It is a cruel kind of sadness that the families of the dead at Fort Hood will have to endure. I would not want to see the story of the military gunman who opened fire on his fellow soldiers yesterday incessantly played and replayed on all the news stations for the next two weeks if I were a surviving family member.

Even as I write these words, there are news producers in studios across the country who are estimating how much of a ratings spike this horrific event will give them the next few days. There are Aryan brotherhoods who are incorporating Major Nidal Malik Hasan's name into their recruitment speeches. Muslim American soldiers who are steeling themselves for a potential backlash within the ranks of their own fellow troops.

These are the kind of real life things, real life but nonsensical, that will go on the next few weeks.

The blood has long stopped flowing from the bullet holes in those thirteen people who died yesterday. The eviscerated flesh around the edges of their wounds have begun to harden. Loved ones, still in shock, are having to scurry about, quietly digging up life insurance policies, forlornly selecting the last pieces of clothing their dead family members will ever wear in this world.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

From Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant

I was required to memorize the phrases above by Bryant almost thirty years ago in high school. It is in times like this that it comes back to me, as clearly as if I had only committed it to memory yesterday.

Yesterday, as I turned the channel to get away from scenes of the chaos, in my mind's eye those thirteen people whose lives were so suddenly snatched from them took their own chambers in the silent halls of death.

The perennial stereotype of the horse racing gambler has been recounted in books and movies as the kind of person who is able to see attributes in the horses that they inevitably lose money on that just aren't there. It almost seemed that they got more pleasure out of not winning than they ever could if their horse actually came in first.

The post race political spin last night was starting to sound the same way as the Democrats began to explain why losing the governor's races in New Jersey and New York wasn't indicative of anything at all other than the will of the voters. "The president", said the White House spokesman, "is not watching returns."

This was one of the funnier quotes of the night - what the hell else would a wonkish pol like Obama, who lives at ground zero in the most political city in the country, be doing? Bowling? Playing Scrabble with the girls? Updating his Fantasy Football picks?

The article "It's The Spending, Stupid" that was released before the results were final in New York's District 23 by Cynthia Lummis, a Republican Congresswoman from Wyoming, was just as funny. "Doug Hoffman's ascendance is a referendum on the reckless spending of the Obama administration and the Pelosi-Reid Congress." It's kind of hard to call this race a referendum on spending when an unknown Democrat actually won the race last night in District 23, but I'm sure Rep. Lummis will come up with an inventive way to recast this outcome into a positive development.

The races themselves almost seem incidental, so hungry is our political establishment on both sides of the aisle for a chance to trumpet their agendas. I've often wondered why, in such a large country, we can't just accept the fact that people who call themselves Democrats or Republicans in one part of the country may not have the same ideological beliefs as those in another part - that the membership in a political party is an affiliation of similarly minded people in the truest sense of the word, rather than a brain washing syndicate that attempts to indoctrinate its ranks from coast to coast the way fascist dictators do.

The people of New Jersey and Virginia and New York's District 23 know these people running for office better than anyone on the national level ever could. When the smoke clears, and the cameras and the reporters are gone, the voters don't care about the national agendas - they care about what's happening on their streets, in their school systems, and in their neighborhoods and downtowns.

But reporters don't call regular citizens to ask them what they are thinking. They call experts and analysts instead. Then they call Sarah Palin and Glen Beck and Keith Olbermann to get the final word on the matter. They use old articles for research. They listen to other journalists and op-ed writers, and end up publishing coverage that reinforces a binary version of reality, as if we are not a multi-dimensional, multiple narrative population who may or may not act in ways that protect our own self-interests.

It would be easy to say that we have devolved into a nation that is all talk and no action, but that isn't really the case. In many ways, to the people who package and sell political talk, reporting on the saying is is much more lucrative than reporting on the doing - how many ways can you describe the construction of a new bridge that will take two years to complete?

But view that bridge through the eyes of an editor, or a public relations specialist, and all of a sudden the building of forms and the pouring of concrete take on a whole new light as we are bombarded by accusations of graft and corruption, payoffs and kickbacks, shoddy workmanship and back room dealmaking.

To the people who need the bridge, the politics of it is secondary to actually getting it completed so they can drive over it to get where they are going.

It would be disingenuous to write all of this and not admit that there is certain amount of irony in my writing this, since I have my own political and cultural opinion blog. At the end of the week, I've written a whole lot more than anything I've done to take action. Maybe what I have to say ads to America's political narrative. Maybe it doesn't.

The upshot of all of this is that for the next two weeks, you will be bombarded with headlines like "Palin's Candidate Loses In NY Congressional Race", "How Will Obama Respond To GOP Wins In VA And NJ?", "Dems, Incumbents Get Wake-Up Call", "Analysis: Elections Not A Referendum On Obama", "A Warning To Democrats: It's Not 2008 Anymore", "GOP Wins Reveal Cracks In Obama Coalition", and "VA and NJ Elections: Obama World Stayed Home".

These headlines, however stirring, will do nothing to alleviate the high unemployment rate, and will have no bearing on any efforts to stimulate the economy, the two things America is really interested in seeing improve.

