In 1978 or thereabouts, when my album collection numbered around 25, I polled a few friends, my brother and my sister and asked them to pick the “best records” in that collection. I assigned point values to all the entries and discovered, to my mild surprise, that the winner was Elton John’s sprawling double album, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

A fine album, lots of quirky little songs on it, and of course a few monsters. All in all, worthy of the acclaim.

One of those songs provides the title for this essay.

I remember wondering why the song had no title. “And each day I learn just a little bit more; I don’t know why but I do know what for. If we’re all going somewhere let’s get there soon; oh, this song has no title, just words and a tune.”

All of 18 (the album was several years older by then), I wondered what those words meant. Was he too busy to title the song? Was it just not a high enough priority? Was this song an early take on “Life During Wartime”?

Was there just no time left for something so trivial?

I am not an economist. My highest education is one college course after high school and a slew of technical classes, and the millions of words I have read on my own in these last 30+ years.

No, I possess no special skill, no special knowledge, no crystal ball.

I just seem to be the only person around who recognizes the law of acceleration.

We’re all going somewhere, and it’s getting quicker all the time.

My oldest daughter is pushing 20. She likes to hang out in my bedroom chilling, usually with her current significant other. The other night I mentioned to her that, back in my day, there was still such a thing as a lazy summer, where you would sit or lie around with literally nothing to do.

No generation will ever again even comprehend the concept of “nothing to do”. Not even a power outage would be enough, unless it outlasted the charge on their batteries. Kids these days, and they come in all ages, have so many options at any given moment that multitasking is now an art, an essential skill, and those who are best at it will rise farthest and fastest.

We’re all going somewhere, but our heads are buried in gadgets while we go. I used to read while walking; kids these days drive while texting.

It’s a different world. And they have no idea what I’m talking about.

There’s such a thing as too busy. There’s only so much time and energy to go around. I got caught up in a brutally useless discussion of poor little Lindsay Lohan, who is actually catching some tough breaks in a California courtroom, but in the scheme of things, well, nobody can afford to go to the movies anyway.

And even if they could, they would just watch it for free, because they can.

The greatest social clash in human history is just over the horizon: How to get work and money out of a generation that grew up paying for nothing and getting whatever they wanted…

The movie “Wall-E” shows a human race which no longer knows how to walk or to socialize person to person, having truly become utterly fat and lazy. Since this is a fantasy, they don’t have to solve the problem of who pays for all of this sloth. But sure enough the American race is barreling toward that very outcome. Just today my brother told me that studies point to Americans being the fattest they’ve ever been and getting fatter.

And I sat there silently wondering, “Isn’t weight gain a sign of stress?”

The human race is stressed, has been for a long time, and America can no longer avoid it. A real unemployment rate populous enough to be the fourth largest state in the union, while at the same time the current infrastructure crumbles beneath us, the infrastructure we will need within 20 years isn’t even on the planning board, and all the reputable economists say if the government doesn’t spend more money, there will be another economic collapse.

And the Republicans veto extending unemployment benefits, in the cynical hope that a downspiraling economy will be blamed on the party in power, as it usually is.

So here is what you need to follow:

1. Big banks and big business caused the economic collapse.
2. The collapse robbed average citizens of all their wealth and ripped out from under them the wage earning capacity upon which they had based their entire standards of living.
3. Democrats were swept into power on the basis of this colossal failure.
4. The Republicans, despite having minorities in both houses, refused to compromise on any significant legislation.
5. Obama and the Democrats pushed through some early assistance, but not enough to springboard a recovery, and were too chicken to go back for more, and were too chicken to fight for extended unemployment benefits, because the midterm elections are coming up and they don’t want to be seen as carefree about the deficit.
6. The economy will continue to bounce between up and down, with a real risk of sinking completely, all through the election season.
7. Voters will punish the Democrats for failing to solve the problem.
8. By 2012, Republicans will have majorities in both houses as well as the presidency.
9. They will not waste that opportunity.

So, to recap, the people who caused all the damage will, very soon, end up in complete charge again, because the people who were chosen by the voters to solve the problem were too chicken to do what was needed.

The generation that swept them into power is now four years older and looking for something meaningful in their lives, such as an economy that seems to be alive and aiming for the future.

It’s too soon to lay out a map for how to get where we need to go, and it’s plainly evident that the people just aren’t angry enough yet to demand real solutions. But chances for real change come along very seldom, and in the modern political climate, the only “new ideas” coming from Republicans involve more use of American might abroad, and less regulation over American business, the policies which brought us to the brink of ruin.

And yet, the American people seem willing to forget, because, well, those Democrats weren’t any better.

No, they weren’t, and shame on them. The list of ways they went wrong is never-ending, because something new keeps coming along.

Somebody tell me how this ends. War with Iran? War with China? A meltdown to swamp the first one? Epic plague? Global warming run amok?

One thing I’m certain of, we’re all going somewhere and we’re going to get there soon.

Let me cross three ideas in your head, and see what we can come up with.

1. Charlie Wilson’s War
2. 9/11
3. Viet Nam

Item 1, Charlie Wilson’s War, is the story of how a U.S. Congressman combined with a single CIA operative to fund and arm the freedom fighters of Afghanistan who held off the mighty Soviet army in the 1970s and 80s, until they were finally able to inflict enough damage to send the Soviets home after seven years, as losers. We can debate all we want that this was the beginning of the formation of Al Quaeda, but the point I’m focused on is this: A band of guerillas defeated a mighty enemy. Why? Because Afghanistan is a bitch. Desert surrounded by mountains, completely landlocked, wild variation in climate and altitude, third world in terms of infrastructure outside a few major cities. In other words, a real dump. A real mess. A really frustrating place to try to win a war against dug-in, well armed natives.

Item 2, 9/11. This was the event which brought us to war with Afghanistan in the first place. Although mistakes were made, the Taliban and al Quaeda were routed, chased into the hills and across the border.

By all accounts, al Quaeda in Afghanistan is still toothless, but the Taliban have made a comeback. Why? Not through sheer force and domination, because if that was the case Americans would be welcomed as liberators. No, it’s because many Afghanis share belief systems with the Taliban, and because the Taliban represent a coherent form of government.

Item 3 is Viet Nam. America lost Viet Nam because we could not get a deal done. For most of the Nixon presidency, Henry Kissinger and others attempted to get a deal done with the north that would leave an intact south. They dropped bombs on the north to help convince them. It didn’t work and it couldn’t work because we could not slow down the north on the ground. We simply never convinced them that a truce was their best option, and they were proved right. The north never signed a truce, the U.S. had to be plucked off the embassy rooftop, and Viet Nam is today a unified, semi-prosperous whole. Who, by the way, enjoy peaceful relations with the U.S.

It’s time to find a way to get a deal done with the Taliban.

We start by acknowledging their legitimacy as a form of government. We start by insisting that they acknowledge the war against al Quaeda. The Taliban must denounce al Quaeda, must denounce terrorism, and must declare that they will not harbor such people and organizations. We must insist that we will stay in country as long as we are asked to and that we will leave when we are asked to. We offer aid and assistance in modernizing the country. We make peace with the Taliban, shake hands with the Taliban, and seek a way forward with the Taliban.

It is not for the United States to declare some forms of government and some forms of religious expression invalid.

That is a basic truth.

It is for the governed themselves to determine those things. The Taliban were routed, the Taliban came back. The people allowed them back. The people accepted them back.

Some will argue that the people were frightened and bullied into accepting the Taliban. I say that the point cannot be proved and that the available evidence contradicts that. And in the end I say it doesn’t matter, because we can’t fight wars based on opinion.

There is no threat to the U.S. from Afghanistan if the Taliban does not provide safe haven for terror.

So, if we sit around a table with each other and start with that as an imperative, by the time we get done offering aid and assistance, it is entirely possible that the Taliban will find wisdom in taking that deal, especially because the U.S. will acknowledge, through such an act, that the Taliban is indeed legitimate. the Taliban will agree to the rule of law, free and fair elections, and an initial power sharing arrangement with Kabul and the Karzai government.

Because there are two important lessons from the list above: the first is that, this is a bitch of a place to try to fight, and the second is that losing is a real option.

We missed a chance at a truce in Viet Nam and were stuck instead with an ugly defeat. Those are the same two options facing us in Afghanistan.

A little over 24 hours ago, I sat transfixed by the image on my PC screen. I was at MLB.com, watching a replay of what was supposed to have been the final out of a perfect game.

The headline that had drawn me there was this: “Galarraga loses perfect game on blown call”.

A blown call. On the last play. This I had to see.

A bouncer between first and second. The first baseman ranges to his right and cleanly backhands the ball while the pitcher churns toward first base. The first baseman squares to throw the ball as the pitcher looks down to find the bag. As he looks up, the ball is coming toward him and a little behind. He reaches for the ball, “snowcones” it in the webbing, looks down and completes his step, square in the middle of the bag. A discernible instant later, the runner’s foot hits the side of the bag. Up the line, umpire Jim Joyce, hunched and intent, takes a slight pause before emphatically and muscularly spreading his arms, half bent, signalling safe.

Gallaraga at first begins to celebrate, raising his arms, then sees the safe call, rolls his eyes and smiles. He can’t believe he’s lost his perfect game on a bang-bang play. Most witnesses realize that the call was wrong. Joyce starts getting earfuls from various Tigers. Gallaraga retires the next batter and gets strange, subdued hugs from his teammates. Several of them and the manager resume their tirades toward Joyce, who stands there and quite literally takes it like a man.

Joyce still thinks he got it right.

A short time later, Joyce addresses the press, having now seen conclusive evidence that he botched the call. “I just cost the kid a perfect game. The biggest call of my career and I kicked the shit out of it.”

I watched it over and over. I could barely believe what I was seeing. Why didn’t the umpires huddle? Why didn’t they simply correct the call? What would have been so wrong about getting together and comparing notes? They were all watching the play, with nobody on base. What would be the harm in checking with each other?

I will never understand that.

And so we were left with the aftermath, and it was a surreal aftermath. Long into the night, fans flocked to their favorite baseball forums and rendered their opinions repeatedly and at length. By my estimate, sentiment ran at least 4 to 1 in favor of the commissioner coming in with his eraser and changing the outcome of the game. I was vociferously among those.

I’ve changed my mind.

And not on any ground such as “purity of the game” and all of that, but because I don’t want this moment altered.

Yes, we could fix it. It was, after all, a math error. Those can be fixed with an eraser and routinely are. We couldn’t pass school without an eraser. Fixing mistakes is a skill, a tool, something good. Surely and obviously, fixing this mistake made perfect sense, and for two very important reasons: 1, the kid did pitch a perfect game. Getting the last call right would only certify that. You aren’t changing the outcome of the game in an unnatural way. There’s no speculating what would happen after that, because there was no after that, it was or should have been the last out. And 2, poor Jim Joyce. How was he supposed to live with himself? How could he possibly go on knowing what he had cost this kid, and how badly it would burn in him that nobody helped him fix it; not his fellow umpires, not non-existent replay, not the all-powerful commissioner. He would be stuck in a permanent living hell.

