Category Archives: Racism

07/17/2023
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Civil Rights, Jesse Jackson, Racism

1000 Words: Warrior

Jesse Jackson isn’t on people’s minds these days as much as he was, say, 30 years ago and more. Especially white people.

He was more or less a bête noir (pun intended) back in the days of St Ronald Reagan. When the most virulent anti-Jacksonists weren’t dropping N-bombs on him in their private conversations, they were publicly calling him a grandstander and a publicity hound. As if white leaders were shrinking violets who all cared only for the good of humankind and had no interest in reaping laurels and riches from their work. Y’know, people like to-be-president Donald Trump.

Jackson in 1983.

Jackson ran for president in the Democratic primaries of 1984 and ‘88. Competing against seven other Dems in ’84, including former vice president Walter Mondale, former Dem presidential nominee George McGovern, Ohio senator and retired astronaut John Glenn, horn-dog Gary Hart, and others, Jackson garnered a fairly respectable 18 percent of the primary vote, winning four contests. Four years later, facing another group of Dems including future vice president Al Gore, Hart again (his horn-dogginess forced him out early in that race), Paul Simon (not that one; this one), and others, Jackson did quite well, earning better than 29 percent of the primary vote and winning 12 states plus the District of Columbia. He ran second to the eminently forgettable Michael Dukakis that year. Many observers credit Jackson’s ’88 campaign with paving the way for Brack Obama’s successful run for the nomination and eventual accession to the presidency in 2008.

Jackson’d been a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the height of the civil rights fight in the late 1960s. In fact, he was present when King was shot and killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Jackson was in the motel parking lot when the shot rang out. Later that evening he appeared before cameras wearing a blood stained shirt. Andrew Young — future congressperson, mayor of Atlanta, and US ambassador to the United Nations — vividly remembered the scene in an interview for a PBS Frontline documentary, The Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. Young said:

After they removed [King’s] body, Ralph Abernathy got a jar and started scraping up the blood and said, crying, it was Martin’s precious blood. This blood was shed for us. It was weird. But people freaked out and did strange things. Jesse put his hands in the blood and wiped it on the front of his shirt.

Lots of white people seemed to be far more offended that Jackson would perform such a showboating display than they were that the nation’s leading civil rights activist had been slain by a white supremacist loner.

(L-R) Jackson, King, and Ralph Abernathy on the Lorraine Motel Balcony.

For my money, Jackson’s act only proved he understood, innately, that politics is mainly theater. To many church-going blacks, Jackson’s blood-stained shirt demonstrated that he would carry on King’s legacy and work, just the way Roman Catholics drink wine transubstantiated into the blood of Jesus Christ. Religion, too, is mainly theater.

In that sense, Jesse Louis Jackson, an ordained Baptist minister, straddling both types of stage, is a thespian as accomplished and heralded as Meryl Streep or Marlon Brando.

Journalist Robert McClory wrote in Illinois Issues back in 1984 that criticisms of Jackson’s desire for the spotlight were pretty much spot on. “First of all,” McClory wrote, “let’s clear the air on the Rev. Jesse Jackson and admit the criticisms of him.

“Yes, he possesses a large, demanding ego. He has a deep-seated need, as some of his oldest and closest friends will readily admit, to be at the center of things, to achieve, to prove conclusively that he is somebody. That undoubtedly is related to his growing up poor, black and illegitimate in his native Greenville, South Carolina, and it all makes interesting material for psycho-biographical analyses….”

Jackson gained King’s attention in 1965 when he, Jackson, participated in the historic Selma, Alabama voting rights marches. King named Jackson, a South Carolina native, the leader of the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket in 1966. It was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference‘s national economic and business advocacy organization. According to lore, Jackson presented himself to then Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, the Democratic king-maker and reputedly  the second most powerful man in the country at the time (exceeded only by President Lyndon Johnson). Jackson asked Daley what he could do to help in Chicago. Daley, it is said, offered him job as a cashier in an expressway tollbooth.

Jackson never forgot the slight, the story goes. If the tale is true, Jackson got his revenge on Mayor Daley in 1972 when he co-led a successful revolt against the Daley-led Illinois Democratic contingent in the party’s 1972 national convention.

After serving as eventual national leader of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson would found Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity, later changed to People United to Serve Humanity). PUSH later would merge with the National Rainbow Coalition to form Rainbow/PUSH. That iteration is still very much active, pushing for universal healthcare, living wages, fair housing, voter registration, gender equality, affirmative action, and environmental justice.

Early on, Jackson would exhort crowds at PUSH events to shout out the mantra, “I am somebody!”

Rainbow/PUSH Headquarters in Chicago’s Englewood Neighborhood.

For a grandstander and a showboater, Jesse Jackson sure has had a profound influence for good in this holy land. Of course, that has never been of much interest to the people who called him a grandstander and a showboat.

In any case, Jesse Jackson, now aged 81 and confined to a wheelchair, has announced he’s retiring from his leadership position in Rainbow/PUSH. As far as I can determine, he’s the last of the King coterie to remain active. Abernathy, Dorothy Cotton, Bernard Lee, Georgia Davis, James Orange, and King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, all have died. Young is in his 90s.

When it came time for America to elect a black president, only a not-too-black, Harvard-educated, mostly middle-of-the-road  figure like Barack Obama would do. The fiery orator, the angry black man, the King protege with blood on his shirt would never do.

Much of white America had apoplexy when the relatively safe Obama took up residence in the White House. The Tea Party, many white anti-government militias, the Trump presidency, and the January 6th insurrection all ensued from that breakthrough.