Newt Gingrich and I have the same alma mater.

I had no idea that we both graduated from Emory University.

The publication the school put out for alumni was in the mail today. Emory Magazine, which has got to be one of the best put together university communications out there, is used mainly to let us know what's going on back at the ranch, remind us of how much all the educational majesty leading up to pomp and circumstance for this generation costs, and prime us for the fundraising phone call from a student...

...a solicitation phone call that ironically came between the time I flipped through the magazine and the time, half an hour later, when I sat down to write this piece.

Gingrich was on the cover of this issue, his white capped head covering nearly half the page in a jowly pose similar to the one in the picture above that made me think of Tip O'Neill in the twilight of his career. I didn't know that he was the founder of Emory's Young Republican chapter. What I had always felt was a deep respect for his intellect, even if I didn't agree with many of the political positions he has espoused over the years.

His latest reincarnation, in which he is teaming up with Al Sharpton to push for improvements in the nation's educational systems, may seem odd from the outside, but I have always been amazed at the idea of a professor with a PhD turning his theories into action. No matter how much you may dislike the conclusions he arrives at, there is no way to deny that Gingrich is a first rate thinker.

One of my buddies, another Emory alum, thinks Gingrich is biding his time until the Sarah Palin types wear out their welcome, when my buddy insists that "Newt can take this thing." What my buddy doesn't realize is how much credibility Gingrich's association with Sharpton has cost him with the army of wingnut zombies following Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin, an army who mistakenly believe that they are real Republicans.

The reality for Gingrich is that his time to run for president has passed him by. As he comments in the Emory Magazine article The Man With The Plan, "I was in an airport, and these students came up and said, 'you're in our history book,'", Gingrich says. "I felt very odd at that point."

I don't know what he and Sharpton and Arne Duncan are cooking up, but I think Gingrich's academic background, his political instincts, and his stature will serve the groundbreaking educational tour well. As a matter of fact, this threesome will be in New Orleans tomorrow, November 3rd, and in Baltimore on November 13th.

In a recent interview that included both Gingrich and Sharpton, Sharpton told NBC, "The parents need to be challenged with the message of `no excuses.'" Gingrich responded, "I think that he has it exactly right, that education has to be the No. 1 civil right of the 21st century and I've been passionate about reforming education. And we can't get it done as a partisan issue."

"Amen" to that.

Where should I begin today?

I'm not so sure.

But that's never stopped me before, so let's get this thing started with the topic that is on the tip of everybody's tongue in - healthcare reform. (Unless you're a FOX News political commentator, in which case the only thing on the tip of your tongue is the phrase "ObamaisaCommunistMarxistSocialistsecretMuslim", which has been repeated so many times it has now become one long word).

Senator Harry Reid seems to have gotten tired of being the Democrat's whipping boy - (can you still say that? - was that racist? - is it safer to just call him a CommunistMarxistSocialistsecretMuslim?) so it looks like a public option of some kind is going to be in the final healthcare bill that gets voted on. But whatever kind of option it is, you can be sure that it will be the variety Senator Olympia Snowe won't be able to support.

The White House spokesman says the president is happy with the outcome. I don't think he means Obama is "happy" like "happy he won the lottery" though. From the subdued tone coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave these days, it seems more like Obama is "gritting his teeth together 'happy' that these clowns didn't drag this out much longer."

Then there is the FOX News debacle that the White House has gotten tangled in. I wholeheartedly understand their point. I can't stand FOX News either. When I am out somewhere, like the McDonald's I used to frequent for breakfast, and they have FOX News on, I ask for the manager and demand that he turn the channel.

Not that CNN delivers the news the way Walter Cronkite used to - after all, they've got their own in house ingrate, Lou Dobbs, stinking up the airwaves nightly as he sneers into the camera and rants about illegal immigrants. Even so, CNN still does better than the Newsreader Barbies and Brylcream Bobs that FOX seems to swear by.

But the White House is in a pickle on this one, because as soon as some emergency other than swine flu comes along, they will have to abandon their stance to get back to taking care of business. (If you believe in Glen Beck, that "taking care of business" will be Obama instituting martial law so he can hypnotize us all and turn us into socialist communist do gooder Ivy Leaguers who will line up to check out books from the library by William Ayers and equip ourselves to DESTROY AMERICA).

Although it is good to see President Obama, in his remarks about FOX News, calling "a spade a spade" somewhere else besides a speech to the NAACP.

NOTE TO WHITE HOUSE: Let us out here in the general public take care of this dustup with FOX. I enjoy putting restaurant managers on the spot.

Although I did notice tonight, while flipping through the channels to Monday Night Football, that Bill O'Reilly was TAKING CARE WITH HIS WORDS when he spoke of the president. I don't mind you trying to indict Obama if he's screwed up, Bill, but you've got to move on from ACORN and William Ayers. Obama won. The race is over. He will be with you for another three years and three months. Guess what? Keep up this nonsensical conspiracy shtick, Bill, and it'll be SEVEN YEARS and three months.

