It has been brought back to my attention, rather against my will (damn you, Facebook), that Zoe Saldana has been tapped to play Nina Simone in a forthcoming biopic. It had to be brought back to my attention because I had successfully put it out of my mind. On learning of this some time ago, I had instantly decided that it was a casting disaster of Nick Nolte-as-Thomas-Jefferson proportions. It suggested to me that the film, like most films, was more about getting cash than about inventively exploring the world of meanings that it meant to invade.
What brought the matter back to my attention, and proved my initial response right, was a social media firestorm over pictures like this:
That's not a production still from a Star Wars set, where the intergalactically exotic extras are waiting to play lively at the Cantina. That's Zoe Saldana, late of 'Star Trek' and 'Colombiana' and various other excuses to watch her run around in skimpy outfits. More to the point, that's Zoe Saldana with her skin artificially darkened and her features artificially altered so that she looks more like Nina Simone. I hardly know where to begin, except to say that this is surely the latest nail in the coffin of vulgar postracialism.
In Sunday's coverage of this week's "storm of the century" it should be noted how compliant, bi-partisan and open to big government many Republican governors are. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie all but endorsed Pres. Obama for a 2nd term and Virginia Governor Bob "Trans Vaginal Ultra Sound" McConnell, stated in a CBS interview that in moments like these, "There are no Democrats or Republicans". Ahem. That may have to be re-considered. The Franken-storm known as "Sandy" the 2005 storm "Katrina" and the various massive meteorological events that we have been witnessing for almost the past decade have a distinctly partisan cast and can be rightfully called Republican storms. For almost two decades, the Republican Party and its representatives have along with various corporate entities engaged in a systematic campaign to deny the fact of the planet's weather conditions changing due to human activity and consistently blocked Congressional efforts to address Global warming. The outright ignorance, corruption and mind boggling stupidity that comprises, the GOP's anti science, contra factual, flat earther conspiracy bullshit will be the literal death of us all. Seasonal Storm Sandy is just the beginning of what many scientists believe to be our weather systems passing the climate "tipping point" wherein human actions to curb the increase in green house gases or reduce the burning of fossil fuels may be irrelevant. We as a species may be looking at our next great Darwinian moment and the word for the future is adaptability instead of mitigation. This helpful little website Surging Seas will give you a sense of what your future needs may be.
So in the mean time the next time you hear some red state buffoon during storm season or drought season or "For fuck's sake I can't believe this is happening" season, mouth platitudes about not being Red or Blue, coming together in times of crisis, or any such politician speak drivel, you point fingers, name names and assign blame, because this s*** could have been avoided. With true missionary zeal, the crypto corporate conservatives and their American Taliban employees have blocked, stymied and undermined every attempt moderate and progressive forces have made to take on the challenge of Global Warming. There may not be red states or blue states during times of crisis but there are those that tried to solve the problems that effect the very existence of our species and then there were those that decided to take hand jobs from Big Oil and Coal instead.
To all of you in the storm's path, be careful be safe and our thoughts and prayers from all of us at Jambangle.
Frank Rich's brilliant, exasperating and infuriating column in New York magazine is a wag of the finger to those overly optimistic about the progress of race relations in 2008. Giving teeth to John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's 2004 work The Right Nation, Rich reminds us that despite liberal/progressive optimism over the years, a defeat of the right at the ballot box, will only encourage a further shift to the right. Contextualizing the modern conservative movement within Goldwater's 1964 defeat, Rich argues the right has only lurched further to the right in search of greater levels of ideological purity and rigidity. I have always believed this to be an inherently conservative nation (restricting the franchise at the founding of the nation and maintaining legal slavery should be a tip off) and have rarely been confused about liberalism in this nation's history. It is the exception not the norm. What provides this nation with a sense of uniqueness is the delusion among many that liberalism is the norm and conservatism the aberration. What this country does is try to be a liberal society but that effort is always in context of the permanent conservative disposition and bloc. So in short what Rich tries to tell us is that if Obama were to win this election, it will not create some Republican implosion, in fact it will only encourage the movement to gird its loins and seek out true conservative warriors. Because as Rich analogizes, conservatives are the cockroaches of American politics, nearly indestructible and most busy in the dark.
