Barak Obama is no Dennis Kucinich, or Paul Wellstone, but He'll Do, I Guess

"Everybody is trying to figure out the process, get registered and understand the politics, to get involved, to be a part of all this, and it's happening! It's happening, in our lifetime."
-Ngia Lawrence

"The structural reality of electoral politics vis-a-vis the much broader democratic necessity of mass-based political education and mobilization is precisely the tension between unavoidable contradictions and constraints that are the automatic result of engaging people to organize on behalf of much larger goals than merely getting someone elected."
-Professor Kofi Natambu

"I suppose it's race you're talking about? Imaginary Blackness and imaginary whiteness? Excuse me, but where does that leave me?"
-Dr. Yvonne Singh

“Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”
-Saul Alinski





ONE.
"Change you can trust"? My leftist Black, Jewish, and Italian-American mentors from my Detroit elementary schoolling up through my graduate education at Cornell had always taught me to recognize the bitter truth Saul Alinski preached: 'change' is a terrible thing. It requires bloodshed at the most, and demands the deaths of sacred cows and the discomfiture of power elites at least. So, the psychic disonance of the phrase, "change you can trust" put me off when I first heard the Obama campaign use it.


Yes, I confess that it took me some time to get with the Obama program.




TWO.
Now, on the eve of 'Little Super Tuesday'--the Texas and Ohio primaries, I support Barak H. Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, but like about 20-30% of his supporters, I didn't start out as an Oba-mite. As a supporter of Kucinich (D-Ohio) in the 2004 presidential election, and then a supporter of John Edwards (D-NC) in this one, I had found Obama's progressive-light patter and his John Kennedy redux demeanor a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g. I was annoyed too, by the band wagon jumping I perceived Black friends and fellow Black intellectuals to be engaging in by jumping onto an Obama good feeling express and talking as if a bourgeois social democratic centrist could, by dent of our collective wishful thinking, be taken as a progressive. I mean for Chrissakes, the man said things like this:

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they
sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can
make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that
the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And
they want that choice.
[Barak Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention
Keynote Address]

What exactly did he mean? He was always heavy on the figurative language ("the doors of opportunity") on vague, progressive sounding abstractions ("...with just a change in priorities..."), and meanwhile he liberally peppered his discourse with what sounded alot like conservative codes meant to appeal to what media flaks call his milk-source, the 'independents' presumably, who some of those flaks and even some legitimate analysts say are really just faithless republicans and soft headed 'libertarians'. Perhaps those conservative codes ("No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems") are slipped into his discourse to appease those who probably don't trust talk of 'change' if the talk is not of a libertarian complexion. The twenty-to-thirty percenters, those independents, republicans ("Obamacans"? yuck), and libertarians, are reportedly joined by so-called 'swing voters' of which I guess I am one: people who don't remain loyal to the two corporate political parties at the top of the food chain but who know better than to look to a Green Party gaining a significant foothold in America before the year 2040, and who 'swing' between the two parties from election to election, or who 'swing' from candidate to candidate, at local, state, and national levels. In short, who knows, I wondered, what this man means?




THREE.
Obama's nod to US politics' obligatory crypto rejection of socialism worried me. I'm with Thom Hartmann; I think government can solve my damn problems and should. Democratic electoral, government should, that is. In a democracy I am the government, right? Is Exxon gonna solve my problems? Is Dupont? I think we all know that Haliburton sure won't. These runaway corporate fiefdoms exerting their wills over my government--and therefore over me--are the problem. As Hartmann rationally reminds us on his Air America radio program, socialism is not a dirty word. The government is not some foreign invader, as that old fart, Ronald Reagan used to meander around muttering ("The nine most terrifying words in the English language," Reagan used to demure, "Are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.' "). Government, Hartmann argues, practises a practical socialism every day and does so quite efficiently and much to our approval, by providing fire department, post office, and social security services. If politicians in the traditional mold (mould?) feel that they must renounce socialism, it's a manifest hypocrisy when they do so since they don't renounce the US mail, meat inspection, FAA standards for airlines, their grandmother's social security check, or the neighborhood fire fighters ready to extinguish any blazes that might erupt inside said politicians' homes.

I was not at first for Obama because realpolitik Obama is squarley rooted in centrist position. His voting record in the senate, his speeches, and his books all bespeak this utilitarian fact. He was vague and symbolic a year ago in his Feb 2007 speech in Springfield, Illinois announcing his candidacy:

In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle,
that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching
for what's possible, building that more perfect union. [Obama, 2007]

Meanwhile, John Edwards, in anouncing his own candidacy chose to do it in the still ravaged New Orleans 9th Ward, standing amidst the debris that was still scattered in the devestated streets. Throughout his campaign he promised if elected to enact a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, and promised to spend our wealth not on corporate wars but on domestic social problems. He gave speeches and Q&A's across the country, standing atop steam shovels, bull dozers, farming combines, on makeshift platforms in the yards of factories, and in impoverished communities. More than simply offering another byzantine and numbingly detailed health care plan, he, unlike Obama and Clinton, took the further rhetorical step of denouncing the pharmaceutical campanies making obscene profits off the health care mess in America. His was an insurgent, populist campaign, and he said so: "This campaign will be a grass-roots, ground-up campaign, where we ask people to take action."

In his June, 2006 "Take Back America Conference" remarks in Washington, DC, Obama said,

The world has changed. And as a result, we've seen families work harder for less and our jobs go overseas. We've seen the cost of health care and child care and gasoline skyrocket. We've seen our children leave for Iraq and terrorists threaten to finish the job they started on 9/11. But while the world has changed around us, too often our government has stood still. Our faith has been shaken, but the people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe again. It's the timidity - the smallness - of our politics that's holding us back right now. The idea that some problems are just too big to handle, and if you just ignore them, sooner or later, they'll go away. That if you give a speech where you rattle off statistics about the stock market being up and orders for durable goods being on the rise, no one will notice the single mom whose two jobs won't pay the bills or the student who can't afford his college dreams. That if you say the words "plan for victory" and point to the number of schools painted and roads paved and cell phones used in Iraq, no one will notice the nearly 2,500 flag-draped coffins that have arrived at Dover Air Force base. Well it's time we finally said we notice, and we care, and we're not gonna settle anymore. [Barak Obama, June, 2006]

Just as I feel that Edwards' constant rhetorical attacks on the true enemies of the American people (i.e., corporations) were illustrative of his aborted campaign and of his possible presidency, I felt that Obama's keynote address, his candidacy announcement, and his "Take Back America" remarks were all typical of his fatuous rhetoric. Obama says, "Our faith has been shaken." Not mine, thanks, I'm agnostic. Obama says, "The people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe." Believe in what? I believe in a windfall profits tax, and labor law reforms, and a seat in the cabinet for a secretary of worker rights, and price and dividend control, and rescinding the patriot act, and how about a superfund to clean up radioactive and chemical spills across the U.S., and how about getting rid of the ruinous Taft-Hartley Act, and while we're at it, we need a full employment bill, and we need to finally pass the ERA (neither Obama nor Clinton truly speak up for women's rights if neither will even utter that acronym). We need to enforce the EPA laws, the anti-trust laws, and the authority of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. I believe in legislation to establish a living wage. I believe in reinstituting the Fairnes Doctrine, and I believe in a progressive tax that would eliminate most corporate welfare, corporate shelters, and offshore corporate shells. The first thing I believe a president should do in January, 2009 is to outlaw Haliburton corporation's escape with our stolen tax dollars to Dubai. That, I believe.

Obama, it seemed to me, was too busy drawing on crypto religious-right codes in talking about 'belief', to utter any overtly socialist noises--the noises Kucinich and Edwards regularly voiced on behalf of a mass democracy. Obama's stump speeches had been just as rhetorically suspect to me. "I've got ten point plans all OVER my website," he recently shouted to one of his rockstar stadium sized crowds in response to reports that Hillary Clinton had accused him, spuriously, of having no 'plan' for something or other. Funny; between the two senators, Clinton and Obama, they have taken some 900 votes, and according to Meet The Press analysts (on the Sunday, March 2 2008 Boradcast) they voted exactly alike 90% of those votes. They are in some ways a two-headed wrestling match, each head battling the other while sharing the same body of ideology. They carp at each other over mundane details while both refusing to name names.

Yeah. That's just it. Kucinich named names and announced necessary socialist solutions to the rot that has become of American social and economic reality. Edwards went so far as to define the real class conflicts that define American life, and named the corporations that need to be beheaded. He was downright (gasp!) Marxist at times in his call to lift up the masses in order to save the middle class: trickle up as opposed to trickle down.



FOUR.
On the eve of Little Super Tuesday, I now support Obama, nevertheless.


The alternative, now that Edwards is gone, is what seems to me more and more like a Hillary Clinton continuation of the politics of what I call "Bushido" (like some fuedal Japanese masochistic warrior code, Bush-ism entails the gleeful willingness to slit one's own belly open for the sake of tax cuts, war, ballooning budgets, and of social spending cuts).