Speaking of Monday Night Football - can ESPN send Mike Tirico somewhere? Ron Jaworski and John Gruden can call the game by themselves. All Tirico does is tell me statistics that I really don't want to know. Add to all of this the fact that I'm suffering from John Madden withdrawal since he left the National Football League's Sunday Night telecast, and that I am still P.O.'ed Madden had to leave Monday Night Footabll, and I am ready to eject Tirico from the broadcast booth my damn self. As a matter of fact, I'll give him a penalty myself - "unsportsmanlike commentating."

Maybe I need to get Glen Beck on the phone and tell him that Mike Tirico is a "socialist communist Ivy League pianist who only has six degrees of separation from William Ayers". While I'm at it, I might as well bend Beck's ear a little more, and throw in there that "having the World Series in NOVEMBER is a communist act, and unconstitutional, and has the potential to MESS UP THE FOOTBALL SCHEDULE...

..and what could be more UNAMERICAN than that?

Sarah Palin is giving President Obama foreign policy advice from her Facebook account...

...and the news media is eating up every word her ghostwriter writes.

In a nation of three hundred million people, there have got to be more than the three hundred names we see week in and week out who have opinions worth exploring.

In all the articles about policy, you never see the number "165 million dollars a day", which is how much it is estimated the U.S. spends each day we are in Afghanistan, mentioned at all. I guess the actual cost is just an abstraction that most of these commentators believe a cash strapped nation shouldn't be worrying about, but in my book, A BILLION DOLLARS A WEEK for anything means we are spending real money.

We are approaching the Afghanistan conflict as if we are engineering a corporate takeover - add a few troops here, deploy a few weapons there, redefine what a "successful" outcome is, and then call it a day...

...the same way we did in Iraq or the laundry list of other countries bigger than Grenada that we have battled over the years since World War II.

The last time we won a war where we crushed the enemy in body and spirit was World War II. Our leaders had a different mindset back then, namely, one that acknowledged more frankly, although not publicly, our vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Our nation wasn't filled with "USA! USA!" chanters but with people who all were related to someone serving in the war effort. We were a nation whose fear of the possibility that we could actually lose caused a large majority of us to understand that our way of life was on the line.

We are not willing to send the one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand troops it could take to crush the opposition forces in Afghanistan. Our allies aren't willing to pony up any more than a nominal amount of their own forces.

The way we felt for a few months after September 11th was the way we felt for years after Pearl Harbor. It was a fear so great that we locked up Japanese Americans by the thousands.

We are not yet afraid enough of the things that could happen to do those terrible things to another nation that we know will work.

I champion Barack Obama's presidency on this blog week in and week out, not because I believe he is a perfect leader, but because I believe he deserves a chance to succeed or fail like any other president. Most of us have normally forgotten we even have a president by now, nine months after a presidential election, but our parochial and narrow minded press will continue to report practically every breath he takes as long as the public keeps tuning in.

Obama's not seasoned yet, not by a long shot, but no other president in the modern era has been either, whether they acted like it or not, in nine months. Somewhere between the fading of the hoopla after getting elected and the re-emergence of the hoopla to get re-elected, you find out what kind of president you really have.

President Obama is a pretty smart guy, smart enough to know how much of a sticky wicket that "eeny meeny miney mo" warfare in Afghanistan has become.

Our leaders in the 1940's didn't have to deal with fighting only the parts of a country that opposed us in WWII - we were committed to killing everybody we could until our opponents surrendered.

If we had danced around the idea that "war=killing people" in World War II the way we do now, we could have very well lost that war.

We had to kill a million people in Iraq before we could convince ourselves that we could leave in good conscience.

So boil it down to number, Mr. Obama, the way they do in corporate boardrooms - how many Afghans do we have to kill to make this mission successful?

I know you can't say this, Mr. President, but that's pretty much it - how many people are we willing to kill to get what we want, and how much is it going to cost?  Or in liberal speak, how rich are we prepared to make our defense contractors? 

                             


General Stanley McChrystal needs to decide whether or not he wants to run for president.

Once he figures that out, he needs to pack his bags.

There are a number of ways built into military protocol that a general can express his displeasure with the ideas the White House has.

But at the end of the day, after all the advice has been given and all the scenarios have been hashed out, America expects its commander-in-chief to be the lead dog on any direction our armed forces take.

Period.

Generals are a dime a dozen. Ask Fmr General Schwarzkopf, or Fmr General Powell. One of the good things about our military is it is designed to operate at a high casualty rate, not only on the field but in the top brass as well.

All I've been thinking about is Al Haig ever since McChrystal began playing rogue general for the media.

If you were the chairman of a major company, and you saw your chief financial officer on CNBC telling their interviewer that they didn't agree with the direction of some of the corporate policies you had put in place, your chief financial officer would be gone by nightfall.

S. and I went to a backyard ceremony for a neighbor's daughter last Saturday. The groom was a soldier, a young guy in his mid twenties who looked just like a young movie star Ronald Reagan with a crew cut. A tank commander, he was chiseled and lean from spending long hours sweating inside the tank's hot interior in Iraq. The groom stared straight into my eyes and said "I'll do whatever the American people ask me to do" without reservation, a statement I heard him repeat numerous times to other guests as he made his way around the room.