Having used this space recently to beat up on the idea of
voting for Barack Obama, I'll turn my attention today to Mitt Romney. It occurs
to me to do this because I've stumbled on the analogy that captures my sense of
Mr. Romney's campaign. Mitt Romney is the political equivalent of Paul
Westhead.
For those who don't know, Paul Westhead is a basketball
coach, and a high profile one at that, at least for a time. He came to the
attention of people like me during his brief stint as head coach of the Los
Angeles Lakers, where he took the helm during Magic Johnson's rookie season
(1979-80). Despite winning the NBA title in his first year, he was fired after
a disappointing finish in the second year. Westhead went on to become the coach at Loyola-Marymount, a moribund college program that won big during his tenure
and set multiple records for offensive firepower. He is now the coach of the
women's team at the University of Oregon.
I hate the practice of treating political campaigns as sporting
events, reducing the deliberative dimensions of an exercise in democratic
living to a daily update on who's winning right now (in the polls). But I find
this sports analogy irresistible. Westhead's mark of distinction as a coach is
his commitment to 'The System' - an offensive philosophy built around unceasing
fast breaks. Westhead's unsympathetic critics describe The System as a blatant
attempt to outscore the opponent, without regard for playing defense. There is
some merit in this description - the point seems to be to coax the opponent
into doing more running than they're accustomed to (not having cultivated the
endurance that The System requires), so that there's no need for defense: just
keep trading shot for shot and the other team will eventually turn the ball over
more, and miss more shots, and lose.
Why this reminds me of Romney: Making assertions is like
playing offense, and providing plausible arguments and evidence is like playing
defense. And Romney is all offense. It's really quite remarkable to watch - not
unlike Westhead's Loyola-Marymount teams.
This is the best response I've read yet to this year's round of 'hold your nose and vote for the Democrat' arguments. It even takes down the 'what about the Supreme Court?' gambit. I find it utterly convincing. But then, I would. More on this soon.
Did anyone else read this NYT piece about the President's balancing act on race as a plant? To be clear, I mean 'plant' in the complex way that informs so much big journalism now - the journalists hunger so desperately for access that when some crumb drops from the table of the informed, they gobble it up and (hmm... not sure I want to commit to this metaphor... oh, the heck with it) and excrete a slightly mediated missive from the powers that be. And the powers are good at dropping crumbs. Then again, it could be an example of good old-fashioned, Judy Miller-style court stenography. Anyway: The "complex calculus on race and politics" that Jodi Kantor reports on Obama's behalf has in part to do with deciding how and when to signal to American Negroes (I use the term advisedly) that I really am one of you, I really am thinking of you, I'm just bound by my circumstances, just wait, I'll do right by you, I promise. And one way to do that is to have someone remind us all just how conflicted he is, and how hard it is to balance negro-dom and POTUS-hood. There should be a name for this move. We've got the sister-souljah move - what happens when a politician publicly demonizes black folks to signal his or her independence to the revered swing voter/middle American. But what should we call this? Having just finished teaching Cathy Cohen's work on this very topic (see chapter 6 especially), I think I'll call it the 'nudge nudge wink wink.'
Looking back on the nuanced expression of the US's alliance with Israel in last night's final Presidential debate I am still aghast at what, from all accounts, were smart politics but would be stupid policy. So here in a special volume of "Y'all Need to Be Ashamed" are the Top 5 Topics that Were Criminally Ignored in Last Night's Debate.
5) Lots of talk of Israel, Palenstine not so much.
But I guess none of this matters to the 5 moronsnuanced voters (Thank your lucky stars for Chihambuane) that still can't figure out what is a presidential campaign and what they should do on Election Day. So Mssrs. Obama and Romney due to your smart politics and canny polling sense, "Y'all Need to Be Ashamed" for not having the courage to make it plain.