And now, nearly 24 hours later, Jim Joyce has managed to live one day since that moment, and in that day he has cried, he has shaken hands with Galarraga, he has received boos, hugs, cheers and an enormous amount of support. The Tigers manager called him a great man and a great umpire, one of the best. The Tigers organization declared that they would not seek to have the decision overturned. And all around baseball and even outside of it, people are talking about how well Joyce and Galarraga handled this awful circumstance.

And so we see that life is not so easily fixed with an eraser. Life is fixed by moving forward, not backward. To go back now and change the decision would be to alter this moment in an unavoidable way, to snatch away its purity.

It is what it is, and we’re all going to have to learn how to live with it.

And if that isn’t a life lesson, I don’t know what is.

Grace not only under pressure but under crushing disappointment. Learning to live with that. Learning to make something good from it. Learning that no matter how bad it seemed at the time, there is after, and after needs tending to.

After can be anything we want it to be.

This post will be difficult to write, and it will be intentionally vague. If the principals in this vignette ever read this post, they will know who they are.

The title of this post is not new. It’s been said in therapy rooms for years. Another variation: “What you do here, what you see here, what you say here, let it stay here.”

In other words, humans have known for a long time that maybe it isn’t the best thing in the world to go blabbing about everything that goes on in your life, and maybe it isn’t the best thing in the world to air your personal issues in front of people you don’t see very often.

And maybe inviting people over to your house, only to unleash that very behavior on your guests, might be pretty bad form all around.

And then revealing deep issues about yourself to family members who you seldom see, under these captive circumstances, has a real chance of becoming such a circus of idiocy that you run a real risk of blowing things up completely.

And then spending much of the time after the blowup sending texts back and forth to others in your house while your guests are left to wonder what’s going on, well maybe that’s just you screaming for help.

While completely denying you need any.

While feigning high insult at the suggestion thereof.

While threatening to walk away from a family member who dared to express concern over the incredible detailed display they’ve just witnessed.

Maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, maybe it’s time to learn that when you can’t check your most flagrant behaviors long enough to be a proper host, and when you present information to family members which indicates that you might have a serious problem, then throw them under the bus for following up on that:

Well, maybe you’re just too addicted to your own drama. And maybe you use the drama as an excuse for not dealing with the thing.

And maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, maybe your strategy of declaring that your Facebook friends are what will save you from ever slipping too far…

Well, honey, how exactly do you expect to know where “too far” is?

Just asking.

Today’s lesson in how banks can screw you is called “Right of set off”.

Remember that account you had with Commerce Bank a few years ago? Remember when somebody was taking money from your account in violation of your agreement with them, and you went to Commerce, YOUR bank, the protector of YOUR money, and told them about it, remember what they said? “Sorry, we can’t stop them from doing that. You signed an agreement with them and you’ll have to take this up with them.” That’s right, you do remember; Your bank did nothing.

So you did what you had to do, you closed the account.

Fast forward to several months ago. Your wife recently got an account at Metro Bank, formerly Commerce Bank. She added your name to the account.

Now, today, you discover that Metro Bank has determined that you still owed money to Commerce Bank from that fiasco a few years ago. So here’s what Metro Bank did: They informed you of the amount still owed, asked if you disputed it, then worked out arrangements with you to pay if off.

No, they didn’t. What are you, stupid?

When your wife started the account she was handed a customer agreement. In that customer agreement, Metro Bank asserted a “right of set off”, which gives them the right to take money from your current account to pay off your old account.

With no warning.

With no recourse.

With no acknowledgement of how much they intend to take.

So, in the last three days, Metro Bank has taken over $200 from your account. How much do they intend to take? Who knows.

Where does that leave you?

Hello, and welcome to my world, a world where I do bring the muscle and nobody notices.

So I keep bringing the muscle.

It’s funny, because I consider myself a humble guy, but I bet that exactly nobody would back me up on that. People that have known me a few years or all my life, they would all say “Walt, he’s a lot of things, but humble isn’t one of them.”

Not that they think I’m cocky. More like, sure of myself.

Even when I’m unsure, I’m sure about it. And I can usually make my case, and I am sometimes damn fine at how I put things.

Sometimes. I have learned to accept that word.

Today I shall rant about race. I usually try to provide the anti-rant when others start spinning, and it is not usual for me to take a firm stance against my friends in the black intelligentsia.

Today I loosen the gloves. I dare the world to notice.

First let me say that from Morris on down, I always feel a strong undercurrent of suspicion at his blog. This suspicion takes two related forms: First, there is a general suspicion that white liberals support blacks only to a certain point, after which blacks are left to fight for their remaining rights to live as freely as white Americans do. There is a long road left ahead, and blacks suspect that whites aren’t truly committed to going that distance.

Or worse yet, drawing their own finish line and declaring the deed done.

The second suspicion is a more targeted form of the first, when a white person, such as myself, wanders into their realm and attempts to contribute to the dialog.

Now mind you, I am well and somewhat lovingly received over at Mo’s. I enjoy being accepted. It gives me some sort of currency, a foot in the door. After all, these are the subjects of tomorrow’s conversations, and we have to learn how to have them. I am excited to be part of that development - something of a pioneer, in fact.

And perhaps it’s that desire for acceptance that makes them suspicious, as though I am looking for either a gold star or some sort of affirmation, after which I can go on my way. I think there is a general knowledge that I come by my interest honestly over the course of my entire life since age 10, truly 40 years now. That does earn me some acknowledgement, not the typical or usual liberal.

And I am no such thing. I constantly argue against interpretations taken by Mo and others when white people behave stupidly, about whether or not the behavior was racist, and what by God does it all mean?

I mean, here’s what it means: It’s time to cool down.

Here we are in 2010. We got Bush out of office. Democrats control both houses of Congress. A black man is President. Coming out of a major economic collapse, the worst in our lifetimes, much money is being spent on those who need it the most.

We have comprehensive health care.

And what are my friends in the BI doing?

Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch.

Oh my God how I wish they would stop.

Just stop! Count to ten! Look, there’s something else! Count to 10, Look! there’s something else!

Perhaps you see the pattern.

There is SO MUCH information out there these days that you could quite literally choose the narrative and then go in search of data to prove it. Pick one. Now, pick its opposite.

Too easy.

If, on the other hand, we just let it pass by and trust ourselves when to decide that something is THE BIG ONE, we would be at maybe the second or third serious social issue since Obama took office.

Instead we average that many a week.

So again I say, calm the hell down. Count to 10. No big one? Exhale.

And what worries me most are that there are a lot of stupid people out there, and there are a lot of impressionable people out there.

And here we are, the intellectual elders, making as much a mess of this as we possibly can. Leading them to who knows where, but not good.

Let’s not be about inciting hostilities, not now, not when there are so many more and better tools at our disposal. It takes two to have an argument, and if the American people have as much sense as I think they do, the Tea Party will collapse from its own lies. Segregationism lives on in the south but nowhere else, and even in the south some folks have just had enough of it.

Time does its thing.

I’ll share two observations I’ve made recently: 1) There is far less racial antagonism in people under 30 than in people over 50; 2) Young people fight old peoples’ wars.

Those of you in or approaching the over 50 set, we have a serious obligation to those who follow, not just our behavior as an example for them to follow, but of our progress toward lasting solutions as a path for them to follow.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join with me.

Fear is not racism.

So we start there.

Fear is not hatred. Hatred is not racism.

So there’s that.

Racism, by the way, is not necessarily permanent. It’s simply a misguided world-view which can be corrected.

So even racism is nothing to fear. It is, rather, a very long, wide and deep “teachable moment.”

Certainly institutionalized bias, certainly gangs of thugs, certainly certain law enforcement officers, all of those things are worthy of the highest order of fear. An individual with a certain mindset could end your life simply for the tone of your skin.

That is indeed something to fear and something to fight against.

We get there one person at a time.

Some will have to die, some will have to go to prison or just go away, and some will be converted. They will start off as a racist and become something better, a person who does not judge others based on their skin tone.

And so we approach each individual differently, because the roots of their issues are not all the same.

Barack Obama is half black. He was raised by white women. His skin tone is fair, his features vaguely but not overtly African. He seems to be, because he is, a blend of races, a blend of cultures.

He is not, in the way some people mean it, “American.” Certainly not the way the previous President was. There is controversy over his nation of origin, which plays into the fear that he’s not really from “here”, he’s from Hawaii and before that Africa and Asia. He’s not from Kansas.

And there are people who fear that “he just doesn’t share our values.”

I happen to believe that’s not true. I think Obama’s values are solidly American. He’s lived as an adult in the continental U.S., held several impressive offices in government, is Harvard-educated, was a community organizer and taught constitutional law.

American enough for me.

And if he’s not born here, that’s a technicality anyway. A stupid one at that.

It is not, however, irrational to worry that Obama is, as I said over at Mo’s (just can’t stay away), more a citizen of the world than a citizen of the United States, and that’s an entirely different question.

To me, anyway. And they may be correct. And so then it becomes this question: Are his values good or bad for the U.S. and the people of the U.S., especially those who like the U.S. to be different than the rest of the world.

Palinites, so to speak. A significant portion of the country believes in an image of the U.S. as unique in good ways, which means becoming less unique is not good.

Sunday night at midnight I will fire up the webcam and get into this issue, specifically how white folks talk about a black President, and what that means. I don’t have anywhere near all the answers, but I’ll try to frame a few good questions and see where they lead.

Be there?

Who am I without principles?

And how do I defend those principles without judging others?

I’ve always been as open-minded and fair-minded as a human could possibly be. I go to extreme lengths to be honest, accessible and flexible. I never shut off discussion, never dismiss another’s point of view, never play games with other people’s passions.

I’m not nominating myself for sainthood, merely expressing my principles.

Which I have a complete right to do. To express them, to live by them and to decide where and how to spend my time and energy, based on those principles.

And so I have taken a time-out from being the DWD over at you-know-where.

I’m not really sure what’s going on right now, but what I’ve seen is a serious concern to me. What started out as a place where educated people gathered to take issues to the next level, has degenerated into a bastion of broad swipes at White Americans who don’t care for this president and the direction of the country.

It has devolved into this: They must be racist.

I made serious, concerted efforts to balance that out. Go see for yourself. I tried. What did I get for my efforts?

Mocked.

Which can happen when you stand by your principles.

Life can get hostile, even and perhaps especially among people who consider each other friends and allies. Why? Because when we are very honest, feelings can get hurt.

Are my feelings hurt? No. I’ve been taking shit for the better part of 50 years and I’m used to it. I’ve always been this person who says what he believes without regard to the popularity of the view, and so I accept, perhaps invite a certain amount of shit.

What’s changed, then? The dumbing down of a very complex issue. Dare I say it? Certain blacks who consider themselves well informed are taking this Tea Party issue and running with it like they’re trying to win the Heisman Trophy.

