23 July 2010

For Colored Bloggers Who Blame Obama When The Rainbow Is Not Enuf



Some of my black blogging brethren have gotten so twisted up in knots about this Shirley Sherrod fiasco THAT SHE OBVIOUSLY BROUGHT ABOUT HERSELF that I believe the logic section of their brains have been deprived of oxygen.

Because in spite of the incontrovertible facts that surround the origin of this mess, which was birthed from the same template of social domination racially obsessed white men have been using since our black asses were dragged off of those slave ships, this has morphed into GOP Jedi Mind Trick #17,642, wherein the attacker and his cohorts succeed in getting the public to indict a third party for failing to properly address a controversy they have manufactured all by themselves in their dank right wing lairs.

However you feel about the president's response, or lack thereof, IS relevant, but it is not the main event. Not even close. Blaming Obama for this mess, or the NAACP for this mess, is like blaming Martin Luther King Jr. for getting in the way of that bullet that James Earl Ray’s rifle fired.

It is like blaming the slaves for not coming to their masters aid and helping them to win the Civil War.

It is like blaming the African captives who died on those slave ships - the ones that brought many of our ancestors here - for depriving the slave traders of their rightful profits.

To the silly rabbits out there, and you know who you are, TRICKS ARE FOR KIDS.

Shirley Sherrod has a platform this week that it looks like she is trying to take advantage of to advance OUR cause, but many of you are already afraid that she will talk too much.

That she will lose her moral authority, or her claim to victimhood, or some other such nonsense, because she is not willing to comport herself as if she is bucking for a promotion for the executive suite at the tight ass corporation YOU work for, instead of being what she is – a sixty something year old black woman who was probably only a couple of years away from retirement in her old job, a level headed woman of at least average intelligence who is availing herself of the chance to tell it like it is, unfiltered, unbought and unbossed.

Two days of one lone voice in the wilderness is too much?

Are you so ready to see Mr. Charlie back in charge, because that looks normal, because that feels RIGHT, that you are willing to trade Mrs. Sherrod's hearfelt, unpolished candor for the very same vitriol you got last week and the week before that from a TV station that should lose its FCC license, or at the very least, the ability to call itself a news channel?

Some of you are on my blogroll.

Some of you are my friends - at least the internet version of friends.

What I want to remind all of you of is something many of us used to say back in grade school, when we first began to learn about slavery, or watched Roots, or got to hold real live slave shackles in our hands.

“I couldn’t have been a slave” was a favorite. “I woulda had to kill me some white folks” was another. “You wouldn’ta caught me picking no damn cotton” was another.

But the ugly truth is, practically all of us with slave ancestry are descended from people who didn’t kill anybody. Dead black people don’t propagate, an equation white slave owners bent on quelling the hot blood of insurrectionists knew all too well.

And yet here we are, fighting against the exact same forces of evil, in a venue where we run no risk of being maimed or mauled or killed for taking it to our enemy electronically with each and every keystroke, and all I see is the same type of “woulda coulda shoulda” folks doing the same thing now that they would have done in the 1800’s – doing the master’s dirty work for him.

One other sentiment I started to see is the old “we don’t need to get these white folks riled up” meme.

Why not?

Even the slaves, in as inhuman a position of deference as they were, understood that there was only so far their masters were willing to go. That they were too valuable to lose in large masses, just like our black asses are too valuable to America today to have all 44 million of us vamoose into thin air.

Very few men, even race crazed white men and the puppets on their payrolls, are willing to burn down their own house while they are in it.

It doesn’t take much to put puppets like the FOX News goon squad and the Andrew Breitbart’s and Michelle Malkin’s and all the rest of the right wing tools who are willing to prostitute themselves unconditionally to satisfy the crazy race fetishes of very, very rich men on their heels. We have put them on their heels before, and we can do it again.

All I will say is, the last time we decided to make Mr. Charlie and HIS rich masters take two steps back, and grudgingly recognize in us African Americans another half-measure of humanity, we didn’t waste any time trying to convince each other that Martin Luther King was guilty for stepping in front of that bullet on purpose in 1968.