How did I miss Sarah Silverman's indecent proposal to GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, from Out Magazine? I haven't watched the video, but on the basis of this picture I'l wager that it's probably NSFW.
Yesterday I left out my favorite argument for undecidedism.
Like the positions I sketched in that last post, this one is actually an
argument against voting for Obama. But also as with the others, I'm imagining
the argument being entertained by people who really want to vote for the President,
but who nevertheless find themselves to some degree moved by these countervailing
considerations, and who therefore find themselves undecided.
This is my favorite argument, though perhaps not the best
one, because it's been with me a long time, and because I encountered it in an
extremely memorable setting. I heard it many years ago when I was a wee lad
(more or less), while watching that dinosaur/Model T of the pre-Oprah TV talkie
genre, "The Donahue Show."
On the occasion I'm thinking of,
Mr. Donahue interviewed a single guest over two special days: the inimitable Louis Farrakhan.
In the social media spaces I monitor, and in the plain old
old-fashioned media, undecided voters have been catching a lot of
heat lately. If you don't already know
all you need to know, one line of thinking goes, then God help you/get a clue/what the f***. Like much else in our
political discourse these days, this reaction strikes me as too hasty. In
solidarity with those citizens still engaging in the lost art of reflection, I
would like to point to three good reasons why a likely Obama voter might remain
undecided even now.
The ironic reality of this nation is that despite what still needs to be done toward the full realization of freedom for its citizens, we regardless, inch by inch move toward a recognition of full human rights as an elemental part of the nation's composition. The above video moves us nationally and me personally toward that goal, not because of any partisan leanings or any jingoistic inclination, but because what we see are testimonials from people whose lives where changed because of political will and spiritual enlightenment. I can say I have felt the power of these testimonials because as a city council man in Oberlin, OH, a city commission brought before council a resolution in support of a Domestic Partner Registry. I was going to vote in support of it anyway because I have come to believe in the indivisibility of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and because I am embarrassed by the State of Ohio's Issue 1 legislation. Yet it was the testimony of one resident, who came forward and outed herself to the public. She spoke of her relationship to a life partner that for its duration went hidden and unrecognized. She spoke of how she moved to Oberlin because it was a place where she believed she could be who she truly was. Yet it was City Council's decision to consider a Domestic Registry that made her believe that it was just a matter of time before she could love as she loved without recrimination and suppression. It is moments like this, the intimate moments, where human speaks to human as a human, where we understand ourselves to be "ecce homo". I was deeply moved by the resident's testimony. I am deeply moved by the experiences of the participants in the above video. We are all human, all too human and the work of perfecting the human consciousness means nothing until we understand that simple truth and make sure it exists from the elemental fabric of our being to the most elaborate structures of the world that we share.
As I related in a previous post I have been driven to unplug from what passes for political coverage of the Presidential race. It is not easy especially when there is cogent engagement from our nation's most esteemed funny men. Honestly Stephen Colbert's question of "Why one debate can make such a difference" nearly provoked me into writing about prize fights and horse races. Nearly. But not quite. Fortunately I believe that what is most honest in human beings is art and what is most insightful springs from the creative instinct. Anyone that is able to tell the truth of our society through narrative, characterization, and setting is someone deserving of my attentions.
David Simon is a social force unto himself. Noted journalist, writer and producer, Simon has the uncanny ability to find the story in the lives of common people. First coming to national attention with his work on Baltimore Maryland's Homicide Department, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Simon converted his words into a critically acclaimed television series, in which, Simon defined his technique and revealed his intentions. Simon's intentions were and are simple and obvious, he believes the audience should understand the lives of those that live at the margins of a carefully crafted bourgeois delusion. The lost the forgotten those that struggle and those that no longer have the strength to struggle are the focus of Simon's work. In the television show Homicide we see the corrosive world of violent crime through the eyes of Homicide Detectives and even then Simon makes us feel not only the despair of the detectives looking for perpetrators but the perpetrators themselves.
