at the family reunions, you know...) has a pretty good chance of Perot/Nader-izing John McCain's odds of being President that much deeper into the sticky muck of impossibility, based on polling in states where the would-be jet demolisher-in-chief needs every damned vote. Oooops!
I suppose the lone saving grace for McCain is that he can probably save campaign money by not having to come up with a separate series of attack ads against Barr.
I mean...he could just simply recycle the subliminally racist ones he's going to be trotting out against Obama, right?
There's more...
I found myself strolling amongst the gathered Netroots throng Friday night along the 6th Street “fun zone” stretch of Downtown Austin, post-a few parties for some of the blogs. There were burnt orange credentials a' swingin' from the necks of reveling progressives from one side of the street to another, but alas—nary an upper-floor water balloon spatter on the ground to be found. “Sigh!”
What could be found was clusters of folks pointedly hashing out this issue and that one. Every once in a while you'd catch a blast of conversation from a group—“But the shit about FISA was...”, or “You don't bring a knife to a gunfight—and when you publicly finance against the right, that's what you're doing!”
I came across some Netroots folks near an open window at Maggie Mae's discussing Jesse Jackson's “microphone malfunction” on Fox, hearing one say “Still, you've gotta feel bad for Jesse...I mean, you know what this makes him look like?
And as if on cue, a Black woman walking by the pub—a local with a crew of fellow revelers and more than likely not a Netroots-er caught the same snip of conversation I did, and she simply blurted out a quick and vicious little epitaph to that empathetic statement.
“Oh, fuck Jesse!”, she spat without missing a stride.
How deeply the knife cuts when wielded so brutally.
It got me to thinking about Jesse in a holistic sense—what he means, what he meant, and what he'll be remembered as. And the results of my pondering are not pretty at all.
I missed the initial showing of the Fox news video and only read Jackson's words. That was for a couple of days. Then, I saw the video and I actually winced on viewing it. What got to me was the bitchy, hater-ific whispering from him and the whole junior high-school way he came across on-camera. For someone supposedly so adept at public discourse and handling himself in the gaze of the media's eye, I was stunned at his unprofessionalism there. I've worked in TV for over 15 years. I've stood before multi-camera set-ups with dangling booms and lavalierres, and the first rule of thumb here is “when in front...punt”. It doesn't matter if you think the cameras and mics are off, or even if you think you KNOW they're off—you ain't in the control room, and you don't know what's going on in there. Someone can ALWAYS hear you, and there's always a chance that something is recording you. Jesse's little “Mean Girls” moment was of course captured forever—that little tilt and hissed remarks to the Smithers-esque clown to his left was embarrassing, and severely damaging to what was left of a frittered-away credibility. Now, in full disclosure, I have over the years been in social settings with Reverend Jackson. Moments where everyone let their hair down, and knowing that, there is a certain expectation of privacy therein. Ratting that shit out is pretty damned foul. But to sit there on a “hot” (meaning fully mic'ed and camera-ed) Fox News soundstage—A FOX FUCKING NEWS SOUNDSTAGE?—and bitch and moan about a...well, let's face it...a rival and and heir—was just dumb. Dumb in the thinking that anything a progressive would say at that place would ever be off-the-record, and doubly dumb in that it revealed something I think many of us thought, but didn't have verification of.
Namely, that there's a LOT of hateration and holleration up in Jesse's dance-er-ree since Obama's run.
And while I respect Jesse like nobody's business for all he's done for folks over the years—his being the burr in Reagan's saddle back in the day, and his ultimately superhuman-humanity towards the downtrodden in society, I also realize he's a somewhat vain man (many up-front leaders are) with a bit of a sense of possessiveness about his place in the firmament in the Civil Rights “sky”.
This kind of self-aggrandizement is nothing new for Black folks of prominence in America—generational tectonic shifts always seem to leave those who came before feeling “dissed”, or “not-properly thanked / acknowledged”. Jesse's mid-eighties presidential runs (One of which I worked on) were landmark events. Turning points in American political history. I still remember the issue of Newsweek with a presidential portrait pose of him on the cover, with the screaming 120 point copy below the pic reading “JESSE?”, playing out an equal mixture of shock, fear, and awe.
But, it was the eighties—a time when a nascent campaign like his could still be easily stifled by the old-school skullduggery of the Atwater-era. There was no internet or alternate media sources for him to use to bypass the spin and smears, and paid-for denigration of his chances. No alternate path to exploit to energize folks with a direct message. And, as proven by his ill-timed, and ill-mindedly infamous “Hymietown” remarks, the man also had an amazing propensity for sometimes saying way too much, too often around those who were too much against him.
He became easy to lampoon, (again, no secondary outlet available for him to control the message.) and worse, he would even aid in people's eventually dismissing him by lampooning himself with sometimes funny, but ultimately prestige diminishing appearances on SNL and the like.
He became a TV pundit fixture and an entire generation has come to know him as that, and NOT the young, idealistic guy who knelt there as MLK's life bled out into his hands on a Memphis balcony. For the easy, steady money one craves in middle age, Jesse sadly opted for a highly metastatic (I don't think he knew how bad it would be) case of irrelevancy.
As the years have worn on, and his place in the activist front lines was superceded by the earnest, but even more flawed Rev. Al Sharpton, I think Jesse became comfortable in his “Old lion who can still occasionally let loose a fearsome roar” status as paterfamila to all things Black and political.
But as is always the case—when MLK's generation supplanted the staid Roy Wilkins era of Civil Rights warriors, or when Stokeley Carmichael's more militant folk, stepped up (and sometimes ON the heels and toes of) and walked right by King's now deemed staid generation of activists, or when a young Charlie Rangel snatched a congressional district and a lifetime's worth of power from an older, established giant like Adam Clayton Powell Jr., THERE IS ALWAYS A BITTERNESS FROM THE PREVIOUS LEADERS WHO ARE SUPERCEDED.
It's simple human nature—and Obama's blistering ascent to pinnacles Jesse can only dream of, while not needing him for much of anything publicly, and clearly very little pre-run consultation privately has got to rankle him. It's a long, LONG time since that Newsweek cover for Jesse. In the last six months I've seen Obama on the cover of GQ, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Time, Newsweek, The Economist and every damn magazine outside of “OK!”. He was a “fringe” candidate up until ONE primary—Iowa—and from then on, he was the tone-setting major player, impossible to relegate to the background or dismiss like Jesse eventually was. Obama was Jesse 2.0. No beta, and a skip over a 1.0 version of the “Black Candidate Software” update. The “bugs” as they were, were worked out between the releases of “JesseWare” and “iObama”. And I seriously doubt Jesse likes being described in that way, but the truth is the truth. The other problem is that Jesse doesn't seem to realize that that IS the truth, and there's a palpable anger there in him over the way people consider his legacy like some ancient version of Windows we all thought was “the shiznit” back in the day, but laugh about in terms of usefulness now.