We kept our eyes squarely locked on our enemy, met him toe to toe, and let the unedited tapes of our enemy’s unchecked depravity speak the truth to the world.


22 July 2010

Andrew Breitbart Should Fall On His Sword Before Sundown



I don't mean that this lowlife should fall on his sword in the way that the Japanese commit seppuku when they have brought dishonor to a noble cause, because there is absolutely nothing noble about the Tea Party or the more deranged elements of the conservative movement.

I mean that he should fall on his sword because any other way of seeing his rancid guts spill out would mean jail time for someone, since this isn't the 1960's anymore, and Breitbart isn't a black man fighting for justice, like Hosie Miller, Shirley Sherrod's father, who was shot in the back by a white farmer, but 2010, where Breitbart is a white man fighting for the right to oppress the truth about who he and those like really are at every turn.

Putting Breitbart on TV last night for his side of the story in this god awful mess that swirls around Mrs. Sherrod's inspirational speech at a NAACP affair that happened over 20 years ago as if he is a legitimate voice is like interviewing James Earl Ray after he was convicted of killing Martin Luther King Jr. and refusing to hammer him with questions about why he pulled the trigger.

The question that Mrs. Sherrod asked last night when she appeared on CNN - "why? Why are they doing this?" - is the same question African Americans have been asking since the beginning of our days on this continent.

I could go on and on with this line of reasoning, but if you are reading this, you have a pretty good idea of where I am headed, and if you don't, you can click this link and "marinate on THIS for a minute", as my more ghetto slang inclined buddies would say, while I get back to the metaphorical flaying of some more of the flesh from our wannabe gangsta white supremacist channeling Mr. Breitbart's ass.

Extermination of the Tea Party is at the top of my Christmas list, but you already know that if you read this blog regularly. If I am lucky, when I finish writing this, I will have one of those nice, long, delicious dreams in which I am a giant wearing an exterminator's uniform, with an enormous can of poison spray that affects the central nervous system of those who insist on elevating human excrement like Breitbart and Glen Beck and even that fake apologizer Bill O'Reilly and the rest of their gang who can't hate straight the way commercial bug spray zaps those nasty critters that occasionally infest your house.

Although, being a realist, I am more inclined to believe what I can see - that if you bundled all of the white hate hustlers like Breitbart who get rich by driving the level of racial animosity among the fringes of white America into a frenzy together, hate hustlers like want-to-be-white Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity - if you bundled them all together and put them into a gigantic space shuttle and rammed it directly into the center of the sun, a thousand years later, when a random solar flare finally spit out the remnants, you could still see the hate these people have encasing molecules of their DNA like protective casings so they might spawn again.

I'll get somebody to sharpen that sword for you, Mr. Breitbart, if you think it will have trouble cleaving through your thick skin.

My buddy from Alabama is right - the Tea Party should move its headquarters to Montgomery, Alabama, the home of the First White House of the Confederacy. It would be a perfect match for their Confederate state of mind.

Make no mistake about, Mr. Breitbart - you and your cohorts clumsy and ham handed efforts to control the political narrative in this country are not going to work. There are too many voices out here this time, too many voices that aren't controlled by Rupert Murdoch or GE or whoever owns the other major networks this week. We see you. We know who you are. And we are willing to go toe to toe with you every day of the week and ten times on Sundays. We already have your place on the wall in the Hate Hustlers Hall of Fame reserved, right between Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh.

The NAACP, which seems to have found a new reason to live, should keep up the good fight. If Ben Jealous does nothing else for the next ten years but relentlessly antagonize bullshit race baiting organizations and those like the Tea Party, which obviously have no problem harboring hate hustlers and white supremacists he will have done yeoman's work at keeping the premier civil rights organization relevant in the new millennium.

Where is Kanye West when you need him? He could boil this whole thing down to one of those embarrassing catch phrases that radio stations across the country would play day and night the way they did the "George Bush don't like black people" song. Is there a rapper out there in need of a hit? A record producer out there who's got a dope beat that nobody has recorded over yet that he can donate to the cause? A lyricist who can work the name "Breitbart" into the hook?

