CAPTION SATURDAY.

   

I need a caption for this pic.

For example: Carson: Donald, all that money and  you are  still rocking a Timex? Cruz:Mine seemed to have stopped. I bet it was made in China. 

*Pic from wired.com by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images  

He didn't have this dream.

        Don’t all of us have one Father? Didn’t one God create us?” (Malachi 2:10).

I saw a disappointing poll yesterday. It basically said that white Christians are more racist than non -Christian whites. I was disappointed but not surprised. That old saying about the most segregated time in America being Sunday morning is true. Let's face it, our Christian brothers and sisters  aren't exactly doing what JC would have done when he was chilling with his posse disciples back in the day.

I suspect that if you preached a sermon in one of those white mega churches down South about us all having one father the offering plate would be very empty that Sunday morning.

Which brings me to a Christian institution of higher learning, Liberty University.

Apparently the "chosen people" who are in charge of that little piece of heaven on earth decided that it was cool to invite Donald trump to speak on MLK Day. Yes, you read that right, Donald freaking trump!

I know that trump says that he has a good relationship with "the Blacks", but this is wrong on so many levels. It's like having Bill Cosby address a Women Against Abuse conference. Not cool.

"I said ‘No, it can’t be,” he said. “I double checked and triple checked. Immediately, it struck me as inappropriate and a lot of my friends as well.”                                                           

              

McGowan said he and some student allies are planning a peaceful demonstration outside of the security perimeter at the Vines Center on Monday. They plan to hold signs with Martin Luther King Jr. quotes and sing songs about equality and God’s love for all.

 

According to McGowan, they don’t oppose Trump speaking at Liberty, just the day he will speak. Trump is one of many presidential candidates to speak at Liberty University this election season. Others included Ben Carson, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz.
 

Reached by phone Monday, President Jerry Falwell Jr. said inviting Trump on Martin Luther King Jr. Day was a purposeful decision, and it was selected out of several possible dates.
 

“We chose that day so that Mr. Trump would have the opportunity to recognize and honor Dr. King on MLK day,” he said, adding it’s part of Trump’s plan for the speech."

You mean right after he says something like this?

“I have black guys counting my money. … I hate it,” Trump told John R. O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, according O’Donnell’s account in his 1991 book “Trumped!” “The only guys I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes all day.”

Trump, according to O’Donnell, went on to say, “‘Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that.”
 

No words.

*Pic from youtube.com


 







   

Republicans debate and you report.

    Unfortunately I will not be watching the entire republican debate tonight. I have some legal work to do that requires my attention. But because I want to be an informed voter and learn where the candidate's stand on the issues, I want you all (especially you right wingers) to watch it for me and tell me (based on what you see and hear tonight) why I should vote for your favorite candidate.

I will eagerly wait for your response.......

*Pic from usatoday.com

America's hopeless "color line".

Take it away Chauncey DeVega:

"2015 was a whirlwind year, full of miserable happenings and scant hope for those of us who write about and study the color line in America.

 

The Republican Party finally surrendered to the nativism, racism and xenophobia that it nurtured among its base for decades. This toxic mix birthed the ascendance of the proto-fascist Know Nothing Donald Trump.

Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald and so many other black and brown people had their lives stolen from them by America’s out of control, hyper-violent, militarized, racist police.
The right-wing news/entertainment complex continued to weaponize its followers. Dylann Roof followed through on his programming and killed nine black Americans after they welcomed him into the fellowship of their church community. Robert Dear also heard the drumbeat of hatred and lies turned into truths by Fox News and Republican presidential candidates such as Carly Fiorina when he killed three people at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado.

The old combination of guns, racism and toxic white masculinity was lethal in 2015. There is no reason to believe that it will be sated in the years to come.

Bill Cosby, once “America’s Dad” and exemplar of “black respectability politics,” was revealed to be a likely sex predator/serial rapist.