Add in Jesse's own self-inflicted wounds post-Hymietown that have so damaged him, like his funniness with Operation: PUSH money in later years, (not giving him a pass on this, but when a “movement” is how you pay the bills and live, stuff always has a chance to get financially dicey down the road a piece) and worst of all, his unfortunate out-of-wedlock fathering of a child outside of his marriage. The ironic thing about this is that Jackson himself spent years challenging Black fathers to step up, much the way Obama did. (Bill Cosby's a different story—he's been a known cockhound for decades, and his bitching about poor Black folks' excesses is as much a “bourgie” class issue as it is a dodge for his own creepy behaviors. He's tired of his rich White buddies in high places asking him 'what's the problem with poor Black folks?', and instead of noting his part in 'pulling the ladder up' and walking away, he'd rather rag his dusky lessers as lazy laggards who are prone to destructive excesses. 'Cause only the fully evolved among us offer up un-asked for Ny-Quil-adas to comely and unsuspecting female visitors. Ugh.) Jesse's credibility on those matters has been so tarnished to where it's cost him a considerable amount of his status in “The Black Community”—especially with women...of whom many now perceive him as a “dog”.
Then, here comes Barack Obama. Younger. Without the baggage. Not over-exposed. A high-end orator as well, AND actually elected to public office at least twice—something Jesse, for all his time and gravitas could never do. Playing the media better, faster and stronger. And worst of all for Jesse, Obama has also emerged as a pulpit arbiter—in fact, the pulpit arbiter heir apparent to Jesse's position there. Folks saw that when Obama was broaching this self-same touchy parenting issue to thunderous applause before Black churches (and even in some sniffy media circles)—like at his breakthrough Birmingham Sunday speech earlier this year. A torch was passed...and Jesse was the last one to know about it. His ego was probably bruised when he found out about it—the hard way...
“Two decades ago, my father ran for president, calling on South Carolina and the nation to 'keep hope alive.' Today, Barack Obama has taken up the torch," (Jesse) Jackson Jr. says in the ad, which will air on 36 gospel and R&B radio stations across the state.
Ouch. Papa J's clearly not ready to cede a bit of the stage, but the spotlight sadly has already swung past him a ways.
It's a status dance Black America's leaders have done since time immemorial. I don't actually Blame Jesse. I feel bad for him. And I'm certain HE feels bad too—not just about his alleged damage to the nominee (alleged because ironically enough, Jesse's screw-ups have so damaged him that a diss from him on Obama potentially makes Obama look better in many folks' eyes), but also the public playing out of his little petty bit of turf-marking via verbal pissing.
And then I go back to that woman sashaying down 6th Street with her friends. Unbidden. Unprompted. Call and response.
“I feel bad for Jesse.”
“Oh, Fuck Jesse!”
The parties went on in the streets that night.
I saw a plastic cup on the ground. Dented. Filmy. A trickle of suds running from its mouth.
The Above Visual Metaphor Worked. The One Karl Rove Cited This Morning? Um. No. Never. And What The Fuck?
As it's hot as hell today with Summer officially on, let's just dive on into the deep end of the cool pool of GOP crazy, shall we?
Rove: Obama's the Guy at the Country Club Holding a Martini Making Snide Comments About Everyone Else
June 23, 2008 1:36 PM ABC News' Christianne Klein reports that at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as “coolly arrogant.”
“Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” Rove said, per Christianne Klein. “He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”
Interesting that Mr. Rove would use a country club metaphor to describe the first major party African-American presidential candidate, whom I'm sure wouldn't be admitted into many country clubs that members of the Capitol Hill Club frequent.
But the picture Rove paints is interesting. Who, pray tell, is Rove at this country club?
The guy telling funny stories near the band?
The charming president of the club's philanthropic arm?
The brainy guy with all the sports scores?
Or the guy who vandalizes your car and blames it on the kitchen staff?
I'll wait while you feel around for your eyes on the floor seeing as how they popped out of your head a few seconds ago.
Washed 'em off? Got 'em back in? Good! Let's make short work of this Tacoma Narrows Bridge of “reasoning” on Rove's part.
First of all, you should take note that Karl Rove been damn near out of his mind with his every loopy pronouncement since the fall of 2006, when he screeched about how he had “The Math”(favorable to the Republicans) immediately prior to the mid-term elections he bollixed up so badly for the GOP. He's managed to make the ramblings of an end-stage syphilitic like Al Capone (“The Bolsheviks! The God-damn Bolsheviks!”) sound like homespun folk-wisdom in comparison.
Perhaps sympathetically, like the person he's championing to replace his boss, he's utterly “lost his bearings” on reality. That's the truly crazy part of his “Country Club” statement—in likening someone who looks like Barack Obama to a pink-cheeked, millionaire swell sippin' Rob Roys at “The Nineteenth Hole” or somethin'. How out of your mind do you have to be in America to make that kind of rhetorical leap?
Let's spell out that leap:
Yeah. It's the Black dude whose father booked up on him, leavin' his White mom to raise him alone, who stilll managed to excel academically, and in spite of that—came back to the South Side of Chicago to work in the 'hood' with his 'peeps', instead of taking the stoopid-money Wall Street jobs...who's the arrogant guy at the country club. Not the guy who married into millions, took part in a Savings and Loan scam, ripping off even mo' millions, and...owns like eight houses in choice locales all over the country. Mmm-kay?
I mean...this is a land where a well-to-do Black Lawyer went undercover a decade ago as a busboy at an exclusive Country Club in Connecticut (as that was the only way he could get in the place) to find out first-hand what down-their-nose White folks really thought of Blacks when they felt they didn't have to hold their tongues around them out of concerns for propriety. There are places where my Black ass would be hauled away and arrested “The Dude” style just for lingering too close to the Goddamned shrubbery at the gate, and Rove somehow sees Barack Obama—who the last time I checked, doesn't sign his name as “Biff”, “Chip” or fucking “Cadwallader” as the “the Guy at the Country Club Holding a Martini Making Snide Comments About Everyone Else.”?
There are too many of these clubs in America where if Obama showed up unannounced with a “member”, all of a sudden there'd be a full course and no room to play—but hey, there's always room in the back for another n*gger to scrub bits of Cobb Salad off the dishes and whatnot, eh?
So, color me wet sand-trap brown, but I'm just not getting this analogy of Rove's with Obama as the swell and... I guess his boy McCain as the scrappy outsider. Is Rove's issue with his inability thus far to elicit the desired “response” from the senator from Illinois? The desired “Angry Black Thug” angle he's so desperate to exploit—whether its rooted in an actual statement or rebuttal from Obama or not? “How dare he seem above the bullshit I'm trying to run! That arrogant S.O.B.! He won't get 'ghetto' like he's supposed to!”
You see, the usage of Woods as a slang shorthand for Barack Obama speaks to a certain racial paranoia of the part of folks like Bellavia. I was in Augusta, Georgia the weekend that Tiger Woods officially burst onto golf's lily-white scene in 1997. I wasn't there for the tournament mind you, but rather, I was visiting a significant other who was performing in town. I found myself at trip's end at Bush Field, the city's airport waiting for my flight home, aimlessly walking from my gate to the oddly crowded bar and back. I finally stopped at the bar's fringe—I couldn't get in it from the huge crowd packing the place—and noticed what everyone was looking at, namely the final round of the Masters tournament just a stone's throw away in which first-year PGA pro Tiger Woods was ripping through the course like Caddyshack's Ty Webb on a fast-drip adrenaline and espresso I.V.. There was a 99% White crowd in that airport bar, and all you could hear over the hushed announcer tones from the TV were grunted “God-damns”, “Fucks”, and an almost percussive slamming down of beer bottles and cheap glass tumblers at every dead-solid-perfect drive and seemingly magnetically-guided putt.
