Adaptation

You'll Learn To Like The Foot On Your Neck
Originally uploaded by Phalanx.

I just finished reading Leon Wynter's fascinating book, AMERICAN SKIN, and he made a curiously interesting observation -- that white men are the very template for the Borg of Star Trek: Next Generation fame; they will adapt to what they cannot assimilate by force. As whiteness continues to lose its overall premium in commercial culture, more and more whites are forced to take stock of their investment in whiteness.

He ponders if whether whiteness will eventually redefine itself out of existence in America, taking blackness along with it. Logically it could happen when social and economic whiteness has entirely outlived its usefulness. Never forget: the underlying motivation for the institution of political whiteness has always been economic first and social second. Hence no economic return, no more whiteness.

Fidel Steps Down

So the big news in geopolitics this week is the Fidel Castro - the penultimate revolutionary -- has relinquished power in Havana. After nearly 50 years of rule, perhaps the longest run of any ruler in history (I don't have all the numbers, but it's pretty long time), Castro has to release his grip on power, and he did it on his own terms without "losing the revolution." Typically, we'd see some rioting in the streets or the opposition party was geared up for the transition and they seize power, but that's not the case here.

I'm curious to see if Barak Obama meets with Raul Castro -- without pre-conditions -- about normalizing relations.

Apparently, the last true efforts to normalize relations occurred during the Carter Administration, but Fidel's support of revolutionary causes in Angola and Ethiopia scuttled the attempts.

The biggest black eye during the Cold War for the US has a chance to heal, before a revolution takes place. Obviously, Cuba could go the way of China and still be a Communist country, but fully embrace capitalist ideas and increase its economy. As the largest island in the Caribbean and natural trading partner/vacation spot for the US, it's been a pissed awsay half-century for both countries.

Will Obama, should he be elected president, actually bring Change to Central America?

What's In A Word?

N - Non
I - Immigrant
G - Gaining
G - Global
A - Achievement...

How's that, fo' yo' ass??!?!?!

THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA, Part Two

I was reading an article in last week's NYTimes about how fucking ignorant Americans are, and how much they actively dodge knowledge?!!?!?
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 14, 2008

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable that’s a questionable adjective, to say the least platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.” Why would you make this statement? It just compounds how fucking ignorant this no talent bitch is? Say something like, “I guess I forgot… world history class was ten years ago.” Don’t drop a bomb that exacerbates your own personal stupidity, please!

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose “Against Happiness” warns that the “American obsession with happiness” could “well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.”This statement is a bit extreme, but it is extremes that the truth is really laid bare.

Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization.This is ALL true; I’ll be pick up this book and reading it on my next trip to the library. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog (“you couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces”) and to praise himself (“brave, brilliant”).And here’s the rub, the whole purpose of the internet is to rant anonymously… of course, you can’t stay in the shadows for too long. People WILL make it their mission to find out who wrote what on the internet.

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.She’s going to get bashed by the people who’s best interest lies in keeping the large majority of the public woefully ignorant on a whole host of topics, fields and subject matter.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history.yes, this true with our country, because the country rube is bequeathed a level of power, because the Founding Fathers wanted to let the masses believe they have a lot of say over the direction that this country is headed, but in actuality that’s the biggest piece of chicanery (i.e. pulling the wool over someone’s eyes, if you have a bad vocabulary) that also happens to be the cornerstone of the true nature of this country. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map. Geo-politics is THE key notion facing the United States as the 21st century progresses, to fail to understand, let alone the desire to understand how the countries of the 2nd World of their geography effects one’s wallet in Green Bay or Kansas City. To bash that knowledge begs that Malcolm X quote, “the chickens have come home to roost.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said. Schooling is perhaps the biggest monetary fraud that I can think of… unless you’re planning on working on Wall Street or being a doctor of some sort, then schooling is a trick, a weeding out process more than anything.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution. Creationism IS NOT something to be believed or taught in schools -- it's a waste of resources and time. If you believe in modern science and medicine, then you can't be down with Creationism -- so stop taking your prescription drugs or OTC meds if you really want Creationism to be taught and believed.

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.

Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a “cultural conservationist.”

For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said.

The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even curmudgeons.