Maybe the general needs to spend more time with his troops, and less with the press.

These soldier's families understand what it is they have signed on to serve, but they don't want their loved ones in harm's way a moment longer than is absolutely necessary.

And they certainly don't want their commander in Afghanistan playing chicken with the commander-in-chief while their child's life hangs in the balance.

Alan Grayson (D) Orlando

How do you get everything you ever asked for as a political party - popular president, significant majority in the House, a majority a hair away from achieving critical mass in the Senate - and then find every excuse in the book for not being able to do what you want?

This healthcare bill fight has been so predictable you would think the Democrats own the trademark rights to the term "political failure".

Even though the reality is that we are very close to seeing some kind of healthcare bill hit the president's desk, the perception that the Democrats are fighting an uphill battle against an opposition whose forces are weak and tattered is the one that predominates political discussions.

Setting aside the differences in rhetoric for a minute, the one thing you know about a Republican is, even if he is outnumbered a hundred to one, he will try to dominate the situation, as if to rule is his birthright. If he is only outnumbered ten to one, he will start proclaiming victory immediately, as if by force of will alone he will negate the mathematical inequality staring him in the face.

Representative Alan Grayson from Florida has had enough. I know he doesn't read this blog or others like it, but he has done the very thing I and countless other bloggers have been trumpeting for weeks - he has simplified the complexities of the healthcare debate down to a few words the general public can get its arms around.

He did not dance around the issues.

He did not come up with a legal sounding rebuttal to the opposition that left enough wiggle room for him to deny it all later.

And he damn sure didn't consult his pollster to determine how this might make his approval rating or his reelection numbers fluctuate.

He boiled down the Republican opposition to ANY healthcare overhaul to simple, direct, visceral terms - the kind Democrats normally shy away from. The kind the Republicans normally come up with in their sleep.

"The Republicans have a backup plan in case you do get sick ... This is what the Republicans want you to do. "If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly."

Rep. Alan Grayson, Tuesday from the floor of the House of Representatives

Can this lone brawler inspire the rest of the Democratic crybabies?


America has made polio a disease found only in history books. Put men on the moon. We can even get our money out of the bank in the middle of the night after its staff has gone home by simply sticking a card in a machine.

We can do this. The Democrats can do this.

Are the Democrats waiting for perfect conditions? 75 or 80 Democratic senators and 300 or more Democratic members of the House? The way they look right now, I doubt if even those gargantuan majorities would be enough.

Maybe there are too many lawyers in the Democratic Party, including the president, who are prone to do that thing that lawyers instinctively do when they open their mouths - try not to get boxed into a corner.

Advocating for a client, ladies and gentlemen, is different than fighting for your constituents.

Quit playing to George Will and George Stephanopoulos - the Peorias around the country get their soundbites via Youtube just like everybody else does these days, and those websites with the weird names that slice and dice the news up into bits of entertainment, to be endlessly re-emailed, replayed and repeated.

The Democrats need to paint themselves into a corner on this one - they need to paint themselves into a corner and dare anyone to try and get them out of it.

Sean Yoes, the host of the AFRO First Edition talk show I appear on from time to time at WEAA, shot me an email a couple of days ago asking for my thoughts on the recent dust up between Obama and New York Governor David Paterson. The political brouhaha between them ensued when a White House emissary allegedly sent word to Governor Paterson to stay out of the 2010 governor's race. You can read the article Yoes ended up writing, titled "Should WH Stay Out of Paterson's Way?", at Black America Web.

But back to the day I originally got the email - later that night I asked S. what she thought about the Obama/Paterson situation. "Obama needs to leave Paterson alone," she said. "Really, he needs to quit sticking his hand into so many things."

I talked with a buddy of mine from New York yesterday. "When did this happen?" he asked.

It was when I spoke to my buddy from Alabama that we got a little deeper into it. "Who gives a damn about a black president telling a black governor not to run? Its all about the politics. The president has no choice but to do what he did."

"You know," I said, "Paterson makes me think of Kwame Kilpatrick. His daddy was a long time state assemblyman from Harlem, the same way Kilpatrick's momma was a congresswoman. You would think the two of them would know better. Actually, now that I'm really thinking about it, you could ask the same thing about Jessie Jackson Jr., Harold Ford Jr. - who else am I missing? - all of these guys had head starts on this thing and look what happens?"

My buddy from Alabama answered before I stopped talking.

"They think they're white."

"Really?"

"Privileged black kids like them never dealt with the same stuff average black kids did."

It was an interesting way to look at it, especially coming from someone whose own African American mother was the mayor of his hometown.

I thought about some of my old associates who qualified as spoiled children of South Carolina's black political elite, people I frequently socialized with back when I was growing up, and the otherworldliness they exuded when we talked about getting into jobs or out of legal problems, as if there was a permanent red carpet rolling along in front of them, smoothing out the little bumps life presents when you least expect them.

To look at Paterson's recent actions and then juxtapose them with his extraordinary confessions during his first days in office was to see the mannerisms and the actions of some of these long lost friends come to life.