No slurs...just a palpable displeasure with what was transpiring. There was a lot of head-shaking and napkin-tossing. And I must say, more than a few almost hissed “Unbelievable. Fucking unbelievables”. I intentionally lingered there amongst that grumpy assemblage, maybe courting trouble, but mostly getting a secondary visual dig in at that unreasonably angry bunch. There were two Black people within thirty feet of that ball of anger. Me, and a guy I thought was an airport employee as he had a uniform-ish-looking outfit on and was leaned against a trash bin. He and I made eye contact for a moment and there was a knowing smile. He was lingering too, a fellow “chip in the cookie” like me. He shook his head with a silent laugh as Woods trod the green grass back to the clubhouse, post-massacre, and the man pulled his wheeled bag hidden by the bin and walked down to his gate...with a big “Callaway Golf” logo on the back of his windbreaker. Golf fan? Duffer? I don't know what he was exactly, but he was getting as much enjoyment out of the first wave of the “sea change” we had just witnessed. I turned back to the crowd and couldn't help but notice their noticing us. There was an odd silence amongst them as they looked on. An almost collective audible and visual sigh from them looking at us, clearly translating as an exasperated “Oh great...we'll have to hear about this shit from 'them' forever about this.”
Woods' win there and his subsequent hyper-dominance and revolutionizing of the game is something that many look at with a level of awe...and a lot of others scowl at with barely-concealed disgust. He effectively took a game—golf—away from the demographic group that pretty much owned it outright since its inception 600 years ago.
He's in the process of re-writing the record book, and doing so at a younger age and with a more punishing dominance than his predecessors. Those facts have upset many of his peers, with requests that courses be “Tiger-proofed” with new and more challenging layouts, spiteful talk of how the game's popularity is in jeopardy due to Woods' “Colossus amongst men” skewing of the sport's talent curve (“If no one else is gonna win—why watch?”), and even outright verbal denigration from...well, there's no other word to use but “haters”
But the underlying zing from the mumbling, GOP-backing sergeant is that aforementioned fear-and jealousy based dissing that Tiger Woods is the constant recipient of. When you think about it, Bellavia's stuttering blather smacks of that same “How dare you enter and rule my last bastion of power?”-speak—I mean, this is the Presidency we're talking about here—not too many last bastions beyond there. And as Woods' emergence represented some serious applecart upsetting, just the consideration of an Obama's ascending to the Presidency flips the whole damned orchard upside-down.
'Oh no. This is the one thing you will not take take from us. not this. NOT the fucking Presidency'.
It was a punk-ass scream for help that he thought was a silent dog whistle.
Well...woof-woof, mother-fucker..
Thus, it's Obama/Woods all over again. I liked the “beautiful date” part of it this time, though. The whole equating the statuesque Michelle Obama with Tiger's Swedish ex-model wife Elim Nordegren. Can you feel the hate, kiddies? Grrrrrrrr! Spinning the senator as the casually victorious, “arrogant” king of all he touches, as some sort of passive-aggressive “poor-mouthing” of the scrappy, l'il McCain's candidacy.
“Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion...”
Oh...fucking...please, Karl. Really? That's the talking point, now? Seriously? Even ABC's Jake Tapper is clowning your ass mightily with your unfortunate bit of drama-queenery from this morning, noting Rove's obvious familiarity with the “Country Club Types”. Again:
But the picture Rove paints is interesting. Who, pray tell, is Rove at this country club?
The guy telling funny stories near the band?
The charming president of the club's philanthropic arm?
The brainy guy with all the sports scores?
Or the guy who vandalizes your car and blames it on the kitchen staff?
Who is Rove in this setting? None of the above.
He's this guy.
The fuck-up scion of the man in charge...lucky because of where he is, but not who he is. Never called on his bullshit, and given enough rope to hang ten men. The mean, spoiled, and classless in spite of his being “To the Manor Born” Spaulding-fucking-Smails from “Caddyshack”. He's the “kid who can do no wrong” because he'll always get another chance, and everybody around him gets the fist upside the head as punishment. He's right twice a day, just like a broken clock and that's been his “get over” for years.
But...if you look at his record—especially lately, he's still...a...fuck-up. Just like his boss. Can you spell “transference”, kids. I bet you could.
All that's left is for him to do is to drunkenly puke his guts out into the sunroof of an expensive car at this point.
I'm hoping it's a Texas-bound limousine pulling out of the White House driveway on January 20th 2009.
There's more...
I sit there at the computer in something of a daze as Senator Barack Obama made his way to the podium, looking quizzically at the scene with my head askance the way cats do when they see something that just doesn't register as familiar in the tidy and ordered feline brain.
What was I watching?
Senator Obama's wife Michelle was waiting for him there and they embraced for a moment, with just a little bit of an extra clinch at the end that kind of said, “Let's savor this for a second, shall we?” And then, she backed up and muttered a quick something, and offered a slender left fist up for “The Dap”, which he never skipped a beat on and returned with a quick, soft “thump”.
Wha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-t?
Did they just do a quick, little “Dap” for all the world to see? A little personal affirmative that looked like they'd done it a hundred times before? I laughed inside for a moment. I've given my wife “The Dap” for jobs well done a thousand times.
When she handled an ornery relative with perfect touch and tone on a hyper-emotional phone call? “Dap!”
If I find a glorious, pre-made pitcher of iced coffee—which she can't stand—in the fridge on a boiling summer morning she's beaten me to wakefulness? “Dap!”
When she tells me of a particularly tricky work account she's managed to find an angle on to complete, and I know the sucker's been the bane of her existence for weeks on end? ““Dap! Dap!”
An unspoken, small bit of cultural shorthand that's just a little bit “round-the-way”, and I just saw...“The Presumptive Democratic Nominee for President.” work it like I do in quiet moments with someone I appreciate. It was remarkably humanizing. And then, a quick pat in the small of the back saying, “Okay...I've got this.” And she was off, while he was...on.
I've got this.”
And what exactly was it he had at that moment? Oh, only the position of the Democratic Party's nominee for the Presidency of The United States of America.
?!
Now, once he plunged into his speech—and it was a hum-dinger, replete with fawning praise for his in-party rival Senator Clinton—I sort of had to pinch myself, because what I was seeing required a certain suspension of belief to absorb. Because I honestly did not think in my lifetime that I would see an African American presidential candidate get thisclose to as George Clinton so perfectly put it, “Painting The White House Black”. This isn't negativity, or poor-mouthing, or spin-management/underselling.
This is reality for millions of Black folks of a certain age. Call us “Boomers”, “Generation Jones” or whatever you will, but for those generations back—from those of us Obama's age and upwards, many of us find this new American reality as of June 2008 a rather daunting one. We may make more money, or have more access to higher learning, and so many other neat-o trappings of 21st century America that our forebears didn't have, but we still carry the stigma of denial of equality once the rubber of ambition meets racism's road. Many of us are old enough to in spite of whatever success we may have enjoyed, know the sting of blunt-force racism up close and personal.