Imagine how a lot of Americans would have reacted had the fiery, angry Jackson been elected to lead this nation.

04/07/2023
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Racism, Republican Party, Tennesse Legislature

1000 Words: We May Be Dumb, But We’re Not Stupid

We’re not stupid. We have brains in our heads and, every once in a while, we use them. We can be fooled, sure. But some scams, some bunk, are so over the top that we’re immune to them.

By we, I mean the liberals, the progressives, and even a few staunch Democrats, for pity’s sake. My we.

As I say, we’ve bought into bullshit before. “Defund the Police,” for one thing. The dumbest most ineffective, most guaranteed to lose us whatever support we’d hoped to gain in America’s heartland (itself a pie-in-the-sky aspiration) slogan ever conjured. The idea behind it made sense: the police are asked to do too much and we ought to devote more resources to mental health crisis professionals, substance abuse emergency responders, and conflict resolution experts to help the cops when they’re confronted by the stoned, the deranged, and the irrational among the citizenry. Defund the Police conveyed none of that message. The only thing Ma and Pa Iowa or Arkansas thought when they heard those three words was, Let’s get rid of the police.

Now any pols who even once uttered that inane slogan are running from it as though from a rabid dog. “What,” they say, baffled, “I said that? Naw! I musta been misquoted.” A prime example: the newly elected mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, who deftly two-stepped away from his earlier support for Defund the Police and was able to win out over his Law and Order opponent.

So, we’re not perfect but we’re not altogether credulous (like members of a certain former president’s idolatrous cult are). That’s why the given rationale behind the Tennessee legislature’s ouster of two of its members yesterday ain’t gonna fool a’one of us. State representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were kicked out of the august Nashville chamber they’d been duly elected to for staging a raucous protest against the southern state’s masturbatorial love affair with guns. After three adults and three kids were gunned down in a Tennessee school the other day, the legislature reaffirmed its commitment to protect the “right” of any and all citizens to possess weapons of war regardless of certain psychological red flags they may already have displayed rather than safeguard a few kids’ lives.

Jones and Pearson led a chanting group of protesters in the statehouse, decrying the legislature’s inaction on sane gun laws. They used a bullhorn to address the room. The protesters made a lot of noise, cried out Shame, shame, shame, and then left the chamber. There was no riot. There was no violence. Nobody died or was injured. Nobody took over any legislators’ offices, defaced paintings and statues, or even took shits on the edifice’s marble floors — all of which happened elsewhere on January 6th, 2021.

Another January 6th? [ABC News video screenshot]

I bring that date up because one of the leaders of the group of majority Republicans who voted Jones and Pearson out of their seats said his party did so because they were afraid the protest was turning into another January 6th.

Jones and Pearson were joined in the protest by a third state representative, Gloria Johnson. She was not ousted by the legislature, although the vote on her expulsion was close.

Gloria Johnson, natch, is white.

She’s not fooled either. When reporters asked her why she’d been spared while Jones and Pearson were not, she replied, sarcastically, “It may have to do with the color of our skin.”

Jones and Pearson were ousted because they are young, troublemaking black men. Period. Gloria Johnson isn’t troublemaking. Perhaps she’s disruptive, an okay way of making waves that’s so valued in the business world these days. In fact, that aforementioned former president is a noted “disrupter.”

Whenever young black men break a rule, it’s a sure sign they’re about to go wild and tear society apart. That’s a lesson passed down by slave masters from two hundred years ago. That’s traditional lore held dear in places like Tennessee.

The mob, the thousands of people who stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021, hoping to overturn the presidential election, crying out for blood, calling for the neck of Vice President Mike Pence and others, a certain revisionist faux-historian now claims, weren’t really troublemakers. Why they were simply passionate participants in good-natured public give-and-take. They were no more dangerous than a couple of guys sitting on barstools arguing over who’ll win next year’s Super Bowl. One Republican congressperson even compared the January 6th riot to a “normal tourist visit.”

Which takes the wind out of that Tennessee Republican who said Jones and Pearson’s ousters were necessary lest the statehouse protest devolve into something akin to January 6th.

What? A normal tourist visit?

These Republicans had better get their stories straight.

These logical inconsistencies remind my of the bar-room spat I had with a Kentucky good-old-boy back around the time the Tea Party was making news. The real danger facing America, he yelled, comes from the goddamned liberals. “They are the most selfish people around,” he hollered.

“Selfish?” I countered. (And, yes, I was yelling too — something I’ve long ago stopped doing when arguing with a member of the Right. In fact, I’ve flat-out stopped arguing with that ilk, period. No sense giving myself a concussion by banging my head against that brick wall). “I thought liberals were supposed to be sob-sisters and weaklings. Nursemaids. Nannies. You’d better get your stereotype straight!”

I didn’t win that argument, of course. People don’t win arguments anymore. Facts be damned.

I wouldn’t win any argument against that Tennessee Republican by pointing out January 6th was supposed to be nothing more dangerous than a school field trip.

Donald Trump may or may not retain his vise grip on the Republican Party as we near the 2024 presidential campaign. Even if he does, he’ll still play second fiddle to the man who penned these lines:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather Scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

12/28/2022
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Hunter S. Thompson, Racism, Snow

1000 Words: Quick Hits

The entire Midwest was hit by a mass of frigid air this past weekend, with temps dropping below zero. Now we’re in the midst of a dramatic warmup with the temperature today, Wednesday, reaching the mid-40s. So, of course, to remind me I live in this weird-assed section of the country, I saw a guy in the Best Buy today wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

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I caught my first cold in more than three years this week. Dang, mang, I forgot how miserable these rhino-v‘s are. But, of course, the fact that I was cold-free for so long just goes to show how well we all isolated ourselves from each other during the pandemic, despite the best (worst) efforts of COVID deniers and mask refuseniks.