Simon's work constantly examines people navigating systems. Whether those systems are the criminal justice systems or in his little remembered prelude to The Wire, The Corner, the underworld of drug addicts. Focusing on the actual McCollough family of West Baltimore, the book and television series charts the effects of the drug trade and addiction on the lives of Baltimore's citizens.
By examining one family's fall, Simon's gives us a fractal of drug life in contemporary US cities.
The Corner's power is its attention to the details of the lives of its characters and how they recognize the system in which they live. Whether, formal or informal, all of Simon's characters recognize themselves as a part of a larger process of gains and losses (systems) and make use of the resources at hand to fulfill what they believe their needs to be. Certainly one has to credit Simon not just for his intention but as well his attention to issues that affect the lives of African Americans. Whether in his writings or in his television work, a hall mark of Simon's work is the preponderance on Black people in the worlds he creates. Unlike most televison writers, Simon understands there are spaces where the occasional white face is just that occasional. Accordingly, just as powerful as the depiction of the clusterfuck around the US "War on Drugs", the deterioration of the US urban space as a result of the "war", and more than the chronicling of decay through the atrophy of US political, cultural and social spaces, Simon's epic series The Wire, inverts the conventions of normativity. The world of the Wire is one that functions under the weight of the rules of its needs. Like the manner in which gravity warps time and space, the gravity of the rules of "The Game" in The Wire warps the rules of mainstream ideology and television morals (Note: Simon's depiction of the "Game" is not just the drug game but any act of vying for power and control in a competitive system. Hence any and all can be players because life itself is a/the "Game"). It's a world wherein those ground under the heels of power determine what is right and sound and relevant. It is a world where those subject to the rules of others create their own rules. It is a world viewed through the eyes of society's overlooked and forgotten folk. Like Frankenstein's "monster" the genius of Simon's attention to these characters is the clarity of their understanding of the circumstances into which they have been thrown. Game peeps game and they are well aware of the hypocrisy, callousness and parasitic nature of those that would rule them.
However this does not override Simon's central concern of telling untold stories of people existing in circumstances beyond their control. Simon's 2008 HBO project Generation Kill is a revisiting of the George W. Bush Iraq War (not to be confused with the George H. W. Bush Persian Gulf War. I swear you can't make this s*** up). Documenting the Road to Baghdad as experienced by a Marine platoon, the series constantly confronts the ambiguity and ambivalence of the foot soldiers' perceptions of the war and its hype. Simon delivers a powerful anti-war message not through jingoism and pedantry but just by introducing the viewer to the realities of those fighting the battles.
Simon's most recent project documents what have been argued to be America's truly forgotten people, the New Orleans survivors of 2005's Hurricane Katrina. Ill prepared for the storm by government incompetence and under-served in its recovery by party politics, New Orleans serves as a perfect example of Simon's condemnation of the forces that dis-serve American life but his celebration of the tenacity of those lives. In its 3rd season, Treme, named after the neighborhood in New Orleans that developed many of the cities most distinctive cultural forms, the show follows a group of New Orleans residents as they rebuild their post Katrina lives. Musicians, cops, lawyers, teachers, carpenters and business people, Simon focuses on the the folk who have decided to work within the boundaries of the system. Unlike The Wire's cast, Treme's character's don't flirt with the underground or prey upon others for power and position but are as Omar Little would call them, "citizens". This attention to workers in "straight" life is what makes the story so much more shattering, as even those loyal to the rules of the formal order, even after its breakdown, are betrayed and exploited. Treme is the other side of the The Wire, as the 'citizens" get their voice in the midst of the chaos, mendacity and corruption that is New Orleans repairing itself.