There’s a saying in blog world that when a person invokes the Holocaust, the thread is dead. Why? Because there is nowhere else to take a topic once it goes there.

We really ought to treat “racist” the exact same way, and I made this point many months ago about Limbaugh. Now I am looking at blacks who I respect and I am seeing them do the exact same thing, and it is just as detestable. There is no place to take a discussion once you have declared the other side racist.

There are some interesting ways to proceed with a discussion about the impact of the Tea Party. The least interesting and the least useful of those is to declare the entire movement racist and then demand that anybody with a different view “prove it.”

Worse than being boring, worse than being a needless waste of energy is the simple fact that this is a dangerous view, as I have plainly stated before.

So, this place may not be as popular as others (there’s an understatement) but if you want an intelligent discussion which does not make wild claims and which does not treat others’ views as cannon fodder, please feel free to say your piece, secure in the knowledge that I will see to it that you and your view are treated with respect.

Those are my principles.

You won’t find a sharper tack than Dwayne T. Hodges. His only problem is that he doesn’t write enough, not to suit me anyway. As soon as I read the following, which he sent to me as an email today, I knew I had to post it. Dwayne graciously agreed, and here it is, unedited by me.

As if I could improve on the work of a master.

What’s up my brother,

I stopped by your blog today, but I couldn’t get into the new material because I kept having an old issue pop into my head. Although I haven’t been commenting much, I have been reading the ongoing dialogue between you and Morris and other folks on his blog. I don’t comment, because I know that the people who have been commenting are not going to change their opinions. Of course you all know that, and the reason to keep doing it is for the people who read and don’t comment, but since all sides are covered, I’d just be redundant.

I did want to talk to you about the laymen Black folks. The ones who don’t post. The ones who don’t really read blogs or even internet news that much. The folks who make up the majority of Black people/voters. Not that they are illiterate or uninformed, but they moreso watch trends. When they see change, they know its change because they know what “the same” looks like. It isn’t a perfect system of assessment, but its basic human nature… and basic human nature has gotten us through a few thousand years now.

I know that you’re defense of the Tea Party is a defense of completely respectable opinions on government and how it should operate. I believe most Black people who just read/listen to a listing of values or platforms will agree with most of them (in respect to the totality of a system of government that is actually fair). But what they don’t see when they see the protesters is “something different”. If you take a video of the Tea Party protests, and take a video of some of the anti-Civil rights protests of the early 60’s (like from the Eye’s on the Prize series), and turn the sound down. You won’t see much difference. And that is the issue for Black people. An angry group of people holding a noose and screaming at you may not be a lynch mob (they may be trying to catch a mountain lion), but you are not going to give them the benefit of the doubt. You will react based on what you have known to be your reality for centuries and get as far away from them as fast as you can.

There has not been a movement from this demographic with this much hatred for a generation. It’s predominantly older, White Southerners in the movement. They are not the majority of the movement, but are the predominant subgroup… and they relish the media attention. Here in NC, they are moving like a well-oiled machine with regional organizers throughout the state who meet regularly to discuss planning. Granting amnesty to illegal aliens didn’t get this reaction. Allowing the government to monitor our phone conversations didn’t. Giving tax credits to oil companies who were making hundred billion dollar profits while gas was over four dollars didn’t. We think about those things and look at the health care bill reaction, and ask ourselves, “what’s the difference?” The only difference that we see is that this is happening while Obama is president. This is so reminiscent of the reaction to Black politicians and White Carpetbaggers in the late 1800’s, and that organized rebellion was tied into the creation and perpetuation of the Klan. Not all the people who hated Carpetbaggers coming from the north and from Washington and overtaking their rights as citizens were Klansman, but they didn’t complain or try to stop things when three out of thirty pulled out a noose and lynched someone to show they meant business. And not all of the other 27 agreed with the actions, but like you said before, with that much negative sentiment you keep your mouth shut to keep yourself out of the noose.

Health Care has more of a chance of bankrupting this country in the long term than this war does. We can’t afford to have uninsured people using the emergency room as the doctor’s office. When they default on their bills the health insurance companies raise the premiums of those who have insurance to offset the cost. We can’t allow companies to make billions of dollars in profits quarterly to say they use most of those profits to cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars they do in research… and it obviously doesn’t add up. And we can’t wait until the Republican Party that promotes the high profits of major corporations stops convincing the poorest of the poor that taking away these corporations’ ability to bankrupt them is a part of our apple pie life in America. The Tea Party is being manipulated to believe that this bill is the beginning of the end of their life in America. They want “their America” back. But no one defines what that is. I remember when I was in Iowa and I was watching the local news from southwestern Illinois. A woman said that we had to go back to “our” America because she has “had just about enough of this diversity shit!” …and the whole statement played unedited on the news. “They” are taking away our America. We need health care change, and we don’t have time to play the same game that we are with the climate. Is this the best plan possible? Absolutely not. But it will get us in a better position 20 years from now when the country is predominantly poor and minority than we would have been otherwise. Imagine then if health care is not mandatory and partially subsidized… no one will have it because the premiums of those who can pay will be so high that they won’t want to. We may be wiped out by things that we have mandatory vaccines for now (by the way, very few people complain about the government mandating polio vaccines).

Back to the main issue. Black people see the same things and hear many of the same catch phrases they have heard for 200 years that have referred to them when Tea Party members talk about the government and the health care bill. Is it unfair, in many ways yes. But it is sooooooo much more unfair that we have been conditioned to feel threatened by angry mobs of White people carrying signs and saying that someone is taking something away from them. If a White woman was gang raped by a group of young black guys, she will very likely feel scared when she sees a group of young black guys. If it happens more than once, that feeling will be reinforced. Is it unfair that she feels threatened if she sees my sons and their friends heading to the basketball court? My sons may think so, but any woman who has been raped will say that it is not only justified, but a necessary part of survival (mental as well as physical) to avoid anything that may lead to it happening again. I would explain to my son that based on her circumstances, her reaction is justified.

Folks like Rush Limbaugh said that Obama wasn’t a legal American, he was secretly a Muslim, he was secretly a terrorist sympathizer, he knew nothing about the constitution, and a bunch of other things, and then equated them to the fact that he was getting a pass on these things because it is unpopular to say anything about him because he is Black. Obama’s treatment is just an example of the playbook for the masses being focused on an individual. Take something that is a thought, turn it into a fact, then tell how it negatively effects White people. We were complaining two years ago that illegal aliens got free medical care. Well, now we have a way to stop it and we’re still complaining. The constant scapegoating is insane. And the scapegoating only works if you can convince good people that something bad is being done to them by the scapegoatee. The vast majority of Tea Party people are good people, they are just voicing their displeasure at the fact that Obama has “taken away their liberty and their tax dollars to give free health insurance to people who don’t want to pay”… despite the fact that more White people than black will benefit in the short term.

Our known reality is that we are the go-to scapegoatee. Reagan’s Welfare Queen thing, when matched with the new term inner-city, made the country believe that minorities in the inner city were bankrupting the country and living like rich people with government money. They never “said” it, but the relationship of the terms and the “facts” let people know the “truth”. It lasted until Newt Gingrich made the mistake of putting numbers on the label. He said that Blacks unfairly were represented in the welfare system since 40% of all Blacks were subsidized while only 30% of Whites. Hmmm 40% of 30 million is 12 million. 30% of 170 million is 51 million. So there was not only more than four times as many Whites as blacks, there were almost two times as many Whites on Welfare as Blacks breathing. Well, the welfare queen thing quickly disappeared, and so did Newt’s career for the next 15 years. But no one ever said “sorry, we wrongly attributed that to you guys.” Sorry about the protests. Sorry about the hate speak. Sorry about kicking people off the Welfare rolls before we created enough job training programs to get them into the system (I know it was done under Clinton, and it was one of several things he did to keep the Republicans off his back… again an example of survival in a hostile environment).

The bottom line is, you hear genuine protest and think that believing it isn’t valid is irrational and unfair. We hear people complaining that someone Black is making things hard for someone White again, and believing it isn’t valid is irrational and unfair. We are both right. I believe that both are right… but that knowledge would not make me feel safe at a tea party rally. There may only be one nutjob at a rally of 30,000, but if he decides to hit me over the head with a sign, one is all I need…. but I wouldn’t feel safe regardless. We have been mentally and emotionally (and too often physically) raped by organized rallies of angry White people that were supported by local politicians and law enforcement for hundreds of years. Telling us we are being unfair not to trust the latest one and just give them a fair chance is really ______________ toward us (I’ll let you fill in whatever word comes to mind).

I only wrote this because I respect you so much. It isn’t about what the left does to the right, or vice-versa. It is about how Black people feel about these rallies, and why we feel that way. You can’t logic away fear of a potential threat… and thank God that’s true or a lot more of us would have been killed over the years. You are absolutely right to support the Tea Party’s expressed reasons for protesting, just don’t tell us we’re wrong to feel threatened. You mentioned in Morris’ blog what the average racist will do. In my sheltered experience, I can tell you that he will do what he can get away with (remember I’ve been shot for being Black). The average racist is not stupid… just racist. They are smart enough to hide behind a sheriff’s or policeman’s badge. They are smart enough to hide behind a legitimate protest. The dumb ones make things hard for the smart ones, so the smart one hate the dumb one’s too. Still, I can’t tell a smart racist from an average citizen at a Tea Party rally by looking at them… but I know they are both there. I just know to avoid the dangerous one, I have to avoid everyone.

What are the three existential struggles? Man versus nature, man versus man, man versus himself? Something like that. I never went to college. That’s my fallback excuse when I don’t know stuff as precisely as others do. “Well, he probably went to college.”

As if I’m asking for extra credit for knowing stuff even though I never went.

Which is true enough.

I chose “Man Versus Nature” as the title for this post because that’s at the root of all other struggle, it seems to me. Today, at this moment, I am struggling to remain upright in a topsy-turvy world.

If there is a race war coming, I swear it’s being started by black veterans of the civil rights era.

And it brings me enormous pain to say so.

What am I getting at? Simply this: President Obama has clearly stirred passions, especially (but not exclusively) on the right. A lot of the public behavior being expressed by whites on the right is scaring the pants off of many blacks, who remember an earlier era when white antagonism toward blacks was on constant display.

I’m pretty sure I’m right that the average black kid under the age of 20 knows diddly-squat about the civil rights era (which we will loosely call the years 1954 to 1968, though of course the history goes on before and after that period). They don’t know what city Rosa Parks lived in. They don’t know the name of the bridge nor the city it entered when the police turned their hoses on marchers. They may know what SCLC stands for, and might possibly know who first made it famous.

They will remember to celebrate his birthday, since it’s a national holiday.

Point? This: Civil rights is a distant concept to most of today’s youth, including blacks. This pisses off civil rights veterans (and they say so publicly) because of course it is a failure to honor their struggle and because they are concerned at a renewal of hostility if certain tendencies go “unchecked.”

