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.

Right Wing Extremists Slinging "Nope Dope" Today

If you frequent the downtown of just about any major metropolitan area regularly, then you know the difference between the homeless and the hardcore crackheads. The temporarily homeless have a look in their eyes that says "I am lost. I not sure how I got here. Can you help me change this picture?"

A hardcore crackhead doesn't have that look. The look they have in their eyes signal that they are oblivious to what is going on around them. All they want to do is get that feeling that they had when they were high, and they'll do anything to get it back.

If you are in downtown Atlanta today, or any of the hundreds of other locations that Tea Parties will be held in around the country, take a close look into the eyes of the vocal, rabid ten percent of the Tea Baggers who are hardcore followers of this diversion, and you will see the same kind of look you see in a hardcore crackhead. All they want to do is get that feeling that they had when they felt they were higher up on the food chain of American society, and they'll do anything to get it back.

The ninety percent who are joiners are like those who are temporarily homeless – they will look to anyone for help when it seems the rest of the world is ignoring them. Some company when it gets dark. Their outrage that will be beamed into your living rooms during the evening and late night news broadcasts tonight will be real, the same way the hunger that curdles the stomachs of the homeless and the hardcore crackheads in the middle of the night are real.

And on Thursday morning, these hundreds of thousands of people will wake up the same way the homeless and the drug addicted do after getting a good hot meal in their stomachs and a little doggy bag to go - like something might really be starting to change in their lives. The hardcore crackheads of the Tea Party movement will be the most boisterous, because their dealers - Glen Beck, Rick Sanchez, Rick Santorelli, Michelle Malkin, Neil Cavuto, and the rest of the street lieutenants - will get the word from the kingpin of the nope dope, Rush Limbaugh himself, that it's okay to give everybody a free twenty piece today.

Because kingpins don't get to be kingpins without knowing how to keep their users hooked.

But we all know how this story goes, because if you frequent your downtown regularly, you know what I know. There are those who are temporarily homeless, and then there are the same helpless souls you saw last month, and the month before that. Because no matter how much you feed the permanently homeless and the hardcore crackheads today, they are going to be starving again by the weekend.

This outrage is a lot like hunger. It can be an urge so overpowering, especially when it is fed by the nope dope, that it forces you to make the kind of decisions that ignore permanent long term gains because you need short term relief. Because you are craving the kind of tingle you had when you felt like "your kind of people" were running things in D.C. And if you get a taste of that uncut nope dope - they call it that "extreme righteousness" - your outrage can become so powerful so fast that it can allow you to simply blow right past some of the realities of modern life.

A week from now, a month from now, these Tea Baggers will still be outraged, indignant at the their brownskinned president, even though the decisions he and his staff are making are about the same as what any other president faced with these circumstances would have to make. The most principled Republican governors in the country have had to bow to the demands of pragmatism, because things are just that bad.

I would imagine though, if I had another brownskinned man pop up as the leader of the party I normally belonged to, and I had to listen to Glen Beck and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh caterwaul all day and night about how bad I've got it, before they got driven home to their mansions to get a good night's sleep, I'd feel pretty abandoned myself.

Pretty disgusted.

Pretty damned mad.

And pretty damn ready for another hit of that "extreme righteousness", even when I know all I'm doing is making the kingpin richer.

After this blows over, I hope the real Republicans, the kind that I grew up around, get together and plan a mass intervention. Declare a War On Drugs and put the "nope dope" dealers out of business. And please, please, get Condolezza Rice or Colin Powell to give Micheal Steele a call and tell him that he's a member of the Big Boys Club now and doesn't have act like a clown anymore. Because there is no way this political party is going to have a chance at building a positive future out of negative attitudes like these.

Chinese Farmers In Africa And Other Sunday Afternoon Insights

Chinese symbol for friendship

I talked to my father last night about a lot of things, including his take on these infamous "Tea Parties" that are going on around the country next week, and the state of the U.S. economy, and the fact that Congress, the present administration and the last one have done little but dance around the issues underlying our current financial crisis, but the most interesting tidbit he shared with me was something I hadn't heard very much about - the Chinese farming in Africa.

"What did you just say?" I asked my father.

"The Chinese," he repeated, pausing to emphasize the next two words, "are farming in Africa."

We talked for a few minutes about why the Chinese were in Africa, but after a couple of exchanges, we both realized we knew next to nothing about this.

"I'm going to read up on this tonight" I said before I hung up. It turns out that the Chinese are doing a 100 billion dollars worth of agricultural related commerce a year in Africa, substantially up from the 10 billion worth they were doing eight or nine years ago.

Why is this important? The only place left to sell things to are countries that are in the process of developing, countries that are still dealing with food, shelter and clothing issues. The only big place that fits the bill is Africa.