Reality tv should be the depiction of the real lives of real people. Crassly materialistic noveau riche divas pursuing empty headed lives in Atlanta or "I should have gone to college" media monsters drunk on the Jersey Shore are not exemplary of the way people live their lives. It's not real. David Simon takes reality serious. David Simon takes the American conscience seriously. David Simon takes politics and culture as instruments of power, expression and human enhancement, seriously. If you want to know what topics the presidential candidates should be answering questions about, if you want to get a sense of what issues need to be front and center in the national dialogue, than you should be watching reality tv as David Simon understands it.
This isn't from the Onion, unless the Wall Street Journal signed on to the joke too. The Nobel Committee has awarded this year's peace prize to... wait for it... the European Union. This is interesting. Yves Smith says it best over at Naked Capitalism:
as we and others have chronicled at length, the Eurocrats seem determined to strip periphery countries of sovereignty and put not just their economies but their societies on the rack in a failing plan to save the banks of the surplus countries. In 2009, the Peace Prize Committee wanted to acknowledge and encourage Obama’s better impulses but instead bestowed the prize as his authoritarian side was coming to the fore. Now, the dark side of Europe is on full display as more and more ordinary people take to the streets to protest the fecklessness of their leaders as social structures are fracturing and old national hostilities are rising under the weight of destructive, misguided policies. Apparently the NPP has become a carrot to get people or entities that might do evil to consider -- to consider -- doing good. This was part of the argument for the peculiar decision to give Obama the prize, and if our unremitting drone strikes and such are any indication, the gambit is paying off handsomely. The same approach seems in play here too. The WSJ reports: Thorbørn Jagland, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said that the organization wants to encourage Europe to back away from the "extremism and nationalism" that led to major conflict in years past. "This is, in a way, a message to Europe to secure everything we have achieved and move forward," he said while addressing a packed crowd at the Nobel Norwegian Institute in Oslo on Friday.
This goes in the category of things that shouldn't surprise me but do. The warm and fuzzies surrounding the idea of a prize for 'peace' obscure the way this prize is woven into an international community that has staked itself on a certain model of the political - which makes sense of prize awards for people like arch-imperialist Teddy Roosevelt (who, in his defense, might actually have been the most interesting man in the world) and nominations for people like Stalin (here, scroll almost all the way down the page).
Oklahoma authorities have arrested a man plotting to bomb 48 churches. This happened last week - the man was charged on Friday, 5 October - but just got to CNN on Monday. As The Detective says, "Why am I just now hearing about this? Oh yeah: saw home boy's picture. Never mind."
Haiti gets $53M from the Inter-American Development Bank to... repair a highway. It's an important highway, to be sure. But people displaced by the earthquake are still living in tents.
In related news, my Haiti news feed is clogged with stories - from Voice of America and USA Today, mainly - about the rise of Islam in Haiti. Am I paranoid, or is someone somewhere planting these stories to establish a narrative that might, down the road, justify military intervention? No, that couldn't happen.
Eric Holder is negotiating with BP to settle the federal claims arising from the gulf coast oil spill. If this is anything like the mortgage settlement that the feds got the state attorneys general to sign off on, then, as Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith says, and forgive the vulgarity, they're just negotiating over who gets to sleep in the wet spot.
I don't care about tonight's veep debate any more than I did the varsity edition last week. Other things are more interesting, like this non-idiotic call for white history month. We may in fact need a new jambangle feature, at least until the election is over: "What's more interesting than tonight's [whatever is happening in the presidential race]." For last week's debate between Middle Man and The Plutocrat, my choice would have been this:
not sure if this was on purpose or by accident, but it's funny either way
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a sort of homage to Izzy Stone, and argued in Stonian (Stone-like? Stony?) fashion for the importance of reading between the lines of the mainstream news. Stone was right about this, I think, and importantly so, especially during the doldrums of campaign season. But following his lead in this means reading the mainstream news, or listening to it, or whatever; and that means subjecting oneself to a great deal of foolishness. Wading through all of that in search of real news is an exercise in what is, in a slightly different context, called tedium management. Everyone has a foolishness/doldrums/tedium threshold. I think I've reached mine.