My man Sean goes into the technical aspects of the political calculations in his article. Personally, I understand where Obama is coming from. And since I'm not a journalist, and won't ever need to get a quote from anybody in Paterson's administration, I can say this - too many of our black politicians like Paterson have been raised to do anything but work. Even so, I think that the execution of sending the message to Paterson was too sloppily done for it to be coming from the White House.

How come the DNC didn't weigh in on this instead, with the White House's intentions deep in the background?

Paterson's blind arrogance is not a reference to his sightlessness - but it is a deliberately pointed description of his administration, as far as the internet and the New York Times tells me, seems so intent on serving Paterson's agenda rather than his constituents, almost every New York state resident wants him gone.

The president may not feel that this could happen to him, but as I listened to all the people I asked about the Obama/Paterson debacle the last couple of days, all of who are die hard Obama supporters, I sensed a certain amount of "Obama fatigue" setting in, a sentiment that his "be everywhere at once" strategy is not helping lately.

I'm no foreign policy expert...

...in fact, I know next to nothing about what kinds of policies we have regarding individual nations with whom we are either allies or enemies.

But after watching parts of the G-20 summit, and the reactions by our esteemed political gabfest regulars, I am convinced that a seasoned kindergarten teacher could do as good a job as the so called "experts" when it comes to understanding the motivations behind the actions of our rivals.

Because if you look at the proceedings in Pittsburgh dispassionately, what you see is the same scuffling for attention that five year olds do when they are on the playground.

Now we see everybody under the sun howling about Iran gaining the power to arm their very own nuclear weapons. I thought our own president, Mr. Barack Obama himself, who, at the very same G-20 summit where all of the news about a secret reactor in Iran began to come out, said that "no one nation should try to dominate another nation."

"Responsibility and leadership in the 21st century demand more. In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War."

President Barack Obama
Address to United Nations General Assembly

Why do we say these things when we really don't mean them?

Because if I'm the ruler of Iran - not Ahmadinejad, but the people he answers to - and believe that my national sovereignty is as valid as any other country's ability to decide its own fate, then I'd probably tell the UN Security Council to go jump off a cliff.

In many ways, it is analogous to the "family meeting" concept that caught on in the 80's, where everybody in the household got together to discuss major issues affecting the entire family. Who had the veto power in those meetings? The parents - the people who were paying for the very room in which the meeting was held.

I'd much rather have my president tell it like it really is - that we get all the say so because we are paying the lion's share of the United Nation's bill with some of the money we've borrowed from the Chinese; that we'd really like to quit building these nuclear weapons because they cost too damn much, but we don't have the muscle to make India, Pakistan, North Korea or Russia give theirs up; that we consider the nukes in France and the United Kingdom to be the same as being located behind our borders; and that we give Israel a pass, mostly for having the moxie to claim an official policy of "nuclear ambiguity" with a straight face when we all know they've got them.

I won't be holding my breath waiting for anything like this to ever happen.

As a communication tool between sovereign nations, the United Nations was a good idea, but the pomp and circumstance and posturing that passes for diplomacy has gotten in the way almost since the beginning.

And if you stop a minute, and think about the facts that are involved - if you take a long, long look at the picture of the little boy in the picture above, who was burned to a crisp in Nagasaki, Japan in 1945 - the only country I can think of that has ever used nuclear weapons in a wartime conflict is...

...the United States of America.

Last week, before rolling out to my hometown of Orangeburg, SC, I did another radio interview with Sean Yoes, who is the host of "The WEAA/AFRO First Edition", an hour-long political talk show on Baltimore's WEAA-FM (88.9 FM), which airs Sunday nights at 8 p.m.

You can click this link and push the "Listen Live" button at the top of the page to hear the show.

This week was a shorter segment. We talked specifically about how President Barack Obama has handled the realities of being an African American commander-in-chief amid the heightened racial tensions across the country.

Is Barack Obama more like W.E.B. DuBois or Booker T. Washingon?  Find out what Sean Yoes and I think tonight on the show.

As always, it was fun. Check it out if you have a chance.

9/12 Washington Tea Party
Picture by NineTwelvePhotos



If you call me by my real name, the legal middle name that I was given at birth, I won't hear you at first, because it is used so infrequently.

I chose instead to use a shortened version of my middle name.

If you keep at it, though, with the version I've mothballed, I'll respond, although inwardly I will feel that you have changed the nature of our relationship in a way in which I really don't want you to get too comfortable with.

But there gets to be a point, after I've heard you say it a half a dozen times, when I am liable to get ticked off, even though it says right there on my birth certificate and my bank statements and any other legal or business documents I posses that this is my actual name.

I imagine President Obama, who went by "Barry" for many years before reverting to his given name of "Barack", wrestled with the need to fit into a society chock full of Bills, Toms and Johnnys the same way I did with my given name "Krishna".

I brought this up because I can look at my hit counter and show you by the spikes in my visitor report just about every time I have used the word "white people" in a title. Those have turned out to be some of the heaviest traffic days I've gotten in the last year.

