Dummies in the Attic

This article raises more questions than answers: what makes the Disney movie "more" racist than the stories of Harris; from whence did the "Atlanta society ladies" come by their belief that they were doing with the will of Harris - when he had no will; what was the purpose of raising the essay by writer Alice Walker, if you were not going to analyze her criticisms and either validate them or repudiate them?

Actually - you seemed to come down on the side of repudiation - but you provided no evidence for the reader as to how you made that choice (were that actually your decision, which again was unclear from the reading).

With no evidence presented to the contrary and with all of the evidence presented showing in the affirmative (pre-Civil War Southern male, no discussion whether he fought for our against the South; stated opposition to integration - might this be from whence those Southern ladies drew their conclusions?; profiting for generations from the tales of slaves - with no evidence given how how he pro-offered remuneration to those slaves and their descendants) how are we to conclude otherwise but that Harris was as racist as the Disney movies made from his stories?

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Card Sharks

Senator,  

Please convince your colleagues that this proposal to lift the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration is akin to a shell game; no matter how desperate one is for the prize being offered, one must always remember the first rule of a shell game: the mark doesn't win.  

Oil prices have risen to near $150 a barrel; gasoline prices have risen to near $5 a gallon. No matter how enticing the proposals being made - regardless of the hundreds of billions of potential barrels of oil that are being bandied about - they cannot reduce oil prices and/or gasoline prices one whit.  

What has happened to the Republican Party? Formerly the party of the "rational actor" theory of economics (you remember: the Chicago School and Milton Friedman), they have now become the home for a quasi-behavioral economics and they espouse pop-psychology theories of energy that sound more at home in an infomercial.  

Sad.  

Our economy - and the world economy - is built on growth. Without growth, all of our structures will not merely crumble, they will implode in spectacular fashion. For most of the 20th century, that growth was a US-led growth, as Europe spent several decades either at war, preparing for war or recovering from war; it was only after the fall of Communism and the Berlin Wall that Europe could turn their attention to growth and by then their population was aging. The last decade of the 20th century saw the rise of China and India as economic nations, as they embraced growth in as fierce a fashion as did the early stage capitalists of our own post Civil War Reconstruction. But their populations were/are larger than Europe and they are growing as rapidly as their economies. So, while once the US had the population and the economy to use all of our oil and much of the Arabian oil supplies too, now we have competitor economies and populations for those same oil resources. Were barrels of oil akin to those of Saudi Arabia found off our shores, instead of supporting the economic engines of 300 million people, they would be tossed onto the world market for the 3 billion people of the developed and developing worlds (while we carry along another 3 billion people just as hungry but just out of reach of the bounties of our tables). The economics of supply and demand tell us that not only is there not enough oil to lower the price on a per barrel basis, they also tell us that the longer we wait to transition to a post oil economy the higher the prices will be (and the resultantly higher hardships).  

The only way not to lose a game of Three-Card Monte is not to play a game of Three Card Monte; tell your friends.

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The Cartoon

You know, I was upset when I first saw this cover. Wait.

First I laughed. And then I thought about those who believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that Michelle Obama is a Black Nationalist (which I am, there is nothing anti-American about that) and that neither of them respects the American flag and I became upset at the New Yorker.

What right did they have to portray a candidate for national office in such light and what other candidate had they so subjected to such satire?

I jotted down some phrases to describe my feelings and I sent them to the Editors.

And then I sat back and watch a full day's coverage of people denouncing this cover on cable news. And during that long day's worth if inanities, a new day began to dawn and the beauty of this cover was revealed unto me. The conversion point - the point at which I not only felt this was a good cover but that I was glad it was published - was when I saw John McCain going before a television camera and recite the Obama campaign talking points: "this cartoon is offensive and tasteless".

So what was it about seeing McCain's grim intonation of Obama's words (they're just words, after all; what can they do?) that changed my viewpoint?

McCain's latest biography add - created by Karl Rove alum Steve Schmitt - incorporates much of the same messages of this cartoon in the classic, Republican tradition of saying things without directly saying things.

How appropriate it is that we are just ten days into the post Jesse Helms-era, as he - perhaps more than any other Dixiecrat - brought coded messages of racism into our political advertisements and our national media. It was Jesse Helms who used a simple shot of a white man's hands opening and then crumpling a letter to send a message against affirmative action directly and at the same time, reaching back to the origins of the KKK and sending a coded message about the encroachment of that most dangerous "other" into land where he was not welcome.

So what messages does McCain send in his latest biography add?

"It was 1968, the Summer of Love . . . " - intones the baritone, male voice, over images of hippies (Barack Obama is just like those dirty hippies - and you know they we not patriotic)

"But it was another form of love shown by one young POW . . . " - here is that narrator again, now introducing our hero (John McCain is "The American President the American People have been waiting for", as another ad informed us)

I will not brainwash you with the rest of the claptrap contained in this ad from McCain/Rove/Bush, suffice it to say that it indirectly impugns Obama's patriotism (just like the burning flag in the cartoon) ties Obama to the old battles of the Sixties (just like the Black Panther gear on Michelle in the cartoon) and I am sure it has a reference to God and McCain's faith - which would close the loop on the "he's a secret Muslim" trifecta.