President Barack Obama continued to face strident opposition from Republicans. America’s first black president is entering the twilight year of his two terms in office with the lesson now fully reinforced that “hope and change” was beaten back by old fashioned racial bigotry and white racial resentment. For too large a swath of white America, a black man who is president of the United States is illegitimate: his policies, however reasonable, are to be rejected as dead on arrival.
There is an ugly irony in how America’s first black president, the most powerful person in the world, is in many ways a 21^st century Dred Scott, the latter a man deemed by the United States Supreme Court in 1857 as having “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”

For those of us who study race and politics during a time when white supremacy is resurgent, American empire is in decline, and the inhumanity of neoliberalism is accepted as the natural order of things, it is easy to surrender to racial battle fatigue. To resist this impulse, a person must develop mental and emotional armor. Ultimately, if the worst of human behavior is your object of study, it is easy to become cynical, to no longer be surprised.

Even by those low standards and expectations, the de facto street execution of a 12-year-old black child named Tamir Rice by an incompetent and emotionally unstable white Cleveland police officer, and his subsequent exoneration for such a foul and wicked act, shocked me.

However, the response by conservatives–in the news media, online forums and by at least one of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates–to the killing of Tamir Rice is potentially even more disturbing.

What should be a source of collective outrage and sadness has instead been transformed into an opportunity to lecture black people about “personal responsibility,” a lightning rod for virulent anti-black racism, a showcase for how white racial paranoic thinking always blames the black victim for his or her unjust killing by the State, as well as one more chances to make excuses for a broken American criminal justice system that enables police murder, abuse and violence against people of color, the poor, the mentally ill and other groups marked as the “disposable” Other.

For example, the comment sections at the website Cleveland.com (which is a news aggregator that also features content from the newspaper The Plain Dealer) were so infested with racism and hate speech against Tamir Rice that the site administrators deactivated them at the end of November.
Cleveland.com explained its decision as follows:

So why, a lot of you have asked, have we chosen to turn off all comments on stories about Tamir Rice?  

The simple answer is that we don’t fancy our website as a place of hate, and the Tamir Rice story has been a magnet for haters.  

We tried to maintain the conversation. The Tamir Rice case offers lessons for Greater Cleveland, and hashing out those lessons in an online community forum could be a healthy exercise. A lot of people firmly believe the police broke the law when they shot Tamir, but others feel just as strongly that the shooting was justified. Passions are strong, and because our comments section could provide a place for venting, we allowed comments on Tamir stories for months. We enlisted a small army on our staff to monitor the comments and delete any that violated our standards.  

The trouble was that we couldn’t keep up. Just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments. Rather than discuss the facts of the case, many commenters debased the conversation with racist invective. Or they made absurd statements about the clothing and appearance of people involved in the story. Or they attacked each other for having contrasting viewpoints. In many cases, well over half of the comments on Tamir stories broke our rules and had to be deleted.  

We ultimately decided that the comments sections of Tamir stories, overrun as they were by wickedness, were not contributing to the needed conversation. In early October, we reluctantly and finally decided to close down the comments on any news story about Tamir..." [More]

DeVega  goes on to talk about the rise of racism in America and the resurgence of white supremacy while the American empire continues to decline.

The state killing of Tamir Rice is just one example of many. Sadly, these types of incidents that continue to divide along racial lines have been the norm and not the exception since the election of Barack Obama.

I suppose we could blame the conservative media and their huge echo chamber, but I suspect that things would be this way if there was no FOX VIEWS and Drudge Reports. What is driving the America's racial divide is the fear in some quarters of the new America that is emerging and the thought that a person of color could actually lead it, again.

Like DeVega, I don't see the color lines in America getting any closer, and I certainly don't see anyone trying to bridge it.

Folks in the majority hate to hear about racism and racial issues because they believe in their hearts that racism no longer exists. And if they didn't, they would have the right-wing media to tell them that it really doesn't.

On the other hand, folks in the minority population see race relations getting worse,  and they believe in their hearts that white resentment and angst is only going to increase as the country becomes more diverse.

Of course we both can't be right.  Fortunately, though,  I think events in the coming years will show us all who is.

*Pic from huffingtonpost.com

 



  

 

Gloom, doom, and "brutalism".

  I must confess that I am as cynical as they come, and I trust no one. It's sad to admit to such a thing, but I basically hold a very unfavorable view of humans.

 But hey, I am a criminal defense attorney in a major city, and I preside over family law cases, so I have earned my cynical stripes. My question to the GOP is this: What's your excuse?

You are a major political party in what is supposed to be the most optimistic and hopeful country in the world, and yet, it's all "doom and gloom" with you guys. I could throw in "fear" in there as well.