Though I now support Obama, I feel much what Alexander Cockburn expressed in his Feb 18 2008 column in The Nation, where he wrote, "I'll forgive Obama a couple of his hot-air speeches just for wiping out the Clintons in South Carolina." And yes, like many other Black intellectuals my age and my political cut (yes, I admit it, I'm a Marxist), part of why I reluctantly clambered up onto the crowded Obama wagon was an abiding low-level disgust I've always felt with the conceits of what I call The Clintonia Stankonia that has, let's face it, Always been there, a sour smell to those of us who've supported the Clintons. I was a columnist and reporter for the Ithaca Times in upstate New York the year that Clinton won the Democratic nomination for his first presidential bid, and I recall publishing in my newspaper one of the hundreds of cautionary 'slick Willie' pieces being published at the time throughout the country. My own piece took Bill Clinton to task for his truculence and rhetorical opportunism, and for his DLC-bred conservatism. I voted for him, but many of us who voted for him didn't trust him, and it turned out there was good reason to hold one's nose that year while pulling the lever for the democrats. As Christopher Hayes wrote in a recent issue of The Nation,

Clinton's fundamentally defensive conception of how to defuse the Republicans on national security (neutralizing their hawkishness with one's own) is an example of a larger problem, rooted in the fact that so many of her circle served in her husband's Administration. Their political identities were formed in the crucible of crisis, from the Gingrich insurgency to the Ken Starr inquisition. The overriding imperative was survival against massive odds, often with a hostile public, press or both. Like an animal caught in a trap that chews off its leg to wriggle away, the Clinton crew by the end of its tenure had hardly any limbs left to propel an agenda. The benefit of this experience, much touted by the Clintons, is that they know how to fight and how to survive. But the cost has been high: those who lived through those years are habituated to playing defense and fighting rear-guard actions. We know how progressives fared under Clintonism: they were the bloodied limbs left in the trap. Clintonism, in other words, is the devil we know. [Christopher Hayes, The Nation, Feb 18, 2008]

And we know, and know, and know, as we watch the incipient paternalism and arrogance that has flowed from the Hillary Clinton campaign, from Hilary's brittle, cold attitude toward t, he voters as she organizes from the right in terms of policy formation, touting the same old Clinton gang from her husband's administration, plus new "Hillaryland" aids brought into The Kindom for Hillary's senate campaign. Some of those personages are of course Mark Penn, Dwight Jewson, the fired Patti Solis Doyle, Mandy Grunwald, Harold Ickes, (and, I strongly suspect, James Carville, on the downlow, shilling for Clinton under the radar), and various other former West Wing advisors and 'Hillaryland' aids. Solis Doyle had coined the term, "Hillaryland" to describe the staff and entourage around Hillary during the Clinton administration and after. These familiar Clinton Kingdom courtiers were and are the ones who carried out the Clinton Way: rhetorical spin, message management, focus groups, polling regimes, media doctoring of image, and message placement. Michael Tomsky's book, "Hillary's Turn," on the senate campaign Hillary mounted in 2000, stresses the continuity of the Clinton Way from the administration to the senate campaign.

FIVE.
There is an abiding arrogance and sense of entitlement displayed by Senator Hillary Clinton in her bid for the democratic nomination. She is disturbingly truculent in her willingness to use the very same attack ads and dirty ad hominem tactics against Obama that were used by the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" against her and her husband during the Clinton administration (including the recent, disorientingly rediculous charge she made that Obama 'plaigerized' Duval Patrick's words, and that Obama is somehow dishonest and reprobate merely for presuming to challenge her policy positions). The Clinton Way obtains, and it carries with it the sour smell of mendacity. Joshua Green, in his recent Atlantic Monthly piece, "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up", addresses that arrogance of the Clinton Way--That Way, which, for me, watching It , smelling It, began my process of moving toward supporting Obama. Green writes of that mendacious attitude of the Clintons being,

An arrogance that I think is the key to understanding all that has gone
wrong for the Clinton campaign....Such arrogance led directly to the idea
that Clinton could simply project an air of inevitability and be assured her
party’s nomination. If she wins—as she very well might—it will be in spite of
her original approach. As one former Clinton staffer put it to me last
spring: “There was an assumption that if you were a major donor and wanted
to be an ambassador, go to state dinners with the queen—unless you were an
outright fool, you were going to go with Hillary, whether you liked her or not.
The attitude was ‘Where else are they going to go?’ ” [Joshua Green, Atlantic
Monthly, Feb 18, 2008]

Where else indeed. Go to their separate websites and read, read, read until your eyes glass over, and you'll discover that, policy-wise at least, there's not a ducat's worth of difference between the finer points of Clinton's numbingly detailed proposals and Obama's just as detailed and just as numbing wonkery. They're both post-DLC democrats, after all. In the debates the two have tended to carp at one another not over macro-theoretical differences in conception and execution (no conflicting methodologies calling up contrasts between the perspectives of exemplars of the American left such as samuel Gompers, Franklin Rooseveldt, Shirley Chisolm, Delores Huerta, Walter Reuther, and Fannie Lou Haimer) but over petty, micro-tonal grace notes which are the only things really that are pass for distinguishing factors in the sing-song sameness of two democrats who basically read from the same score. Obama approaches the center from the left, Clinton from the right, but they both meet in the middle; the middle-America, middling miasma of what democrates are, sans the courage and the vision of a Wellstone (D-MN), a Maxine Waters (D-CA), Edwards (D-NC), Kucinich (D-OH), a Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL), a Bernie Sanders (D-VT), a Shelia Jackson Lee (D-TX), or Barney Frank (D-MA), best of the democratic party, none of whom were given cabinet positions in the Clinton White House.

And so, Bill Clinton's recent, embarassingly patronizing rebuke of Obama turned my eye toward 'where else' we might be able to go. Bill charged that Obama's claim of having a different position on the war than Hillary is 'a fairytale,' saying, "give me a break" when asked about Hillary's voting to give Bush authority to attack Iraq.i "It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates," Clinton complained, "Trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, numerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution?' " Picyunne though this thin difference is, perhaps Bill is correct to point out Obama's seeming contradiction. Perhaps I am being naive in my own assumption that Obama was simply being honest in '04 and is now simply demonstrating that he has grown more alienated from the Bush regime. Perhaps I'm equally naive to wish that Hillary would have found it in within herself to be more alienated from Bush than her voting record suggests. Maybe Bill is right that again, there's not a ducat's worth of difference between his wife and the man from Illinois. Yet, the smirk that hovered on Bill's lips as he spoke those words, his attitude, which I felt conveyed the deep seated Clinton belief that only they can reasonably or legitimately lay claim to political power and that those who support them would be fools to consider anyone else, well, it galled me. Not his defense of his wife, but his arrogance as he did it--that is what made me recoil.

Then, there was the less covered remark made by Hillary that nevertheless spooked me: in a moment of supposed 'vulnerabilty' she weepily spoke of how 'some people think elections are a game,' implying that if one is progressive and does not support her then one is not being serious. "Some of us are ready [for power] and some of us are not," she intoned. It is a familiar Clintonia-Stankonia message. BET Founder and Black media millionaire Bob Johnson carried the Stankonia message in Black face, saying at a rally that Obama can only be taken seriously if the election were a movie. "This is real," Johnson stressed, staying on message for The Stank. The implication was that Clinton is real, Obama is not.

Therein perhaps lies the key to why those of us who, although reluctantly, have clambered up onto the Obama wagon. Clintonia emphasises that same old tired zero sum gaming; the idea that any ally (such as Lani Guiniere), any near-core belief (such as protection of the Fairness Doctrine), can and should be jettisoned in the name of winning and of protecting The Kingdom won. Along the way, the Clintons polarize and bifurcate (left and right, us and them, top and bottom), and the old trickle down theory of power lives with fierce tenacity in them (the Clintons, products of the DLC era are definitely top down politicians who see constituencies, aids, appoitees and the like as their soldiers, their rank and file meant to follow marching orders so that we can benefit from the scraps left from their victory feast). It sours one's desire to support them whole heartedly. Though he won't speak of it, this just might be what soured Al Gore so much, leading to the cold shoulder he gave and got to and from the Clintons through the last of the administration, through Hillary's run for the senate, and through Gore's run for president that seemed to operate outside of the golden glow of The Kingdom. Gore seemed to have lost heart in the end, perhaps even to have been broken hearted. It may have been the Lewinsky scandal, which, reportedly, Gore never got over being disappointed about, or it may have been the gradual betrayel of so many of the social policies Gore held dear. For whatever reason, Gore lost heart.

It is not the heart that Clintonia aims for, but the feet: we must accompany them on their long march, conceived at Yale and begun with the governorship of Arkansas, as foot soldiers in the Stankonia army: from Hope to the governor's mansion in litle rock, to the White House to the Senate and finally now the White House again.











It's all been one long campaign for them, never ending and played as a blood sport, if Joe Klein's 1996 book fictionalizing the Clintons, "Primary Colors" is on the mark. If it isn't, then certainly James B. Stewart's 1997 non fiction book, "Blood sport: The President and his Adversaries," about the Whitewater affair, for all its sensationalizing of the Clintons' war against their legion of enemies, penetrates to a crucial, uncomfortable truth about the Clintons: they fight, succeed, thrive, and perform best when they are wounded, hounded, and beseiged. Meanwhile, those loyal to them often are maimed and bloodied by, even fall beneath the onslaught (whatever else "Blood Sport" isn't, as Michael Isikoff dismisses it in his 1996 National Review rebuke of Stewart, one thing it is, is a glimpse into the grand guigonol sufferings of Clinton loyalists, Jim and Susan McDougal, who by the media and legal abuse they took over Whitewater, paid for their loyalty to the Clintons by Jim's certainly exacerbated illness and his subsequent death, and by Susan's years of incarceration and persecution at the hands of Dark Lord, Ken Starr.














SIX.
And it gets worse. One could get lost venturing down the dark corridoors of Clintonia Stankonia bloodletting. These two have indeed been the target of almost psychotic hatred, and perhaps as psychotically, have adapted to it and learned to channel it, process it, even draw strenght from it. Doubt me on this? Read The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, from 2000, by two of America's better investigative journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. This book adds the tragic Web Hubbell to the list of victims of Clintons' enemies (he lost his career and serves a 21 month prison sentence). Then there is the truly tragic death of Vince Foster, apparently a suicide, possibly driven to such despair over the Stankonia price one payed for proximity to The Kingdom that he took his own life.