I'm a year younger than Barack Obama, and I know what it's like to be chased through an all-White neighborhood in New York City with bottles exploding on my heels as a teenager, just because I showed my Black face there to get something that wasn't available near home. Came down the steps of the elevated J Train in then mostly-White Woodhaven a few years later where I saw a toddler with his mom walking past me.
The little boy pointed at me, smiled, and said “Ni-guh”, in the cutest baby-voice you've ever heard.
Mom never said a word. Didn't blink and kept on her merry way with that little, tousle-haired cherub whose soul she'd sadly already managed to partially wreck. I stood there dumbfounded for about a minute. And then I went back up the stairs and said “the hell with what I came here for”, got on the train back to Jamaica and have never set foot in that neighborhood again. That was twenty-two years ago.
Only last year, the fashion statement du jour wasn't the drapey Paul Lyndian scarves so favored by style-setters like Vogue's dandy-monolith André Leon Talley. No...the neckwear wildfire trend that swept the nation like a Klan cross too near dry brushland was the old standby rope noose. Everything old was new again. From the “Dirty South”, all the way up to the so-called “refined” North. Ironic, genocidal “cool” was all the rage. I'm surprised I didn't see an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt with an old lynching pic silk-screened on and the ironic phrase “Hang In There Baby” printed below it, as the noose came roaring back with such a vengeance (pardon the unfortunate pun) in the public consciousness. The Goddamned noose. One of the most powerful symbols of wanton, hate-driven violence in history made a major comeback last year.
In America, people.
And here we are one summer later, standing on the verge of seriously “getting it on”, if you will.
Color me a deep, dusky mahogany, and surprised.
Black folks are so damned used to being the perennial, gullible “Charlie Brown” who gets true equality's football snatched away every fucking time by the great, all-powerful “Lucy” that we've taken on ol' Chuck's nonplussed demeanor about the whole damn thing. This is how the shit is. Yet, we run for it every damned time, thinking the outcome'll be different just this once...
And somehow, this time...things are a bit different. Obama is somewhere I / we never expected him to be, while w-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-y deep-down wondering if he'd ever get close.
He's close. Really close. Scary close. And it requires a reboot of a lifetime of conditioning and thinking. How did we get to the point where instead of the ball being snatched away, there's a better than even chance our foot may actually touch the damned thing, or better yet...
I noted post-Iowa that Obama was more or less “surfing” a change wave as opposed to initiating it, saying:
That's what Barack Obama's doing here. He's just shooting. Tapping into “it”. 'Cause “it” is bigger than he is. And that “it” is a tidal wave begun with the Supreme Court's December 2000 judgement that Bush be installed, fluttering down into the collective water of history. The ripple began there, rolled into larger ones with the Iraq debacle, became waves then and rose higher with the repeated flouting of the Constitution—FISA, glad-handing torture, and then, the open subverting of justice, and now crests eight years later on a sweat, shit and pee-inducing Tsunami that isn't about a grumpy bark of “Throw the bums out!”.
No. This is a level beyond that. It's a “Throw the bums out, then burn down the place we were in, so we don't have to remember it and let's build some place completely new that's got no ties to the old bullshit.”
Obama just happens to be the dude who was out there on the breakers when that wave rolled in, and for what it's worth—he's riding the living hell out of it,
For all of the positives Senator Obama brings to the table, and those positives are indeed mighty ones, when I look at America's long, and unresolved history of racism—right down to last year's “noose-a-palooza”—his present nearness to the levers of power still reads as an anomaly to me and many others you would think would be turning cartwheels of joy. What could move this country to this strange precipice we stand at today?
Say hello to the forty-third President of The United States, George W. Bush.
Should Barack Obama pull this thing off, down the road, the most diamond-hard of hard-core American racists will burn effigies of Dubya's figure, as they will blame him, with some truth behind it—for the country's electing its first Black president. Bush has so trashed the country—its reputation, its infrastructure, its economy, the military, the right to privacy, the Justice Department—just about every element of any piece of government that his “King Midas In Reverse” hand has touched, that he has moved America to the point where for many more than ever before, race will not matter as much in their choice of president, and said people are seriously willing to consider the polar opposite image of the executive branch awfulness they've endured for eight years.
Commander In Chief can't speak? Let's get one who can, huh?
Commander In Chief is an absolute idiot? Can we get one who's got an above-average intelligence, please?
Commander In Chief has the diplomatic skill of an F-5 hurricane? Howsabout someone who will talk to people and exhaust negotiation before more hasty, destructive considerations?
Commander In Chief is everything people have come to utterly despise in the typical, privileged class of leadership for over two hundred years?Okay, fuck it. we will at this point actually consider someone for the job who does not even look remotely like the dude who has fucked this place to Kingdom-Goddamn-Come.
And yes...even if it means said person is a Black dude who can trace his bloodline all the way back to the Motherland in so few steps, Alex Haley's grave is probably trembling from inner centrifugal forces as we speak.
The Bushian legacy may be akin to the fabled volcanic one of the Hawaii of Barack Obama's youth. The destructive power of a earth-shattering volcanic eruption rains down boiling lava and a thick ash—burning away and fossilizing the past in so many ways. And from that hell-spawned lava, mineral-rich ash and debris, the soil becomes hyper-fertilized to the point that what grows from it...can often be spectacular.
I watched Obama speak, and I didn't pick up the phone this time—for there were indeed a few calls—and I must admit, I did more soaking in and straight looking than listening. It was history, in real time, and everything I believed up to that point was being challenged by the unfolding reality before me. But then, this passage hit me like a two-by-four to the forehead...
So it was for that band of patriots who declared in a Philadelphia hall the formation of a more perfect union; and for all those who gave on the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam their last full measure of devotion to save that same union.
So it was for the Greatest Generation that conquered fear itself, and liberated a continent from tyranny, and made this country home to untold opportunity and prosperity.
So it was for the workers who stood out on the picket lines; the women who shattered glass ceilings; the children who braved a Selma bridge for freedom's cause.
So it has been for every generation that faced down the greatest challenges and the most improbable odds to leave their children a world that's better, and kinder, and more just.
And so it must be for us.
My wife had rushed into the room early on, along with my stepson, and this time, unlike the last, she did not flinch. She did not cower. She did not hide.
She watched in full, with her hand at her mouth and wettish eyes and shaking her head. The texting-crazy lad at my feet kept silently dropping his head and thrusting a pointed finger at the screen, as if to say, “Yes!”
And me? I sat there, with my Pavlovian trepidation for his security being subsumed by what could only be called awe, as my very soul seemed to be re-arranging itself, like a computer's hard drive after a necessary, diagnostic de-fragmenting. Not to sell anything short, but I'm frankly astounded at where Barack Obama stands right now. And the hell with the complacent “Hey, I'm just glad to be here” mantra. “Here” is actually one hell of an amazing place when you look at it.
I remember the odd, glassy-eyed look on Chris Matthews' face that night, and Olbermann's self-satisfied near-chuckling at Chris' obvious discombobulation. The lovely, post-primary shade “Buchanan Purple” didn't manifest itself that night, as Pat seemed kind of melancholy—as if it were a hot August day in 1974 and he'd stumbled across a sweating, near-empty pitcher of Manhattans on Nixon's grand piano in the White House. Mostly ice, really—and looked down the hall at the Oval Office, sporting light spots where pictures had recently hung. The sight of history packing its bags. And then...the sound of helicopter blades “whup-whup-whupping” to take-off speed outside. The “Boss”...was gone baby, gone.