I recently read an article  by David Brooks in the New York Times were he wrote about the "brutalism" of Ted Cruz, a man who I consider to be typical of the leading politicians on the right these days.

"In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years. 

 

Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.

 

Some justices were skeptical. “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your state?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked. The court system did finally let Haley out of prison, after six years.

 

The case reveals something interesting about Cruz’s character. Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.

 

Traditionally, candidates who have attracted strong evangelical support have in part emphasized the need to lend a helping hand to the economically stressed and the least fortunate among us. Such candidates include George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

 

But Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.

 

Cruz lays down an atmosphere of apocalyptic fear. America is heading off “the cliff to oblivion.” After one Democratic debate he said, “We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day, and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously.”                   

 

As the Republican strategist Curt Anderson observed in Politico, there’s no variation in Cruz’s rhetorical tone. As is the wont of inauthentic speakers, everything is described as a maximum existential threat." [Source]

 

But it's not just Ted Cruz. Watch the next republican debate and try to find a sense of optimism among the people on stage. You won't be able to do it. It will be all fire and brimstone, gloom and doom. America, if you let them tell it, is going to hell in a hand-basket, and getting their fast.

 

Watch Donald Trump and his brown shirt thugs get physical with someone at one of his campaign stops for just exercising their right to free speech. Or watch him single out some poor cameraman or reporter for derision from the crowd for just doing their job and earning in a year what he makes in an hour. Watch Chris Christie bully people for asking simple questions at one of his previous town hall meetings.  

 

This is the GOP way: Meaner, angrier, and louder than those soft, kumbaya singing, hand holding, dems.  It's become the party of John Wayne, and  not a moment too soon for their base of angry Americans looking for someone to blame for all of their anger. We will be tough, mean, and heartless, because that is what is needed to keep the America we love and cherish safe.

 

I am still trying to figure out what the hell they are all so angry about. And I am curious to know that if having someone from the majority population in the White House will cool some of that anger. I suspect that it will, because looking at it objectively, there is absolutely nothing for them to be angry about.

 

Let's "Make America Great Again!" If it will make you all less angry I am all for it.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"HAIL LEPAGE!"

      I saw Chris Christie making excuses for the racist knuckle -dragging governor from the state of Maine on television.

Christie actually had the audacity to declare that Governor Paul LePage is a "good man" who just said a bad thing. I am paraphrasing now, but basically he said that the governor apologized for it, and now it's time for us to all move on. 

Christie excused the man's racism and doltish behavior by saying that he was born poor and a had a very hard upbringing, as if that's an excuse. He wanted to know if we didn't all make statements like this from time to time.  

Sorry Chris, we can't move on; not just yet. The man is a governor and you are running to be president of the United States. Insulting an entire community with asinine stereotypes is not something you just apologize for (sort of) and  move on. (BTW, the real D-Money is white.) Sadly, if you are a bi-racial person living in the state of Maine, you are probably calling U-Haul as you read this. Your governor has just put a scarlet letter on you.

Chris Christie in his capacity as a presidential candidate, cannot just declare that it's alright to make such comments and that we should all move on from them. At some point Chris Christie has to cut his racist friend loose. He might not want to, but politics demands it. (I see you Rev. Wright.) 

I have to give it to the governor, though, he hit the holy racist grail with his comments: Black drug dealers sexually assaulting innocent white girls. Just wow!

Again, one of the sad aspects of this story, is that Chris Christie, a man who is trying to become the leader of the free world, found it necessary to defend this cretin. 

But we get it, Chris is trying hard to catch a man in the presidential primary who actually has white supremacist making robocalls for him.  Hey, it's tough keeping up with the racists these days. The bar has been set very high low.

But hey,  I am not alone with my outrage. 

"For anyone who truly loves Maine, it’s no longer just embarrassing to see this state’s once proud name reduced to so many national punch lines. It’s agonizing.

It’s also beyond counterproductive: The longer LePage portrays his state as a backwater of ignorance and intolerance, the less attractive Maine appears to the newcomers – of every age, religion and ethnicity – we so desperately need.

Instead, we get this endorsement from the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, described by the Southern Poverty Law center as one of the leading hate websites on the Internet: “Maine Governor Calls Out Black Drug-Dealers for Impregnating ‘Young White Girls’ … Excellent. Hail LePage!” [Source]

"Hail Christie, and Hail Trump.