It it there I choose to stop. There are some things I really don't want to know or understand about the price the Clintons have paid and still pay, one suspects for their decision to go into public life and public service. Perhaps it is a price that has forever marked them, and perhaps it is a price that makes them hunting hawks to Barak Obama's Bluebird of Happiness. Perhaps I find myself supporting Obama just out of fear for him. Does he know what he has gotten himself into by going up against The Kingdom and perhaps becoming the first politicain to truly, soundly beat them?















I brushed off that one very stanky hint of this Clinton arrogance that has surely then grown out of their great public pain, when Bill made an ass of himself here in Detroit at Rosa Parks' funeral by dressing down the Black audience for what he deemed their attitude of disrespect. I defended him though doing so left a sour taste in my mouth. In retrospect it seems the "First Black President" didn't aprove of how Black folks here chose to mourn. Or, more likely, the first White president to have been thoroughly blackened by abuse, was letting show that capacity of his for a cold rage--it seeps from the edges of Clintonia; and however justified by the price the Clintons have paid, one must ask one's self: is it time, after nearly twenty years of Clintons and Bushes in power, to lay this pain to rest, to move on past the haunted political landscape of these past two decades, to, dare I say it, embrace 'change we can trust'?

Finally, it is Obama's effect on the democratic landscape that convinced me to leave forever the pain haunted land of stank. no more Troopergate, not more 'vast right wing conspiracy' if we go with Obama. Barak Obama's campaign has catalized a large increase in votership, in youth participation in the electoral process, and bi-party (as opposed to 'bipartisan') crossover among primary voters. In short, he energizes people on the left, who, like most sane persons, would rather look forward to something (the Obama populism) than labor under something (the Clinton legacy). African American professor, author, cultural critique, and publisher, Kofi Natambu urged me in correspondence to look to this populist element of the Obama campaign, rather than focusing exclusively on Obama the man. I had written to Kofi:

Kofi;

I am on a personal level very troubled by the Obama campaign not in and of itself but for the deep ideological underdevelopment it exposes in African American popular thought. The uncritical, utopian, and downright parochial attitudes and reactions of the working class and the masses reveals itself in the attitude that voting for Obama is a fullfillment of 'the dream' (whatever that is) and that all Black people ought to be uncritically, unquestionaingly overjoyed about and committed to Obama as a (finally, yes) viable Black presidential candidate.

And when contrasted against any (emphasis--ANY) of the Republican candidates, yes, Obama looks pretty good, and I'd vote for him in a heartbeat. Because he's a sane alternative to them, and because he's Black like me (more or less like me). However, he is not currently a nominee for president, he is running in the democratic primaries leading up to the democratic convention where that party (a party I do not belong to) will choose its candidate for the general election. As a primary candidate, to anyone reading news sources, anyone with a historical sense, and anyone who considers Obama's voting record as a fairly conservative Chicago machine insurgent senator, Obama leaves far too much to be desired. Of course, prominent Blacks in the left union movement, in trade union political organizations and from the old guard Black power movement (sources like Black Commentator, have documented these marginalized Black intellectual and political voices) have been openly voicing criticisms of Obama.

Contrasted to John Edwards, who was also a senator and who has a far more progressive voting record in the senate than does Obama, Obama is revealed to be a fairly empty signifyer. He delivers a rhetorical, empty message of cultural and racial unity and vaguely progressive proposals such as single-payer health care (albeit heavily controlled by top heavy government management rather than transfer payments through heavily taxing the wealthy) and withdrawal from Iraq (without a single word of criticism about the huge, so-called 'embassy' being built there for the purpose of future US hegemony in the region, nor a promise that he will end the CIA activities in the region, end the torture and murder of Arabs by the US military/corporate/intelligence apparatus, or end the illegal incursions across the boarder into Iran, and general counter-democratic manipulation of Arab states in the region. He won't swear against any future or further neo-colonial adventurism there). In short, for someone chanting, "Change you can trust" the Brother ain't talking about changing a damn thing as president.

Edwards, however, has gone on record during his nearly invisible campaign against all of these things, and has thrown in a proposal for a socialist universal health care system, citing Canada by name. Edwards has on top of that, called out by name the corporations he plans to bring to heel should he be elected. Edwards' voting record (pro working class, pro democracy and local power and control, anti-corporate and anti-intelligence regime in terms of foreign policy) begs us to entertain the possibility that he might be telling the truth about what kind or president he'd be.

Thus, we can see, in the disparity between how Edwards and Obama are treated/covered, that class is far more salient than race in this country. While the blatantly racist media cover a clown and fascist like Huckleby with more attention to detail and respect than they do Obama, still the media betrays its deeper raison d’être: to suppress class consciousness. Ironically, the white man, Edwards, has had his possible working class base undercut by the Black man's--Obama'--bourgeois message. Obama cuts right off the top of Edwards' base the Black and Latino and to some surprising extent even the long lost former democratic white working class constituency that would have rallied to a socialist message in terms not of race, but of unions, access to legal process, health care for the poor, full employment, an end to all wars, free education, full literacy, return to anti-trust, fairness doctrine, and NLRB standards.

Meanwhile, Black people, perennially unsophisticated politically, unaware of the
details of history (even recent history ) are as short sighted, no, blind in their support of Obama as they were in their naive embrace of a war criminal who rather than being hailed as a 'role model' for Black women should instead by tried in the World Court in the Hague for crimes against humanity (it is Condi Rice, of course, to whom I refer).

The troubling thing? As a Black man I am expected to take none of this into account and uncritically turn my back on the civil liberties, global freedom, and
unionist/socialist heritage of my people (Paul Robeson, Randal Robinson, Harry
Belafonte, Angela Davis, Iris Young, Fanny Lou Haimer, Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier--our Native American Brother, Denmark Vessy...well, you get me). I am expected to embrace Obama with no thoughts in my head and no fire in my belly.

I'm for a green party candidate, or for the Black female candidate who is currently fourteen years old living in Sandusky Ohio playing with her I-Pod and listening to Hugh Masekela who will some day be at the head of the Peoples' Independence Party with Howard Zinn and Studs Terkel as Emeriti advisors and Lani Guinier as campaign manager, Otherwise, I'll vote defensively for whoever the democratic nominee is, simply because we need to get the left hand of darkness out of the whitehouse before they kill the Earth. It would be nice if that default vote had a black face, but would be even nicer if he/she could be an insurgent humanist rather than a Chicagoan. It would be nicest of all if one could speak openly in public of one's criticisms of that Chicagoan without fear of being called a 'self hating Black man.'

Where is Boo Radley when you really need him?

Ray Waller

Kofi's response was thoughtful, and in fact turned my own thinking around. He responded to my email message and in his message took me to task for my political short sightedness. He reminded me of the reality of electoral politics. Beyond the mundane business of practical and theoretical politics, i.e., getting a particular politician elected, is the question, Kofi reminded me, of mass political organization. Organizing the masses can be enbaled or even inspired by a given political leader, and by necessity in America, it will nearly always be a liberal, bourgeois leader--such as Robert Kennedy, or . In Obama's case, an entire network of youth activists has grown up around the candidate. Even more crucial, his is a candidacy that for whatever reasons inspires a broad range of political constituencies that are coming together in an historically significant movement that can be harnassed for progressive purposes. Obama mobolizes a broad range of progressive coalitions seeking free speech, electoral reform, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, social reform, and corporate reform.

In the wake of Kofi's reminding me of the unavoidable problematics and contradictions involved in electoral politcs for the sake of mobilizing the masses (across the country, across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and region, such mobilization is taking place not around Clinton, and, to my grief, not around Edwards, and to his own grief, not around Ralph Nader, but around Obama), it began to occur to me that, yes, there has been a progressive vanguard in this country for a long time now--one of its major nodes bing the pacific northwestern states, and one of its major nodes of ideology being the anti-globalist movement. After "The Battle of Seattle" and the "Battle of Miami"; after countless skirmishes in American cities over NAFTA, the IMF, and the attacks on the G-7, where had that activism and counsciousness gone after 9-11 and the media black out of all forms of progressive grass roots poiltics, 911 having provided a pretext for the government-corporate elites to institute a political dark ages in America? They had not gone aywhere. They had not been asleep. They had been waiting for a vehicle through which to reemerge. For now, Obama is that vehicle. As Kofi wrote me, "No matter who is the nominee--Obama or Clinton--since our preferential ideological choice--Edwards--doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of actually gaining the nomination--we must continue to struggle for and actively demand that these politicians own up to the structural and philosophical IMPLICATIONS, if not the ACTUAL CONTENT of what they say. So the real job before is much greater and much more important than merely deciding "who" gets the nomination, and thus the opportunity to "run" for President. As activists, as intellectuals, as workers, as thinkers, as CITIZENS we have much bigger fish to fry. Because no matter "who gets in" from the limited field of what is frankly two rather highly compromised NEOLIBERALS at best (Obama & Hillary) WE STILL HAVE TO MAKE DEMANDS OF THEM AND PUT FORWARD OUR OWN AGENDA(S)."

Kofi reminded me of the words of the great cultural critic and Caribbean revolutionary, C.L.R. James, from his 1960 text, Modern Politics":

"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
-CLR James

Yes, we have our work cut out for us, is what Kofi demands we remember: it is not Obama who matters, but all of us here in this America that has been taken from us by a reactionary coup. It is our responsibility to take back America, as they say on Air America Radio, and to use whatever means necessary to do so. Up to and including taking back the Democratic party and rebuilding it in our own image, the image of the masses, from the inside out. Tom Hartman daily calls for this strategy to be implemented "Democracy begins with you--" Hartmna says, "Tag, you're it!" Obama is a vehicle. It's up to us to take the wheel.