And how do they propose to “check” these tendencies?

In order to deliver a comprehensible answer, they would first have to correctly identify what they are seeing. Do I deny that there are racists in America in 2010? No. Do I deny that they are emboldened by the Tea Party movement? No. Do I believe they should be confronted and dealt with? Certainly.

Stop.

Do not link an entire movement to the acts of a few. And do you know why? Because, civil rights veterans, you hated the broad brush treatment back in the day, didn’t you? And don’t we all know how incendiary it is to make sweeping statements? And don’t we know how infuriating it is to have your opinions categorized as hate?

What exactly have we learned?

Why are civil rights veterans so determined to re-fight an old war?

And when the first church burns, then what? Ramp up the rhetoric even more?

As each day of the Obama presidency unfolds, we find that more and more we are talking at each other, not to each other.

That’s not what the promise of this presidency is supposed to be about.

My black brethren, please check yourselves. There is a better way to go about this, a more nuanced way, but more importantly a more intelligent way, building on the lessons learned in that all-important era.

How about some peaceful protests at the next Tea Party gathering? How about offers to debate and discuss specific issues? How about inviting your white neighbor over for lunch?

How about reaching out?

It was an amazing embrace.

On live television, Phil Mickelson, the winner of his third Masters golf championship, hugged his wife, Amy, for all he was worth, and it was clear that she wasn’t planning to let go any time soon. This past year has been an enormous roller-coaster ride for the couple, as first Amy and then her mother were diagnosed with breast cancer. Amy had been too week to travel until this week, and had stayed in bed at their rented Augusta, Georgia house until today. She had watched her husband perform magnificently on golf’s biggest stage, keeping things steady until his opportunities for greatness came.

And when they came he seized them with a frightening vengeance, as though he could banish all of his worst fears and demons by willing himself past a field of veterans and greats. He got into trouble off the tee and out of trouble with his flawless short game, and hammered home his triumph with an array of birdie putts starting at the ninth hole and averaging one out of every two holes remaining. His final round 5 under par 67 cleared the field by 3 strokes. His four foot par putt at 17 to keep his lead at 2 was, noted CBS commentator (and fellow 3 time champion) Nick Faldo, likely to never get the credit it deserved.

Nor, it seems, does Mickelson. More famous for being a boy wonder who took forever to win a major, a long hitter and awe-inspiring touch artist who nevertheless flinched or goofed at big moments. But in truth it’s been eight years since he slew that demon with his first major, at this same tournament. He has gone on to win another Masters and a PGA tournament title, while finishing second many other times at majors.

And of course his career has been overshadowed by the ascendancy of Tiger Woods, who has won 14 career majors and is almost always considered the favorite at any major he plays. His win at the U.S. Open in 2008 on a fractured leg is the stuff of legend. Keeping Woods at bay at a major is no small feat, although this year perhaps it was expecting too much to ask that Woods be the best golfer in the field in his first outing since the revelations about his private life last fall. Still, he was five back at the end, in fourth place, more than respectable even at his high standard of excellence.

What was not up to standard was Woods’ behavior on Saturday. Several times after hitting a bad shot he could clearly be heard cursing and speaking in crude ways, behavior he had sincerely promised to eliminate. One slip-up could be overlooked, but any more than that would clearly be a failure of restraint. There were so many others that CBS eventually stopped broadcasting sound when Tiger was taking a shot, just in case it happened again.

Sunday Tiger played about as loosely but did manage to keep his emotions in check. Afterward he said he would take some more time off to “re-evaluate”. Good thinking, because he was not yet where he expected himself to be with regard to his outburts, and the lack of restraint made it difficult to root for him to win. He seemed churlish and petty at times, and not nearly respectful enough of the game.

Mickelson has an unbroken record of respecting the game, and so far as is known, of coming home to his wife. It is worth noting that Mickelson’s cancer-stricken wife and their children were all present at the tournament, while Elin, Woods’ perfectly healthy wife, and their two children were nowhere to be seen.

Woods may make it back to his previous level of excellence as a golfer, and he may clean up his act in the ways he has promised to do. However, today was about the contrast between a man who had it all and still wanted more, and a man who understands who he is and what he is about, and chooses accordingly. Mickelson provided so many amazing moments on the way to his victory that it reminds us that he really does have it all: great looks, a great game, a spectacular family and the tremendous good will of the golfing community and its fans. He goes about his business the right way, and in turn he is accepted, respected and beloved by many.

Lee Westwood of England deserves to be acknowledged for shooting below par while starting the last round with the lead, good enough on this day for second place. And 50 year old Fred Couples, a two time champion, played 3 of his four rounds under par and also ended five strokes back, the lowest score ever for a man his age. And Tom Watson, a legend in his own right, at age 60 completed four rounds under par.

So many great stories, perhaps pushed aside by the interest in the Woods comeback (and ratings did indeed spike), but if so, then let at least a few of us stop and admire those who go about their business earnestly and honestly and achieve greatness of their own, on the biggest stages under the greatest pressure.

Let’s remember why we honor and embrace our heroes. Certainly let’s root for redemption for those who stumble, but should we not pay special respect to those who have the wisdom to choose well in the first place?

Hats off to Phil Mickelson, who this year more than ever allowed us to bask in that contrast, and provide much-needed perspective to the American relationship with celebrity.

I know a little something about sexual abuse.

I know it from the inside.

I know people who’ve committed it, and who’ve been victimized by it. I know that it leaves deep scars on many people who are touched by their proximity to it.

I know that in this country, the United States of America, we have become almost frantic in our rush to identify as many “sex offenders” as we can, so that we can “be safer.”

That’s a topic for another time: Are sex offender laws the proper tool to deal with this issue?

Today’s topic is a culture of permissiveness.

I believe that priest sex scandals go back to the 1980s, and as I recall, several went far enough to have the priest convicted in court. It has come to light over the years that many more cases were kept under the covers because of a Papal policy of secrecy. In some cases, cash payments were made to the victims in order to ensure their silence.

Not exactly the tainted silver awarded to Judas Iscariot for turning Jesus over to the Hebrews, but in a way it has the same end result: Destruction.

There is evident complicity in the long, winding road of priest sex abuse. The Church is complicit in this behavior because the church, as a policy, “forgives” these “sins” and metes out only the slightest punishments: repentance, relocation and occasionally loss of congregation. No criminal charges, no jail, no “sex offender” status, no official acknowledgement to the victims.

I can tell you that such a culture not only allows more abuse to take place, it encourages it. If you are a man who knows that his sexual attraction is to young boys, then you know where you belong: the Seminary. You need to go get your collar so you, too, can join the club and start taking part in its activities.

And I’m not exaggerating.

If you are a person of faith, Catholic or not, you surely want to believe that every man (or in some cases, woman) who seeks to be a “preacher” has only God’s blessing in mind, wants only to serve others and promote healing and togetherness.

You surely do not want to believe that your priest can’t wait for the sermon to be over so the party can begin.

And yet, as you sit there in the pew of your church today, Easter Sunday, how can you know that the man leading you in somber reflection is, himself, pure and holy and worthy of your acceptance as the leader of your church? How can you be sure he is not “one of them”?

We seem to always hear gasps of shock when another priest is “outed”. Firm denials, spasms of disbelief, then a slow acknowledgement that, sadly, your “Father” also crossed the line into the devil’s temptation.

No. Your “Father” made a beeline to the priesthood twenty years ago because who doesn’t know, that’s where you go to find boys?

Sinead O’Conner, she of ripping the Pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live while screaming “Fight the real enemy!”, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times recently. She was commenting directly on the atrocities committed across generations in Ireland, where poor children were summarily routed to supposedly public schools which were run by the Catholic church, the State Religion of the Republic of Ireland, and where these children were subjected to years of emotional, physical and sexual battery.

O’Conner made the simple point: Rome wants to label this as an Irish Catholic problem, instead of a problem within Catholicism itself. She said that if only Rome would acknowledge the depth and breadth of the problem, she would run back to the church with open arms.

Such is the love of Catholics for their faith. Love which has, for years, been misappropriated by those upon whom it was bestowed. Because humans are fallible, we sometimes forget that ALL humans are fallible. We sometimes forget to be sure where we place our love and our trust.

We sometimes forget that people can seem to be very good, better than us, a moral guidepost, and be harboring the most awful secrets, secrets which threaten everything and everyone we care about.

It cannot be understated that the Catholic church has become NAMBLA, a place where men go to play with boys under the covers, both literally and figuratively. They have figured out how to “explain” it to boys that this is really God’s work and a good thing.

They’ve got it all figured out, they have for years, and they have a reliable backstop in their own Pope, who after all, wrote the policies and oversaw the handling of these cases for years, making sure that the secrets stayed buried away, making sure that no priest need worry about being abandoned by the church if he was to commit such barbaric acts of betrayal.

No, quite the contrary: boys may be in danger if they wander too close to the wrong priest, but the priests themselves are quite well protected.

That’s the atrocity being committed by the Catholic church today, and for many generations: The powers that be serve only their own determination to behave in the most un-holy and inhuman ways, then put the robes back on on Sunday morning, to tell the rest of us how to go live our lives.

It was a short, strange trip.

In the upper right video, I talk about it.

I was on for a long time but dormant, became more active recently, and then realized it was creeping me out. I just felt strange interacting on a daily basis with people I never see. Some might say “That’s the point” but to me it was a bad substitute for actually being a part of somebody’s life.

To me it makes more sense to admit you just drift out of touch with a lot of people you’ve known along the way.

I think Facebook is fine for those who do actually also see each other in person, or perhaps for parents and children who are apart. But this whole concept of cyber-closeness just felt strange to me.

So, goodbye Facebook. Anybody who needs to let me know something important abougt your life, I’m sure you have my email address.

Nigger!

Queer!

Quiz time: What do André Carson of Indiana, Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri and John Lewis of Georgia, all Democrats, have in common?

Other than being member of the United States House Of Representatives, you mean?

Oh, right: They’re all black.

And of course, they all shared the pleasure of being called “Nigger!” by “health care protesters” at their place of employment, the U.S. Capitol Building.

The NY Times with the lovely details.

Oh, yes: They were also spat upon.

And when the mob saw Barney Frank, they couldn’t call him “Nigger!” because, well, he’s white.

But he is, you know, homosexual, so they found some words for him, too.

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From a very cool site:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/:

Why would a white, suburban, 16 year old boy grab a microphone and announce to the shoppers at his local Wal-Mart:

‘Attention, Walmart customers: All black people, leave the store now.

I mean, I cannot honestly comprehend that.

The immediate reaction is disgust. Why should a black person, in 2010, have to deal with such obvious racial bias? Sure, they know it’s only one person, but they also likely suspect that he will not be punished for his prank. Thus, the white community tacitly, silently, ashamedly allows and therefore supports these insulting and vulgar displays.