100 YEARS OR MORE?!?!

The other n night on CNN’s LARRY KING LIVE, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) was the guest and he espousing the underpinnings of “The Straight Talk Express” – first off I don’t know why a Dolly Parton Song is being used as part of his campaign slogan-age, but to each his own; the meat of the interview, in my mind, was McCain trying to defend his statement about keeping troops in Iraq for 100 years. Certainly, he didn’t mean it – although we have had troops in Germany and Japan for well over 50 years (but in peacetime, not in the middle of an insurgency that’s lasted longer World War 2, and cost even more – yet has generated less in terms of world changing technology).

What McCain’s biggest problem is when it comes to the illegitimate War in Iraq is that he can’t live down the supposed shame of the VietNam War – especially because he’s tortured and decorated vet of that misbegotten conflict. I’m taking anything whatsoever away from McCain, his struggle, his POW days, his war record – but that armed conflict left a black eye on American foreign policy and military for close to two decades (rehashed by shit like FIRST BLOOD). The US didn’t exactly recover from that, and at the end of the day we’re now good trading partners with VietNam; with normalized diplomatic relations. But the might of the vaunted US armed forces was called into question (however, effectively propagandizes as unstoppable by Hollywood throughout the 80s and 90s).

The current pre-occupation with the Middle East has not only blinded America from its true and present interests across the globe, but the crux of the problem could have been dealt with effectively if a “fuck all y’all” foreign policy wasn’t in effect during the Reagan and Bush years (sure, we’ve been dicking the Middle East since the end of WW2, but it took a new level after Reagan came into office).

So for McCain to claim that we can’t leave without victory (and that MEANS what?) is just ridick!!! No one has even defined what “victory in the Iraq” is supposed to look like. Arabs aren’t cut-out for democracy… I can’t call it when it comes to any place in the whole region is operating under a democracy as entertained by the Greeks. There might be “elections”, but they’re reasonably phony.

And the spiraling costs of the war – in hard dollars, in human lives, in wasted war material, the psychic cost to the nation – doesn’t seem to be factored into McCain’s equation.

Should Barak and Hillary have hard exit strategies? Yeah, but the operative word is strategy – which is something that is usually considered flexible and is oft-revised. No one wants to have the US Military show the pink of its ass, but there’s no problem in turning tail and running – because we’ve done in numerous times before… can anyone same Beirut 1985?

LIVING COLOR SAID IT BEST – “I’m The Cult of Personality”

That hard rock anthem from 1989 from the first legitimate Black rock band in say 25 years is know being used as a invective remark aimed at Senator Barak Obama’s Democratic nomination campaign; which accusations of having a self-referential campaign message, one has to wonder what exactly does it mean to be President. Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan were charismatic leaders that could have worn the same goathorns, and even Dubya has his own cult of personality – people just wanted to believe that Compassionate Conservative BOOLSHIT – and old boy got elected, and fucked the country with a sharp spike up it’s tight ass.

Sure the Obama camp and its supporters are rabid fans of the man, but they see a man who can articulate a message. People attack his policies or more to the point that his policies are hazy, but if you really think about what Presidential Contender actually made a lot of his election platform come to pass? When you get down to it, national policy isn’t controlled by the President.

Representative Chet Edwards (D-Texas), perhaps has summed up Obama’s candidacy the best, “It's not Senator Clinton's fault, but the baggage she carries is the divisiveness of the 1990s. People are wanting to turn the chapter to the future rather than going back to the last chapter. It's not fair but that is the reality."

Let's Be Real Now

The one thing I really enjoy about Barak Obama’s speaking is that he doesn’t sound like a character on THE BOONDOCKS - not a straight-up coon like Uncle Ruckus, a white-washed chump like Tom DuBois, a foolish old negro like Robert "Grandad" Freeman, a clown hip-hop nigga like Riley or "down for the cause" kid like Huey. All stereotypical examples of how niggas talk, but Barak evades that -- which makes him acceptable to all non-African Americans, whether they get down with his politics or his meesage is another story.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that show, but far too many African-Americans SOUND like African-Americans when you throw a mic in their face; more aptly, they sound like niggaz.

Senator Barak Obama delivered a Victory Speech in Wisconsin the other night, a speech with the grace and power of man who knows how to wield power and influence for the greater good (whether that’s true is anyone’s guess, but I have to hope so…) and it just really began to usher in a new era in America’s socio-cultural landscape.