Veteran left activist and theorist Grace Boggs was interviewed by one of America's best and last real journalists, Amy Goodman, on Jan 22, and pointed out the same deeper issues that Kofi argues us to recognize:

GRACE LEE BOGGS: Well, I think that—I think it’s wonderful, by the way, that both Hillary and Obama are running and that they’re frontrunners in this campaign, because I think they help us to see that it’s not a question of race or gender, it’s a question of whether we encourage the movement and unleash the movement of people from below or whether we try to run things from above, from the White House. And though I consider myself a feminist, I have to look at what Hillary stands for in terms of top-down leadership. And I have to understand—have to look at Obama and see that
younger people, a new generation is emerging and looking for the kind of healing that this country needs, that he has unleashed that, though his policies are not that different from Clinton’s. But he has unleashed an energy in the young people particularly, which has great promise. And he has also helped to unfreeze the unity that existed among blacks. He has helped us to see that all blacks are not the same. I think that people have become—that in the
interest of unity, blacks who have not actually been in the same place—some of them are in the White House and some of them are in the Supreme Court and some of them are in the Congress, and others are groping with very fundamental questions of daily life. And that that split actually exists in the country, that it actually exists in the community, but this campaign has helped us to see, to begin to grapple with that difference.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Grace Lee Boggs. She is in Detroit, Michigan. You are not usually deeply involved in electoral politics, yet here you are deeply believing in the significance of what’s happening this year. What has changed? And did you ever have hope in other electoral years, in other presidential—times of presidential elections?

GRACE LEE BOGGS: I’ve never had this much hope. I’ve never had—because I think this one is unique. You know, policy-wise, I think Dennis Kucinich is much more on the right track. In fact, I support him. But he does not have that particular combination of a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother that can help unleash different energies. You know, sometimes—he can’t help it, of course, but sometimes it takes a certain person to do that. And I don’t think it’s not—to me, it’s not so important, the electoral politics. How they will develop, I don’t know. But when I felt that energy of young people, and I feel it around here, and I think of what Fanon said about each generation emerging out of obscurity must define its mission and fulfill or betray it. We’re living at one of those tide times....Barack Obama used a phrase in his speech at Ebenezer,
which I think we have to sort of embrace. He said we have to lead “by example.” That’s what we have to do. He can do it—maybe he can. I don’t know. But we had charismatic leaders in the ’60s, and they almost all got gunned down. And if we depend so much on charismatic leaders, not only are they in danger, but we do
not exercise our capacities in relationship to our situations to create the world anew. And that’s where we are...What I’m trying to do
is encourage the capacities, the energy, the creativity, the imagination, that exists in people at the grassroots to redefine and rebuild our society. If we want to live in freedom from terror, we have to begin looking at ourselves, redefining who we are, redefining who this country is and reassessing what it is within our capacity to do.
[Democracy Now, NPR Radio, Broadcast Jan 22, 2008]

Let's give Christopher Hayes and Patricia Williams some final words. In his aforementioned Nation column he writes,

Obama's rhetoric tells a story of politics that is distinct from both the
one told by Beltway devotees of bipartisanship and comity and from the
progressive activists' story of a ceaseless battle between the forces of
progress and those of reaction. If it differs from what I like to hear, it
is also unfailingly targeted at building the coalition that is the raison
d'être of Obama's candidacy. Consider this passage from Obama's stump
speech:

"I've learned in my life that you can stand firm in your principles while still
reaching out to those who might not always agree with you. And although the
Republican operatives in Washington might not be interested in hearing what we have to say, I think Republican and independent voters outside of Washington
are. That's the once-in-a-generation opportunity we have in this election."

Obama makes a distinction between bad-faith, implacable enemies
(lobbyists, entrenched interests, "operatives") and good-faith ideological
opponents (Republicans, independents and conservatives of good conscience).
He wants to court the latter and use their support to vanquish the former.
This may be improbable, but it crucially allows former Republicans (Obama
Republicans?) to cross over without guilt or self-loathing. They are not asked to renounce, only to join. Obama's diagnosis of the obstacles to progress is twofold. First, that the division of the electorate into the categories created by the right's
culture warriors is the primary means by which the forces of reaction resist
change. Progress will be made only by rejecting or transcending those
categories. In 1971 a young Pat Buchanan urged Richard Nixon to wield race
as what would come to be known as a wedge issue. "This is a potential throw
of the dice," he wrote, "that could...cut the Democratic Party and country
in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half." Obama seeks to
stitch those halves back together.

Second, that the reason progressives have failed to achieve our goals over
the past several decades is not that we didn't fight hard enough but that we
didn't have a popular mandate. In other words, the fundamental obstacle is a
basic political one: never having the public squarely on our side and never
having the votes on the Hill. [Christopher Hayes, The Nation, Feb 18, 2008]

Williams writes, also in The Nation, about several 'dreams' that might hypothetically arise in our fitful sleep now that we are so near the morning after the long night of Bushido. It is her oronic "Dream Number Two" that I'll share here:

Dream No. 2: Barack Obama is extolling the love, fortitude and courage of
the woman who raised him "as a single mother." At first, the crowd imagines
he's said "black single mother." There is a pause, then a quick reconfiguration. Oh, yeah, his single mother was white. It startles. As the throngs look at one
another in wonder, they begin to see Lebanese-American single mothers and
Taiwanese-American single mothers and Irish-American single mothers. They see that black single mothers--even the ones on welfare!--have a lot in common with all kinds of other mothers. Working mothers of all stripes are magically gilded with halos around their heads, illuminated as those who perform the hardest juggling acts, whose devotion is tested every minute of every day and who still don't earn but seventy cents for every dollar a man earns. Close-up of
awe-struck faces as this realization hits a broad swath of the population.
Voters decide not enough is trickling down from Enron and the oil companies.
They join to revise the distribution of tax benefits; they join unions; they
lobby for quality daycare. Eyes spill tears of appreciation and contrition. All
boats start to rise. [Patricia Williams, The Nation, Feb 25, 2008]

Boats might rise. And not to mix metaphors, this sort of Audacity of Hope is the promise of a chastening and purifying fire that seems to burn in the center of the Obama movement even if not the Obama campaign. The man is a movement, yes, because of the motion of all our feet and our hearts. I'm on. I'm aboard.

My dear friend and fellow sufferer from our grad school days at Cornell, Regina Rodriguez of Obama's home turf--Chicago, is Mexican American, and I think of her and of her fierce progressivism (she too, supported Kucinich in 2004, and supports Obama now) when I read hastily thought out editorials about how Mexican Americans are racist, and may not want to support a Black man. Those same editorialists were arguing the exact opposite when Hillary fired her Latina campaign manager recently, saying Latinos were 'up in arms' over Hillary's appearing to be insensitive to Latinos, and that Obama would surely benefit from that. The vagaries of racial discourse and its subtly brutal offensiveness toward all "Others" in the Black/White dramaturgy, are what Patricia Williams is satirizing.

My dear friend and fellow sufferer from our grad school days at Cornell, Professor and working actor in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Yvonne Singh, who must daily negotiate an American culture rigidly polarized between what she calls 'imaginary Blackness and imaginary whiteness,' would and did laugh a lusty, victorious laugh at Patricia Williams' satire. Behind the humor lies the promise: a new world, or at least a new United States of Hegemony; one that finally slips the surly bonds of our fitful nightmare of (contructed) racial identity to emerge into a dawn of egalitarian struggle. Finally.

The fire this time.

My "Audition"

Hey, just some silly, shallow fun for those who read my blog: my "audition" for an animated Taco Bell commercial. How do I look?

Create your Gizmoz and audition to star in a Taco Bell TV commercial!

Perri Approves

In these dark times of proto/neo/crypto fascism, I often feel that no one can read anymore, that there is no more multi-vocality, that the master tropes and the master languages have all drowned out the vox populi, that subaltern voice that says, "hey, the emperor ain't got no clothes on!" (or, as Austin Powers says, stripping away the veneer of our so-cherished self deception, "It's a man, Baby!"). In these dark times of Fox TV induced mass hypnosis and Opra Winfrey induced crass non-gnosis, it seems that no one appreciates a good Miles Davis solo, that nobody gives a shit that Marlon Brando elevated himself from the level of nefesh to that of chaya in his brilliant furioso terce rima performance in "The Missouri Breaks" (say whaaat?--yeah, I know, sounds like I'm talking crazy, don't it? Only those familiar with Kabbalic text will get that 'levels of soul' thing with nefesh and chaya? I'm talking out of my head again, right? I'm being difficult, huh?).

But, guess what? Dr. Perri Giovannucci has given me the seal of approval on my "response to Coach". She wrote to me, saying:

"The mere fact that I use language to communicate ideas does not make me language's bitch." Oh my God, [Ray,] these must be the most brilliant words in the English language today! How Foucauvian! How Barthesian! I LOVE IT!!! I would place it in the footer of my email template so that it would go out on every email I send -- except that I'm looking for a job and have to communicate in a properly bourgeois manner with all the proper bourgeois out there!! But I warn you now, I will steal this and use it every chance I get! Way to go, Waller! You go, boyfriend! Love, P.

So, the rest of the pharisees out there can all go jump, you feel me? I can speak in as many voices as I want to, so there. Somebody approves, so screw you if you don't. Language is a glove, and if it fits, you must acquit. I am free to try on voices, flex my fingers, try on another one, make a fist, put on yet another, and wave goodbye. I done got some props from my ex breezy up in here, and I intend to continue to represent! As St. JErome said, Amor ordinem nescit and as Santa Clause's Old Lady said to the elves to keep up their spirits in hard times like these, adeste fidelis. So, adeste fidelis to those of yawl who know what I'm talking about, and the rest can eat shiznit.

Dig?

A Response to 'Coach' Regarding My 'Worldview'

Coach wrote:

Professor Waller, I enjoyed your interview on the Atheist Hour. You showed your ability to reason under fire, which is a very tough thing to do. I was quite surprised to hear that you do not have a worldview. A worldview is a collection of beliefs that one holds as one's presuppositions. A person interprets all the evidence gathered through her senses in the light of her worldview. I would say that it is impossible, as a sentient being, to not have a worldview: "The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group." (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=worldview) How can someone not have a worldview.