I can write "fringe", "subset", "few", or any one of those other words that mean "some" or "minority of" all day long, but it doesn't matter - to the many vocal critics on this blog and others who are turned off by this latest turn in our nationwide dialogue on race, any mention of the word "white people", it seems, is an indictment of all white people.

The one thing I have noticed in all my reading - and I have read many, many millions of words over the years - is how little the phrase "white people" is actually used in our newspapers or on our news reports. On the other hand, minority groups are identified by name so often, that to hear someone say "black people" or "asian people" or "Hispanics" sounds normal.

Kind of like hearing the shortened version of my name sounds normal to me.

Writing the phrase "white people" seems to really bother these folks who rush to fill the comment sections of this blog and others like it who are bringing a different perspective - a much needed different perspective - to political discussions.  This indignation at being singled out formally is as if every usage of this phrase pricks away at what I can only assume is the neutrality that these sensitive folks feel they enjoy in America.

Talking about race in America is uncomfortable. It calls into question a person's own sense of morality. It forces people to examine closely all those inequities we have learned to rationalize instead of challenge.

Watching our punditocracy in action this week, both in print and on TV, twist Jimmy Carter's carefully chosen words into a blanket pronouncement fitting the narrow minded narratives of yesteryear that seem to run continuously in their heads, I have come to the realization that I am tired of seeing the same old same old AARP crowd holding the political conversation in this country hostage.

And I am not amused by the rest of the entertainers posing as political prognosticators who populate our airwaves with commentary that begins at the ridiculous and goes downhill from there.

One of the real challenges we face in America when we talk about race isn't just the empirical evidence and the undisputed facts - it is the degree to which we are willing to accept other viewpoints as legitimate.

George Stephanopolous asked President Obama the obligatory question on race and the statement made by Jimmy Carter better than I would imagine any of the other interviewers in the president's TV news show marathon did today, posing it not as a either/or, "is the claim legitimate or not" fill in the blank query, but in more realistic terms that asked instead to what degree is the claim relevant.

Stephanopolous asked, "Does it frustrate you when your own supporters see racism that you don't think exists?"

President Obama answered, "Look, I think that race is such a volatile issue in this society - always has been - that it becomes hard for people to separate out...race being sort of a part of the backdrop of American society versus race being a predominant factor in any given debate."

"A part of the backdrop of American society."

Like the names the president and I were given at birth, whether we wanted to acknowledge them or not, race is as important to the American story as the percussion section is to a symphony orchestra. Excluding any acknowledgment of the way race has helped to fuel the fire of discontent about the healthcare debate or concern over the notion that this particular president's administration is aiming to "take over everything" means we are not willing to fully explore the sources of the animus and vitriol that lie at the root of this subset of white America's recent group protests and individual protestations.

I will repeat the end of the last sentence - subset of white America's recent group protests and individual protestations - for those of you who eyes usually miss this explicitly stated demarcation.

The irony in all this is, the only time I am happy to hear my full name called is when the issue of healthcare is involved - specifically, when I visit the doctor's office - because when I hear the nurse with the clipboard read my name, it means it's time to head back to the examining room and see the doctor.

9/12 Washington Tea Party
Pictures by NineTwelvePhotos


These white Americans you are seeing on your TV every night hollering and yelling and screaming about our president's Kenyan roots need to be put on the hot seat, to get backed into a corner, to be force fed until they choke on the ugly truth that underlies the relationship between blacks and whites in this country.

It is their special brand of unrestrained, self righteous indignation, as if all the right thinking people are lined up behind their sneering eyes whenever they utter a derogatory racial pronouncement about our African American president that make me want to throw something at my damn TV.

Yesterday, as I watched the news, this circus reminded me of something I wrote a few years ago, something that sadly, is still true:

"White folks, and white men in particular, have always found ways to alter, bend, or just totally ignore the rules they've made up when something doesn't suit them."

The Black Folks Guide To Survival

S. and I shook our heads and rolled our eyes all through the news last night as the newscaster talked innocuously about the nature of the recent protests across the country while pictures of angry white people filled the screen behind him. It was as if the news announcer was playing charades, avoiding any mention of the one word his viewers were looking for to describe those protestors.

We both stared wide-eyed at the TV as Jimmy Carter came on to thoughtfully but reluctantly say what we have known since the beginning of this mess - that there are a lot of white people in this country who aren't willing to accept a black man as their president. Why were we so wide eyed? Because the old joke in the black community was that nothing existed unless white folks said it did. No alternate points of view were relevant unless white people said they were.

All I know is, I am not taking the weight for the racial problems America has brought on itself.

The "go along to get along" days are over.

Living in America will be more complicated as a result.

And in the end, there may not ever be an answer to racism.

To the people who are gearing up for this weekend's hate rally, whatever part of the country you are in, I've got a news flash for you - the otherness of black people is bound only by your limitations.

Think about it for a second.

Why would I delineate for myself a perimeter around my humanity just because my skin has a different hue? Just because my nose has a different shape?

Why wouldn't I want to be able to take myself less seriously? Why wouldn't I want to experience the gloriousness of complete and total freedom? Why wouldn't I want to experience a weightlessness that consigns all boundaries of my existence to the nether regions of my consciousness?