Speaking of COVID, The Loved One insisted I take the test, just to make sure. I’d been certain I only had a cold and not the Big One so I resisted for about 13 seconds. Long enough for her to guilt me into pulling out the test kit.

As soon as I started opening up the box and all the little packages therein, I started worrying. By the time I’d swabbed both nares of my bugle and put the swab into the test solution, I was sure I’d be sentenced to a lifetime (well, a week, at least) of home incarceration.

I set the alarm for 15 minutes, per test directions, and began thinking of how I might talk my way out of staying inside for so long. I simply can’t stay home. Never have been able to. My mother called me a gypsy because of it.

The alarm rang and I slowly made my way to the bathroom where the test thingy was waiting. I felt like a criminal defendant returning to the courtroom as the jury filed back in after deliberation.

The finding? Not guilty.

“I’m a lucky guy! I’m a lucky guy!” I hollered.

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Speaking of COVID deniers and mask refuseniks, the Commander-in-Chief of that lunkhead army, the 45th President of the United States, came to mind the other day as I thumbed through Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

I run hot and cold on Hunter S. Thompson. Largely, his books are all about him and that’d be nice if I was at all interested in him. I’m not. He does, though, draw some brilliant, colorful word pictures and occasionally illuminates some previously unseen or ignored aspects of the Hell’s Angels, Las Vegas, and other topics he’s expounded upon.

Anyway, Thompson, in the book, is following George Wallace around as the segregationist ex- and future-governor of Alabama campaigns for a second time for the presidency. Wallace is scheduled to appear in Wisconsin at 7:30pm for a big rally in Racine. His handlers, though, insist he squeeze in a brief appearance at 5:00pm in Milwaukee, about 50 miles north.

The Milwaukee handshake-fest is set up for a place called Serb Hall on the city’s south side. It’s a weekday and the crowd will be factory laborers, mostly of Polish heritage, just getting off work. Reporters and observers think the handlers are making a big mistake — the Milwaukee south side Poles will be exhausted and hungry so why would they turn out for a campaign rally?

To Thompson’s surprise, the place is absolutely packed. Thompson is embraced by locals who buy him drinks and are eager to talk with him. Here’s what he writes:

For the next two hours I was locked in a friendly, free-wheeling conversation with about six of my hosts who didn’t mind telling me they were there because George Wallace was the most important man in America. “This guy is the real thing,” one of them said. “I never cared anything about politics before but Wallace ain’t the same as the others. He don’t sneak around the bush. He just comes right out and says it.”

That was 50 years ago. When the eventual 45th prez was running, a mere seven years ago, people were saying the exact same thing about him. In fact, simply substitute the words Donald Trump for George Wallace and the above paragraph could have been written when wits and wags were trying to figure out why Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton.

Did I mention, by the way, that George Wallace was this holy land’s premier racist through the 1960s and into the ’70s? He was proud of and outspoken in his racism. It was the only thing he had going for him on a national level. Nearly ten million people voted for Wallace in “68, 13.5 percent of the total. This despite the fact that his running mate, the former Strategic Air Command boss, Gen. Curtis LeMay, had called for using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

Wallace openly and repeatedly endorsed segregation. That’s what people meant when they said “he just comes right out and says it.”

Segregation wasn’t on the table in 2016, but America had just experienced eight years under the presidency of a black man and Trump’s campaign slogan was Make America Great Again.

He just came right out and said it.

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My old friend and former roommate, John Spencer Bergman, brought this image to my attention:

Bergman still lives in my beloved hometown, Chicago. The Windy City for years has experienced  un-neighborly strife between neighbors over parking spaces following heavy snows. Chicago got hit by a few inches this past weekend and, as usual, folks shoveled out the parking spaces in front of their homes and put old kitchen chairs out to reserve them for themselves. That’s illegal but, hell, who follows the law in Chicago?

Some Chicagoans have gotten creative in placing objects out to prevent their neighbors from grabbing their shoveled parking spots. This guy turned to Jesus to accomplish the task.

08/17/2022
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Native Americans, Racism, Sacheen Littlefeather, Tomahawk Chop

1000 Word: A Rich Vein of Hatred

I’m old enough to remember the Oscars night when Sacheen Littlefeather took to the stage and declined the Best Actor Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando as a way to protest Hollywood’s depictions and treatment of Native Americans.

Brando’s turn-down of the award followed by a couple of years George C. Scott’s nix of it. Scott, though, thumbed his nose at the statuette because he didn’t like the idea of competition among actors. He’d won the Oscar for his portrayal of World War II Gen. George S. Patton in the eponymous biopic. Which, BTW, was co-written by Francis Ford Coppola who, of course, directed The Godfather, for which Brando was being celebrated — or at least scheduled to be — that fateful evening.

Marlon Brando, though, was a noted advocate at the time for Native Americans, and so came the appearance of Littlefeather.

Image: UCLA Library Special Collections

The New York Times yesterday ran a piece on the event that took place nearly a half century ago. Sacheen Littlefeather now is an old woman and the photo the paper ran of her was certainly jarring. About as jarring as the face that looks back at me from the mirror every goddamned morning. No matter how much we acknowledge that time flees, its flight freaks us.