My Reply:

Coach;

Now, would you say this claim of yours (that it is not possible to not have a worldview) is a self-evident claim? Is it an a priori claim? Or, is it a predicament of language (I tend to think that the illusion language gives us that we are actually organizing the universe into definable catagories often misleads us into thinking we are making sense of things when in reality we are not making sense because there is no sense to be made)? I assume that you are too intelligent (I like your use of the indefinite pronoun, 'she' which implies that you are either a woman and thus a superior intellect, or a man who is sensitive to language) to say that your claim is biological (that way lay Hitler).

I'll tell you why I refuse to accept the idea that I must have a 'worldview', which I had hoped I'd implied strongly enough on the pastor's show, but of course, again, language often double crosses or at least fails us. I am PROFOUNDLY suspicious of this claim, in English, mind you, that I must have what you called "a collection of beliefs that one holds as one's presuppositions". First of all, why should I assume that they are MY presuppositions? Aren't they the presuppositions of the society and social sub group(s) to which I belong and which have conditioned my ideas, thoughts, values, and the like? In a sense, really, one cannot EVER have a worldview of one's own, since one's worldview is always that of some arbitrary social milieu.

Please don't imagine that I am just playing with language here, either, because I am quite serious. Logically, you will claim that having just said all I've said, I have in fact declared a worldview. Aha! See the slippery nature of language? How it defeats us? Linguistically, I cannot in fact claim to not have a worldview because the way in which grammar works will conspire to make me affirm the negative claim I make in the very act of making it. I will undo my own claim in uttering it. That's only a linguistic reality, however, I'd argue. And I'll take this idea even further: why should I not demand to be unmolested by the typically unsubtle English of "worldview"? What about the french, "approche globale", which translates as 'worldview' but notice how the French term eliminates the English-implied imperious gaze from above or without, in recline, and how the French language turns the phrase into an active rather than passive description--a 'global approach' not a 'view' as if from a rise or a remove. Then there is the wonderful Italian, "visione del mondo", which means something like 'vision of this world'. As is always the case with Italian, there is far more of a sense of poetry, imagination, and what Spanish speakers call "mente" (reflection, reflexivity) in this phrase.

You see, like so much else that happened between the pastor and me in our discussion, he compulsively tried to force, to superimpose his beliefs, his assumptions, his language, and HIS 'worldview' (concretized, fixed, and handed down from on high) onto me without my permission or even my own input. This is typical of contemporary American Christians of the Protestant type, I have found in my interactions with a wide range of people, including all sorts of Christians. Indeed, every religious group seems to have elements of this sort of force and domination at least at its edges or enscounced in its fundamentalists.

I don't have a worldview. I reject that idea, as is my right--I reject it's Anglophilic mentation and point of view, as well as the cultural smallness of its usage. Such is my right. The mere fact that I use language to communicate ideas does not make me language's bitch.

Warmly,

Professor Ray Waller

Max Castro’s Definition of 'Multiculturalism' is Dead Wrong

"Miami is where neon goes to die"
-Lenny Bruce

As someone who has done time in Miami (City of the padded shoulders, I call her--I lived there for nearly a decade), I still feel tied to the place, try as I might to clear my head of the art deco faces and poolside souls that float along Bird Road, sit stark still in sweaty exile in the stalled traffic of Highway One in South Miami, and hurtle down the Dolphin Expressway inside the freezer-cooled, sealed consciousness of Mercedes.

Even the supermarket parking lots are done in pink motif.

But Elian Gonzales be damned, it's in my blood for the rest of my life, that place, and I'll always miss Hialeah, and the Japanese dive I hung out at with Tony and Perri on Douglas Rd., and the blue skies like the face of Prozac, and so it is for any of us who ever lived there in paradise for a time. I am dying a slow death from three years now of missing real cafe cubano, my beloved media noches, and Little Havana's garish ethnic arrogance that spills West from the shadows of downtown skyscrapers along Eighth Street to crash right through the pretentious charms of Coral Gables with its nerve to exist right in the middle of Miami and yet have streets with names like Galeano and Phoenetia and Ponce DeLeon in sharp contrast to the rest of Miami whose streets are numbers not names (Coral Gables is my former 'hood', a place where GM executives, former Guatemala CIA-backed torturers and airline executives retire to) and on and on westward until it is no longer Little Havana in body but only in spirit, past the "Pasta Factory", past a hundred dollar stores and outdoor laundromats run by plaid wearing older gentlemen named Ignacio, past Florida International University (where I used to teach--greetings, Don Watson, I miss you, Jefe!) before hurtling in spirit into the maw of the everglades to die in the open jaws of an alligator.

Elian be damned, I miss that place, for all its corruption, hideous cruelty, and shameless insanity. Imagine LA without the restraint (yeah. it's that insane).

So when things happen there, I have an opinion about it. A while back, a Black Miami politician named Arthur Teele committed suicide in the lobby of the Miami Herald by putting a gun to his head and shooting himself after telling the security guard there to tell a Herald reporter named Jim Defede to tell his (Teele's) wife that he loved her.

No. I' am not making this up. It's better than both the screenplay and the novel I wrote about Miami while I was there, so I wish I HAD made it up.

Max Castro wrote about this incident, and the political corruption that infected Teele and led him astray and toward this uniquely Mimai (neon) method of self annihilation. But Miami is MY city too. Part of me sees it as my home, Pastor Cook help me. When I read the piece in Progreso Weekly by Castro, once-and-future columnist for the Miami Herald, I had an opinion of my own. I take exception to one small aspect of what he writes, though I agree with his general attack on Miami corruption. Below is a response I wrote and sent to Progreso editors. Don't know if they will publish my response to Castro or not.

But you get to read it here. Ain't you lucky.



1-15-06
To the Editors of Progreso Weekly:

I disagree with Miami journalist Max Castro that Arthur Teele's death is proof of the 'multicultural' nature of corruption in Miami. Castro claims that,

The Teele tragedy is not a story about “Another Black Man Done in by Media and
the Establishment,” as some would like to portray it. It is a tale about the
equal opportunity, gloriously multicultural and immensely seductive nature of
our corruption. It’s the one area in which we in Miami have achieved absolute
parity. Arrogance and greed, your name is Humberto Hernández, Demetrio Pérez,
Howard Gary, Cesar Odio, Alex Daoud, Miriam Alonso, Alberto Gutman, Miller
Dawkins, Jimmy Burke, Donald Warshaw, Dan Paul and…Arthur Teele, may he rest in peace. Black and white, Anglo and Latino, Jew and Gentile, there are no barriers
to misfeasance and malfeasance here, no need for affirmative action or
set-asides where graft is concerned. (Castro, Progreso Weekly, Aug, 2005)

Is Castro serious? I lived several wonderful, frightening, incredible, horrific, beautiful, and insane years in Miami and every year I lived there as an undervalued, underpaid, and powerless university professor in a racist and anti-intellectual city, only served to strengthen my conviction, from my Black perspective, that three things are inescapably true about Miami:

1. That there are few places on Earth more astonishingly beautiful than Miami—from the weather, the endless sky, and the dreamlike blue ocean, to the quality of the light that I woke up to every morning and the clarity of the stars in that tropical celestial sphere every night.

2. That the utter cruelty, brutality, venality and corruption, the materialism, and self aggrandizement not only of politicians and the wealthy, but infecting all levels of social life in Miami all the way down to the working class and the poor, is breath taking and disheartening enough to kill the optimism of even the most devoted of Samaritans.

3. That my own people, Black people, are virtually invisible in the echelons of every single institution of power in Miami, from civil to economic to intellectual, other than the roles they play there as in every other modern American city, as the inevitable gladiators of the sports industry, the singers and dancers of the entertainment industry, as a handful of corrupt politicians, and as a small portion of the Black clergy that is comfortably connected to mass media influence.

‘Multicultural’ is not a word I would ever apply to the Black experience in Miami, not even in terms of crime. Arthur Teele’s horrific death is but another nail for the box I’ve buried my Miami experience in; his death does exemplify exactly the “story about “another Black Man Done in by Media and the Establishment, as some would like to portray it” that Castro says it isn’t.

Teele, a Black Miami city councilperson indicted on ethics charges, accused the Miami police of stalking him, was despairing of the negative publicity he was receiving in the Miami local media due to rumors that he had been involved in extra-marital homosexual activities. After the apparently sympathetic writings of Miami Herald reporter, Jim Defede, who questioned the actions of Miami police in his Herald column, Teele apparently felt that Defede was someone he could appeal to and trust. On the last day of his life, Teele called Defede to talk about his despair, and ultimately ended up going to the Miami Herald’s offices where he shot himself to death in the newspaper’s lobby.

Max Castro’s article, published in Progreso (Progreso Weekly, Aug 4-10, 2005) claims that this tragedy exposes the paradisiacal image of Miami as being no more than a veneer over a ‘darker’ Miami; a Miami of deep corruption, a Miami of ‘multicultural’ vice:

magical realism had given way to noir, and the paper’s front page featured a
photo of Arthur Teele sprawled on the floor of the Herald building, his head in
a pool of blood. Wednesday morning’s festive, folkloric take on Miami was
overtaken by the night’s events, which lay bare another side of the city, an
ugly and brutal one, and the reality of real power versus the purported power of
the pen. The real city (Castro, Progreso Weekly)

True, so true. The long list of multicultural names of the corrupt that Castro mentions in his article, however, includes people who definitely did not end up dead in a pool of blood on the floor of the lobby of the Herald.

And there's the rub. Yes, Black men participate in America's corruption, and among Black Miamians are Blacks who are venal, selfish, racist, and materialist, and it seems that even in Miami, some Black leaders manage to rise to the top of the corruption heap; and in fact that is exactly when American corruption stops being a trough and becomes, in Max Castro's words, a VISE--that crushes the heads of Black men, I might add.