Pat looked on Tuesday night like he realized in a bigger way, that “The “Boss” was gone baby, gone.”
I didn't watch much more TV. I made myself a drink. A Pimms and Seven, and sloshed it about the glass and ice to chill it as I padded downstairs to the front steps. I sipped it slow, and looked up every now and then at the stars and frankly wondered to myself, “How?”
And though I knew “how”, as I'm decent with math and strategy, I still had to ask, in the face of where I live and what history has taught me.
I could hear my phone ringing upstairs. My wife called down. “It's your mother!”
I took the call. She was ecstatic. And she was angry, too. Where was the concession?
“Ma,” I said. “The hell with a concession. Do you realize what happened tonight?”
And she seemed to hyperventilate for a moment as a string of vowels and consonants came out of her mouth tumbling like a mess from “Fibber McGee's Closet”, but at the end of it all, she took a breath and I made out the words “Not in my lifetime”.
“Not in my lifetime” applied to me too. Maybe too many of us, sadly.
But here it was. And a hundred hours later or so, that concession and endorsement would come too. Classy and painful all at once. Bittersweet, yet full of vigor.
In my lifetime.
What else will I see? I have no clue. I see Senator John Sidney McCain before me. The dangerously flawed John Sidney McCain, in fact. And I see him and hear him word-salad-ing, lying, and spouting off like some primeval geyser that has only steam and bubbles and no blast. He mauls a speech like a pit bull in a slaughterhouse. He lamely dodges confrontation with his lies as if it's the year 2000 and there's no Google or YouTube to fact-check his ass before millions of pairs of eyes. I see the tepid support he garners and the “We are fucked” faces of his fellow in-party troglodytes. The ball is right there ready to be kicked for all it's worth. And the “Charlie Brown” in me fairly screams To hope is to render yourself vulnerable.
Well God-dammit...call me vulnerable. Because I'm hoping.
There's more...
It was a week ago when the heated “discussion” over Appalachia's Democratic primary voting patterns went from orange ember to white-hot flame. The decidedly revealing exit polling from the West Virginia primary set things off in a huge way, sending MSNBC's Pat Buchanan into paroxysms of red-faced keening that made more than a few viewers (like my stunned kids who were watching) actually fear for his health.
But it was his crazed words about what the West Virginia results “meant” that gave many pause. If you looked past the “guy-on-meth-from-an-episode-of-Cops” yelling, the point he was desperately trying to hammer home was one about Obama being in deep trouble with “hard-working, White” Americans because of the state's demographic breakdown post-the vote. The breakdown went nearly 70%/30% in a 95% White state, going against the prevailing trends—numbers that should indeed concern Obama, but can not be forced into the general election template Buchanan nearly stroked-out trying to cram it into.
It also doesn't help when allegedly more cosmopolitan states try to cast that primary in dumb, lowest-common denominator bolierplate, as shown in the following day's New York Daily News front page and main spread.
But that is the world we live in, where the three-word tag is king. The sound-bite, the five-second run-down...with no consideration of history or a desire to actually look with a discerning eye at why some things are the way they are. Consider this: West Virginia and Kentucky, and virtually everyplace else in that chain of states that form Appalalchia proper are not simply the short-hand, Cliff Notes™ snapshots we're force-fed the appearance of. Not the hard-core bastion of retrograde hate and susceptibility to the worst impulses of jingo-tastic, faux-American disregard for forward-thinking we are led to believe they are. I could see how that mask is mistaken for the region's face, thanks to people like Buchanan...
...but even cursory look at the region and what it has gone through tells the real story of why things are.
There is the very nature of the land itself. Rugged in its raw form, and rougher still through what has been done to it by man and moguls, this is a place where large corporations make mega-fortunes on ripping the very heart out of the earth and cleaving off its scalp. The coal mining industry, while not employing the huge numbers it once did, is still a major economic force in the area. With upwards of 600 open and active mines in the region, pulling out close to 300 million tons of coal every year, pitting and scarring the land as the dark manna is hauled out on the cheap, the region's workers average a paltry $25,000 per year in pay for this back-breaking hollowing out of the earth beneath them. You add in the mills that have taken up the slack, where every fiber-filled, right-to-work breath steals a little bit of a person every day, and then stir in the “legacy” economy that pays to keep alive the people who gave of their bodies for decades—pensions and stratospheric late-in-life health care costs, and you have a population dangling by its economic short and curlies. And the moguls who own and ioperate these cash-cow companies have a vested interest in keeping the area's population ill-educated (which lessens the opportunity to gain work beyond home), financially on eggshells and “American Dream”-starved. Were these folks to in large numbers move beyond the necessity to work in these life-stealing industiries, where-oh-where would the cheap labor come from? There simply isn't enough of an incentive for “illegals” to descend upon the mountains and snatch these jobs up. For that low level of pay (and it'd be lowered still for brown-skinned folks) and body-busting work, there would have to be more of a secondary, benign payoff than Appalachia-as-it-stands can provide. Things that many take for granted, like ease of inexpensive travel and access to the culturally familiar would work against a replacement, outsider workforce. So you have in effect, a group almost permanently chained to the corporations that call the shots in the area. That is what is called “a captive workforce”.
This is the main reason why the young leave there in droves—the limited opportunities for success compared to the rest of America. Sadly, Appalachia is not a place you think of when thoughts of making the most of the “American Dream” come to mind. And that's the way the region's controlling interests want it. Born poor, keep them poor, and said poverty keeps enough there to be used as fuel for the money machine. It's also why the voting populace skews so heavily older. These are the folks tied to home—be it by duty to family who needs them, or an inability to escape. They will be born there, live there, work there, and yes—die there.
Now, this is not to say that they are terminally morose, or constantly unhappy...or dare I say it—bitter. They most certainly are those things when times are at their hardest, as would anyone who feel the weight of clouds limiting their sight of prosperity's sky. But they get by. It doesn't consume them. They live their lives as fully as things allow. And they no doubt know that the country outside of where they are experiences life differently—maybe with the odds stacked in a less-high pile against them. It's only human for there to be some envy, and even some antagonism.
Here's where race creeps into the picture. When you take into account the relative scarcity of Black folk in the region, racism's spectre seems odd in that it would appear hard to hate people who aren't there to be hated. Racism though, is a chameleon, changing pattern and texture depending on environment and situational catalysts. It manifests itself in Appalachia as an outgrowth in large part from socio-economic pressures and good, old self-esteem issues. This is also in the interests of the “bosses” whose businesses so dominate the region, and further, the local politicians in their pockets. As a distracting straw man, they unsubtly perpetuate the dusky, but actualy unseen “other” as a factor in their doing so poorly. And since time immemorial, no group wants to be regarded as the low man on the totem pole (The irony of using a Native American metaphor should give us all pause.), and in America, regardless of social station, African Americans can never truly escape that position.