Littlefeather was a White Mountain Apache. In keeping with the whole Hollywood thing, she was breathtakingly beautiful, her Native American accoutrements seemingly straight out of the costume department. Despite that, she spoke honestly and with real emotion about the film industry’s depiction of Native Americans through the years. It seemed she might break down in tears at any moment during her minute-long speech. Only a creep would be failed to be moved by it.

Well, the Oscar audience that night 49 years ago was filled with creeps.

I was 17 years old at the time and still in thrall to things like the Academy Awards broadcast. I watched as Littlefeather spoke and was aghast at the boos emanating from the crowd. Of course, not everybody booed. The cheers for her balanced out the jeering but it was the negative reaction that stuck with me. Even then I was baffled that anyone could be so…, well, assholish as to boo someone speaking from the heart about the racist portrayals and treatment of her people.

What I didn’t remember, and learned of in the NYT article, is many in the audience actually started doing the tomahawk chop while Littlefeather spoke. If you’re not a sports fan, you may be unfamiliar with the tomahawk chop. In places like Atlanta and universities whose team names are some variant of the Native American thing, fans launch into rhythmic faux-Indian calls, chopping with their right hands in time, mimicking warriors wielding their savage weapons. You know, the way they’ve seen Indians in old Hollywood movies behave. Cop a peek at the fans of the Florida State Seminoles doing the chop:

As an aside, this is a prime illustration of why I shun, as much as humanly possible, going along with the crowd. I steadfastly refuse to do a thing for the simple reason everybody else is doing it. Do you blame me?

Anyway, the Oscars, then as now, is not a sporting event. This despite that fact that, as George C. Scott pointed out, it’s a race between competitors. You’d figure an Academy Award night crowd would be rife with creative, sensitive, progressive, caring folk who’d at least wish to listen to the plaint of a young, frightened woman standing up for her people.

Sadly, the crowd on the night in question was (il)liberally sprinkled with, um…, assholes.

I’m no babe in the woods. I know there’s been a broad current of hate running through the American bloodstream since this holy land’s very inception. I know about lynchings and institutionalized racism and block-busting and red-lining and homophobia and misogyny and every other kind of emotional and spiritual cancer that afflicts far too many of our fellow citizens. Still, I was shocked to learn about many in the Oscars crowd doing that stupid chop during Littlefeather’s speech.

And it gets worse. Apparently John Wayne had to be restrained from charging the stage and stopping Littlefeather from speaking. And Sacheen herself claims she was shot at — with guns, mind you — in the aftermath of the event.

Another aside, this one about John Wayne. His career and legacy largely were made by his roles in all those gorgeous John Ford westerns like Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Stagecoach, and Rio Grande. During World War II, Ford served as a commander in the US Navy, heading the service’s photographic unit. He actually participated in the D-Day landing at Normandy, witnessing the carnage and suffering a wound himself. For his part, John Wayne, the movie tough guy, stayed home during the war, increasing his reputation and bank account while many other Hollywood actors and directors sacrificed years of their careers for the war effort. Ford never forgave Wayne for avoiding service. In fact, acc’d’g to accounts, Ford repeatedly harangued Wayne about it during filming of their last picture together, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.

Pretend Hero.

Have we gotten better over the years? President Truman ordered the integration of the armed services in 1947. Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey gave his rousing “bright sunshine of human rights” speech in favor of integration and full civil rights in America in 1948. In the 1960s, Ernie Banks, the biggest sports star in my hometown, was compelled to live in the all-black Chatham neighborhood. Thirty years later, the one-time lily-white suburb of Highland Park was proud to claim as its resident Michael Jordan. Today, no one bats an eye when a black and white couple walks down the street hand in hand. The year Littlefeather spoke, I was in a car with an older co-worker when he spied a black man and a white woman walking on Grand Avenue. “Lookit that,” he said, his voice dripping with contempt, “a nigger and a white chick.”

I’d like to think we’re better than that today. We can’t say the word nigger in a public setting now. And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has issued an apology to Sacheen Littlefeather for her treatment that night in 1973.

But they’re still doing the tomahawk chop in Atlanta.

03/28/2022
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1000 Words, Academy Awards, Alopecia, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith, Racism, Violence

1000 Words: A Blow For The Oscars

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I’ve always been baffled by the attention people lavish on the Oscars. For me, the Academy Awards ceremony ranks up there with the British Royal Family and the Westminster Dog Show. I just don’t get it.

Then again, I’m obsessed with the fortunes of a bunch of guys in pinstriped pajamas trying to hit a little ball with a long wooden bat. So who am I to judge?

Last night’s Oscars actually made headlines for a reason other than some young star’s side-boob or an aging actor’s scold on the latest injustice. Will Smith, who didn’t know it at the moment but would in short order be named Best Actor, smacked with an open hand or slugged with a close fist — I couldn’t tell which — comedian Chris Rock.

It ranks up there with other ad-libbed acts on Oscar night through the years, including Sasheen Littlefeather standing in for Marlon Brando, the streaker who ran past David Niven, and the time the presenter announced the wrong Best Picture winner.

Anyway, Rock joked that Jada Pinkett Smith’s next movie should be GI Jane II. It got a chuckle because in the original GI Jane, Demi Moore had her head shaved. The joke being Pinkett Smith, recently revealed to be suffering from alopecia, likely won’t have to be shaved for the role.