* * *


If you read this blog regularly, you know that my father is a Republican - not a RINO, or somebody who was just mad at the Democratic Party because they let everybody in, but someone who is well versed in GOP minutia and is fairly well known among the party leadership in South Carolina. So when I asked him about these "Tea Parties" planned for next week, I wasn't sure what his answer would be.

"You know," he said, "there are a lot of people out of work right now, a lot of people who are hurting, who are looking for some way to vent. I don't disagree with their right to assemble, but stuff like this...things like this can lead to anarchy if people aren't careful."


* * *


The bad thing about being a writer is that in the middle of his preaching, you find yourself doing stuff like critiquing the minister's selection of the controlling metaphor in his sermon. How S. decided to become a member here I don't know - there were so many songs I thought I was at the Soul Train Gospel Awards. The good thing about being a writer, especially a writer of fiction, which I am in my other non-paying night job, is the amount of self-examination you go through in creating fictional characters. Every narrative is self-referential because the writer has to always start with what he knows about himself and the people he or she has come in contact with to lend a sense of authenticity to make-believe lives.

A reverend who is loud and perspires heavily may get you excited for an afternoon, but a reverend who tells you a story that builds upon itself can give you the kind of insight and inspiration that lasts for weeks.


* * *

The Ladies Number One Detective Agency on HBO on Sunday night with Jill Scott as the star, self taught detective Mma Ramotsweis is entertaining, but if the show's script doesn't call for her enterprising secretary to get paid this week, I may have to quit watching until the secretary has got a big wad of pula stuffed in her purse. I mean, Mma Ramotsweis has a house, a car, and is even hiring little boys off the street to pass out flyers, and can't afford to pay her employee anything at all? Other than this plot twist, its not bad. Not bad at all - one of the few prime time shows on HBO that doesn't try to break the world record for most profanity used in an episode.



This is what happens when I eat dinner too early.

"Tea Party" Protest Same People Still Bitter About Election

I don't have any problem with people protesting the status quo. I serve as an agent provocateur myself here at Brown Man Thinking Hard, so the idea of the taxpayer "Tea Parties" that will be held next week on April 15th is the kind of thing that would initially appeal to me. I can even see some merit in the reasoning behind some of their issues with the Obama administration, even after allowing for the highly partisan slant of their platform.

The thing I don't like about it is the kind of people it has attracted. They are the same insufferable types as the dissatisfied Democrats who formed P.U.M.A. after Hillary Clinton lost her mojo late last spring when it became clear that she had been out hustled, out organized, and out fundraised by Barack Obama's crackerjack campaign managers. In fact, if you look closely at the people standing in the crowds at these "Tea Parties", you will see a common denominator, uniquely American smugness that can only be achieved by angry white people with an incomplete command of two or three catchphrases, the kind who are always suspicious that their birthrights are being stolen right from under their noses.

I thought about the things I protested in my life as I mulled over the details behind this latest partisan assault masquerading as a populist movement against the American government. Years ago when I was in college, the only black English professor I ever took a class from was a part of the journeyman teaching circuit, taking short term jobs wherever she could find them. The good doctor's PhD, as far as I knew, was a real one. Her passion for her chosen field of study, African American literature, seemed genuine. The quality of her research appeared to be solid. I have no real recollection, though, of how much she had published.

My alma mater, one of the most venerated institutions of higher learning in the south, had been spending the income from their enlarged endowment like water in an effort to recruit the best academic talent to our campus. The good doctor liked what she saw, so she applied for tenure. I don't know the mechanics behind tenure, so all I can tell you is that she was denied tenure, although I would imagine that she may have been denied the right to even apply for tenure, or was possibly even turned down for a teaching position with immediate tenure.

So the good doctor fought back. She filed grievances through the proper channels. She lobbied the department chair. And she went outside the university, enlisting the aid of Atlanta's civil rights and protest community. Now that I think about it, I don't know how I ended up involved in the good doctor's struggle to gain a permanent position on the faculty. She had a way of putting things in terms that made it seem like you were letting yourself down if you didn't at least listen to what she had to say.

A determined band of students from her classes started meeting at the good doctor's house to do what we could for her cause. Inside her home, she took the gloves off. She spoke freely of the horrors she had suffered at the hands of college administrators across the country. She condemned the idea of so much authority resting in the hands of white men, who she felt were already predisposed to discount her scholarship because she was black and because she was a woman. To impressionable college students, her anti-authority rhetoric spoke to that thing in all people that age who were still largely dependents of their parents, their original authority figures.

We got to meet C.T. Vivian. We were supposed to meet the celebrated writer James Baldwin, in town to do research on the Atlanta child murders, who had ostensibly enlisted in the good doctor's cause to put outside pressure on the university to reconsider her application, but he never materialized. And there was a hodgepodge of old line civil rights protesters who milled around the good doctor's house on Saturday and Sunday nights as she plotted strategy.

