Waka Flocka Flame And Other Insane Resurrection Day Inspirations

I never really thought of Easter as a holiday growing up. Back then, Easter meant interminable treks through department stores, looking for new clothes. A longer than usual church service, where you sat scrunched up next to people because all of the once-a-year Easter visitors who came that Sunday.

The only saving grace was the food.

I still don’t think of it as a holiday, but S. does. Which means we have a feast, the kind that requires us to pull out a hundred dishes that will take two hours to clean up afterwards. A variety of wine. Scrumptious desserts. And then we sit down to eat after church, where I am now one of those once-a-year Easter visitors who makes everybody sit closer to their neighbors than they really want to be, and eat and talk for hours.

There is something about the languorousness of it all, the slow progression from your first serving to your second, the settling effect that allows you to begin digging into dessert an hour or so after the main course, and the warm patina a few glasses of wine give to the whole thing, that makes it feel positively Italian, if real Italian family dinners are as decadent and baroque as the ones we see depicted in the movies. It felt even moreso this year when the Resident Diva dubbed my brother “Luigi” out of the blue, after the Super Mario Brothers video game character.

The conversation is, loosely speaking, a round robin affair, with stories and gossip and imaginatively recounted memories that are poignant and hilarious and heartfelt all at once.

Which is how I learned who Waka Flocka Flame is.

How my brother, isn’t much younger than me, knows who this rapper with no album is is beyond me. But the Resident Diva, who was as surprised as I was that my brother knew this, took the storytelling baton from my brother and kept running with the tale about the rapper with the crazy name.

The name was so funny I kept saying it over and over.

Waka Flocka Flame

Then I open up my USA TODAY yesterday(yeah, I know, its a schlocky excuse for a newspaper, but hey, I’m a writer – a social and political commentator, no less - you gotta look everywhere for ideas these days) and I see that Michael “Money Mike” Steele has got all his executive rats jumping ship.

Waka Flocka Flame

I turned on the TV last night to see slimy Republican hatchet man Alex Castellanos, who was an unpaid advisor to Steele just last month, stare into the camera and call for Steele to step down. Castellanos looked as if the big money boys in the GOP had a gun in his back. If you ran diagnostics on the video with some super sensitive recording analyzer you could probably pick up a faint “TELL THAT NEGRO TO WALK THE PLANK! NOW!” coming through the Castellanos earpiece.

Waka Flocka Flame

Steele, looks like you are on the ropes. The way “Luigi” and I and a few of my other brown-skinned consigliore’s see things, your boys have two choices. They can offer you a cushy landing pad at one of these fake ass think tanks they pay to print up propaganda and drop $30,000 or $40,000 a month in your direct deposit for a year or two, to keep you quiet…

…or jump into this dogfight to get you out of office with both feet and risk having you spill the beans on the whole operation.

If I were you, “Money Mike”, I’d call in Waka Flocka Flame. Tell the board you are working on a “resurrection” of your chairmanship, and Mr. Flame is your first new “disciple.” Keep it simple - make him your “fuck you” consultant. From what I’ve seen in the videos on youtube, he is very, very good at saying “fuck you” with meaning – not Samuel L. Jackson type good, but pretty damn good for a rookie who says he’s only been rapping for six months.

Could you imagine Brian Williams having to report on that shit? "In today’s political news, RNC political consultant Waka Flocka Flame dropped the 'F-bomb' 37 times…in one sentence during a fundraising call before exhorting large donors to 'help us get our stacks up, bitches' for the fall election season."

Think about it, Money Mike.

You’ve got nothing to lose. You would make history. Who knows? The RNC board might even kick in a NetJets lease for 12 months “to ease your transition” if you brought enough real flavor to the office to scare the shit out of them.

That’s W-A-K-A F-L-O-C-K-A F-L-A-M-E

Blacksheep Political Consulting won't even send you a bill for this hour, Mike...

...but we'll be happy to let you take us to the strip club the next time you're in the ATL.

Are Politics The New Black?

These days, black seems to go with everything.

To those who get most of their information about African Americans from TV and talk radio, this newest version of us - smart, articulate, attractive, and highly skilled at marshalling resources and attracting political support - must seem like an overnight sensation, a sudden invasion of the highest levels of American political power.

Michael Steele's ascension to the head of the Republican National Committee is a bigger watershed moment in some ways than Barack Obama's rise to the White House. Even if it is window dressing, as many suspect, and some Republicans already freely admit, I would imagine shock waves are being felt around the country, especially after Colin Powell's famous interview on Meet The Press last year in which he took Republican leadership to task after endorsing Barack Obama for president.

"Will Steele be another Powell?" is certain to be on the minds of many of the party faithful this weekend.

I talked to my father earlier today about the whole thing. He's been a Republican for over 30 years. A lot of my friends ask me how I square my own political views with his. The answer is, I don't have to. We actually don't talk about politics all the time, but when we do, a lot of our discourse revolves around the philosophical underpinnings of various political stances rather than the tit-for-tat, "party versus party" type of heated rhetoric you see so much on political gabfest shows.

Anyway, since he was on the phone, I asked him about Michael Steele. He didn't immediately address Steele, starting instead with Katon Dawson, Steele's main opponent, who is now famous for having held a membership until last year in a white's only country club. My father, who is normally a big booster of all things relating to our home state of South Carolina, gave a guarded assessment of Dawson. "If Katon had gotten elected, he wouldn't have been able to be very effective because of the baggage he would bring in with him."

So I pressed him about Steele again.

"It took him six votes!" he said, as if Steele's victory had been a struggle, rather than the triumph the media has proclaimed it to be.

"But he won," I said.

We talked a bit longer. My father wondered how much that a need to pander to the nation's new fascination with black politicians had to do with this outcome. "If he doesn’t go in their trying to take over right away, he might have a chance to do something," my father said, although the tone in his voice was wary.

We didn't get a chance to talk about the party's dynamics, and how this was going to interface with the Rush Limbaugh end of the GOP. Internet blogs are already beginning to call Steele Limbaugh's assistant. It remains to be seen whether Limbaugh is willing to sacrifice the allegiance of his radio audience by attempting to push for a more inclusive party, which is certain to cost him many of his staunch "us versus them" listeners.

Ron Brown was in the same position Steele was when he was the first African American to run the DNC – the Democrats were in disarray, and the Reagan Republicans were steamrolling everything in site. Whether or not Republican operatives can be as open to working with Steele as the Democrats were when they finally warmed up to Brown remains to be seen.

If Steele is going to suit up as the GOP's "anti-Obama", then they are going to have to give him the tools to work with, and get out of the way. This was a tall order for the Democrats back in the 80's, and it is an even taller order for the Republicans today. The faith of many of the party faithful is about to be tested in ways they would never have imagined a year ago.

Are politics the new black?

Not yet.

Maybe that will be the case when we get to the point when there are viable, competitive African Americans who campaign for senator, governor, and even president under the GOP banner the way the Democrats have finally begun to do it.