It was a tiny bit risky, making light of her medical condition. Still, it’d be forgotten almost before the chuckling had died down but Smith strode on stage and whacked Rock. As he marched back to his seat, he announced, loudly, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth!”

It may be the first time anybody ever clouted anybody else at the Oscars. I’m willing to bet there’ve been some thumbs thrown at one or another of the booze- and cocaine-fueled after-parties, but during the proceedings, I doubt it. Again I don’t know because, again, I don’t care.

The incident is big news this AM. People are gleefully expounding on it around the world. Editorialists are trying to Make Sense of It All. Opinionators are wondering What It All Means.

Let’s take a look at it through a variety of lenses.

Perhaps the first thing to consider is as yet we have no idea what Pinkett Smith thinks of the whole thing. She did not mount that stage and clock Rock. It was her husband. Many people find humor to be a healthy way of dealing with whatever malady has befallen them. I spent about six months making jokes about my cancer back in 2016. That, of course, doesn’t mean everybody enjoys a good guffaw when it comes to, say, a recent diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. But, again, we don’t know what Pinkett Smith’s views are.

We do know that the gag incensed Will Smith enough to resort to violence. And the funny thing is, many of the folks who’ve been decrying American society’s recent decent into violence (really, not a new development, after all, but…, y’know) have endorsed Smith’s slug. Or whack. Or whatever.

One social media poster I know wrote: “Chris Rock got what he deserved. Making jokes about a person’s disease is crossing that fine line between humor & inappropriate.”

Another poster wrote: “I spent years, as a volunteer & professional, involved w issues of domestic and other forms of violence… and Smith’s violent behavior is normalized every.single.day across the globe.”

Pinkett Smith’s kid, Jaden, tweeted: “And that’s how we do it.” Whatever it is and whoever we are.

It turns out Rock has made jokes about the Pinkett Smiths before. Back in 2016, they boycotted the Oscars over the Academy’s historic pushing of black actors and filmmakers toward the back of the bus. Will Smith the previous year had starred in the movie, Concussion, and many believed the Academy’s snub of him for the Best Actor nomination was yet another example of Hollywood’s apartheid. Rock, 2016 Oscars host, cracked: “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited.”

Pinkett Smith took it in apparent good humor. Appropriate since, that’s what it was all about. “Hey look,” she told reporters afterward, “it comes with the territory.”

Pinkett Smith, after all, like everybody in the hall, makes her living standing before millions of people, essentially shouting, “Hey, look at me.” And she certainly hasn’t kept her alopecia a secret, so Rock wasn’t betraying any confidences.

And, again, we still have no idea what she thinks of the crack at this time.

But we know her man was moved to fisticuffs. Lawyers might tell us what Will Smith did to Chris Rock last night constitutes criminal assault and battery.

“He should have been arrested,” wrote Clemmie Moodie, the entertainment columnist for The Sun.

Moodie, I should point out, is a white woman. This is relevant because Will Smith is a black man. How might she have reacted if the swinger was white? How might the fallout have differed had Smith instead been, say, Tom Hanks? We’ve come a long way, baby, and overt racism is frowned upon in this day and age — cryptic references and dog whistles are preferred now — but the idea of a black man driven angry enough to start swinging still scares the bejesus out of way too many white people.

And too many women remain, even in these “enlightened” times, scared to death of too many men. Spousal and domestic abuse continues to be a dangerous epidemic around the world. The guys most likely to beat the hell out of their female mates seem to see their women as…, well, their women. One woman wrote on social media: “I am also stunned how many people are saying they would ‘stand up for their woman’ in the same way…. Violence in the name of protecting a woman is OK? Does it get more patriarchal than this?”

For all we know, Jada Pinkett Smith might have been mortified by her husband’s impulsive reaction. Thus far, there’ve been many ways to look at this incident. The only way we haven’t considered is Jada Pinkett Smith’s way.

12/30/2015
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Bettie Jones, Chicago Police Department, Guns, Quintonio LeGrier, Racism

Hot Air

What Cops Do

Really, calling the cops is white people’s security blanket.

Your home gets burglarized, you call the cops. You do this even though you know they’re not gonna put three shifts on the case to track down your flat screen. Still, you feel better when they show up.

You get into an accident, you call the cops. They come by and take your report — something you could have done simply by driving to the nearest police station. When they show up, you feel as though justice will be served as they haul in the idiot who slammed into your hot rod. Which, of course, they don’t do.

Some lunkheads start pounding each other out on the sidewalk, you call the cops. By the time the squad car rolls up, the lunkheads are gone. The cops tell you they’ll keep a lookout for them. Sure.

The cops are there, mainly, to hold your hand. They make you feel safe. They give you the illusion that the scary, chaotic incident you just witnessed or experienced is really under control, their control — your friends, the men in blue. Now you can go back to sleep.

It’s not that way for people living in black slums. Most residents of tough, poor, inner-city neighborhoods are afraid to open their doors to the cops. This was brought home dramatically Saturday when Chicago police, responded to a call about an emotionally disturbed young man raising hell in his father’s apartment on the city’s West Side. The young man, Quintonio LeGrier, was running down the stairs of the apartment building while carrying a baseball bat when one or more of the responding officers opened fire, hitting the college student with six slugs. A seventh shot took the life of a 55-year-old mother of five, Bettie Jones, who’d opened her apartment door to see what all the fuss was about.