*Pic from huffingtonpost.com

The "dream of whiteness".

 I told myself that I wouldn't be doing too much cut and pasting this new year, but every now and then I come across an article that is so on point and so in sync with my own thoughts that I just have to share it with you.

This one is from the fine Canadian writer, Stephen Marche:

"The border.

You feel your whiteness properly at the American border. Most of the time being white is an absence of problems. The police don’t bother you so you don’t notice the police not bothering you. You get the job so you don’t notice not getting it. Your children are not confused with criminals. I live in downtown Toronto, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in one of the most open cities in the world, where multiculturalism is the dominant civic value and the inert virtue of tolerance is the most prominent inheritance of the British empire, so if you squint you can pretend the ancient categories are dissipating into a haze of enlightenment and intermarriage.

Not at the border.

My son’s Guyanese-Canadian teacher and the Muslim Milton scholar I went to high school with and the Sikh writer I squabble about Harold Innis with and my Ishmaeli accountant, we can all be good little Torontonians of the middle class, deflecting the differences we have been trained to respect. But in a car in the carbon monoxide-infused queue waiting to enter Detroit, their beings diverge drastically from mine.

I am white. They are not. They are vulnerable. I am not.

Here’s the thing: I like the guards at the American border. They’re always friendly with me, decent, even enjoyable company. At the booth in between the never-was of Windsor and the has-been of Detroit, the officer I happened to draw had a gruff belly and the mysterious air of intentional inscrutability, like a troll under a bridge in a fairytale.

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

“Why would anyone ever choose to go to Burlington, Iowa?” he asked philosophically.
“I’m going to see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.” Then, because it did seem to require an explanation: “They’re giving rallies within a couple of days of each other.”

“Why would anyone ever choose to go see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders?”

I didn’t argue, because it was the border, but I could have said that the police chief of Birmingham estimated that 30,000 people showed up in Alabama to see Donald Trump in August and that in Dallas, he had filled the American Airlines Center, and that his counterpart, Bernie Sanders, has generated equally unprecedented numbers – vastly more than Barack Obama drew at comparable moments in the 2008 campaign.

“I’m curious,” I said instead.

At this point he asked me to roll down my window. But it was all fine. Like I said, I’m white.

I drove through the outskirts of the ruins of Detroit, across the I-94, one of the ugliest highways in the United States, the old familiar lightness fluttered to my heart. I love America. America is not my mother. Canada is my mother. But America is an unbelievably gorgeous, surprisingly sweet rich lady who lives next door and appears to be falling apart. I cannot help myself from loving it.

For people who love to dwell in contradictions, the US is the greatest country in the world: the land of the free built on slavery, the country of law and order where everyone is entitled to a gun, a place of unimpeded progress where they cling to backwardness out of sheer stubbornness. And into this glorious morass, a new contradiction has recently announced itself: the white people, the privileged Americans, the ones who had the least to fear from the powers that be, the ones with the surest paths to brighter futures, the ones who are by every metric one of the most fortunate groups in the history of the world, were starting to dying off in shocking numbers.

The Case and Deaton report, Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century, describes an increased death rate for middle-aged American whites “comparable to lives lost in the US Aids epidemic”. This spike in mortality is unique to white Americans – not to be found among other ethnic groups in the United States or any other white population in the developed world, a mysterious plague of despair.

In one way, it was easy to account for all this white American death – “drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis”, according to the report. It was not so easy to account for the accounting. Why were middle-aged white Americans drinking and drugging and shooting themselves to death? The explanations on offer were pre-prepared, fully plugged into confirmation bias: it was the economy or it was demography or it was godlessness or it was religion or it was the breakdown of the family or it was the persistence of antique values or it was the lack of social programs or it was the dependence on social programs.

Case and Deaton call it “an epidemic of pain”. Fine. What does that mean?

On the I-94, you do find yourself asking: what the fuck is wrong with these people? I mean, aside from the rapid decline of the middle class obviously. And the rise of precarious work and the fact that the basic way of life requires so much sedation that nearly a quarter of all Americans are on psychiatric drugs, and somewhere between 26.4 and 36 million Americans abuse opioids every day. Oh yes, and the mass shootings. There was more than one mass shooting a day. And the white terrorists targeting black churches again. And the regularly released videos showing the police assassinating black people. And the police in question never being indicted, let alone being sent to jail.
And you know what Americans were worried about while all this shit was raining down on them? While all this insanity was wounding their beloved country? You know what their number one worry was, according to poll after poll after poll?
Muslims. Muslims, if you can believe it.