But then, why should one 16 year old boy bear the brunt for centuries of guilt? To whatever extent he thought he was being clever, he also in some way believed he was permitted to behave this way. How much of that is his fault, and how much of it is, for lack of a more selective term, “in-bred”?

But what I keep coming around to is this: He’s probably highly impulsive and not as funny as he thinks he is. He may have real issues with regard to boundaries. This may have been a cry for help.

There just might be something else going on.

And here we sit, dissecting the “meaning” of all of this. Well, at this moment, at least I do.

And so for now here is where I’m at with it: It was a stupid thing to do.

Move on.

But now this, this is much more insidious:

As part of a black history celebration at the end of last month, teachers in each classroom at the school chose an African-American role model. A representative child from each class wore a picture of their class pick on his or her shirt in a parade around school.

The suspended teachers chose O. J. Simpson, the imprisoned former athlete; Dennis Rodman, the retired basketball player and controversy magnet; and the transvestite entertainer RuPaul, district officials said. Many other teachers chose conventional role models like President Obama.

Now, as a 50 year old white dude, I know exactly what these white dudes were doing. I used to live in Brooklyn. I am quite familiar with the type.

These guys are Klan-like haters of black people. These guys are stone racists.

They should be charged with high crimes and have a very public trial, where they are forced to defend why they humiliated children for the sake of, by proxy, expressing their own racial hatred.

My blood boils at behavior such as this.

I want this sort of evil rooted out, exposed, and made to suffer. At the hands of white people, not black. This is not about vengeance, nor about righting a historical wrong. No individual human can ever be made to bear that weight.

No, this is about who we are as a people, what we stand for, what we allow, what we absolutely and without equivocation reject.

These educated white men humiliated innocent children.

None of the news accounts seem to know whether or not the children are black, but the school itself is over 90% black and latino, so the odds are that children of color were used in this way.

Some defend the actions of the teachers, some are saying there is no evidence the actions were racially motivated.

Let’s get real.

These are grown men who made conscious choices to mock Black History Month, and therefore black history, and therefore blacks in general. This goes far beyond “poor choices”, and any person in a position to know that, such as those in charge of the Los Angeles School District, who denies the pure evil of these actions is a dissembler and a further threat to the common welfare.

If the people in charge will not fire these teachers, then the Mayor must fire that person and put in charge a person who will fire these teachers.

And then let the teachers sue. Let’s go ahead and put this behavior on trial. And after they lose, let them face trials of their own from the parents of the children they humiliated, and the parents of every other child at the school who by extension were also humiliated.

And if there was a way for society itself to bring them up on charges, it would only be too proper.

(Note: TP will begin tonight, Monday March 15 at midnight. Last night got bogged down by technical difficulties.)

Morris likes to say to me “I don’t understand why you aren’t doing more media.”

Evidently Morris has no interest in being my agent, because that’s as far as it goes.

I’ve been mulling my options, in fact that’s pretty much all I do, it seems. I want to write a book about climate change; about the state of race relations; about the relationship between society and sex offenders. It seems I’m paralyzed by the sheer weight of the things I want to get done.

I have an idea, an experiment, so to speak, and I want to give it a try. I’m going to start a broadcast program called “Talking Points”, a half hour nightly Ustream broadcast which will also be available on demand. I will see if I can patch in guests and commenters via Skype, and carry on actual conversations with people who are interested in the topic at hand.

This show will begin tonight, Sunday March 14, at midnight Eastern time (which technically makes it March 15), 9:00 PM Pacific. Tonight will probably be more about shaking out the bugs than anything else. If somebody wants to skype me at Walt.Bennett, we can figure that part out as well.

I am always unscripted. Repeat: I am always unscripted. I will never prepare my words in advance, though of course I will prepare my ideas.

My Ustream address is: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/talkingpoints

Tonight we will touch on the topic of President Obama and his overall effectiveness in office. As primer material, you should be familiar with the recent dialogue at the Mo’Kelly blog, as well as this morning’s New York Times Magazine piece on Rahm Emanuel.

In general, we will be exploring the following:

- What promises did Obama run on?
- Has he steered a course toward keeping those promises or compromising those promises?
- Is this attributable to “Say whatever you have to say to get elected”?
- Should we have believed those promises in the first place? Is Obama different from any other candidate who won the presidency in that regard?
- Is Emanuel a good or bad influence on the President’s agenda? Is he keeping Obama from reaching far enough?
- What lies ahead? Assuming a one term presidency, what should the top agenda items be?

I’ll get into each of these in detail tonight, and I welcome you to join me. If you can’t make it, I will keep the broadcast available as a saved show, and of course we’ll do it again tomorrow night.

My plan is to broadcast Sunday thru Thursday. Fridays and Saturdays are for getting out of the house.

I wrote the following over at the Mo’Kelly blog, and I thought it made sense to post it myself:

It’s really more about the rich/poor dynamic, the have/have-not dynamic.

It’s just that the lower you go on that scale, the more the inequities tilt toward people of color. A rising tide may lift all boats, but most whites manage to jump off a sinking boat before it sinks.

So the issue would seem to be that we finally have a President who should be completely in touch with that dynamic, and he simply has not done enough to make sure the boat doesn’t sink. He seems more interested in handing out life preservers, except that we all know there aren’t enough of them.

The poor are an ineffective voting bloc, which is why John Edwards did not win the Democrat primary.

If its true that the measure of a society is how well or poorly we treat the least well off, then our grades are very low.

And perhaps it’s not up to Obama to right every wrong, but half his job is persuasion. In other words, the American President sets a clear tone for what kind of society we are.

This President has attempted to set a tone, but it seems to me his gaze is more outward than inward. He seems more concerned with what others think of us than with what we think of ourselves.

I do not believe that he feels our pain.

We must have a jobs program. Unemployment will be high for years, there are all sorts of serious public works projects that need doing, and far too many of us are hanging on by a thread.

We need to put 5 million people to work via such projects, probably for the next five years, and then we can allow the private sector to start absorbing them.

And if it’s about the deficit, well, we found the money to bail out the fat cats and the oligarchs, we found the money to keep those megamillion dollar bonuses rolling on Wall Street.

Let’s send some of that money to my street, and your street, and his street, and her street.

And we don’t need a check in the mailbox: We need work. We need training. We need dignity and a sense of accomplishment. We need a hand up, not a hand-out (h/t Rev. Jackson).

I am incensed that this country bumbles along as though the least well off among us will find a way to figure things out for themselves.

The Washington D.C. shelters are overflowing with homeless families.

Please, Mr. President, suggest to them how they might find their way out of this mess.

The doughy white dude who wants to teach us about race.

Thirty-four years old, 12 or so years out of Harvard. Writes about music for the New York Times.

Quite white.

Yep, I absolutely agree that Jon Caramanica is qualified to tell us what’s wrong with John Mayer, and to assure us that “what Mr. Mayer might perceive as a progressive understanding of race can be just as shortsighted and pat as a conservative one. It also shows just how easy it is to presume that cultural intimacy means comprehension.”

Let me just ask now: Has Caramanica spoken to Mayer about his true views? Did Mayer intend to elaborate more in his Playboy interview? Was anything left on the cutting room floor?

I’ll answer my own question: Caramanica has no clue and doesn’t care. He had one motive in his “review” of Mayer’s MSG concert (which Caramanica loved, by the way; the show, I mean): To kick up as much dust as possible in the hope that somebody would care about his opinion of the weeks-old, let-it-die-already stupid stuff Mayer said - and acknowledged as such.

Nope. For Caramanica, that’s the entire problem:

But it’s also the last significant public statement he has made about the controversy, a silence that is threatening to become too much of a comfort zone.

In the last week or so there’s been little conversation about Mr. Mayer’s faux pas. The result is an implicit and worrisome approval of Mr. Mayer’s quick fix, as if it were enough.

Shamefully, that part of the interview drew far wider attention than his egregious discussions of race. First, there was the use of the slur, regrettable even though he did so ostensibly to demonstrate a point about the limits of racial understanding. (”It was arrogant of me to think I could intellectualize using it,” he wrote on his Twitter page.)

But what followed in the interview was even more troubling. “What is being black?” he said. “It’s making the most of your life, not taking a single moment for granted. Taking something that’s seen as a struggle and making it work for you, or you’ll die inside. Not to say that my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my struggle is similar to one black dude’s.”

It’s a stunningly naïve perspective…

From the outside looking in, everything is more or less as it was before. And that comfort, that status quo, is dangerous.

Let’s recap:

Worrisome.

Shameful.

STUNNINGLY NAIVE.

Why so worried, shamed, stunned, Jon?

Oh, right: Because you know better than Mayer does what it means to be black in America.

Which we can tell by looking at your picture. Or from the fact that you hang with black musicians. Or from the explanations you provided in this hit job.

Please, Mr. “I went to Harvard so I could write music reviews”, please oh please tell us all that you know about race which eludes Mayer.

Just start with this, Jon:

“What is being black?”

As if we didn’t know that the world is full of fat, stupid idiots.

But here is my real question: Why does Mother Times allow people such as Caramanica to wander so far from their mandate, especially when it’s for clear self-aggrandizing purposes?

Or is it Mother Times’ opinion that Caramanica has elevated this discourse and shared with us something which is so meaningful that they just had to let it through?

More likely: Do they even acknowledge such a thing anymore as journalistic standards?

I want to know what 5 million times $30,000 is. I think it’s $150 billion.

30 times 5 million is 150 million. A thousand millions is a billion. Yup. That’s right.

Let’s see. TARP cost $900 billion. The Recovery Act cost $700 billion.

That’s 1.7 TRILLION dollars, my friend. Stack those dollars as high as the moon.

For One tenth of that we could pay 5 million people a $30,000 salary. With $20 billion left over for incidentals.

I’m no economist but I know that labor is roughly one quarter of the cost of doing business, so we would actually need $600 billion for our “company”, which is still about one third of TARP+Recovery.

Now, what will our company do with all this labor and capital?

- Rebuild the national electric grid to improve on the senseless amount of energy lost in transmission, and to bring clean sources such as solar and wind from places like the desert to where it’s needed.

- Build a national network of reservoirs, aquifers and pipes to capture enough precipitation to keep the entire country flowing with water, no matter how “dry” their conditions may become.

- Build a network of waste water treatment plants, which produce two important things: clean water and fertilizer. Build enough of them at a high enough standard to return it to the water cycle.

- Build solar. Build wind. Build nuclear.

- Build fast train tracks. When fast trains are quicker than planes and can run on renewable energy, we will be able to wind down our reliance on jets, which are expensive and require fossil fuels.

- Construct new buildings and rehab existing buildings to become as energy efficient as possible. Require existing government buildings to have these makeovers.

There are others. Feel free to add your own. Increase and decrease the size of the work force as economic conditions change.

Put workers who want to work back to work. Rebuild this great country. Leave our children in better condition than the world was as we found it. Learn the lessons of a civilized people and adapt accordingly.

Get stuff done!

Who’s with me?

This post was originally going to be titled “Keith Olbermann Is A Fat Stupid Idiot”, because he wrote and then recited this tripe.