Screen Shot 2015-12-30 at 11.06.33 AM

Bettie Jones

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The kid LeGrier had lived a horseshit life. He’d been abandoned by both parents and was the victim of physical abuse. He’d recently lost a close foster brother to a random shooting. He’d also had a very recent history of troubles, allegedly being involved in three separate scuffles at Northern Illinois University where he was studying electrical engineering. He’d experienced alarming mood swings in recent months.

quintonio-legrier-e1451162268771

Quintonio LeGrier

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The crisis called for caring professionals with special training in handling emotionally disturbed individuals. Problem was the only people who came to the West Side apartment house were cops carrying loaded firearms, cops whose first impulse was to squeeze their triggers.

What is it that would cause a cop to open fire on an emotionally disturbed young man carrying a baseball bat? Other than his skin color, natch. And it really doesn’t matter if the shooting officers were white or black, the racist culture within the police department of Chicago and pretty much every force around this holy land trumps racial brotherhood. Black cops are just as petrified of crazy niggers as white cops are today. Because, really, that’s all young black men are anymore — to a certain segment of society.

Bettie Jones’s childhood friend Jaqueline Walker had a question for the cops in the aftermath of the shootings: “Why you got to shoot first and ask questions later?”

Quintonio LeGrier’s mother posed her own heart-breaking query about the cops in the wake of her son’s death. “What are they trained for? Just to kill?”

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12/22/2015
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Barack Obama, CBGB, Chicago Police Department, Donald Trump, FactCheck.org, Gen. Martin Dempsey, Hillary Clinton, ISIS, Lamon Reccord, Laquan McDonald Shooting, Misogyny, Police Brutality, Racism, Seymour Hersh, Syrian Civil War, Uncategorized

Hot Air

One Shot, One Year

For my money, this is the picture of the year, 2015:

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[Image: John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune, November 25, 2015]

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That’s a young fellow named Lamon Reccord, a participant in street protests against Chicago police brutality and the killings of black people in general around this holy land. The protests broke out this fall in the aftermath of the release of a video showing a CPD officer shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times on a South Side street some 13 months earlier.

This particular confrontation took place at the corner of State and Randolph streets in the Loop the day after the video footage was released. Reccord already had gained national notoriety when he was video’d staring down another Chicago cop the day before. He’s either a symbol of morally-justified resistance to police racism and the use of deadly force or he’s a troublemaking punk, depending on where you stand on police/black relations in Murrica these days.

Loyal Pencillistas know where I stand.

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Insurrection?

Correct me if I’m wrong, lawyers and military experts, but if Sy Hersh is right about this*, Gen. Martin Dempsey has committed a clear violation of military chain of command, putting the himself at risk of court-martial, incarceration, and even death. It seems like treason, pure and simple. It doesn’t matter if the president’s decision is right or wrong. That’s not how the military works. In fact, it borders on a coup.

And, really, haven’t you been expecting one or another Obama opponent to lead some kind of mutiny, even at this late date in his presidency?

Screen Shot 2015-12-22 at 11.12.50 AM

Dempsey (L) & Hersh

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Remember when the big panic going around held that Obama was secretly planning to get us involved in a big war or some such emergency so that he could declare martial law and remain in office even after his term(s) expired? Then again, that particular paranoiac delusion might well have gotten lost in the flood of all the other psychotic reactionary hallucinations to Obama’s election. There were so many of them, after all.

In any case, at least one reactionary was sure to commit some act of overthrow, given all the panic surrounding the first black prez.

[ * Just in case you’re too pressed for time to read the piece, Hersh asserts in the January 7, 2016 issue of the London Review of Books that Dempsey engaged in a secret plan to lure the Russians into the Syrian civil war and simultaneous battle against ISIS. Further, he ignored the White House’s strategy of attempting to remove Bashar al Assad from power. Dempsey, acc’d’g to Hersh, thought Obama was all wet in his Syria strategy so he freelanced his own plot.

Hersh, BTW, is a dogged, fearless investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and the US Army’s abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. He also occasionally cooks up the occasional crockpot conspiracy theory. The question, then, is where does this latest revelation fall in Hersh’s spectrum? ]

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Cashing In

CBGB’s in New York City’s Bowery district was the chic-est place for punks to hang out in the late 1970s and into the early ’80s. The seediest bar imaginable, run by a guy named Hilly Kristal on a side street rife with the homeless, junkies, broken glass, and discarded syringes, the place introduced the world to the likes of the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, the Dead Boys, Patti Smith, and countless other heroes of punk.

cbgb-1983-nyc-billboard-650

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Even inside the place, CBGB was littering with trash, vomit, dog shit, and strung-out mainliners. The very ugliness of CBGB became its selling point. Punk — and CBGB — symbolized a violent reaction to Middle American sensibilities, corporatism, advertising, music marketing, and the use of personal hygiene products.

CBGB served food, after a fashion, because its liquor license demanded it do so. Nobody went there to eat, believe me. The place has been closed for years now, its frontage now redone a la gentrification moderne.

Nevertheless, an entrepreneur named Harold Moore is opening up a CBGB restaurant in Newark Int’l Airport. Moore says he’ll serve $9 deviled eggs, an $11.50 iceberg lettuce salad, and a $14 hamburger to travelers hoping to recreate the Bowery/punk experience. The only thing is, Moore isn’t going to be serving Hilly’s legendary chili which, acc’d’g to lore, usually contained cigarette ash, spit, and other bodily fluids you can only imagine.

Need I remind readers that this holy land is one weird fking place?

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Duh!

FactCheck.org has named Donald Trump its political liar of the year. The truth-digging organization selects an annual top lying bastard and, really, who else could it be in 2015?