It's the oldest sub-plot in the American epic: just when Blacks (or browns, or yellows, or women) begin to successfully play the corrupt but lucrative American political and economic 'game' the rules change, or, in the case of Teele, the allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. In the American lexicon, it's not 'corruption' until Black, brown and yellow hands begin to do it.

Lest we forget, the weapon of alleged sexual scandal was wielded even against our most (seemingly) upstanding Black leaders, such as M. L. King, who, shortly before his assassination was threatened by the FBI with the release of photographs of himself allegedly having sex with women other than his wife. According to declassified COINTELPRO files, we know that such photographs were reportedly sent to King's wife by J. Edgar Hoover. As I sit in Detroit writing this, on the anniversary of MLK's birth, It is not difficult at all to imagine, regardless of evidence of Teele's corrupt activities such as money laundering (in fact perhaps because of them), that he too, may have been victimized by law enforcement officials seeking to destroy his legitimacy within the Black community.

Teele's claims of being followed by police officers, seemingly accepted as true by Jim Defede, and Teele's abrupt disintegration into dementia and then into suicidal despair seem all too familiar from where I sit, in Detroit, as a Black man in America. Right here in Detroit not long ago a prominent member of the Black community, a political leader in the state democratic party, Melvin Hollowell, was publicly disgraced by charges of sexual misconduct. As Detroit’s local independent weekly, the Metro Times reported:

Two weeks ago, the Detroit Free Press published two long,
front-page stories that graphically destroyed the career of — and probably
immensely damaged the life of — Melvin Butch Hollowell, a man who is not an
elected official or on the public payroll, and who has been convicted of
nothing.
He has, in fact, been charged with only a low-grade
misdemeanor. But they ran these stories, with large headlines (“Hollowell
accused of picking up hooker” and “Police report: Woman says Hollowell paid her
$60 for sex”) because they involved a prominent person and gave them an excuse
to write what amounted to soft porn disguised as journalism.
The newspaper described the supposed sex act in especially graphic detail in its
earlier outstate editions, basing the account on what the “known prostitute,”
also identified as a heroin addict, told police. (Hollowell denied doing
anything except stopping to help a woman he thought was in trouble.) (Jack
Lessenberry, Metro Times, 9/1/2004)

Mister Hollowell had to resign his position as a leader in the state democratic party as a result of his public humiliation.

Am I defending corruption? No. I'm simply pointing out the second oldest sub-plot in the American epic: when the Negro ends up dead his death itself becomes proof of how 'equal' we all supposedly are if not in any other way (and indeed, the "State of Black America Report," the Bureau of Statistics, FBI crime reports, national morbidity and mortality rates, and all other objective measures of Black life in this hell of urban America shows that we are not equal in any other way), then at least we are equal in terms of corruption.

Bull. As a former resident of Miami for eight years, living there as a Black professor, writer, journalist, and intellectual, I had long maintained that the hypocritical double standard that former Miami Mayor Joe Suarez was held to (they went so far as to question his manhood in the pages of the Miami weekly, New Times, which I publicly denounced the Times for doing--my letter of protest was printed in the Times) was a double standard that demonstrated that Whites in Miami saw no contradiction in 100 years of white corruption being rewarded (i.e. the elevation of corrupt oligarchs like Henry Flagler to the status of gods) while Latino corruption (or even the appearance of it, as was often the case with Suarez) is bitterly denounced. Must Max Castro be reminded that the St. Augustine Record, in 2002 reported these fateful words:

Flagler worth $100 million at death

On May 27, 1913, just a week after his death, the will of Henry M. Flagler - who was said to be worth $100 million - was made public.
The document created a trust designed to keep his businesses running and to ensure the continuance of Flagler's policy in Northeast Florida.

while this is a headline at Mr. Teele's death:

Arthur Teele Dies After Self-Inflicted Gunshot
POSTED: 6:32 pm EDT July 27,
2005
UPDATED: 12:07 pm EDT July 28, 2005
MIAMI -- Former City Commissioner
Arthur E. Teele Jr., recently indicted on corruption charges, died after
shooting himself in the lobby of The Miami Herald building Wednesday,
authorities said.
Teele shot himself in the head shortly after 6
p.m., police said. The Herald said it happened just after he asked a security
guard if he could see columnist Jim DeFede.
"He said to tell
DeFede to tell his wife he loves her," the security guard, Feliz Nazco, told the
Herald.
Delrish Moss, the Miami police spokesman, said Teele
died at 7:50 p.m. at Ryder Trauma Center. (NBC6, South Floria---NBC6.net)

Would Max seriously claim that these two Miami big shots, Flagler and Teele, are comparable as examples of the multicultural nature of American corruption (and of its spoils)?

I doubt it.

Pastor Gene Cook's Show, "The Atheist's Hour"

Well, here I am back after so long an absence--I don't look after this blog like I should, sort of like I am about my Marxism. It's always there, in the back of my heart and mind, but sometimes I go long periods of time not examining it. My beloved ex, Perri, points out to me that I'm really an anarchist, in other words, I like freedom so much I even yearn for freedom from my own thoughts, beliefs, and words. I yearn even to be free of my self. So, I often ignore me. Leads to lack of sleep, ill health, fatigue, not enough time spent with friends, and neglect of one's own blog.

Ah, well.

Another thing I ultimately am, and I'm more sure of it than ever, is agnostic. Not atheist, which I can't help but regard as the other side of the same coin as theism, but agnostic. I don't believe we puny humans (as Klatu would call us) can or will ever know the nature of the existence of God or Gods, and we cannot either confirm or refute the existence of God or gods. We just simply don't know enough of anything to even begin to test, seek out, or verify/repudiate such a thing as a creator of the universe. By the way, I doubt we are even correct in our assumption that there IS a "universe". That word is a conceptualization, a name, that we affix to the pitifully limited portion of the spacetime continua we think we can percieve. Electro-magnatism, gravity, the strong and weak forces, poor little Einstein, the smartest of all we puny hairless monkeys trying to create a 'unified field theory' to account for these ideas (ideas that probably are laughably far from the 'real', the actual '(T)truth' of existence, anyway) and Stephen Hawking gliding around in his steel auto-didacto chair, his spooky, synthesized voice mocking even the assumption that we CAN ever 'know' anything.

I was interviewed a couple nights ago by Pastor Gene Cook, a Man-of-God whom I must confess (pun unentended) I like, and whose radio show, "The Aetheist's Hour" plays on 'Unchained Radio' out of California--San Diego. Quite an experience to be grilled by a 'believer' and by the various 'believers' who called in during my segment with the pastor. You can dowload my interview at the Unchained website:

http://unchainedradio.com/nuke/index.php

but be warned, you'll have to register with the website first. Registration to become a user is free. Callers called up and challenged me about my a-theism, and about my uses of languguage, and it was no walk in the park. I had to defend myself. It was a good experience. Made me have to think consciously and by the seat of my pants about what I think and what I wish to defend. I gather I must come off to some people as uncertain WHAT I think. People kept telling me I have a certain 'world-view', which I feel a visceral repugnace about: what is a 'world-view' and which 'world' were they accusing me of viewing? If I hold one view at this instant does that preclude me from holding some entirely other view the next? Is that in fact, a view in itself? Does that question even make sense?? As Heisenberg wrote:

The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.
--Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927

The right to think anything and everything at once. That's what I stand for, that's what I defend. Not meaning to sound like Marcel Duchamp, but I'm afraid that's what it really boils down to for me: I'm a marxist, an agnostic, a Duchampian radical Incompleteness Theorum/Uncertainty Principle supporter (viva Kurt Godel and Werner Heisenberg!), and most of all, I suppose, an anarchsit.

Perri knows me.

God Help Us All

I recently got an e-mail message from my beloved ex girlfriend, Perri writing from Miami ('beloved' because unlike most men I am willing to admit that our ex-girlfriends usually deserved better than we could give them when they were with us, and because I'm damned glad Perri is willing to still be my friend). She was writing about the latest episode in the soap opera of cultural malice that is deforming American public life. I had heard about it already: that one of the icons of American feminist discourse, Erica Jong, had been treated like shite [kacke] by graduating seniors at the College of Staten Island during her address to them at their graduation ceremony.

To add insult to injury, there had been a particularly ungallant commentary written about the incident by Michelle Maskaly, a columnist for the epiphenomenal (you know, mental events are totally unconnected to material reality, and such?) newspaper, Staten Island Advance. Perri’s disgust over this sturm und drang was a notch higher than mine inasmuch as she had been moved to send an e-mail message to Maskaly. Maskaly’s column had read:

CSI graduation: Pomp and circumstance, boos and hisses
Author Erica Jong alienates some with the tone, length of her commencement speech

By Michelle Maskaly


Best-selling author Erica Jong was booed and told to "Shut up!" and "Go Home!" during her 40-minute speech yesterday at the College of Staten Island's commencement exercises.

As Ms. Jong, best known for her 1973 novel "Fear of Flying," talked about everything from truth in advertising to truth in politics and the shallowness of public relations -- but said precious little about graduation -- some of the thousands in attendance on the great lawn at the college's Willowbrook campus stood up and began to object loudly. A little less than halfway through her speech, some graduates began tossing around an inflatable beach volleyball. Some even got up from their chairs, just yards from her podium, to go chat with friends and family who were seated behind them. Ms. Jong, however, was unfazed.

She continued to speak as though everyone were listening attentively. "I'm a writer," said the author of eight novels. "I spend days and nights playing with words, trying to make sense of them. Telling the truth has never been easy. It's gotten harder." She complained that getting to the truth is tougher than ever because "words have been corrupted."