Every 2-4 years if one is a member of a marginalized group in the US (person of color, LGBT, living below the poverty line, women) one gets a view behind the curtain and is shown what is the real situation regarding power in this society. The Real Situation regarding power in this country is that to be a member of a marginalized group is to be held in a hostage situation. Electoral year politics reminds you of how you are held captive by the at times idiotic whims of the majority (those with the guns and the explosives). Headlines like this and this and this remind you that your life in this society can at times have the consistency and logic of a leaf on the breeze. WTF is "legitimate rape", every woman and most men on the planet want to know! How the hell in 2012 can you believe slavery was a good thing? Jim Crow was not much pf a party! And how can 90 minutes of lying so maniacal, The Joker would not be amused, make a majority of US citizens forget the previous 2 year's worth of gafftastic assholery on the part of the sweaty plutocrat from Massachusetts and put him back in contention in national polls?! Yes Obama blew it! Yes he sucked! Yes he should have prepped better or whatever reason there was for him to stagger in the home stretch. But damn really? Romney remains Romney and how does one forget that fact in a night? When did A=A stop being true? So this is the hostage situation, where fairly reasonable people are held in thrall to a majority population wherein more people recognize Michael Jackson as the composer of Billie Jean than recognize the Bill of Rights as a part of The Constitution of the US. Oh for the sweet release of Stockholm Syndrome!
Hostages to "Democracy"
I return you now to your regularly scheduled blog.
I knew we would be served Steel Magnolias in blackface, but I didn’t care. The idea of representations of black (southern) women on television was enough reason to tune in to Lifetime’s star-studded remake of the classic southern white women’s tear factory. With Alfre Woodard, Phylicia Rashad, Jill Scott, Queen Latifah, and Adepero Oduye leading, if the whole thing went to hell, at least the ladies would shepherd it in a badass actress basket. Right?
Ahem. Newwwoooh.
While I am generally forgiving of terrible southern accents—I know y’all can’t talk like us—I was struck by Jill Scott’s imitation of a white southern woman’s accent to play a black southern woman. Jilly from Philly, who once sang, “fatback taffy sho’ is good to me/fatback taffy knocks me off my feet,” turned into Paula Deen. Jill’s Tropic Thunder whitetalk-blacktalk-whitetalk accent, though, is symptomatic of a broader issue: our continued inability to imagine black women as southern and/or middle class beyond church hats and fans.
Further, save for the wobbling at the wedding reception (which has become popular even at white folks’ nuptial celebrations) the unaltered script with black faces produced a bizarro-world in which a group of black women could meet in a beauty shop week after week and never talk about race or black womanhood. In attempting to imagine black women as southerners, region obliterated race, offering that same old color-blind racist yoke that produces empathic blacks by, well, erasing their blackness. The most promising moments in the film were those where blackness threatened to interrupt and intersect with the narrative. In the iconic scene where M’Lynn, played by Queen Latifah, finally lets her emotions loose in the shop, I saw glimpses of Set It Off’s Cleo, and half-hoped the ladies would all ride out and rob a bank. Talk about wheelz of steel.
Perhaps what’s most frustrating about Negresses of Steel is that black women’s femininity—or specifically their (perceived, constructed) lack thereof—makes possible the varied archetypes of white southern womanhood, from sundress-wearing belles to infallible magnolias. White southern womanhood in particular is predicated on black southern womanhood, not the other way around, which is what a blackface Steel Magnolias gets us. We still know painfully little about black southern womanhood, and even less about the contemporary black southern womanhood Steel Magnolias attempts to offer us.For all of their ratchetness, Real Housewives of Atlanta, Love and Hip-Hop Atlanta, and Tyler Perry’s corpus give us that glimpse into an originary black womanhood for which we are all guilty of seeking out. Sometimes Zora and Ida B. ain’t enough to make it through the week.