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Our National Shart

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Girl Cooties

Ugh! Hillary’s got lady parts. And stuff comes out of them! Gross.

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Please, Click This Link — It Gets Better!

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Okay, can we all admit now that Donald Trump is the worst excuse for a human being this holy land has produced in many, many a year?

Okay then.

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12/20/2015
3 Comments
2016 Democratic Candidates Debate, Armaan Singh Sarai, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Douglas A. Wissing, Fascism, Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, Racism, Texas

Hot Air

Hell-ary

I didn’t watch last night’s Democratic candidates debate but I understand Hillary insisted it be conducted in Afrikaans. Yet another craven attempt to sabotage Bernie Sanders, whom the vast majority of America prefers and who holds a triple digit lead over her.

Screen Shot 2015-12-19 at 10.30.05 PM

Clinton: “Ons sal julle vermorsel!”

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Like It Is

On a serious note, for all the bluster about which candidate speaks her or his mind and which one will dare to utter one or another truth, it was Martin O’Malley last night who was bold enough to say what the sane among us know:

What our nation needs right now is to realize that, while we face a terrible danger, we also face a different sort of political danger. And that is the danger that democracies find themselves susceptible to when unscrupulous leaders try to turn us upon each other.

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley speaks during a roundtable interview in Annapolis, Md., Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2014, the first day of the 2014 legislative session. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

O’Malley (AP/Patrick Semansky)

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We will rise to the challenge of ISIS and we will rise together to the challenges that we face in our economy. But we will only do so if we hold true to the values and the freedoms that unite us, which means we must never surrender them to terrorists, must never surrender our American values to racists, must never surrender to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths.

Unscrupulous, racist, fascist, and a billionaire with a big mouth. Yeah, that’s pretty much a capsule summary of Donald Trump. And, hell — let’s take the gloves all the way off — he’s a terrorist, too.

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Another Brown Bomber

Are you freaking kidding me? Yet another brown boy has been busted in Texas for the heinous crime of carrying something that some fever-delerious pack of scared bunnies thought was a bomb.

Yep. Last weekend, a 12-year-old kid named Armaan Singh Sarai was held in juvenile detention for three days in Fort Worth because some white boy miscreant told the schoolteacher he was going to bomb the school.

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Ka-Boom!

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The teacher reacted — oh-so-reasonably, natch — by immediately calling the cops, who came to the school, took Sarai in, and locked him up from Friday through Monday. All on the say-so of some adolescent dickhead. Sarai’s parents, BTW, were not told of his whereabouts while he cooled his heels in stir.

It turns out Sarai has a backpack with a solar panel on it so he can charge his electronic device while carrying it. A dopey-assed clown in his class pointed it out to Sarai and told him he was gonna tell the teach it was a bomb. Sarai laughed and the dopey-assed kid laughed. But, mirabile dictu, the dopey-assed kid dropped a dime on Sarai anyway and paranoiac psychosis ensued.

The whole damned incident could have been no-harm, no-foul, except Sarai was incarcerated for the entire weekend and — get this! — he is suspended from school, must wear an ankle monitor, and still faces unspecified criminal charges.

No mention is made of the teacher, the cops, or any sane authority figure simply eyeballing the solar panel backpack and, once establishing it was not an weapon of mass destruction, kicking the class clown in his white-boy ass.

Kicking kids in the ass is forbidden in schools these days.

Putting them behind bars — especially when their melanin level is more elevated than the average Cauc. kid’s — ain’t.

‘Specially in the Lone Star State. Do us all a favor, Tex: Secede.

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Wissing Well

A quick update: Doug Wissing’s new book, IN Writing: Uncovering the Unexpected Hoosier State, is flat-out flying off the shelves at the Book Corner. Grab it while you can, kiddies.

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Douglas A. Wissing

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06/23/2015
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Barack Obama, Bloomingfoods, Charleston Church Shooting, Confederate Battle Flag, Fox News, Fresh Air, Marc Maron, Nikki Haley, Racism, Terry Gross, Todd Starnes, WTF Podcast

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Potty Mouth

Okay, you wanna know what’s weird? Fox News, natch. ‘Course, you already knew that. But the point was driven home again yesterday when one Fox News commentator reacted huffily to Barack Obama’s utterance of the word “nigger” on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.

Obama/Maron

The Prez & Marc Maron

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For the two of you on this planet who don’t know the backgrounder yet, Maron does this online interview show in his garage and somehow scored a date with the Most Powerful Person on Earth. If you want more detail about it, click over to Terry Gross’s Fresh Air interview with Maron [the first time, I dare say, that the act of fellatio was ever broadcast on NPR.]

Anyway, Obama, talking about race relations in this holy land, said to Maron during the podcast:

Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say “nigger” in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination.

Now, that’s the kind of statement we’ve come to expect from the Good Obama — nuanced, incisive, compelling. As opposed to those statements of the Bad Obama — mealy-mouthed, evasive, nebulous — you know, the kinds of things that we demand our presidents say.

Obama has violated countless cardinal rules of the presidency, first and foremost among them being brown-skinned. Remember when George W. Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card had apoplexy because BHO had the nerve to work in the Oval Office in his shirt sleeves? By uttering the South’s most famous gift to the American English vocabulary, Obama soiled the presidency once again, at least acc’d’g to a jimoke named Todd Starnes, who, apparently, says words for Fox on a regular basis.

Starnes, writing in his “Todd’s American Dispatch” online column, sez:

President Obama caused jaws to drop across the fruited plain when he uttered the N-word during the interview which was published on Monday. He mentioned the incredibly offensive racial epithet during a conversation over race in the aftermath of the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina…. 