Then along came Stephen Baldwin.

Aren’t white people going all stupid over The First Black President. Which is funny because if you ask Black Folk, he ain’t Black Enough. Forgot his roots and all.

Which is, of course, much more accurate. I never did see a whole lot of black in Obama, and he seems to want it that way.

Lest we forget, blacks make up about 20% of the population, not enough to elect a president. Obama had to appeal to all in order to have any chance.

The word is “homogenized.” Who could argue?

I wonder what prompted Keith Olbermann to get out of bed one morning and declare all white people racists. Fair enough that he feels that way, but then he has the hubris not to chalk it up to his own inadequacies, but to throw, oh, THE ENTIRE WHITE RACE into the pit of racism with him.

In case he got lonely, I suppose.

Not likely that K.O. will ever get lonely. He’s his own favorite company.

As to the substance of his remarks, K.O. just couldn’t wait to paint conservatives as the true racists. Why are there no blacks at the Tea Parties? K.O.’s “quaint” explanation is that people are confused like his granddaddy was. Actually K.O.’s point is that we shouldn’t be so confused 60 years after Jackie Robinson, or something like that. We should all be better by now.

Except that he “admits” that white equals racist, a statement that I find so offensive that I almost wish the man harm. And except that he acknowledges that tribalism is in all likelihood a primitive trait. After all, black folk prefer their own company, same as white folk do.

What racism has always been about is not who we choose to associate with, but a belief that others are not our equal because their skin is darker than ours. K.O. mushes everything together into a stew of senselessness. Never has a man flung himself off a cliff more spectacularly.

You will know that there is a strong liberal bias in the media if K.O. is not brought to account for this flagrant violation of sensibility and sensitivity.

And might I add, sanity.

Mr. Olbermann, I never met Ed Murrow, Ed Murrow was never a friend of mine, but this I know for certain: You, sir, are no Ed Murrow. You’re not even a David Strathairn.

I’m pretty sure Stephen Baldwin knows better than to take himself seriously, although you never can be sure. But one thing I guarantee: A lot more people know about his conservative radio program today than a few days ago. I don’t know how else to explain his decision, with a video camera in his face, to refer to President Obama as “Homey.”

Seems to me he had to know it would be seen as offensive. Seems to me that must have been his point. I only bring this up because (a) we don’t need this crap in our lives and we should tell people like Baldwin to stuff it, so maybe the next guy knows it’s not a free pass; and (b) because somebody might say it proves Olbermann’s point.

No, it only proves that Stephen Baldwin is also a Fat Stupid Idiot.

This post goes out to Nobody.

It’s assumed, somewhat accurately, that Nobody reads this blog.

That’s OK. It gets captured somewhere for posterity. And anyway, I get it off my chest and then I feel better.

There are people who say stupid things. I will venture that in fact that number comprises 100% of the human race. Saying something stupid is simply part of being human. We have jaw muscles and they sometimes work faster than our brain muscle.

Sometimes we really just want to take the whole thing back, think about it a bit longer, and try again.

Isn’t it somewhat ironic that people judge each other for such slips? After all, none of us and I mean none of us wants to have to defend every single thing we utter.

What’s the basis of all of this? John Mayer and Morris O’Kelly.

Mayer, you probably know, said some stupid and insensitive things in his Playboy interview, most of which would have been ignored within a few days, except he had the unfortunate lack of wisdom to invoke race.

Morris, an African American man, is almost always quick to pounce on stupid things white people say which invoke race.

He likes to use words such as “inexcusable” and “unacceptable.” Which I take to mean: He isn’t inviting Mayer over for Sunday chowdowns anymore.

No, of course, Morris’ larger point is that we as a society cannot permit people to get away with being insensitive to the black experience.

Hey, I’m down with respecting the black experience.

AND I’ve been known to be stupidly insensitive. I once told a black guy I was playing Monopoly with that it was cool that he could get to be the plantation owner.

Off the chart stupid. I got called before the commander for that remark. I was 19.

Old enough to know better but far too inexperienced to realize that there are some places you just can’t go.

Ah, but I learned. Those singed fingers have a way of conveying a lesson.

Morris either misunderstood Mayer’s remarks to Playboy, or Morris deliberately twisted those words, because what Mayer said was this:

Someone asked me the other day, “What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?” And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass? But I said, “I can’t really have a hood pass. I’ve never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, ‘We’re full.’”

The headline of Morris’ first post on this was: “JOHN MAYER SAYS HE HAS A ‘N***** PASS’”

Well, no he didn’t, as I explained to Morris. Morris did not change the headline. So at that point, whatever the original intent, it became a lie.

So, Mayer said some really stupid things and Morris lied about it. Morris also published several other posts on the topic, and as of Monday, February 15 he was still Tweeting about it.

I have no issue with those who were deeply offended by Mayer’s remarks, including his invocation of “white supremacy.”

He thought it was clever. Like I did about the plantations.

He wasn’t clever, he was stupid. It wasn’t funny, it was offensive.

And so we learn.

But to listen to Morris, not only is Mayer beyond redemption, but it is clear to Morris that Mayer actually disrespects black people and may be a racist.

So he responds to being offended by being offensive.

I abhor this zero-sum approach to life lessons. There does not have to be a dead body in order for us to learn from an experience. It is not necessary to pillory Mayer in order to make the larger point that words matter.

No sane, rational person can possibly conclude that Mayer has the slightest malice toward blacks, based on the Playboy interview or any other source. It becomes a massive cheap shot as well as an ugly smear to “go there”.

Morris will argue that Mayer “went there first.”

No, Morris, he didn’t. He tried to be clever, said something stupid, had no intention to cause the mess he caused and would really like to clean it up.

Morris will say “He hasn’t tried hard enough.”

But wait a minute, Morris: Weren’t those words “inexcusable” and “unacceptable”? So what could Mayer say to win back your respect?

“I LOVE BLACK PEOPLE!!!”

Would that do it?

Military leaders have begun to come out in support of President Obama’s stated intention to lift the current ban on openly homosexual members of the military. Essentially, this would mean that you could continue to serve even if you were openly gay, discussed being gay, engaged in gay behaviors or sought to marry a member of the same sex.

And the question is, are we ready?

I know that other nations, notably Israel, do not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. They’ve done it that way for a long time. We have not. The United States of America still exhibits homophobia routinely.

Especially in athletics and especially in the military.

Why? Because men live and work in close quarters in both cases, and because men have a fear of being confronted by a physically superior man who wants to violate them. We aren’t afraid somebody will kiss us on the cheek, slap us on the ass or make a pass. We’d be disgusted and annoyed, but not frightened. No, we fear a monster, somebody who takes what he wants. We fear being made helpless.

When we know that we are surrounded by men who prefer women, we have nothing to fear (unless we go after the same woman, but those are normal male battles) from each other. We can unite in a common bond, a brotherhood, something physical, emotional and chemical, with no fear that somebody in the group is having a different hormonal reaction than we are.

It’s complicated and it is of course primitive. We can, in our thinking brain, rule out the basis for the fear. We know it’s not catching. We know there is little chance we will be the victim of sexual aggression. If we work on it and work on it and work on it, we can get there.

But can we flip a switch? That’s the unknown.

Can we revert from a peer pressure which insists on conformity and swift justice to a peer pressure which insists on respect for diversity and tolerance? That’s enormously unclear.

It’s the “right” thing to do. Is it the correct thing to do? Will it be properly handled by all sides? Will men become demonized for failing to adjust rapidly enough to the sudden change?

I see rough sailing ahead.

By now, Paul Shirley’s blog post about Haiti has become infamous in our little corner of the globe. He crossed many lines of decency in his “blame the victim” rant, but he at least attempted to justify his stance, and he did offer a broader grasp of the devastation.

Still, he did dump on some people who have had enough dumped on them already. Above all else, his timing was perfectly awful.

I’m something of a gadfly over at the Mo’Kelly blog. It seems that I am frequently not of the same opinion as Morris, who is more than gracious in affording me the space, opportunity but more important, the invitation to express myself however I may choose.

He frequently disagrees with me - after all, I disagreed with him first, and all’s fair - but we quite often have enormously fulfilling exchanges, where we are both, I believe, made better by having had the experience. And it is not uncommon for such exchanges to take place with others who drop by. It’s an intellectually challenging place and I enjoy it immensely.

Morris jumped out in front on this story. It turns out that Shirley, a former low level NBA basketball player, also did a guest stint on the ESPN blog. Once ESPN found out about Shirley’s blog post at FlipCollective, they summarily “fired” him from that spot. Told him that his presence was no longer wanted. Morris was highly in favor of that outcome and dedicated two separate posts to it, the second of which also appeared on HuffingtonPost.com. If Morris saw any irony in that stance, he did not say so.

FlipCollective still welcomes Paul Shirley. He published a “reaction” post the other day. So, based on current evidence, Shirley has not been punished for saying what he said. Not at the place where he said it.

He just doesn’t get to call ESPN “home” anymore. Fair? Sure. It’s their place, they can deactivate your entry pass whenever they want to.

What concerns me, more than a little, is that what Morris refers to as “personal conduct” was in fact the act of a blogger blogging. Just as I am doing now, sitting down at my keyboard to be as honest as I can, that’s what Paul Shirley did. He sat down at his keyboard and attempted to be honest.

He didn’t slander anybody, didn’t threaten anybody, didn’t seem to have any animosity toward anybody. He simply believed that this nation was very poorly led, and that there ought to be some sort of method by which, this time, the assistance they will surely receive can be applied to a better future. In other words, “tough love.”

Real tough. Barbaric, cruel and ill-timed. All of that, yes. But also a point worth pondering. The standard of living in Haiti is below miserable. Natural disasters will always whack them in the ass. If we don’t, as a species, find a way to improve that, just as sure as you’re born, there will be more and more humanitarian disasters in Haiti.

Now perhaps ESPN just decided that hey, if you’re against aid to Haiti you must be a scoundrel and we don’t need no scoundrels working ’round here. Or maybe they didn’t think it through. Whatever their motivation, what is clear is that they have the power. They have the power to kick a guest blogger off of their site for views he expressed somewhere else.

So “personal opinion” is now “personal conduct.”

Meaning, be careful what you say. It could cost you everything.

And so far, Morris doesn’t get that, and I don’t think too many other people do, either. See, Morris is all confused about the fact that “This is not a First Amendment issue!” which is correct. Shirley’s rights aren’t being violated, and he is not only still free to speak, but he kept the gig where he wrote the original piece. He hasn’t been maligned nor constrained in any appreciable way.

No, this isn’t about Paul Shirley, who is a lot more famous today than he was a week ago. This is about ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which also owns ABC and a host of other properties. This is about the fact that more and more humans communicate through the web, which means they use somebody’s service to do it. It might be Google, it might be AOL, it might be Facebook or Twitter.