‘The American dream is dead but I’m going to make it stronger!’

My body is white and it is male. It is six foot tall and weighs 190lb. It is 39 years old and it has had to start running. It has had to start counting calories. There is a tingle in the joint of my right thigh, so I try not to think about my body. The tingling comes and goes. I know my body is going to kill me.

“A man who fears suffering already suffer what he fears,” as Montaigne said. That’s one of the reasons why men die so much younger than women – six years younger on average in America.

Ninety-two percent of men say they wait at least a few days to see if they feel better before they go to a doctor, but I know what they mean by a few days. They mean a few more days than makes sense. It is hard to have a male and white body and to conceive of its weakness. In the same breath, my body cannot bring itself to believe it is the personification of power, though it evidently is in any rational accountancy of social status. It feels like a mere body. It feels mortal.

I’ve never been to a place as white as Iowa. That’s the honest truth. Whenever I go to America it’s New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or Florida. In Burlington, at Jerry’s Main Lunch, the signature dish is “the hot mess, eggs and bacon cooked right into the hash browns. The sugar shakers all have white crackers in them, to prevent clumping – a classic bit of commonsense American know-how. The hot mess is delicious. Why don’t they make these everywhere? Why isn’t there a chain of Jerry’s Main Lunches serving hot messes all across the midwest?

The answer is in the rest of the town: everything that’s going to leave has already left Burlington. The beautiful brick buildings downtown are mostly vacant. The most interesting street is the road out of town.
The Memorial Arena, on the banks of the Mississippi, filled up early. Trump wasn’t speaking until 6pm but by 4.45 the parking situation was grim. Outside the building, the hawkers who follow Trump on the road, event to event, sold T-shirts and buttons, three for $10. “We shall overcomb.” “Cats for Trump, the time is Meow.” “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Inside, every seat had been taken and the floor filled quickly with a standing room only crowd. Burlington is 10% black. The rally was 99.99% white.

The people who attend political rallies in America are a specific genre of humanity, like the people who stand outside in lines for nightclubs. They know where they’re supposed to go and how they’re supposed to behave when they get there. They have gear.

An elderly lady sat beside me wearing a sequined stars-and-stripes-hat she clearly takes out for just these occasions. “Y’all from Illinois?” she asked. I’m not but I can pass. She goes to all the rallies, she explained. She’s been a Republican her whole life, an active Republican, an Iowa Republican. For 30 years, she’s been in crowds like this one. She plans to go, one time in her life, to the national convention. Like going to see the Stones. When the organizers passed around hand signs reading “The Silent Majority”, she grabbed a dozen so she could pass them around to others.

Cheerful helpful women were half the crowd. Angry and absurd men were the other. They wore T-shirts with whole paragraphs written on them: “I am a United States Military Veteran. I once took a SOLEMN OATH to defend the CONSTITUTION against ALL enemies, foreign and Domestic. Be advised No one has ever relieved me of my duties under this Oath!”

There were cars in the parking lot slathered with bumper stickers. “We the people are 100% FED UP!” “So if guns kills people, I guess pencils miss spell words [sic], cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat.” “I’m straight, conservative, Christian, and I own a gun. Is there anything else I can do to piss you off?” A picture of Obama with “Does this ass make my car look big?” The Republican style for 2016 is angry aphoristic humor. Behind comedy, absurd rage: America is the greatest country in the world but America is falling apart, government is the problem which is why government must solve it.

This was a Trump production so naturally there was a VIP section. A door guarded by bald, unsmiling men, the bouncers who stand forever as the bored sentinels of indifferent celebrity. A swinging door at the side of the stage received and dispensed the best-looking people, the ones with the buffed neutrality of political professionals, the women whose faces have been tautened to a perma pout, the men who get their hair cut before every event.