If he talks like that in public — I can only imagine what he says in private. [all sic]

Dig, this is from the “news” network that that for at least 36 hours tried to convince its senescent audience that the Charleston shooting was an attack on Christianity and not dark-skinned people. That Dylann Roof kid had to shriek that he did it because he wanted to start a race war before the Foxers finally came around to the truth of it all.

This, too, from the “news” network that champions and/or features the following people: Rudolph Giuliani, Jeb Bush, Nikki Haley — each of whom has been quoted as saying it’s impossible to know why Roof gunned down nine black people in a church, despite the facts that he told friends he wanted to kill black people, he explained to one of the black people at the church why he was killing black people, and then told the police he went to the church specifically to kill black people. Right, that Roof kid, he’s sure a puzzler.

So, Starnes positions Barack Obama as a foul-mouthed punk for merely saying the word that I’d guess a significant percentage of the Fox News audience uses in everyday language — and not in the abstract, illustrative sense that the President used it. Starnes shudders to think what maledictions Obama employs in private. One can only assume that in the Oval Office, women are “cunts,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who’ll visit Washington in September, is a “slant-eyed gook,” and a good weekend is chockfull of “bitches” and “whores” whose derrieres are covered with “animal trank.”

Because, isn’t that how black guys talk? And Obama’s a black guy, QED.

BTW: Starnes has written essays and/or posted videos at least five times regarding the Charleston terrorist act. Not once has he decried the odious racism that was at the heart of the massacre. In fact, he stuck with the attack-on-Christians trope much longer even than his Fox confreres.

The killing of nine black and brown human beings by a white supremacist, apparently, is far less serious than the president using the term “nigger” to make a point. Like I said, Fox News is weird.

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Haley’s Kudos

Let’s give credit where it’s due. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley yesterday called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds in Columbia. I never thought she’d come around but she has and she should be commended.

SC Confederate Flag

Down With The Flag

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If you want to split hairs and say she should have expressed herself in this manner long ago, go ahead. I agree. But she’s done it now; not every Republican has.

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Bloomingfoods’ Tomorrows

Parsing the statements of the National Co+Op Grocers reps who spoke at last night’s Bloomingfoods co-op owners open house meeting, I sense that they see the local food retailer’s future much as I do.

National Co+Op Grocers people have taken over Bloomingfoods‘ operations this spring and summer in order to find out why the operation was collapsing in a heap. The president of the board of directors and the general manager have resigned, scads of mid-level managers have been axed, and even before Nat Co+Op took over, B-foods closed its flagship Kirkwood Avenue store.

My recommendation is B-foods should shutter all locations except the Near West site. Nat Co+Op director C.E. Pugh told the crowd yesterday that one of the many actions to be taken in the near future includes the shedding of “unnecessary assets.” That sounds like code for more store closings. “We’re going to be in the period of downsizing for a few months,” Pugh added.

Pugh and Nat Co+Op’s Paula Gilbertson, who’s serving as acting GM, both spoke of two of the three remaining B-foods locations in terms that cannot be described as optimistic. On the other hand, when talking about the Near West store Gilbertson and Pugh spoke of spiffying up the place.

Maybe — just maybe — B-foods can escape from this morass leaner and in possession of a brighter future.

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She’s Got It

Day two of The Loved One’s birthday week. I’m posting songs dedicated to her Monday through Friday this week. Yesterday’s tune was Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” Today, let’s go with something from my fave blue-eyed soul brothers, the Average White Band.

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06/19/2015
2 Comments
Charleston Church Shooting, Fox News, Guns, Nikki Haley, Racism

Hot Air

Kill Joy

If anything of value can emerge from the South Carolina church shooting Wednesday, it’s the sheer entertainment we’ve gotten from the Wingnut Right’s reaction to it.

I mean, imagine how flummoxed the Fox News et al crowd has to be over this terrorist attack. Nine blacks (the American equivalent of one-half a 22-year-old suburban blonde) are killed by a white boy gun fondler whose beef against them is they represent the bestial horde that’s raping Cauc. women and “taking over” this holy land. Honestly, in the bizarro world of the Far Right, is this even a crime? Hell, the porcelain dolls who pass for news commentators on Fox and other ultra-conservative media outlets are hammering away at these grievances every day anyway.

So, while the sane among us were decrying this white supremacist attack, the Fox/Far Right people were dithering over its meaning. Golly no, it wasn’t a racial attack, a number of them bleated; it was…, um, er, more of an attack on Christianity — yeah, that’s the ticket! And the little loon who pulled the trigger wasn’t enabled by our devil-may-care gun laws; in fact, some “wits” proffered, the whole shebang wouldn’t even have gone down if the parishioners had been packing heat themselves, as should all god-fearing, Murrica-loving, primarily pale-skinned citizens.

Fox News

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For nearly two full days, the Goebbels wing of the know-nothing crowd seemed nauseatingly (albeit explicably) muted about the attack. That is, until this AM when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley finally found a reason to shout about it.

Perhaps it occurred to her as she showered. I know many of my own epiphanies come upon me as I lather up. However it happened, Haley realized she and the state could kill the kid.

How exciting! Haley announced that, goddamn yes, the sovereign state of So. Car. would indeed seek the death penalty when the kid goes on trial.

Haley

A Ray Of Sunshine

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See? Now the Fox-ers and their ilk can get all het up over this…, er, um, little incident.

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