And what we saw with this episode is a glimpse of the future, a future where “corporate interests” overrule “free speech”. A future in which you can and will be silenced if your opinions aren’t good for business. A world in which speech can never be eliminated but it can be tightly controlled.

I suppose it was there all along, this threat. And I suppose that I’ve been aware for some time now that the best way to get through life is to keep your head down. Why cause a fuss, why call attention to yourself, why become the latest example that the system will never let you threaten it?

We live in a police state, not at all unlike China. We’re given just enough freedom so that we have reasonable quality of life, which makes us happier workers. But if we even consider interfering with the free flow of commerce, if we seem to be the slightest threat to economic vitality on a small or large scale, then bells will go off, red lights will flash, and a car with dark mirrors will screech up along-side, with masked men inside waiting to whisk us away.

And for a few days people will ask, “Where did he go?”, until the word comes back that he went too far and now he’s gone, after which others will stop asking questions and make sure to keep their own heads down from now on.

I want Beyonce to write some political songs. I think she’s capable.

Don’t we need this generation of musicians to start expressing the reality of life in the 21st century?

I start by asking the question: what sort of century are we having? Where is it likely to lead us?

25 years ago I was the next generation, the one being handed a mess to clean up. Divisive racial tension, high deficits, unjustifiable wars, pollution, foreign oil, Wall Street and so forth. We really thought we had some stuff to solve.

Compare that to today.

Today’s 25 year olds face unknowns wherever they turn. How good an idea is an MBA? A Law Degree? An MD? Any college degree at all? How useful will today’s skills be in five or ten years? How will we continue to afford health insurance, energy, car insurance and so forth? How many more bites can they take out of our paycheck for “small” expenses that add up quickly? Who among us isn’t mostly broke as soon as we get that check?

I never feel as broke as I feel on payday.

So, NextGen, here is the world and we’ve made it quite a mess for you. On top of the urgently pressing immediate problems, we’ve got some fantastic long-term problems for you. Social Security is basically insolvent; global warming will get so much worse in the second half of this century, that you will be accused of handing off a dismal legacy to your children unless you come up with some really incredible solutions really soon.

Likely you will not. Likely your generation and all future generations will be about massive adaptation to a rapidly changing world.

Along the way, you might want to decide that you ought to take more control over what’s important.

So, talk among yourselves, NextGen. There’s quite a bit to figure out, other than, you know, who had the best dress at the VMAs.

Just saying.

Banks getting pummeled in the press. Bernanke under seige. Geithner hideously unpopular. Taxes on bonuses being proposed. No let-up in sight.

And most of the people mentioned above have no idea why they’e being treated this way.

“It’s the meltdown, stupid.”

See, to a man (and they’re all men; almost all white), they believe that (a) this is not all their fault; (b) to the extent that they are at fault, they’ve learned their lesson; (c) they are still the best stewards of the financial apparatus of capitalism because they understand it better than anyone else.

Listen - this is true. It may seem ridiculous, it may seem in many ways like a joke, but it - is - true.

That is exactly what they believe.

Did you notice that stocks were down quite a bit last week? Do you know what the reported reason is? You may choose not to believe this, but anyway:

Because Bernanke may NOT win a second term as Fed Chief.

That’s right, the markets are supposedly afraid that it will be bad news if Bernanke is not re-upped.

Either that’s a fabulous example of financial press spin being tightly controlled from the inside, or an enormous paranoia on the part of investors that a new fed chief would mess everything up; or both.

In any case, what it points out is that irrationality has become the norm. The only truth these men understand is making money. They are money changers. Their job is to take somebody’s money, give it to somebody else and make a profit from it. They were decried as evil in the bible, and to this day, if you explain their job to the average person, and how their incentives work, and how their compensation works, you would be very angry. You would say this makes no sense. You would say that there must be a better way than this.

You would understand that. They do not.

The money changers view themselves as capitalism’s grease. After all, what happened when they crashed? The economy ground to a near-halt. Doesn’t that prove how important, how vital they are?

They also proved they were too big to fail, and they proved that the government would choose to save them rather than find out what the world looks like without them.

A game of chicken that they neatly won.

And now they want to accomplish one thing, and they are very urgent about it: Resist any and all attempts to interfere with or regulate their practices.

They really don’t get it, do they?

It’s the meltdown, stupid.

You presided over the worst financial debacle in history; you lost more economic value in a short time than had ever been thought possible before, and you came within a whisker of destroying the very system. You cast millions out of work and made millions more paupers, losers of all their wealth.

You destroyed a large swath of the consumer sector. You destroyed property values. And in both cases you strongly encouraged rapid growth, THEN destroyed that value.

The people don’t know exactly how you did it, they only know it was you. When they hear you say that you want to go back to paying single-year bonuses to one person that is more money than they will ever make in their lives - and that you want to do it for hundreds of your employees - guess what? They don’t say “Ah, the American Dream at work!”; they say “That’s where the money went!”

In other words, any system that could pay somebody that much in a year, and lead us into this deep of a mess, must be a completely wrong system.

No wonder you won’t let anybody in to fix it. You like it just the way it is.

And so it’s simple. The mass intelligence of the people is taking over. They will not stop until the system that caused all of this, that they were deliberately meant to not understand, is replaced by something simpler, something stronger, something better and something explainable.

Now the only question is: Does the President understand any of this?

Tomorrow I will be 50. The Rev. King would have been 81. I know the holiday is next Monday, but I would like to take a moment to speak of my feelings for a man who I have taken to calling “The Last Great American”.

Over at the Mo’Kelly blog, Roger wrote: “Man can overcome his enviroment when he seeks a higher plane.”

That was so beautifully said that I immediately started breaking it down. I decided that the word “enlightenment” belongs in there somewhere, and it reminded me that Dr. King believed in the same thing. He believed that enlightened humans were incapable of injustice, of inhumanity, and therefore of racism. He spent the last 15 years of his life, knowing he would die young, moving from city to city and issue to issue to represent the belief that we can talk to each other. He knew in a way that many of his contemporaries flatly rejected that not only did you need to find some white folks you could trust, not only did you need a number of white folks on your side, but that there were good, honorable, decent people who understood his message of enlightenment and considered themselves enlightened.

I am one of those people.

I cherish the man and all he stood for. Some will choose to peck away at his shortcomings. I’m comfortable saying that his personal peccadillos were first and foremost human frailty, and second and most important, vastly overshadowed by his contribution to modern society. He was the rightful heir to Gandhi, and it is no mere tokenism that we celebrate his birth as a National Holiday.

Happy Birthday, Reverend. We miss you now more than ever and we are ever thankful for what you gave us.

Lesser beings live among us.

Have you ever pondered why there is such a gap between humans and the next smartest species? I mean, it’s an incredible gap. Why aren’t there species in-between?

My answer has long been: Because we killed them all.

In recent years I have amended that view somewhat. Those who we did not kill, managed to survive by assimilating with modern humans. In other words, lesser beings found a way to survive in our world.

And we found use for them. They clean our toilets, they tend our gardens, they dump our trash, sweep our floors and serve us our fast food. Do modern humans also do these things? Sure. But modern humans could do almost anything else, if they wanted to. Lesser beings cannot. This is the limit of their abilities.

The problem is, they don’t recognize themselves as lesser beings. They in fact believe they are superior to others, despite a complete lack of evidence other than their own belief. However, according to the U.S. constitution, they get the same one vote that modern humans get.

You can spot a lesser being a mile away. He or she is completely certain of their beliefs and sees the world in terms of those who are right and those who are wrong. As soon as they know your opinion about something, they immediately have you classified. They almost universally believe in one form of religion or another, and it is common for that religion to teach them that those who do not believe as they do are evil.

Before you get any ideas, yes I absolutely assert that today’s Republican Party has made it their primary objective to appeal to lesser beings, having learned that they can be folded into a voting majority. However, you will find lesser beings all across the spectrum of views and beliefs.

In The Age Of Twitter, the post-apocalypse of the IM world, we are well into our second generation of people who will never be able to spell, and will never be able to express a thought which is longer than 140 characters. It is impossible to fully tax one’s brain when so little is required in order to communicate in such a way. Speed and the ability to multi-task are all that one needs.

So, for example, they will be extremely well qualified to run the take-out window.

I’m in a bad mood about the state of discourse in this country and the world at large, which is at an all-time low in my half century on this planet. Lesser beings live among us but they are allowed to vote, are allowed to gather in large numbers in order to seem substantial, and take it upon themselves to impose their shallow, misguided beliefs on the rest of us.

And it’s difficult for me to imagine either the world that portends, or what it would take to alter that course.

Yahoo News, via the AP, wants to make sure we know that many more soldiers are surviving their war wounds these days, leaving them to live lives of horrible handicaps, mental as well as physical:

Far from winding down, the numbers of wounded U.S. soldiers coming home have continued to swell. The problem is especially acute among those who fought in Afghanistan, where nearly four times as many troops were injured in October as a year ago.

Amputations, burns, brain injuries and shrapnel wounds proliferate in Afghanistan, due mostly to crude, increasingly potent improvised bombs targeting U.S. forces. Others are hit by snipers’ bullets or mortar rounds.

With Veterans Day on Wednesday, wounded veterans from the recent conflicts consider the toll of these injuries, and the rough road ahead for the injured. Of particular concern are the so-called hidden wounds,traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder that can have side effects such as irritability and depression.

Since 2007, more than 70,000 service members have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury — more than 20,000 of them this year, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. Most of the injuries are mild but leave symptoms such as headaches and difficulty concentrating.

Today’s New York Times wants us to know that the inside scoop on President Obama’s thinking towards the war in Afghanistan is that his closest advisors want to send an additional 30,000 troops.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan, but President Obama remains unsatisfied with answers he has gotten about how vigorously the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan would help execute a new strategy, administration officials said Tuesday.

So there is this terrible quandary facing the President: Send more troops, knowing that the casualty rate will soar; leave the troop level alone, knowing that it’s inadequate to accomplish any rational mission and will result in more casualties; or bring the boys home.

As a veteran (non-combat), my plea is to bring the boys home.

Kerry asked a generation ago: “Who will be the last to die for a mistake?”

How is it anything but a mistake to continue this war? We’ve been there for eight years, sent Al Quaeda scurrying into the mountain region in neighboring Pakistan, and dethroned the Taliban as the recognized government of the country.

The logical question is: Why haven’t we declared victory and brought the boys home?

The illogical answer is that we haven’t completely defeated either enemy. The logical rejoinder: How can that be done and how would you know? And the corollary question is: Isn’t containment good enough?

Let’s see: they live in the most primitive conditions imaginable. Yes, they still attract recruits, but not in the numbers they did at the start of the conflict. Their movements have been severely disrupted. Keeping in mind that we had the intelligence in hand to prevent 9/11, is there really any worry that we will be victimized by another massive surprise attack? The logical answer would be: Not if we’re paying attention.