The woman beside me – Stars ’n’ Stripes Hat – was wearing a pewter elephant pendant. A young girl in a bright orange dress passed out of the VIP entrance wearing an elephant pendant encrusted with diamonds. Elephant pendants were a theme, I noticed, and elephant brooches and elephant rings and elephant T-shirts. They came in all different price points and in all different styles: round elephants reminiscent of French cartoons from the 1960s, and strange pseudo-sexual shimmies, and with 1920s straw boater hats leading parades. There was one kind of elephant you couldn’t find. An elephant that actually looked like an elephant. A realistic elephant might serve as a memento to the hundred elephants killed for their ivory every day. A naturalistic elephant would be inherently environmentalist. The elephants must all be fabulous.

Like any good show, there was a warm-up act. In fact, there are two – three if you count the recitation
of the pledge of allegiance. The first was Tana Goertz, an Iowa woman who had been runner-up on the third season of The Apprentice. “What a good-looking crowd,” she pandered. She vouched for Trump as a woman (“He loves women!”) and as someone who had returned to Iowa (“How could you live in New York City if you didn’t love people?”). She promoted the idea which is at the core of every last thing that Trump does, that simple contact with the man brings prosperity. “When you’re in the Trump train you’re going places!” She walked off to polite Iowan applause. The crowd would probably, all things considered, rather have listened to the Elton John music playing on the speakers instead, but at least she made the effort.....


....The title of Between the World and Me comes from a Richard Wright poem called White Man, Listen! and it was never going to get much whiter or more male than me in the Motel 8 sipping bourbon and beer, on my iPhone, with the Jays and Royals highlights flickering in the background and the thud of the satellite dish factory in the background.
The urgency of the book, the vitality of the historical imagination at play, rose like waves into crests of anger tumbling over their own force. It was all of a piece. And it all made very ferocious sense. Between the World and Me is one of those books that possess the powerful inevitability of a natural phenomenon – as if it accrued out of the ether that surrounds us, a crystalline formation of the outrage that defines the moment. To criticize is beside the point. It’s just there.

To me, the key passage in Between the World and Me, comes after Coates has been on television explaining to the host the desperate consequences of yet another police assassination of a black boy.

I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.

Right then, reading that passage, I knew that white people were going to love this book. What white people crave – more, they require it, they require it to live – is an alibi from their whiteness, an escape from the injustice of their existence. There are various alibis available depending on how much stupidity you can tolerate. You can say to yourself or to others that black people are stupid and lazy; you can say that you don’t see color; you can call your uncle a racist so everybody knows you’re not; you can share the latest critique of brutality on Twitter with the word THIS; and now you can tell a friend that she really has to read Between the World and Me.

 

Because that Dream of Whiteness, the dream of treehouses and cub scouts that tastes like peppermint and smells like strawberry shortcake, is a perfect alibi. Who lives that dream? Somebody else may live it but not me, not anyone I know, no one I could see in Burlington. That’s a dream that belongs to somebody else. Always to somebody else.

It certainly didn’t belong to the Winegard factory workers who were drifting to their cars at the end of their shift. The whiteness of my existence was my iPhone and the fumes of bourbon and beer, and the game from last night and the tingling in my thigh. The tingling in my thigh was my body – the reality I can’t look at because I’m too afraid of my mortality.

To me, the best question ever asked about race in America has always been the one that James Baldwin asked, when an interviewer wanted to know if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America. “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place,” he said. “If you invented him, you, the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.” The obsession of intellectuals over the question of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr active or passive resistance – was moot; the pressing matter was why white people were blowing up churches filled with children." [Read the entire article here]

*Pic from slate.com

CAPTION SATURDAY.

*

I need a caption for this pic.

For example: All in favor of calling in the fashion police.

*Pic from buzzfeed.com

El Chapo, D-Money, Shifty, and The Central Park Five in- between.

In the infamous words of Alonzo Harris: "Oh what a day! What a motherfucking day!"

First, congrats to the Mexican Navy for capturing El Chapo. (That's him above in better days.) I must admit that I never thought that they would take this guy alive.

Word is that they owe this capture to US intelligence operations. I am quite sure that if our friend Donald trump was our president he would take credit for his apprehension.

Then late last night here in Philly some lunatic tried to execute a police officer in the name of Islam. (Save the "It's Always Sunni In Philadelphia" jokes, please.)

 

The Poor cop is lucky to be alive. Dude just runs up to him and starts blasting. The cop gets shot 3 times, and gets out of his patrol car and returns fire.  