Blaming the president for not responding to this properly is like blaming the fire department for not getting to your house fast enough after the neighbor's bad kid sets your house on fire. It would be nice to turn Obama into a black superhero, but he is just a president, doing his job one day at a time. And in case you are too slow to follow that metaphor that opens this paragraph, Andrew Breitbart is the bad kid - a racial arsonist hell bent on doing whatever he can to destroy the fleeting progress America has made towards racial equality.

Every once in awhile, though, these racial arsonists fuck up and set their own damn houses on fire.

The problem you've got, Breitbart, is that I will be the one answering your 911 call.






02 July 2010

Quit Waving The Damn Flag And Get Real About Immigration



Everybody is trying to make it to the weekend and the president is still grinding away, with a speech yesterday guaranteed to open up debates from coast to coast during this most patriotic of weekends.

But if we could quit getting caught up in all the god damn flag waving for a minute, we might really be able to see more clearly why this is a problem, and why doing more of what we are doing now is not possible.

Every house in my neighborhood was built in part by illegal immigrant labor. If you live in a house in just about any metro area in the country that was built in the last twenty years, yours was too. This labor allowed you to buy a bigger house for less money - whether it was ten percent less or twenty percent less or some number somewhere in between I don't know, but it should be obvious to anyone who knows how to operate a basic calculator that paying less than market wages translated into a benefit for the builder and the homeowner.

BY the time I return, illegal immigrants with leaf blowers will have cleared my neighborhoods streets of debris.

The golf courses I passed this morning all employ their own armies of illegal immigrants to keep their fairways and their greens cut.

The restaurant where I ate a bacon biscuit had several illigal immigrants working in the back prepping food orders and washing dishes.

Squadrons of illegal immigrants descend on the houses I pass everyday to clean them, or repair their roofs, or paint them, or lay sod, or any number of tasks that keep an oasis of Republican rectitude looking crisp and clean.



As Americans - not just Republicans, or Democrats, but AMERICANS - we will lie to ourselves so much it should be listed as an official pathological disease category by the Psychological Association.

We cannot and will not pay the hundreds of billions of dollars a year to completely secure the border and aggressively deport any and all illegal immigrants.

If we did, the people who depend on this cheap labor would squawk their heads off via their lobbyists, PR people and fake political action groups.

The good thing about not being the president is not having to deal with everything. I have done no research on the illegal immigrant problem, and I am heavily inclined to follow the rule of law.

But unless we want to leave this issue in the "permanent national complaint" category, we have got to quit bullshitting ourselves about our moral purity and get real - we are in a symbiotic relationship with 15 million to 20 million people who are an integral part of our daily lives.



And since all our principles seem to evaporate whenever we can get something we want cheaper, we need to act like real capitalists and come up with a capitalist solution, rather than one cooked up in a church pulpit or a political rally.

The president is right about making these people citizens, but he can't tell Americans the real reason why this is the only answer we are willing to pay for. He can't tell Americans that we are prone to say one thing and do another, because that's not what we elect our presidents to do.

Is this is an easy answer? No. Do I like it? No. But there are a lot of things in life I don't like that I deal with because it is the best that can be done under the circumstances.

Even in Arizona, where antipathy against illegal immigrants is high, and new laws seem to hit the books daily to eradicate them, I don't see any mass firings of illegal immigrants. Any groundswell of support AT ALL from those who even as I write this are preparing pay envelopes to hand out later this afternoon to their no documents required employees, employees they are counting on to return to work next week, and the week after, and the week after that so the rest of us can continue to get the stuff we want at as cheap a price as we possibly can.



But since I'm not the president, I can tell you why most of us, when it comes to immigration, are full of shit. Until you start tearing the sheetrock out of your house that was put up by illegal immigrant hands, until you start stripping the paint off of your house that was painted on there by illegal immigrant hands, until you start stripping the shingles off your roof that were nailed in place by illegal immigrant hands, until you stop eating at restaurants that use illegal immigrant labor, or refuse to eat food tended and picked by illegal immigrant hands...

...you need to put down that damn flag and start trying to learn some Spanish.