My own level of perception is at once panoramic and precise, the connections between my ocular and my cerebral functions requiring exactly the same amount of electrical activity as yours, the osmotic properties between my dendrites and my synapses identical to those that course along your nerves.

But this truth telling about race doesn't really confer any benefits to me so long as you insist on rejecting these assertions, so long as you insist on avoiding the facts, so long as you cling to your sanitized versions of our God awful past relationship.

America was going to have the same warts whoever got elected.

The economy was going to be in bad shape. The banking system was going to be broke. Afghanistan was going to be an albatross. Immigration was going to be a hot topic. And ten million people would have become unemployed, regardless of what ANY president was able to do in the last eight months.

You know all this.

If you don't, you have no business holding up placards denouncing things you don't understand.

It would make much more sense for you to be in Connecticut right now, demanding some of the trillions back that you have loaned your Wall Street bankers, the same bankers who are even now repacking the exact same securities that caused this financial collapse in the first place, with a shiny new name and one of those gold stars from the ratings agencies that are about as valuable as the ones a kindergarten teacher gives out, for resale to the people who run your 401(k).

But that black bogeyman is still one of the most powerful agitators in the business of politics.

I'm still waiting for someone, somewhere, to bring O.J. into this.

I woke up this morning to see President Barack Obama's face next to Kanye West's face on Huffington Post, underneath the headline Obama: Kanye Is A "Jackass".

I wouldn't give a damn myself if Terry Moran, who is obviously only pretending to be a journalist, abused my trust and twittered my off-the-record comments. But then again, I'm not the president of the United States.

So I imagine the staffers at the White House are losing their minds today over the nincompoop of a journalist who Twittered this entertaining tidbit to his followers.

Obama's "dead ass right", as a caller said on the radio this morning.

Kanye's been a jackass for a long time.

Everybody knew that.

No news there.

But the same people who think no black man, however wrong he is, should be criticized, especially by other black men - they are probably already cranking up the rhetoric down at "Don't Hate, Incorporated." Already hollering on the airwaves about the president applying a double standard to West's outburst while accepting an apology from Joe Wilson, who deserves the nickname "Old Yeller" waay more than that dog in the Disney movie.

The thing that's even worse for all of us is the narrow lens through which our media will distill all of these machinations, as if the entire country should shoehorn its varying perspectives into a New York/New England point of view.

If you think Kanye West's feelings or the manhood he seems to be wasting on snatching microphones out of teenage white girl's hands is more important than the president's opinion, you need to get your head examined.

And if you think "Old Yeller" got off easy, take a step back for a minute and think about this - for the foreseeable future, Joe Wilson's name will be linked every night with Serena Williams and Kanye West whenever the media refers to the "Week of Outbursts" we endured last week.

It doesn't get more ironic than that.

Last Friday, in between moving the Resident Diva into her dorm and getting a new air conditioning unit installed at home, I did another radio interview with Sean Yoes, who is the host of "The WEAA/AFRO First Edition", an hour-long political talk show on Baltimore's WEAA-FM (88.9 FM), which airs Sunday nights at 8 p.m.

You can click this link and push the "Listen Live" button at the top of the page to hear the show.

This week was a shorter segment. We talked about a post I did earlier in the week, titled "Where Are All The White People With Good Sense?", which seemed even more apropos Friday than it was on Tuesday when Mr. Joe Wilson, from my home state of South Carolina, showed Wednesday night that he had absolutely no respect for the office of the presidency, or the accepted protocol of the body in which he sits.

I'll let Eugene Robinson, another South Carolinian who coincidentally is from the very same town I grew up in, be the high minded journalist who tells you via his Washington Post column that we shouldn't stoop to worrying about whether this is about race or not.

Because it is, all day long and twice on Sundays.

The only thing that S. says whenever his face appears on TV in our house is 'another John C. Calhoun", another one of South Carolina's illustrious politicians, a nineteenth century vice president of the United States who was an advocate of slavery, states rights, limited government, and nullification.

S. might be right.

Take away the slavery and it sounds like a laundry list Joe Wilson would be proud of putting on his website.

"Most little white children come from families powerful enough to shut out reality."

Jonathan Schwarz
"Four People Turned Stupid By Power"
A Tiny Revolution

I don't know if I agree with the modifier "most" that Schwarz uses here, but I can certainly see the point Schwarz is trying to make. And if there ever was a moment in time that this quote summarizes, it is today, Tuesday, September 8th, when a certain frenzied subset of our paler population will withdraw their budding genuises from school so that Little Johnny will not have to be subjected to listening to that bad, bad man, Mr. Barack Obama himself, otherwise known to us real Americans as the president of the United States.

"I am not going to give him unfiltered access to my kids."

I imagine HBO will see a drop in its subscriber base soon. I expect sales of the video game Grand Theft Auto will tail off into nothingness. And IPod's will litter landfills across the country. These predictions would make sense if these parents were telling the truth - that anything untoward should never come within a hundred yards of little Johnny's pristine ears unless it has been filtered.

What planet are these people raising their kids to live in? Johnny can't stay on the curb of his cul-de-sacs for the rest of his life.