Obama’s popularity among white women is the most contested constituency in the entire race (one that Hillary Clinton has been winning hand-over-fist in the early voting), and it has been the deciding factor in the big prize contests, but that seems to be eroding as witnessed in the Potomac Primaries just yesterday. In addition, Obama pulled something like 56% of white male voters… something that Clinton has, is and will struggle with.

What does this say about the transracial nature of America? That the one country founded on the hatred of another racial/ethnic group is now finally able to set aside that element of “otherness” – or at least publicly – an embrace a Man who stands for change and camaraderie across traditional dividing lines? Surely since the complete acceptance of Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson as the appeal-to-all Pitchmen, the understanding that their could be an African-American president was tickling some peoples minds… enough so for the people behind Fox’s 24 put a Black man in the White House for multiple seasons dealing with crisis after crisis, and he never failed from the foibles that many would unjustly hang on a Black man’s ability to lead and to make cognitively

The odd thing about Obama is that he’s not a born-n-bread American nigga… because there is a TREMENDOUS amount of baggage the goes with that. Of being part of the constituency that is ever the socio-economic underdog. The burdens attributed to American Blacks are like Atlas’s impossible burden – difficult to shake off because they define that person. To be in the “struggle” typifies what it means to be Black, but it’s not a mutually exclusive moniker.

To look at it from another angle, the new majority of so-called Minorities (the people of color who are non-African American) ascribe to and aspire to be what was dubbed “white” for 88% of the last 100 years – a whiteness that rings of truth and realism in terms of what it means to be societal and financially successful. Yet that same group of People of Color looks to stand on the shoulders of what American Blacks created culturally and side-step any and all malapropism that go hand in hand with being “urban.” It’s a known fact that 50% of all Hispanics consider themselves “white” when walking the streets of America.

Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable.

Smack Back

There's lots of talk now that Senator Barak Obama's presidential nomination campaign has become a Cult of Personality. As much as I love that song from the late 80s Black hard rock band, I find it slanderous to claim that Obama's campaign is a cult with no relevancy behind it.

Sure, the backers and supporters of the campaign are rabid fans, but that's because the public at large REALLY has enough of the boolshit that's happened under Dubya's reign.

Ranging from all the conspiracy theories about what really happened on 9/11 to the true nature of the Bush families relationship with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens. And everyone is sick of hearing about the war in Iraq; even if you're an idiot and thinks the war was the right thing, you're probably sick of hearing about it and all the lies and deceit that led up to the shameless event.

What is quite possible about the Obama's campaign is that Obama isn't providing enough substantive policy and election platform, because he's shaping his policy and saving the release of the nuts-n-bolts of it all until he's facing John McCain... not much reason or rationale to drop elements that the GOP can get a jump start on fucking up the Democratic contender's election campaign.

However, a President doesn't need to have it all worked about during the campaign, because all policy concepts need to be flexible once one is occupying the Oval Office. In reality, the President can't ramrod policy down the the throat of the American public -- they have to go through the Congress, and people see to forget that. If the Congress is about putting up road blocks for the President, he or she ain't gettin' shit done.

The President does need to be charismatic or at least have some sort of the media impact -- Reagan, Billy Clinton, and Dubya all have a strong media impact quality; Reagan and Clinton hold people in their sway because they speak with such direct fluidity toward the audience; Dubya's complete display of ignorance and inarticulateness is so shocking that it's captivating for the sheer joke of it all.

Senator Obama's voice is gripping like a Tony Robbins character, but that doesn't make him a demagogue.

Hillary Clinton - much like Al Gore during his presidential run -- is too packaged, too staid to be captivating, and yes, sadly, because she's an older woman the key components of her charisma have aged away or would be highly inappropriate for her to use to aide her media image -- even if she was doing squats and lunges for the past 16 years and had a tight asss and lithe legs, she'd be taken to task and laughed at if she wore any kind of clothing that accentuated her female sexuality.

So it goes to reason that Hillary's campaign and those who are supposed to be impartial in their reporting on the campaign are going to find whatever they can to perform character assassination on Obama. This is a smart thing, because ultimately the likability of a candidate has an overwhelming amount of ethereal evidence as to why a voter chooses a candidate.