"Advertisers, politicians, celebrities, they all think they have a good reason to tell us the opposite of what they mean," Ms. Jong said. "They advertise products like Viagra that could blind you or hormone pills that could cause breast cancer. "Politicians speak the opposite of what they mean. They say clear skies when they mean pollution. They say collateral damage when they mean killing civilians." The public, said Ms. Jong, "writes off many lies as PR (public relations)" and has stopped expecting the truth. "Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes pledging their love to Oprah when they really mean PR," Ms. Jong said. "Do we really need wellness when we have health? News is what they don't issue in press releases."

Ms. Jong's remarks were met with some vehement disapproval. "She gave a political speech when she was supposed to be doing a pep talk," said the father of a CSI graduate who declined to give his name. "Some graduates wanted to throw stuff at her. Whoever heard of a commencement speaker talking about body bags?" Dorothy, a 48-year-old mother of a CSI graduate, categorized Ms. Jong's speech as "all-around bashing. "It was disgusting, despicable," said the Fort Wadsworth woman, who would not give her surname.

"She called politicians liars, called us all liars. She trashed America. Mostly, she just wanted to talk. It was personal spewing. There was nothing about graduation." In a statement issued through a spokesman yesterday afternoon, Dr. Marlene Springer, president of CSI, said: "We are delighted to have had such a noted author at our commencement. Her message, that we need to look closely at words and (that) their power is important, I'm sure our audience understands."

Ms. Jong taught literature and freshman English as a professor at the City University of New York in the 1960s. Her son-in-law, Matthew Greenfield, is a tenured English professor at CSI. In a press advisory about graduation issued by the college May 31, Ms. Springer lauded Ms. Jong for caring "deeply about her commitments." "Her presence is sure to be compelling, provocative and motivational," she said in the advisory. Ms. Jong encouraged the graduates to take what they have learned in the classroom and apply it to the world around them, and not to take words at face value. "Whoever controls the words is framing the debate," Ms. Jong said.

"You will be able to be framers of the debate rather than the people sitting there and listening to the conversation. Listen to what is said and question authority. I want you graduates to get mad when you're deliberately lied to."

[reprinted here from The Staten Island Advance without any permission whatsoever from anybody]

Whew. So goes the progress of a once-democratic society through the guts of a beggar, to paraphrase Hamlet, but here now is Perri’s message to the sagacious Ms. Maskaly:

Dear Ms. Maskaly, I'm sorry to say that I found your article about Erica Jong's graduation address at CIS to be reductive and biased.

You don't seem to have made any attempt to try to understand what her speech was about or its importance for the new graduates who are poised to enter their chosen professions. I don't say that you have to agree with Ms. Jong -- but simply that your article does little more than replicate some of the hostility which some members of the audience showed to this esteemed author and intellectual. Perhaps intellectual is the key word here. If the audience was anti-intellectual, that doesn't mean that you should be as well.

Your article would have done more justice to Ms. Jong and to the event of her speaking, hostile as it was, if you had at least tried to show some of the stakes of the talk and its reception. Otherwise you run the risk of sounding just as reactionary and small-minded as the disruptive graduates -- and, apparently, their parents as well -- at the ceremony. Small-mindedness and anti-intellectual reduction are not befitting of a journalist, don't you think? I'm sure that was one of the points of Ms. Jong's speech.

You might have learned something from her, had you made the effort to pay attention.

Respectfully yours,

Perri Giovannucci, PhD
University of Miami,
Coral Gables, Fl.

Bravo for Perri, though it does not appear that the Staten Island Advance has published her response to Maskaly, and though I fear public culture will only get worse in America. Women, Blacks, Latinos, Gays, Lesbians, and mein Gott, even the differently abled (physically challenged) are being demonized now by phalanxes of beer spouting, belly button brandishing Bush Kinder who want to party, not think about pesky little historical details such as the efficacy of the feminsit movement, the question of the validity of the Iraq occupation/genocide, or the public debate over political ethics or lack of same in our barely elected politicians.

And so, how de rigeur it is now to be stupid, bestial, gauche, and ignorant, and to be arrogant and self satisfied about what a pig one is.

The most disturbing thing I myself had already read in news reports about this incident, in which some of these so-called 'students' (walking beer mugs is more appropriate a description than 'students' for some of the present day anti-intellectual children on American college campuses--I ought to know, a few of them turn up in my classes--I'm a professor of English) started tossing a beach ball around as Jong was speaking, was that one oafish parent saying, "She gave a political speech when she was supposed to be doing a pep talk…Some graduates wanted to throw stuff at her. Whoever heard of a commencement speaker talking about body bags?"

"A pep talk"? That's what a commencement speaker ought to be now--a halftime cheerleader, a pep-talker? What's more disturbing about this oaf's statement? The fact that he's so stupid he doesn't know that during the Vietnam era there were thousands of campus commencement addresses against war, hegemony, sexism, racism, and patriarchal assholes like himself, or the fact that right now, in this current Vietnam-2 era (Iraq), the same thing is going on all over the U.S.; that commencement speakers are, just like Ms. Jong, addressing the issue of the coming needless deaths of many young people just like his own fool-spawn, who, if the oaf offspring is male, and even perhaps if it is female, may just end up coming home to him in a bodybag?

Shan't he feel disappointed about his investment having been spent in vain? He will have shelled out $4,308 per year in tuition in-state, or $8,908 out-of-state, which are the expenditure stats for parents of CSI students. See U.S. News & World Report at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/directory/brief/drglance_29040_brief.php to verify how much Pop got hopped on by Oaf Jr. Ah, well, his little oaf will at least get a free burial care of Uncle Sam if it comes to that.

Jong, like any intellectual, was committed to the truth of what she had to say, and not to the idea of being liked by the audience. I know from experience as a lecturer, teacher, and performing artist that there's a world of difference between sitting in a dark room hunched over a computer keyboard eking out rants, opinions, and spiteful comments as a weblogger and standing in front of a live audience all focused on your physical self ("How do you feel about critics who don't like your creative choices?" Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsallis was asked by a documentary interviewer. "I don't care," he responded. "See, I'm a Jazz musician. I know what it's like to walk out onto a stage and play some stuff that people don't want to hear, but I play it anyway, because it's what I have to say.") Erica Jong's calm and determination to continue despite the audience's derision and detachment was not unlike a good Jazz musician, a fine chef, a faithful revolutionary, or, oh, I dunno, an intellectual during the rise of Fascism in Germany after the end of the Weimar Republik (if the lederhosen fit, Amerika's fresh young graduates so eager to be off to the patriotik wars will wear them).

Jeez, I would say something about the irony of it all, but we live in the time of the aftermath of irony, don't we? Irony, like democracy, intellect, and civil society, are dead as doorknobs.

It's enough to make you fall into reminiscing about the era of the Clinton Presidency (Mike Malloy, of Air America Radio likes to refer to Clinton as “the best Republican President we ever had”). I have been calling the era of Clinton "The Interregnum".

An interregnum is often a period of relative calm, civility, and/or artistic and social freedom just after the decline of a highly organized, sophisticated republic and just before the rise of an empire, a tyrant, or a totalitarian monarchy (for example, ancient Athens after the decline of the 500's, BCE, Pythagorean and democratic republic and just before the rise of the Thirty Tyrants and the martyrdom of Socrates).

God help us all.

none of the perpetrators have been caught

" !!!!PAY ATTENTION!!! "

It is just this sort of psychotic shout that often begins the foolish communiqués I am moved to write about here and now.

These communiqués constantly slip past my spam guard and come to me in the form of uninvited e-mail forwards (with my own captive e-mail address buried among hordes of many others; the addresses of strangers). The particular e-mail forward in question starts off with that particular psychotic shout.

The psychotic shout was followed by these words:

The Latest Scam:The way the scam works is, a man slips into a women's restroom andsneaks into a stall. He waits until there is only one woman in therestroom in a neighboring stall. The criminal then stands on the toiletand points a hand gun into the next stall, demanding the woman's valuables.After getting her cash and jewelry, he demands that she remove all ofher clothing and kick them out of the stall. The thief tosses theclothing into a shopping bag, hangs an out of order sign on the restroomdoor, and slips back into the mall.

Oh, my. I should immediately alert my mother, my daughter, all my female friends to this dastardly activity, shouldn't I?? In fact, the e-mail forward urges me to do just that:

PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. This has so far been a nearly perfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught. Don't let this happen to another woman.

Yeah, women should not ever go into a public restroom to take a piss. Too dangerous. In fact, they should line up outside public restrooms and one at a time they should go in with their husbands, boyfriends, significant masculine others, or oh, I don't know, maybe go in with strong, brave men (Gulf War veterans, perhaps) who might hire out their manly services as 'public women's room valets' to accompany each woman individually into the enemy-infested public restroom to take a piss in safety. Right, Truth Seeker? Huh? Hehhh? Yeah, sure.

I am puzzled by what it is that drives we Americans to use the incredibly powerful technology of the internet as no more than a petty tin can on a string to transmit propaganda: infantile, adolescent, and mundane gossip, public safety tips, muck, and dirty laundry (actually, I’m not that puzzled. I figure it’s a mixture of narcissism and shallow denial--all symbolized by that nitwit popular saying Americans love so much--'have a nice day').

We e-mail this sort of trash across the Web rather than communicate with one another about reality (by 'reality' I mean not 'crime-blotter' gossip about scams, not local TV nitwit news 'tips' about how to avoid pan handlers and con artists, and not warnings about the dire need for women to be shouted at and warned about how not get robbed at the mall, but REALITY.

Let me re-introduce the concept of reality to you: it's the very basis of consciousness in a civil society--you remember civil society, don't you, Truth Seeker? Public education, public institutions, public health, public liberties, and public discourse all buttressed by voting rights, wage and price controls, freedom of assembly, and maybe even every now and then public protest. In other words, politics, history economics, geo-politics, news of the world outside the borders of this prison we call the United States, or even, (gasp) REAL SOCIAL INSIGHT).