Since our TV producers can't seem to come up with any other creative ways to get you to watch their news product this week, all we will be seeing is these people who will be snarling and howling and shrieking and yes, CRYING, as if Beelzebub himself is going to whisper his evil thoughts - study hard, read more, make goals for yourself - into little Johnny's ears.

So what I want to know is...

...where are all the white people with good sense these days?

Are they still on vacation?

Have they left the country?

Or are they just so ashamed of these people who look like them, who may be their cousins, or their coworkers, or their in-laws, that they don't want to be mentioned in the same sentence with them?

I've been thinking about these irrational parents that have been featured rather prominently on TV lately. You know who I'm talking about. They are wild eyed, or teary eyed, and sanctimonious, and all of them are white, and they swear that if President Barack Obama so much as breathes in Johnny's direction during the school day, he will have their kids calling each other "comrade" by the time they come home.

Which is interesting, because many of these parents don't even know what socialism really is. Couldn't tell you what the tenets of communism are if a years worth of gas for their SUV was at stake.

I've been thinking about these parents quite a bit lately, because some of them are my neighbors. They are the people who will just about have a stroke if their child's teacher assigns their kid homework on the weekend, that sacrosanct time here in LaLa Land that is mandated to be filled with fun, fun, fun - four wheeling and jet skiing and hunting and fishing and SEC football games and soccer matches and birthday celebrations.

But if Johnny doesn't listen to his parents now, as any outing to a local restaurant will confirm, then what makes these moist eyed mommies think that their "wittle munchkins" are going to listen to the president while he talks on a TV screen in their classroom?

Another phrase, one that I've heard through the years that may hone in a little closer to what I want to say today is this:

"If you want to see where stupid children come from, follow them home."

That point was driven home Saturday night while I was reading an article by a friend of mine:

"Tom Hui is a self-described video game lover. Michelle Liu calls herself a nerd. Marissa Pan simply likes books, and Tanya Nguyen prefers balance in her life.

What do they have in common? All scored 2400 on the SAT, putting them in the elite company of 297 nationwide and 10 in Georgia earning perfect scores last year."

Gracie Bonds Staples
"Four Area Students Score 2400 On SAT -- Perfect"
Atlanta Journal Constitution

After reading a story like the one above, why are the white parents that will be paraded across our airwaves today, prattling on about the president's powers of hypnosis, even relevant?

These four real American children in the excerpt above all attended public schools.

I live less than five hundred yards from a public library, which I frequent several times a week. There are so few white children in there at times, you would think you were in a foreign country instead of an Atlanta northern suburb.

What I want to know is what these people are going to do when this brownskinned president stays on their TV year after year? Even if you only watch FOX News, guess what? They don't have a storyline if it doesn't include Obama. When are they going to do when he stays on the front page of their newspaper week after week?

Are they going to lock Johnny in a closet, like the child abductors in the news this week? Are they going to build ideological bunkers behind their houses, and set off air raid signals whenever the stench of liberalism draws near?

The best protection for your child is an appreciation of knowledge for knowledge's sake. An understanding of the basic tenets of critical thinking. And a facility with the English language that includes mastery of a vocabulary large enough to recognize the nuances that differentiate the meaning of one word from the next when someone is speaking to you.

But that, as my mother would say, is too easy. Makes too much sense. Instead, these people will do the thing they always do, the way Rick Pitino did when he went into a rampage a couple of weeks ago at a news conference while discussing the latest allegations from his adulterous sexual dalliance - claim that the truth is what they are telling you, and that everything else is all lies.

Where are the white people with good sense these days?

Are you out there?

Right about now, if the script was flipped, and these were black people doing this, I would have already been approached by someone white by now who would ask me, point blank, "why are they doing this?"

But if they don't want their Johnny listening to the president of ALL of these United States as he gives out the kind of simple advice - study hard, read more, make goals for yourself - that helped to get Obama where he is today, that's fine.

Put President Obama's speech on for the black kids.

Jamal WILL be listening.

Put it on for the Asian kids.

Jiao WILL be listening.

Put it on for the Hispanic kids.

Javier WILL be listening.

Put it on for the Indian kids.

Jharma WILL be listening.

Put it on for the children of all our immigrants, for their parents who have defied every challenge in the book to get to the real America, the one that has "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" tattooed to the base of the Statue of Liberty.

The thing about white people with good sense is...

...they are boring.

The same way black people and Asian people and Hispanic people and Indian people with good sense are boring.

Which is why you won't see them in front of any TV cameras today.

They'll be the ones soberly helping their children to master their A-B-C's and 1-2-3's. Demanding that homework get done before play time begins. Adding enrichment programs and activities on their own to bolster what the school teaches. Helping their children learn, one day at a time, how to navigate this thing we call life without having to depend on slogans and jingles and propaganda of any kind to give them their own sense of personal direction.

Training them, in other words, to deal with the world and its realities rather than look for an excuse to opt out.


I don't know what these people are worried about.

Because if Barack Obama was really the Malcolm X type of political radical they make him out to be...

...he'd schedule a speech to school children every other week to MAKE SURE these people took little Johnny out of class each and every time.