Mark my words, lots of people didn't like Walter Mondale, didn't like Michale Dukakis, didn't like Bob Dole, didn't lilke John Kerry as people, as someone who they are supposed to respect as the "face" of the nation -- and that's why their opponents beat them in the election.

America The Brave? How About America The Weak!?!

New Beefeater Garb?
Originally uploaded by Phalanx.

There's a lot of talk that Barak Obama is a weak candidate because he has openly talked about sitting down with America's various nemesis nations around the globe and starting a dialogue with NO PRECONDITIONS! This is includes Cuba, Iran and Venezuela.

If you think about why Hillary and all the GOP candidates don't go for this -- it has to do with the American Psyche. Americans believe basically that it's us versus the world because everyone in the World wants the one thing that we offer -- a chance to be an American citizen.

The thing about why the U.S. Government is only willing to negotiate with Iran on the point of nuclear arms, before even considering discussing anything else stems from the the 1979 Hostage crisis. The Iranian Revolution beat America's ass for the whole world to see, and we basically didn't do anything about it -- which softened up the Democrats for the next 4 presidential elections. The US now just can't get over what happened almost 30 years ago.

And that's also why the U.S. Government refuse to even recognize Fidel Castro and Cuba, because he turned his back on America and seized up all the American business assets that were based and nationalized them.

We all know that Dubya rolled up into Iraq and orchestrated Saddam Hussein's execution because Hussein attempted to assassinated Dubya's father after he left the Oval Office.

America is one of the most nationalistic/jingoistic countries the planet has ever seen -- it leads to us being basically an ideologically isolated nation, and the US's mindstate is that of The Zero Sum Game, but it's not the case. Many times when the U.S. does "bad" to other countries its believing that those antagonistic actions must to some "good" for the USA. But that's not all the case, in fact it's ultimately rarely the case.

The US Government has been so preoccupied with the Middle East since the 2nd Intifadah erupted in the fall of 2000, that its basically lost its ability to influence other places on the globe -- like Latin and South America. Do you honestly think that if GI Joes weren't getting their asses handed to them in Fallujah, that Dubya and Rummy wouldn't have thought twice about sending in troops to displace Hugo Chavez?

Endorsements

This is late but...

Over the weekend Barak Obama stormed through South Carolina and took the state, and with something like 25% white votes (up from 10% only a few weeks before)… which is huge.

But what’s really huge is Carolyn and Ted Kennedy


Carolyn Kennedy, the last of those connected with JKF said in the NYTimes Op-Ed the other day“we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.” in regards to supporting Barak Obama.

Now I have to say that the forced parallels between Obama and JFK are interesting, yet scary at the same time. When JFK was running for office, Dwight Eisenhower was gearing up to warn the country about the frightening rising power of the military industrial complex. When Obama is running for office, Prescott’s grandson has been exerting that self-same military industrial complex at the expense of the United State’s economy and its geopolitical power/diplomatic reputation THROUGHOUT THE GLOBE.

JFK came from a rich family with money and political ties that pre-dated Prohibition – Obama’s pop comes from East Africa!

Carolyn Kennedy ended her op-ed piece with this, “I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.” Again the parallels with her Pops are endless, but most importantly

Lastly, will the most dubious parallel hang around Obama’s neck the way it hangs around JFK’s? And I don’t mean dicking down a famous movie star! (and truth be told, there ain’t no young star who’d be worth it – sure someone like Jessica Alba or Emily Blunt – don’t slip on this white girl’s booty!, but aside from that…)

Here’s the thing about Obama – he is getting the youthful cynics who have cringed at politics since they were kids during the Reagan era to become part of the process. Even if American national politics is the most rigged political theater this side of an African dictator claiming he wants democratic reforms, to have people actual giving a flying fuck about their future and their children’s future is what makes Obama a contender. Now, will a huge majority of white folks pull the lever in the voting booth when they reach the “nigger candidate” is the huge question… they did so in Iowa to a winning result, and they obviously did so in the Nevada and New Hampshire (but in large enough numbers).

On a side note, you know what is interesting? Why is it that when people talk about the lower classes in America, its referred to as “the working class”? When we all goddamn well know that what is meant is those who really slave for their minimum wages and getting pegging by that Dominatrix with heavy duty strapon going by the sobriquet of Big Business/Corporate America?

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