Why is it that I never receive uninvited forwards about that sort of thing, telling women to NOT be afraid to go into public restrooms but rather to reject shopping malls altogether in favor of locally owned, community-based, shopping centers that cycle dollars back into the communities rather than shoveling their money down the gaping maw of the multi nationals that own and operate shopping malls that take women's dollars out of the city, out of the state, then out of the country to fund the building of more sweat shops and maquiladoras in Mexico and American Samoa, where women have far greater worries than getting robbed at the mall (where they have to worry about being raped by their foreman if they fall below quota turning out those Nike running shoes that cost Nike 75 cents per shoe to manufacture though they cell them for more than 100 dollars per pair once they arrive at the mall)?

Here’s something from the internet (Reuters) that I found interesting, that women are doing other than cowering in fear of public toilets:

International Women's Day Marked in Iraq
[March 8, 2004] International Women’s Day was marked in Iraq today with protests by several hundred Iraqi women demanding more rights (Reuters 3/8/04). Women in Iraq are facing violence, poverty, unemployment, and substandard water, food and medicine. Kidnapping and rape have increased dramatically in the post-war period. For the most part, women no longer go out in public unless an armed male relative accompanies them. And women may be losing in the political arena as well. The interim constitution signed today, while appearing to be supportive of women’s rights, may clash with provisions in the constitution which make Islam the fundamental religion and a guiding source for legislation. If interpreted conservatively, women’s rights may be restricted in the future.

What moves me to say all this is that the above forward and many other uninvited forwards I've received of late are becoming increasingly mundane, petty, infantile, and stupid gossip about safety tips, and various other useless communications which amount to people killing time with a medium (e-mail) that we could better put to use communicating with one another about the fact that we now live in a country run by the criminally insane (Bush, Woolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and the rest); a country that has discarded democracy in favor of fascism. A glorified "Nike- town".

That reality has made ALL our lives less safe, less secure, less certain, and worst of all, most offensive of all, it is now dangerous as hell to travel outside the U.S. since the entire world is disgusted and appalled by the tyranny of the United States, and likely to want to beat American citizens traveling abroad about the face and neck.

This most pathetic of these recent forwards (see the entire text of the forward, unedited, pasted below) is one which urges women to be afraid to go to rest rooms at malls because men are lurking inside women's rooms waiting to rob them, steal their clothes, and leave them naked inside the stalls. If I may do a bit of Derridian deconstruction here, the forward uses suspiciously boilerplate language that sounds as if it were lifted from local news reports (why is it that the robber uses a 'handgun' and not a 'gun' or 'pistol'? Could it be because 'crime-blotter' reports in local newspapers always use the term, 'handgun'?). There is no specificity to it:

This has so far been a nearly perfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught.

If none of the 'perpetrators' (the use of police procedural language here is odd) have been caught then how are we to know there are several of them, and not just one? Are we to assume that these crimes are taking place in so many malls that it could not possibly be only one person? Of course we are. The lack of a city, state, or even time period in this text (its rhetorical uses of timelessness and spatial ambiguity) creates the impression that this is in fact a ubiquitous occurrence. It's everywhere. Thus, no need to cite statistics, examples, locations, or any of the other details that would make this objective or credible information.

Presumably, women ought to stay home, only travel, even in daylight hours, in groups or with men to 'protect' them, and should be ever and always afraid. Yeah. Right. And of course, the people who mass mail this crap everywhere are obviously so naive, so gullible, that they don't stop to think that this country is now FULL of these kind of urban myths meant to further frighten and intimidate the majority population (women and people of color) into submission, fear, silence, and a sense of powerlessness as the REAL threat to women (which is a Hitlerian president in Washington slowly gnawing away at women's rights, women's liberties, and women's control over their own bodies) goes on committing his crimes against us all without accountability. I have YET to receive an uninvited forward denouncing the destruction of abortion rights, attacks on Roe V. Wade, and the elimination of unions.

The destruction of unions alone has been the major source of disintegration of economic power in the lives of women, since unions (nurses' unions, garment workers' unions, food service unions, teachers' unions, hotel workers' unions, etc.) have directly or indirectly accounted for some 90% of the accumulated wealth American women achieved between the 1940's (when women eventually came to make up some 70% of the industrial workforce and even after men returned from the war, remained between 25 and 36% of the industrial workforce) and 1980, the year that the Reagan backlash began eating away at forty decades of American women's economic gains.

I don't think women should live in fear of public restrooms, unless of course, they think that their greatest abusers, Ronald Regan and George W. Bush might be lurking in there waiting for them to strip them naked and steal their purses.

Oh, yeah, that's right: they've done that very thing to America's women already, haven't they? Stripped them naked, and stolen their purses. And just as the stupid forward says, 'none of the perpetrators have been caught'.

You have a nice day, now.
___________________________________________
THE STUPID FORWARD, Unedited:

Subject: FW: Warning-be aware / Ladies Please Read !!!!! - PayAttention!!!!!!!!! -

PayAttention!!!!

Please read and pass on to every women you know. Be Blessed. Subject: FW: Fw: Warning-be aware / Ladies Please Read !!!!!
The Latest Scam:

The way the scam works is, a man slips into a women's restroom andsneaks into a stall. He waits until there is only one woman in therestroom in a neighboring stall. The criminal then stands on the toiletand points a hand gun into the next stall, demanding the woman's valuables.After getting her cash and jewelry, he demands that she remove all ofher clothing and kick them out of the stall. The thief tosses theclothing into a shopping bag, hangs an out of order sign on the restroomdoor, and slips back into the mall. The out of order sign ensures no one willsoon come to the woman's rescue.

It usually takes an hour or two for thewoman to work up! the nerve to leave the restroom in the nude, givingthe criminal ample time to make his get away. The woman is left nakedand humiliated in a mall full of strangers.The best defense, say police, is to never go into a shopping mallrestroom alone, as only women who are by themselves are targeted.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. This has so far been a nearlyperfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught. Don't letthis happen to another woman.

A Book Review

It's been a while since I've updated this blog--been teaching, writing, hustling, forming new friendships, dissolving old ones (or, more accurartely, watching with regret while old friendships have dissolved under the incredible deformative powers of Bushnomics' reactionary social devolution and abuse).

These are hard times.

Yet, in my absence, I have encountered and been touched by so many amazing people. One of those people is John Saba--a humanist and mysitc. He is a Lebanese-American who lives just outside of Detroit in the city of Livonia, Michigan.

Michigan, like America, is very reactionary right now. The largest Arababic/Muslim/Middle-Eastern population in America is located here in the Detroit area, in the city of Dearborn, and the large Arab-American population is an occasion for anti-Arab racism among Detroiters--even Black Detroiters. This is saddening, and outrageous. I do all I can as a university professor, journalist, artist, and intellectual, to oppose anti-Arab racism, and to my shame and dismay, many of my own race exhibit this bigotry, when what we ought to be exhibiting is solidarity with those who are now suffering the racism and abuse we have historically had to suffer in America.

As many people will know, a prominent Arab-American citizen of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was unjustly arrested by the FBI following the 911 attacks, held in confinement away from his family and even his legal counsel for more than a year, then, finally deported, even though no evidence against him was ever produced by the government. Despite the efforts of his neighbors and friends in Ann Arbor, and the efforts of defenders throughout the United States, this poor man never received justice. So much for the assumption we all had and now feel less secure about, that Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan, swaddling place of the old "Students for a Democratic Society," and home of Tom Hayden, is a progressive city.

But back to John Saba. I interviewed him for the newspaper I work for here, "The Michigan Citizen," and although anyone who wishes to can view the published review at michigancitizen.com along with all the other journalism I've done for Michigan Citizen, I want to share that review with any readers of this website who come to my corner of it. John Saba, a proud Arab-American, and a man who professes compassion for the oppression of Black people, is an example of the diversity, humanity, and beauty of Arab-Americans.

As I sit here in my office on campus I think how there are many such examples here in the Detroit area. Right across the hall from me happens to be the office of a fellow professor, Alex Shami, who also happens to be of Lebanese origin, who is a valued academic and community figure here in Detroit. John Saba is not unique.

I feel I've let down my friend, Regina Rodriguez, who inspired me to begin this blog. I haven't kept up my writing here as I promised her I would. So, this is my return, and I will make more time in the future to share my thoughts with readers, and as always, it's all dedicated to Regina, with love...


“You are the Tabernacle of God”
Author: Dr-of-Divinity, John M. Saba, Jr.; Leadfoot Press; Detroit, 2004; 112 pgs.
By Rayfield A. Waller

Of Christian-Lebanese descent, Minister John Saba of Livonia is deeply spiritual. He told The Michigan Citizen he has ministered in prisons and homeless shelters in Detroit and other cities. He’s taken the gospel of Christ to street people, drug addicts, and the poor. He dropped out of medical school to study ways to heal the body rather than profit from illness.“I was working on human cadavers,” he recalls, “and after my first year of that I felt a little freakish — nothing they were teaching me would stay in my head. I believed God had a higher plan for me. I became interested in the body and nutrition.”

“You are the Tabernacle of God,” from Detroit’s “Leadfoot Press, is the result of Saba’s long, ecclectic search for that higher plan. The book is a series of carefully, minutely researched meditations on divinity and the body, an eccentric but endlessly fascinating decoding of biblical text. He uses as his tools ancient Judaism, The Apocrypha, Sophism, the mystery systems, and technologies such as acoustics, chemistry, genetics, and mathematics. Precedents for Saba’s absorbing book are both ancient and modern.His method is what I call ‘techgnosticism’: a dazzling and dizzying display of various esoteric, sacred, and scientific knowledges melded into one; a radiant synthesis of higher spiritual and intellectual precept.

The book evokes in the reader a euphoria of perception. This being the culmination of 66 years, a career in real estate, nutritional supplement sales in a company he founded, 42 years of marriage to Jeanine Saba--his ‘closest