I recognize that we really can’t talk about black women as a differentiated group such that the notion of wanting a particular group of black women—in this case, southern black women—to be represented with any nuance is absurd. However, that there are regional variations in black women’s experiences is undeniable, from incarceration to marriage to infant mortality rates. The cyclical nature of black migration notwithstanding, there are key cultural differences, too, that deserve attention, beyond church hats, diabetes-sweet tea, and backyard collard greens. Because (and in spite) of the film’s shortcomings and what those failures highlight about the invisibility of black women writ large, Negresses of Steel compels us to imagine (because they ain’t there) the intersections of race, class, gender, and region in black southern women’s lives and to endeavor to make the perspectives of actual black women central to the multitude of discourses about black women.
*****
Zandria Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Memphis.
Recently there have been published two very dramatic considerations on the use of the ballot. At The Atlantic Conor Friedersdorf argues in Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama that the president's foreign policies have set unprecedented examples of presidential abuse of powers and undermine the very fabric of the Constitution and thus the Republic. These actions in short are 1) The continued use of drones to assassinate Al Qaeda operatives and the resulting damamge done to Pakistani civilians. 2) The President's decision to assassinate US citizens that have affiliated with terrorist organizations without due process and 3) The commitment of US forces to the Lybian uprising against Qaddafi without congressional approval. These are valid points and as Friedersdorf states his refusal to vote for Obama is a clear statement of his political and moral conscience. In an unrelated but relevant piece Joel Bleifus in In These Times argues that the Left should avoid thinking of voting as an act of "self expression" and adopt John Sanbonmatsu's Gramscian idea of strategic voting. Carl Davidson, former member of the Student's for a Democratic Society said about Sanbonmmatsu's work, “In the long run you need both self-expression and strategy. You
need the inspiration that can be provided by self-expression, but you
need a smart strategy that enables you to win.” These are not new ideas regarding the path to power. The most notable recent exponent of this idea is Saul Alinsky who wrote, "The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action." However the two articles ask a deeper question for me which is what is the nature of the vote? Friederdorf's view seems to be that the vote is a personal decision wherein ones personal views are expressed in their purest form. Sanbonmatsu and Bleifus encourage us to think about the vote as a strategic positioning in a war of maneuver. I like to think of voting as a rare thing in US society, that is, one of the last remaining secular rituals where someone is not making cash and that can express regard for the entire nation. What neither Friedersdorf nor Bleifus ask is, "What does my vote mean for someone else?" Every single vote is a drop in an ocean whose wave hits some distant shore. The effects of that wave, like any other, are what determine its force. What we must think about, and especially the Left, is where my vote (or lack of voting) will push that wave. Who will benefit, who will suffer, who will get needed support and who will not if I do not vote? The "problem" that Alinsky refers to has to be more than the problem of efficacy. It has to be the problem of the vision of the community and its relationship to power and ideology. It
has to be a consideration of the problem of the one and the many, the
problem of I and Thou, the problem of the pebble in the pond. Moral and political purity along with strategic visioning are noble qualities to have but ones vote has to be an expressionof something broader, deeper and a re-affirmation of a commitment to our fellow citizens.