All of the tropes of the McCain campaign's latest ad are satirized in the cover cartoon of this week's New Yorker. And here was McCain saying all of it was "offensive and tasteless".

Ladies and Gentlemen: spread the word far and wide that we - the American people - have before us a candidate who shall not fall down before the slimy tactics embraced by the Republican Party in their relentless quest for power and ill-gotten gain. They say it is always darkest before the dawn, but I think I just saw the sun beginning to peak over the horizon.

I think I will go outside and rejoice in this new day.

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One People

This may seem like a strange article to link to for the extended riff below, but this is the vibe I felt after reading this article on Moment.

This article struck me as I see Jews as an excellent model for which to achieve Afrikan Unity - just as the Americans are and the Europeans are and the Indians are and the Chinese are and the Arabs are too. When you are trying to do what others have done - why not model your approach on what they did?

Creating an Afrikan Unity (more than just a political Afrikan Union) does not mean that all peoples of Afrikan descent will hold the same opinion on any one set of issues. Just as that is not a pre-requisite for any of the other "unities" that exist across the societies of the globe. Instead, what an Afrikan Unity means is that we will see ourselves as members of a collective body of people. And this collective will coalesce together to defend itself against those who are perceived to be outsiders.

How many languages are spoken across India? And how many still remember the partition with Pakistan and Bangladesh? And yet there are enough members of this group we call "Indians" who have a common definition of what that means, such that they can all come together and celebrate national achievements like becoming a nuclear nation. And the same is with China: many hundreds of languages are spoken across the mainland of China and yet they can all come together and celebrate events like the Olymipics and mourn events like this last earthquake.

The same goes for Jews:whether Reform or Conservative or Orthodox or convert - they all agree on the right for the state of Israel to exist. And even for those who disagree with that point or believe that the Palestinians have been abused, they still agree that there exists such a people known as Jews.

So I believe that Afrikans should be more like Jews and more like Indians and more like Europeans and more like Americans too. Afrikans need to see ourselves as One People; Afrikans need to realize that their is so much more we can achieve with the larger scale that comes with dropping national borders and even more that can be gained by realizing that tribal differences are merely branches of the same family as opposed to separate families that hold grudges against one another. Today, the peoples of Afrika are divided against each other and we have known for decades what happens to a house divided.

Once we realize that Afrikans are members of one family - One People - we will be able to provide the assistance to one another that is within us today, but that we are blinded from seeing by the filters of nation and "tribe". Removing these blinders will enable the Afrikan People to throw away the yoke of the IMF, the World Bank and the welfare state. We need this sort of "assistance" from those who would control us and our resources not.

One People. One Family. Many Tribes. That is our source of strength and it should never be used to divide us and set us one against another.

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Okay, here is my POV on FISA

To all of those hyperventilating over the new Obama position on FISA I say, "take a deep breath, my brother".

Hold it.

Hold it.

Now exhale, slowly.

Let me make a proposition: we all care so deeply about fighting against telecom immunity as it seemed like that was our last chance to get some justice in what is perhaps the biggest crime in our nation's history. And that is not an overstatement: when the one individual who has been granted executive authority in our nation and is tasked with upholding and defending our Constitution willfully chooses to abridge said Constitution well, there can be no greater crime.

I am with you.

But seriously, isn't a civil suit against AT&T rather weak compared to a criminal prosecution? That's like arresting the hooker and letting the pimp walk (oh, wait - that is what we do). That's like arresting the drug user and letting the dealer walk (oh, wait - that is what we do). Forget metaphors, what I mean to say is: don't you really want to see these perps shackled and frog-marched to the penitentiary?

I do, but it could be just me.

In the end though, I still have hope. I have hope that a Constitutional Law Professor (and no, not that John Yoo mofo; how in the H-E-double hockey-sticks does Stanford University justify placing that nincompoop on their staff? In a teaching position, no less!) will at a minimum constitute a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to give these citizens (making a huge assumption on my part that they still see themselves as citizens and not as members of some sort of Star Chamber empaneled to rule over the rest of us) one last chance to come clean, confess their actions and come back to the fold. I am not asking them to be Democrats or liberals; I am asking them to commit themselves to the Constitution and to renounce attempts to "save" the Constitution by subverting it.

Should they reject an offer of this sort (which I see as a benign gesture of national healing), then I would expect President Obama to immediately sign the treaty for the International Criminal Court and instruct ever other signatory to that treaty to issue a warrant for the arrest of GWB et al, should they ever leave US territory.

Perhaps the humiliation of being internally exiled as though they were members of a banana republic dictatorship will inspire them to come in from the cold.

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