You may be bad off. You may be under-educated, or ill-housed...but as long as you ARE NOT a n*gg*r, you ARE NOT at the bottom.
For some people—for a LOT of people, that's more than enough to make them feel a little bit better about themselves. And anything that enables that is hunky dory when you're effectively parked in what America deems its sweaty regional armpit.
This is why plays to race as a subtle “feel-good” mechanism work in Appalachia—never mind that the person cast as the “one you should consider below you and thus unworthy of your trust” might actually help them. It's that gut play to emotion and self-esteem that is fertile ground for the evil's seed to take root. It clouds reason and common sense. It allows people to instantly believe the worst of Black folks—never mind the ridiculousness of a specific claim. Someone must be at the bottom and as long as it's a n*gg*r and not them, a sigh of relief can be breathed. It is much more of a tool than a belief system in a place where the overwhelmingly White population is so hopelessly beaten down, ironically worse off than a lot of their African American comrades in poverty.
It is why a Harvard educated Black man scans there as an other to be rejected out-of-hand as a potential leader...or more simply, a boss. (And “the boss” already doesn't play well in their circles, understandably) The “Harvard” hurts, but the color of his skin is the true dividing line here, and the one that ultimately wounded him in his primary battle against the equally well-educated, but demographically different in other unmistakable ways, Senator Hillary Clinton. On the whole, these people are not garden-variety racist in the practice of their day-to-day lives. In fact, considering their isolation from Black folks, racism is probably quite the non-factor in everyday life. Fighting to survive in the face of a constant economic strangulation is. There is the chance that in a general election that these folk could be swayed by strong economic revival messaging should Obama win what seems like a near-certain nomination. Their issue isn't so much about hatred of people like him as it is a desperate boosting of the wounded self-esteem of folks like themselves.
And there is the nub of it—a wounding. Wounding the vast bulk of the country America never sees when it thinks of those of us in dire straits. A wounding with the mocking “Soooooey!” calls and barbs on incest being a norm instead of a taboo. The day-in/day-out wounding that is the direct result of the social, cultural and economic armpit-ization of a mountainous swath of 21st century America encompassing some 25 million people. Starved of opportunity and resources to make better not by chance, but by design, because somebody more powerful wants it that way. When you back a bunch of folks into a corner and kick them about like trapped rats, you really can't be surprised at what they'll do to make a point. Silly, spiteful and self-defeating as it may seem.
Looking down our noses at Appalachia is what's at the root of this. Looking askance at them as the Daily News and other opinion-makers did is what perpetuates it. But it's going to take looking at them eye-to-eye as fellow human beings the way a Bobby Kennedy did in 1968 and trying to understand their problems, to finally help these people, and remove the stigmas that have been put in place to specifically keep them where they are—physically and socio-economically. It means actually doing things to fix their situations—not cheap pandering and playing to the short-term “gains” brought by emotions and dog-whistles. It's easy to hate on them, and even easier to simply dismiss. Greater America has been utterly guilty of this in its treatment of Appalachia to this very day, simultaneously ignoring and faux-courting them, and in the end giving them nothing.
What we saw there wasn't quite your boilerplate systemic racism—there is endemic prejudice involved in the voting pattern, but looking at the facts—and the true demographics, it's also a lot of conditioned response. Conditioned negative response—to their own very real oppression. It doesn't make it right or fair. But it is what it is.
“Writing these people off” isn't the thing to do, though. as it only continues the status quo that keeps them reacting as they do. Appalachia's race problem is more of a symptom than a disease. It can be fixed. But it is going to take an honest effort to make America “work” better for them. Effort. Care. Pressure. And time.
It's almost miraculous what those things can do. And if you don't think so, hell...just ask a former lump of coal.
NY Judge Hands Down Not Guilty Verdict in Sean Bell Shooting Death
As I'm coming out of a blended pain and drug haze from dental surgery yesterday, I wanted to keep things light and easy post-wise. I didn't want to have to tackle something as politically, socially and most of all emotionally loaded as this story, but...in dealing with my own small travails, this case's winding down to a finish in the last 72 hours necessitated it. The brutal news:
Three detectives were found not guilty Friday morning on all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens.
Justice Arthur J. Cooperman, who delivered the verdict, said many of the prosecution’s witnesses, including Mr. Bell’s friends and the two wounded victims, were simply not believable. “At times, the testimony of those witnesses just didn’t make sense,” he said.
His verdict prompted several supporters of Mr. Bell to storm out of the courtroom, and screams could be heard in the hallway moments later. The three detectives — Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper — were escorted out of a side doorway. Outside, a crowd gathered behind police barricades, occasionally shouting, amid a veritable sea of police officers.
The verdict comes 17 months to the day since the Nov. 25, 2006, shooting of Mr. Bell, 23, and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, outside the Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens, hours before Mr. Bell was to be married.
It was delivered in a packed courtroom and was heard by, among others, the slain man’s parents and his fiancée. The seven-week trial, which ended April 14, was heard by Justice Cooperman in State Supreme Court in Queens after the defendants waived their right to a jury, a strategy some lawyers called risky at the time. But it clearly paid off with Friday’s verdict.
Before rendering his verdict, Justice Cooperman ran through a narrative of the evening, and concluded “the police response with respect to each defendant was not found to be criminal.”
“The people have not proved beyond a reasonable doubt” that each defendant was not justified in shooting, he said, before quickly saying the men were not guilty of all of the eight counts, five felonies and three misdemeanors, against them.
Mr. Bell’s family sat silently as Justice Cooperman spoke from the bench. Behind them, a woman was heard to ask, “Did he just say, ‘Not guilty?”
Yes...Judge Cooperman did say that.
For those of you unfamiliar with the case's particulars, Steve covered it in depth with several very detaileddetailed posts at The News Blog. In a nutshell, seventeen months ago to today, Sean Bell, and two friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield were at a bachelor party for Bell at Club Kalua—a divey little strip club in South Jamaica, Queens, about two miles from where I grew up. Upon leaving the club, there was a brief verbal dispute with other parties and the three men—Bell, Benefield and Guzman went to Bell's car to go home.
Graphic from The New York Times
Mr. Bell was to be married later that day. Unbeknownst to the trio, the club was being watched both internally and externally by plainclothes detectives clocking for quality-of-life and liquor-law violations. Several of the plainclothes officers were consuming alcohol to “blend in”. As the trio of young men left the club, one of the officers claimed to hear one of them talk about “going to get his gun or gat”. Several of the officers converged on the car and confronted Mr. Bell and his friends. A brutal one-way shootout ensued where fifty bullets were fired by the officers at the car—31 by one officer—killing Bell and wounding his friends Mssrs. Benefield and Guzman.
There was no weapon present in the car or on the persons within it. Bluntly, it was a city-sanctioned massacre. Post-the initial spat in front of the club, tensions were evidently high and there was dispute as to whether the officers identified themselves properly or at all. Bell's car either lurched forward after he was shot or just before, and the wild and reckless fusillade of bullets flew, some striking an overhead airport monorail station and narrowly missing passengers a block and a half away.
Those are the particulars. Secondary elements of the story include the following:
1.) The officers involved WERE NOT GIVEN BLOOD-ALCOHOL TESTS in spite of the fact that several of them HAD BEEN DRINKING.