Children Dressed as Men in Hip-Hop: BET Hip-Hop Awards and Violence By Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar
I hope Rick Ross and Young Jeezy read this letter. But it’s broader than these two rappers who were allegedly involved in a violent clash at the BET Hip-Hop Awards show to be aired October 9th. On September 29th Atlanta was abuzz with a wide range of events, notably the Atlanta Football Classic and two hip-hop-related events: the Tupac Amaru Shakur Collections Conference, and the BET Hip-Hop Awards. I spoke at the Tupac conference where people arrived from around the country to present papers on the meaning, and legacy of the world’s most successful rapper, and one of the most significant figures in music from the last quarter of the 20th century. I looked forward to seeing friends, scholars, and colleagues. I did not consider anyone getting shot, stabbed, beaten with a bottle of Moët, or stomped out in the lobby of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Disagreements over the interpretations of Tupac would likely not lead to people running to “pop the trunk.” True to expectations, it was a fun, engaging, thoroughly rewarding violence-free event. Across town another hip-hop gathering was unfolding; and fools and thugs were infiltrating it. True to the most cynical expectations, the BET Hip-Hop Award show was tarnished by violence. According to police reports and eye witnesses, a brawl erupted backstage between the camps of rappers Rick Ross and Young Jeezy. It spilled into the parking lot at the Atlantic Civic Center where police pepper sprayed grown men fighting. A friend of mine, a conventionally-cynical “old head” remarked that commercial hip-hop, in its current state, is simply burdened by idiots, and idiocy. Many are no longer shocked that adult millionaires, some of whom are fathers and husbands in their 30s and older, would fight like school children settling disagreements with escalating taunts and violence. The ridiculous behavior is embarrassing, distressing to the wider hip-hop community and, simply put, stupid. This was more than a classic case of keeping-it-real-going-wrong. It is emblematic of a sordid culture of impulsive, irresponsible, and reckless behavior celebrated in verse and life. It is a blurring of the lines between studio and street for the artists. Incredibly talented artists, gifted with wit, charisma, business acumen and passion have allowed themselves to risk it all for foolish bravado and immature antics that they misinterpret as cool, courageous, and brave. I hope 50 Cent’s people read this. Critics who are outside and inside of the Hip-Hop Generation have alleged that hip-hop has devolved into a mockery of itself. Rappers celebrate the joys of selling crack, killing black people and degrading black women. There is no adult male rapper who has gone platinum in the last decade who has not embraced at least one of these themes. Some allege that commercial hip-hop is a modern Minstrel Show: “Step right up! Not only can you listen to the songs about these fools assaulting each other, you can actually watch them do it in real life!” If you know The Game and 40 Glocc, please forward this note to them. A few miles away from the violence at the BET Awards, the Tupac conference covered a wide range of topics related to his short, but impactful life. Like us all, Tupac was flawed, even in his brilliance. He loved his people, community and world. He wanted more for himself and those around him, even as he struggled to reconcile his hurt, trauma and conflict with others. In the end, conflict with others took his life. Part of his life story is, in some respects, a cautionary tale. While the prison industrial complex wreaks unprecedented havoc on black communities, while black youth are killed by the thousands in cities across the country, those who are at the center of [black] youth popular culture often herald prison like a rites-of-passage, and the drug trade like Pop Warner football. The murders of Tupac, Biggie, Jam Master Jay, Big L, and others in hip-hop are lamented, yet a tired, child-like cycle of beefs only inspire and provoke future possibilities of death and misery. It would be outrageous to even imagine Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson cliqued up at a national academic conference and being pepper sprayed by police for trying to stomp out Henry Skip Gates and his boys. I hope for the day that it will be as unexpected and outlandish to imagine a scenario of violence at a hip-hop award show. Until that time, the wider hip-hop community remains a poster child of crass, crude stereotypes and infantile behavior, a miserable mockery of itself, with declining sales, narrowing of artistic creativity and an unabashed culture of self-destruction. I hope someone forwards this to Chief Keef, because this is what we don’t need or like. ***** Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar is Vice Provost for Diversity and Professor of History at The University of Connecticut. He is the author of Hip Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap and Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity.
Princess Bride alert - I think that word does not mean what you think it means: I have a friend who was on debate teams in high school and college. He won awards, teaches debate technique to kids now - he's serious about the art of debate, and has been for over a decade. Having caught some of last night's festivities, he declared, 'I feel dumber now than I was an hour ago, just from watching that.' And: 'My students would eat these guys alive.' And: 'If that's a debate, then I spent 13 years learning something very different.'
I hardly know where to begin with this one. The short version: very early in the morning on May 16, 2010, a SWAT-type police team, shadowed by a reality tv video crew, invade a Detroit home in search of a murder suspect. But they invade like they're trying to take an enemy bunker, and one flash-bang grenade and one gunshot later, a 7-year old girl is dead, shot in the head. They later find the murder suspect in a separate apartment upstairs.