 

The shooter's mother says that he had some mental issues.  He used a stolen police officer's weapon (irony alert) to do the shooting, so background checks would not have prevented him from getting his hands on this particular weapon.

 

I am not going to make excuses for his depraved behavior like certain folks like to do when we have situations like this. The mental issue he had is that he is a depraved lunatic who probably should not have been on the street.

 

Up in New York some poor teacher was fired for wanting her students to know the truth about something that actually happened for fear that it would "rile up black students".

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The case of the Central Park Five should be taught to these children so that they can learn about the injustices that can take place in this country. The fact that the school district tried to fire this teacher for teaching her students actual history is a disgrace.

 

But this is a part of a larger pattern in this country where those on the right and other like minded individuals would like us to rewrite history.

 

"Thanks to social media, it has become easier for parents to call out these issues in history classes. Last October, for example, one Houston mother’s Facebook post about her son’s McGraw-Hill textbook, which incorrectly referred to slaves as “workers” and included slaves in a section on “Patterns of Immigration,” went viral. The textbook manufacturer eventually printed new textbooks and offered the new edition to schools across the country.

Educators and education journalists also brought attention to “Playing History: Slave Trade” — a video game that was sold as an educational resources about slavery, but that actually allowed players to stack slaves on top of each other like Tetris. Screenshots of the video game were retweeted many times on Twitter, and the criticism eventually led the CEO of the company that made the video game to address the controversy.

Still, there has been substantial backlash from conservatives who want to present U.S. history with fewer references to the civil rights movement, discrimination, slavery, and violence against Native Americans. After the College Board changed its AP history standards to include more information on slavery and Native Americans, the RNC said the standards “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects” and advocated for Congress to stop funding the College Board. Conservative legislators began pushing legislation to prohibit spending on AP U.S. history courses, and eventually the College Board caved to the pressure — agreeing to add specific mentions of the Founding Fathers and use the term “American exceptionalism.”'

And did you hear the one about the man from North Dakota who drove all the way to Washington to kidnap the Obama's dog, Bo? 

"An officer responding to a tip from the Secret Service tracked down Stockert at the downtown D.C. hotel. He admitted that he had a shotgun and a rifle in his pickup truck, both unloaded, along with ammunition for the weapons, according to a police report.
It's illegal to possess unregistered firearms in D.C.

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The report said police also found a machete and a billy club."

At first I was a little concerned for the first dog, but then I read this:

"When he was arrested, the police report said, Stockert claimed that his parents were John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe and that he came to the capital to announce his campaign for president and advocate for a $99 per month healthcare plan."

This dude is clearly crazy. But I wish him luck with his campaign for president. He can't be any crazier than some of the candidates already in the race.

Take for instance Donald trump, he was telling his brown shirts to throw a protestor out in the cold last night and take his jacket.

"Republican front-runner Donald Trump directed security to kick out Bernie Sanders supporters from his Vermont rally and to confiscate their coats.

"Throw them out into the cold," Trump ordered security, as protesters shouted "Bernie! Bernie!" during his rally Thursday night in Burlington, Vt."

Yeah I would probably vote for the wannabe kidnapper over the trump dude. 

     Finally, someone should remind the governor of Maine (and Chris Christie supporter) what century we are living in.

LePage, talking about Maine's heroin epidemic, described out-of-state drug dealers as "guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty" and said "half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave."

LePage, who's white, didn't describe the races of the drug dealers on Wednesday during a town meeting in Bridgton, and a spokesman said Thursday he wasn't making a comment about race.

But moderate Republican and LePage critic Lance Dutson, who called attention to the remark, said the governor was playing to people's racial fears.

 

"This is one of the most blatantly racist statements he's ever made," said Dutson, a former CEO of the conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center who helped create the GOP group Get Right Maine to combat extremism. "One of the things that's offensive about it is that it's reminiscent of this fearmongering in American history that people would like to think is long gone." [Source]

 

If true, what does this say about the "young white girls" in Maine? Maybe he should be lecturing their parents and not D-Money, Smoothie, and Shifty. (Where did he get these names?) I am going to ask the one person I know in Maine how this guy was even elected in the first place.  

 

*Pic from atlantablackstar.com