2.) As per usual, the officers were allowed to operate under the still-being-phased-out “48 Hour Rule”, where after a deadly and contested shooting, they had 48 hours before they could be questioned by investigators—(and ostensibly “get their stories together) a perk not allowed the general public, as the surviving victims, Benefield and Guzman were interrogated while in the hospital recovering from their wounds.
3.) Also as per usual, the officers opted for a judge trial as opposed to a jury trial, fearing the judgement of regular citizens and instead, placing their fate in the hands of a partner in law enforcement—a judge. This is a common tack taken by New York police to lessen the odds of conviction.
Now, once this case moved to trial, and after of course a change of venue was requested (Cops in New York routinely feel that the people they are policing are not fit to judge their actions), the NYPD pushed for a judge trial. Once that was in effect, the odds of conviction probably dropped by about seventy percent. In spite of the overweening physical evidence—no gun or anything resembling a gun present on the victims and of course, the obvious attack of “contagious shooting”—where even if the initial shot is fired by a police officer, fellow officers react and pretty much empty their clips, Judge Cooperman found for the officers.
I'd love to say that this outcome was shocking, but in New York City it isn't. It is next to impossible to convict an on-duty cop for any sort of wrong-doing against a citizen—even a killing that is fairly obvious a murder in this town. There is a seemingly endless string of such “tragic” deaths. New York police have fallen back on the “Twinkie Defense” (or in NY parlance, the “Cruller Defense”, where over-stimulation due to sugar consumption is taken as a reason for sudden, violent outbursts by cops), mystery seizures that have caused them to freakishly fire their weapons at unarmed Black kids, “black hands from nowhere” that miraculously choked to death victims of police officers, instead of the choke hold applied by the officers (reacting angrily to a errantly-thrown football in a street game striking their squad car).
Par for the course in New York City. I remember calling in to the cartwheeling idiot wingnut Curtis Sliwa's radio show after the infamous Amadou Diallo shooting. I was angry. Livid, actually after a piece of news came my way about what happened in the immediate aftermath of the murder. It turns out that after gunning Diallo down in his vestibule, officers knocked down his apartment door and “tossed” the place—looking for what, no one knows. I asked Sliwa on-air why they did this. “Can you tell me why the NYPD tossed the apartment of an unarmed man they shot down? Give me one good reason for that.” Sliwa stuttered and muttered something about how officers who show up on the scene of shootings often don't know the particulars of what's gone down beforehand. “Things happen” he said before hanging up abruptly.
“Things happen.”
Something always “happens” when it comes down to the NYPD dealing with people in the 'hood. Be they White or Black officers, there is an overwhelming fealty to “the blue”—the force. I have a close relative who worked in NYPD Internal affairs down on Hudson Street for a decade. It was he who told me about how the force doesn't release its numbers on how many are drummed out every year. A force some 37,000 strong. “Nobody wants to hear that number. X-percent of the force getting shit-canned for drinking, drugging and whatever? Just take the 'ten-percent rule' into account. Ten percent of any workforce is shitbirds and fuck-ups. And shitbirds and fuckups tend to gravitate towards each other.” The other factor is that non-shitbirds and fuckups are often covered for by their decent co-horts thanks to the “blue wall of silence”. Said idiots either get drummed out or get classified to the “rubber-gun squad”—a term for malcontents who due to union rules cannot be fired but are instead put on desk duty. Then, beyond those bad actors, there are “questionable” cops who for whatever reason make one huge, bad (and tragic) decision and are knee-jerk looked-out-for by their NYPD brethren as well.
That's what I think happened that night at Club Kalua. Somebody got jumpy, wanted to play tough-guy hero and his twitchy-trigger stupid dragged his fellow officers down that macho road into a storm of one-way gunfire. Add into the mix the decision-clouding element of the classic cop's claim “I felt my life was in danger!”, which is used as the ultimate fallback defense. 'We have no way to know what was on the officers' minds. They may well have been afraid.' That nebulous void of trying to figure out what was on an officer's mind leaves a lot of leeway for one who is pre-disposed to say, “Eh, you know what? Maybe they were scared.” And in spite of the obvious leaps beyond reality that shows like “Law & Order” take, one thing that is a truism is the cozy relationship between the police, district attorneys and judges. They have to work together every day sending civilian criminals to jail, so when you get a case where they are in essence pitted against one another, you get the weirdness where cops choose judge trials instead of juries. An awful lot of back-scratching goes on.
Yeah. Whatever. For Black folk in New York, the Bell killing goes right alongside the others on the mantle full of the unarmed victims whose killers went unpunished. Diallo. Dorismond. Zongo. Glover. Stansbury.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. 41 Shots? 50 shots? What's the difference. The only way you get a little justice in these cases is when the victim is unfortunate enough (for the police) to survive alá Abner Louima. Dead men tell no tales, indeed.
What is interesting is the odd vibe around town, what with Five-O's increased presence and all the talk in the local news about preparations being made for potential violence on the part of protesters. I noticed it this morning while traveling. Beat cops all over the place. Cruisers on the slow-crawl while clocking corner activity. The date and timing of the verdict was well known to all in town. Today, a Friday would be the day and the police were already in place to quell...whatever. The “laugh” here is over the idea that somehow one can actually “prepare” for unrest. And secondly, the idea that there is some sort of automatic default to unrest should a verdict go bad. If that were the case, New York would've been a pile of smoldering rubble decades ago.
The furrowed brows and grave tones of newsfolk over helicopter shots of people gathered outside the courthouse is laughable. 'God we hope there isn't any violence—get a tight shot of that guy with his fists balled up.' Here's how it works, idiots—shit jumps off whenever it wants to. Odds are it won't be when you have several thousand officers in the streets. It'll be random. It'll be away from where you think trouble's brewing. It happens fast and the trigger will be something you never saw coming. That's how it almost always goes. In Detroit in 1967, a raid on a “blind pig” (a Detroit-ism for an after hours spot) set things off. Rough, offensive acts that are compounded by hazy memory and mistaken word-of-mouth are a familiar trigger. Now, let a cop fuck up this weekend and kill a kid with clear evidence of malice and injustice, coming on the heels of this bullshit and you may see some ugliness. I pray to God it doesn't come to that, but hey...as Sliwa so casually said to me, “Things happen”.
What doesn't help is that after Rev. Al Sharpton effectively called for calm, and quelled tensions by leading angry people away from the courthouse (on his way to Bell's gravesite), we had the spectacle of Michael Palladino, the head of the NYPD detective's union gloating about the verdict at hi spress conference, replete with cheesy soundbites (“How do I spell relief? N-O-T-G-U-I-L-T-Y! That's how I spell relief!”), along with crass call-outs of Sharpton and other activists, local union leaders who backed the family and pretty much anyone who didn't four-square agree with the NYPD's account. He's the only one of the major players acting like an asshole about the verdict, playing the stereotypical “our way or the highway“ role of “the pig”.
There is a special place in hell for gleeful apologists and cheerers-on of police brutality and I sincerely hope Palladino's descent there is a slow and excruciatingly painful one. It wouldn't be stretch to say that there are a lot of New Yorkers who wouldn't piss on him if he were burning in plastic alongside a road. They'd probably try to put the blaze out with a bottle of Mazola™.