But black college students, especially at a top flight mainstream university, are more conservative than College Republicans. Those descended from parents who had gotten along to get ahead knew instinctively to shy away from the limelight and refuse to sign protest petitions. Those who were less fortunate depended so heavily on the college for aid that they wouldn’t do anything that might jeopardize their ability to earn a degree. Which only left the hard headed and the adventurous among us who agreed to stand up at a press conference for the good doctor and denounce the college administration. Being both hard headed and adventurous, I ended up being one of the key spokespeople for the good doctor's cause.

By the time we got to the press conference at the old Paschal's Restaurant and Hotel near downtown Atlanta, I'd learned a lot about protesting. From the dozens of us who gathered weekly at the good doctor's house, only three or four of us were actually willing to stand in front of the TV cameras in our mod "power to the people" black clothing and read our prepared statements. My mind was more on the silky haired, mocha colored goddess who stood beside me, a fine young woman from Michigan who hadn't given me more than the time of day before I became a protester than it was on the intent of my short speech.

Protesting became addictive. That spring semester, we protested something or another in front of the student center along with reinforcements from the Atlanta University schools. I sat in the ornate office of my university's president with a gonzo, balls to the wall partner-in-crime to present to the preternaturally cool president a set of demands for funding a new kind of African American organization on campus, since the Student Government Association seemed to have a stranglehold on the student activity fees we paid every year. I sat on a panel that spring at a symposium that pitted HBCU minority student concerns against mainstream university minority student concerns, where I proceeded to excoriate the status quo mindset among black college students.

When our protest for the good doctor didn’t elicit a response from the university through any channels, public or private, she began to become desperate and bitter. Some of Atlanta’s old line families, ones with connections to the university itself, she told us one evening a couple of weeks after the protest, were implicated in the Atlanta child murders, which was why the police were having a hard time making a case against anyone. And why the university was out to get her.

The balls to the wall guy who sat next to me in the president's office to help present our new black student organization proposals turned out to be some random black guy who had never been enrolled at the university. It turned out that he wasn't just always over at his girlfriend’s dorm room – he was living there illegally, at least until the school kicked him out of the dorm and banned him from campus.

Everybody at the helm of these things had ulterior motives. But it was easy, if you didn't know what to look for, to get caught up in the emotion of group action. To feel empowered by the kind of leaders who understood your pain and suffering better than anybody else.

In a down market, as members of an out of favor political party, Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin seem to be making as much of a play for increased influence and a higher "Q" rating as they are making a push for economic justice. I just wish they would point their troops in the right direction - the abuse of corporate governance that has allowed CEO's to become financial rapists.

Hating the president is pointless if you are not RAISING MONEY and ORGANIZING NEW VOTERS for your own candidate, or grooming somebody other than Sarah Palin for president, or learning to get over your aversion to Mitt Romney's religion because he is the best chance you've got. Money and votes, not outrage and protest, are what will facilitate an administration change.

I actually realized halfway through this little rant that isn't fair, but the irony, at least in my mind, is that neither are these crazed fanatics, the kind of people who will get together to beat your brains out to protect "the sanctity of life" and then drive home past real live human beings in need that they could care less about.

The principles in most protests are based on basic core human values and good intentions. But it is the extreme rhetoric that is most revealing, whether it is an angry looking young black man standing in front of a TV camera denouncing a "paternalistic administration that treat professors like sharecroppers" or these legions of Americans, almost all of whom are white, who are angrily denouncing "the liberal media", "Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the new Obama Administration" or "socialists".

How do I know they are white? Go see for yourself:

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/03/07/tea-party-on-taxpayer-revolts-in-green-bay-lafayette-olathe-and-harrisburg/

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/03/21/liveblogging-the-lexington-ky-tea-party/

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/03/15/huge-thousands-converge-for-cincinnati-tea-party/

I tried the same thing on Google, since I'm apt to be biased in the links I provide. Try it yourself – type in "tea party taxpayer revolt" and select "images" from the Google toolbar, and you'll see that these protesters look suspiciously like the same white people in the Pelosi daughter's documentary who hated "that Muslim" running for president.

Maybe it's the way I look at the United States in the context of world history, but I've always thought of this country, at less than two hundred and fifty years old, as a nation entering its adolescence. Which means we are entering that awkward phase that all teenagers go through before they finally begin to come into their own as young adults. America's greatest days, I believe, are ahead of us.

The only advice I have for the protesters is the same advice my mother gave me the summer after my "semester of protest", when she learned about these activities for the first time during the break between my junior and senior year. "I think you need to remember," she said, with her patented left eye cocked open stare, the same kind that the actress Pearl Bailey used to use when she meant business, "why we sent you there."

My mother didn't want another Malcolm X - she wanted a college graduate.

And I assume that the Tea Baggers want more at the end of the day than a sore throat, so I suggest to my angry friends that you check your leader's ulterior motivations out to make sure their game plans can translate your ire into something that pays off for you as much as it is going to pay off for them.