And I wouldn't blame 'em.
------------------------------
Home now and Five-O is on every other corner in pairs on the main drag down the block from me. Looking nervous. They can thank their good friend Mike Palladino for that. It's been a warm day, with more to come.
That's all you need in Campaign Season 2008 to create election-influencing media.
The $1000 dollars will get you a decently powered computer bundled with near-pro level audio and video editing and compositing software. The broadband internet access allows one to gather the raw digital media for the creation and then distribute the finished product to the masses. The handle on pop culture, tropes and visual, emotional shorthand enables a content creator to know just enough— just e-damn-nough to make the produced piece grab the eye and psyche. And finally...an agenda.
Oh my...an agenda. That's the driving force—the solid rocket booster that launches the piece from a mere “that'd be cool to do” meandering to a crystallized, will-to-power-ed reality. Be it employed for good, or evil, a hard and fast agenda added to those other elements is the catalyzing force behind what people are able to do today producing ads that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to crank out a mere ten years ago.
In the entertainment community, there's a lot of debate about this paradigm—the hyper-democratization of the process where high-end art/product is created, and there's an equal amount of discussion/consternation about the same situation in political circles. A Goldwater “Daisy”, or Atwater-esque “Willie Horton” ad can be whipped up in a matter of a day—hours if you push, and uploaded to YouTube in minutes for millions to see and be influenced by.
That's the world we live in—an exciting, almost instantly receptive and reactive one, fairly vibrating with readiness for our (“our” being anyone with an agenda and the easily accessible technology) “art”.
The following is one such example of that “art”—albeit a toxic one. A crudely done one in fact. But again...that agenda thing, and access to the media to manipulate gives a motivated party power. The power to influence,
To re-cast.
To pull from the recesses of the mind, imagery and emotions that move people to think, and act
Observe.
It's two minutes and thirty-nine seconds of what I'll call “trope-o-lining”—bouncing up and down repeatedly on well worn audio and video snippets that go to the heart of White America's fears of in-your-face (meaning non-deferential) “Negritude”, and it's crafted by a hard-core “grunt” for the right. The creator, a former producer for the chalkboard scratching that is “The Laura Ingraham Show”, named Lee Habeeb is a freelancer basically just doin' his kuh-ray-zee wingnutty thang on his own. A loose cannon if you will. But, give the devil (I don't know the color of his eyes) his due. It is an effective ad. Not necessarily because it's well done. You could toss off a lookalike ad on a seven year old 500 mhz G4 Mac. What makes it “effective” is its maker's dedication to wringing every drop of gut-level, fear of the non-pink paranoia out of its target viewers—namely White folks on the verge of cutting loose some serious racist ballast in even considering a Black person for the office of President. This ad was designed to bring the “waverers and considerers” home if you will. It plays to people of a certain age. Boomers who grew up in the first “saturation” media age of the 1960's when the visual media of television took hold. Insofar as it who it targets—it uses the perfect loaded images and sounds. And if we as progressives are to defeat the right this year, we'd damned sure better develop a discerning eye for this stuff and be able to dissect it—one, so that we can better “SDI” it (“Star Wars” it and blow it up before it detonates in our backyards), and two, so we can master the techniques ourselves and mount people-powered media counter-offensives against them.
So, let's “ad-topsy” this thing shall we?
From the start, there is an over-arching narrative this ad is fighting against. A powerful narrative that Obama has worked hard to cultivate and has some serious staying power.
Obama is, in spite of his people-rallying ability, is what you'd have to call a “cool” presenter. Even at his most animated and exhorting, Barack Obama is decidedly NOT what one would call the blazing firebrand. In his rhetoric and approach, he is a “cool” persona. That flies in the face of what his GOP opponents need him to appear as to spark the base's racist turnout and to tip tightrope walkers back to the rocky earth of fear-based voting patterns. Thus the deployment of the fiery, and decidedly “hot” Jeremiah Wright's words to his flock in the video. He is NOT Obama, but he is someone close to Obama—someone Obama trusts and evidently values, and that is good e-damn-nough to get the job done. As Obama himself refuses to play the badass “Stagger Lee” and give the soundbites that so inspire White fear (a.k.a. a carte blanche to hate without compunction), this ad's creator cannily used—as Obama's better-funded and more professional detractors will—Wrights hard, “Liberation Theology” (more on that in another post) words. They ARE hard words. Spat, cried, growled and laced with the hurt of centuries of subjugation, but in their shorthand form—chopped and clipped with the scrubber bar of editing software—“God damn America” is a soundbite-perfect call to arms to the yellow car-magnet brigade, and other such rhetoric literalists for whom slogans mean far more than actions.
It is in fact, an attempt to re-cast him. To move him from the amiable, palatable “Cliff Huxtable” Black guy you'd gladly welcome into your home and buy a pudding pop from...to the dangerous antithesis—the jumpy, volatile “Richard Pryor—the “brotha” you can't really trust because he just might call...“a spade a spade” and deal with those inconvenient truths that make you squirm in your oh-so-comfortable seat.
Wipe away the silly, nonsense Cosby gobbledygook that raises a chuckle. Goodbye to “Hey, hey, hey!” and all of that. And say “Heyyyyyyyy, bay-beh!” to “That N*gger's Crazy”, unpredictability and getting called out on your shit—all with that twitch in the face and yes...the rough words. The hell with post-raciality, this is a forced re-n*ggerfication. And there is nothing more fear-inducing in America than a so-called angry, agitated n*gger. Even a fictional one. Joe Klein long before he shredded his credibility with bloggers, tore his ass with Black folk with his jumpy, paranoid pronouncement that Spike Lee's “Do The Right Thing's” ending riot sequence would spur homeboys to “wild out” in frustration at ...the man. A real angry man, albeit a non trash-can tossing Rev. Wright's brash imagery and words kick the video off. Others pick up the ball and run with it deeper in. More on those in a minute.
But pair Wright's verbal molotovs up with the editing trick in the video that digitally blunts Obama's greatest strength—his ability to express himself verbally—where he is made to stutter and stumble in the cut-and-pasted “call and response” technique used in the piece and you have a well-deployed, if disingenuous bit of media manipulation.
Now, toss in three healthy shakes of “HateAmerica” spice. Shake One: Wright's words. Shake Two: The stuttering chop-up of Michelle Obama's “First time I've been proud of this country as an adult” comment. Shake Three: The statement of Obama's about the superficiality of sporting the “flag lapel pins”, and the semi-artful mash-up of the debunked “Pledge of Allegiance/National Anthem” stance of his. Tis a bitter seasoning indeed. It plays to the truism that it only takes a typically callous dose of good, old American racism to unearth in many Black folk—a not deeply harbored enmity for Mother America's superficial pledge of “equality for all”—which IS America as far as racism's perpetrators are concerned.
The insidious barb in this “play” is that the factual aspects of that African American cynicism are downplayed by the very parties who catalyze that cynicism with their daily deeds. They deem that anger, that bristling as irrational and unjustified.
Which leads us to the most hackneyed, yet wannabe poisonous images in the “ad”. Immediately after the “Pledge of Allegiance” section th
“Dude, My Party Sucked...Mind If I Crash Yours?”