This enemy was a gnat before Bush turned them into Godzilla. Guess what? They really were still gnats, and still are. The IRA is a more formidable terror organization than Al Quaeda. There are far more worrisome government entities than the Taliban, which is only in power in regions where the national government has not yet extended its reach. In other words, the forgotten people have been scooped up by the Taliban. As their governments improve their social services and law enforcement, the Taliban will continue to be pushed back.

Yes, there is a fundamentalist sect in that region which believes that any act of violence, as long as it is committed in service to Islam, is acceptable. Of course the Koran teaches no such thing, and so most of the Muslim world rejects these extremists.

In other words, they’re isolated, even within their own world.

There is no nation on earth which is being run by Muslims with the intent to make war. The closest is Iran, and they are much more bark than bite. SecState Clinton has warned that, if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, the Taliban will once again take over the entire country.

If so, and if they insist on making war or harboring those who do…we got lotsa bombs.

My strongly held view is that this threat can be contained without placing American soldiers on the ground. The supposed objectives that our boys are there to achieve: pacification, nation-building; are not what they are trained to do. They are trained to win battles against an armed, identifiable enemy.

If it was in the interests of the United States to fight that fight til the bitter end, I’d be among the first to say so. Not only do I reject that argument, I defy anybody in Washington to explain how it could even be achieved. If we are in Afghanistan for another five years, the place will look pretty much the way it does today: A shaky central government, pockets of Taliban influence, and opium still the number one export.

The only difference will be the thousands more young men and women dead or maimed in service to this senseless pursuit.

Say it with me, and say it like you mean it:

Bring the boys home.

(* I just like the sound of “bring the boys home” from a literary standpoint. I mean no disrespect to the many women who also serve proudly and with distinction in hostile territory.)

You will need to read the previous post to make sense of this post.

At the end of the day on October 7, 2009, my checking account balance was $414.70. A depsosit had been made which was waiting to be credited to the next banking day. This would also be the case on October 9 and 13, which was a Monday, the deposit having been made on Saturday.

M&T’s web site dutifully recorded the deposits and reflected the amount in the balance. At no time between October 7 and October 13 did the balance fall below zero.

There were seven debits to my account in that period. M&T found a way to hit me with NSF fees ($37 each) for six of them.

I wrote a letter to the branch manager, showing him his own web site with balances that supported each and every debit. I asked for a response in writing. My wife delivered the letter, which he read, after which he told my wife to have me meet with him and that there was “no way” I would be getting all of the fees refunded. I told my wife that I will not meet with him, that I want his response in writing and I will proceed from there.

I have already contacted Pennsylvania State Attorney General Tom Corbett’s office, to see if he will investigate these practices.

It seems clear that M&T is posting debits before credits. Why? To favor themselves and screw their own customers. A balance that should be $96 is instead $88- because of these NSF fees. Other transactions which should have cleared were NSFed due to the fees which preceded them.

Never a below-zero balance. Six out of seven transactions NSFed.

Much more to come on this. If this must be the battle ground to make banks stop screwing their own customers, so be it.

If any manager of any bank wishes to step forward and reject these practices, I will be happy to bank with you. All you really have to do is one thing, just one:

If I make a deposit before you process a debit, please process the deposit first.

Is that asking too much?

I will name more names as this saga unfolds. I have a suspicion that it will get very ugly.

I have a fundamental question to which I currently don’t have an answer.

I consider it an existential question in the electronic age:

“What is the human reaction when institutions steal?”

If you steal from me I can go to the police and say “Morris stole from me.” And they will make a case and you will get in trouble, if you did it.

Where do I go when my bank steals from me, and simply deny that they stole? Simply insist this is how they do business?

Who do I go to? Who gets in trouble?

Today, those answers are both: “Nobody.”

And that has to change.

The details (I will keep my bank’s name private for now, pending the final resolution of this matter):

My income is not enough to pay all of the bills. I need my wife’s income, too. Due to personal circumstances, her income has become less reliable recently, causing our bank balance to hover close to zero for a day here and a day there, until more money comes in. We have several bills which come out automatically, so it’s always dangerous to use the accounft for any other purpose. We try not to.

On October 7 our balance was $410. We knew a rent check for $430 was due to hit the account, and we made a deposit that day. It was made after close of business, but still in the afternoon. We fully expected it to hit the account as of October 8. It did.

However, not until the bank decided to post the rent check, which put our account in the red. They then processed a $10 credit card purchase, also while the account was in the red, and docked us $37 twice - $74. Then they posted our deposit, which would have covered both debits.

So now my wife has to waste part of her afternoon making sense to the people at the bank, that we did everything properly and there is no justification for delaying the posting of the deposit until after they posted the debits, other than to screw us. The money was in their hands, the information was available to them at the start of the nightly cycle, and they simply chose to do things in the sequence which would allow them to steal from their own customers.

I know that there has been talk of making banks allow customers to decline transactions which would overdraw them. However, such a bill does not go nearly far enough. At least two, possibly three things also need to happen:

1. Deposits made before the start of  the nightly cycle must be posted before any debits are posted.

2. If the customer uses their debit card as a credit card, the bank has two choices: a) they can place a visible hold for that amount against the balance, so the customer can see that the money is unavailable; b) they can post the transaction at a later date, but the debit to the account must be as of the posted date. We must outlaw the practice of back-posting a “credit” transaction to a debit account.

3. The bankers say that their customers prefer to have the largest debits paid before the smallest. Fine: give customers a choice. If I want to pay my nickel and dime stuff first, let me. Because quite frankly I’d rather not pay $37 for a 5$ purchase, when I had the funds to cover the purchase until you paid the largest debit first.

I’d also like to see the fees rgulated. $37 is obscene, especially when no human labor was involved. There should be a graduating scale so that the occasional mistake doesn’t cost anywhere near as much. Rules and options also need to be clearly spelled out.

We need national banking reform, because quite simply the banks have turned on their own customers. We put our money into their supposedly safe hands, and they repay our trust by finding every way they can to steal that money.

The very definition of pathetic.

Who can forget candidate Obama famously bowling an incredibly low score in his miserable attempt to look like a regular guy? We all laughed.

It’s not so funny when people are trying to throw you into the gutter. As President, Obama has come under withering attack from the right (sorry, there’s no other way to say that) challenging his very legitimacy as president, insisting he’s not a natural born citizen, for example, and declaring him a socialist, a totalitarianist, an egomaniac and much worse. Over at the Mo’Kelly blog, we learned that a congressman from Missouri recently told a joke about a golf course being over-run with monkeys, likening that to today’s Washington. How clever, comparing the Obama administration to an invasion of monkeys. No racial overtones there…

And so the question is, how to handle it? Remember Michael Douglas as “The American President”:

		SHEPHERD
		Let me see if I've got this: The
		third story on the news tonight was
		that someone I didn't know 13 years
		ago, when I wasn't President,
		participated in a demonstration where
		no laws were being broken in protest
		of something that so many people were
		against it doesn't exist anymore?
			   (beat)
		Just out of curiosity, what was the
		fourth story?

				LEWIS
		See, I think it's important, when we
		deal with it, that we--

				SHEPHERD
		Don't deal with it.

				LEWIS
		Excuse me?

				SHEPHERD
		They're trying to get us to swing at
		a pitch in the dirt. No one ever
		wins these fights. It'll go away.

				LEWIS
		I'm not sure that's the wisest--

				SHEPHERD
		Aw...hell!

				ROBIN
		See, it's already distracting you.
		Why don't you let A.J. and Lewis--

				SHEPHERD
		No, you reminded me, I'm supposed to
		have dinner with Sydney tonight.

“The American President” was only a movie, but I always agreed with the president on that. If you let your sworn enemies dictate the terms of the debate, you have already lost. Obama seems determined to stay above the fray. If anything, his surrogates have not gotten the message. Folks such as Jimmy Carter, who believes he knows what’s in congressman Joe Wilson’s heart, do not help and probably hurt Obama’s efforts to be seen as the president of all the people, far too busy to allow himself to be besieged by petty efforts to bring him down.

There are so many legitimate issues to be challening Obama on, starting with “Obamacare”, which is probably not socialist enough to accomplish the stated objective of bending the cost curve. In his determination to appear “centrist” and “moderate”, Obama will avoid going too far to the perceived political left. Nevermind that this would have been considered a centrist position a generation ago; today, “single-payer” is considered a potentially deadly solution to the health care crisis, which would bring about “rationing of care” and “thousands of doctors fleeing the profession” and “an end to innovation”.

In reality, there is no other long term solution. Paying insurance companies and doctors and hospitals directly with government money, as is already done, cannot help but skew the market conditions. Injecting more government money into the same system, as the proposed plan will do, can only skew things more. In the end, severe decisions about how to pay for these services in the next generation and the one after that will be even more politically divisive than today’s debate.

So, the real problem for Obama is not how to deal with overt racism or all of the name-calling, it’s really how to chart a political course in an era when most Americans view government involvement in any issue as a sure way to make things worse.

So, staying above the fray is good, it keeps his hands clean. Much more important is restoring belief that this country is actually governable. Toward that end, a botched, beaten down and toothless health care overhaul has a real chance to kill off whatever hope remains for an uplifting Obama presidency.

That’s the problem this president needs to solve, it says here.

Tonight, President Obama finally reached into his pocket and pulled out a little - perhaps a lot - of his hard-earned political currency. Tonight he put some chips into play.

It’s not as though we didn’t know he had moments like this in him. Moments like this are what got him elected. On the other hand, only the most progressive and perhaps the most naive among us believed that his persuasive power alone could change the course of history.

No, but as it turns out, that and a solid congressional majority can. Obama made it clear tonight that a bill is coming, made it clear what the bill must contain, and then offered his hand in compromise about how to get there.

And by my estimation, he went maybe ten minutes too long. In political speech-making, that’s unheard of. Bill Clinton would have overshot by 40 minutes, at least, beating us into submission.

Obama cuts like a knife. His oratorical skills are among the best since Reagan, and that’s a pretty high standard. It’s not easy to soar when you’re talking about fixing the plumbing rather than selling grand visions, and the problem with selling health care reform as a grand vision is that this center-right country sits up and asks, “government what?”

So Obama tip-toed around the vision thing, focusing more on the practical fact that health care costs are on course to bankrupt individuals as well as the national budget within a generation. He looked across the room and warned them, “You know what happens if we do nothing.”

I’ve been growing increasingly wary that Obama can be an effective president, that he can wrestle control of the dialog back from the harshest elements of the right wing, and that he can sell his programs to the American people in a way that they’ll believe and accept.

Tonight he laid down the law. He really is going to keep right on talking to us like grownups. He really is going to go right on telling secrets about what goes on in the halls of power. He really is going to keep on behaving as though his only purpose is to serve us.

The question is not, should we believe him? Let’s go ahead and say “Yes.” The question is: “Will it matter?” Are the streets of Washington so thick with the blood of ten thousand battles, that no man can come through clean? Was Obama able to reach all the way to the White House without getting blood on his own hands?

Tonight he dared Congress to join him or get run over. He managed to lecture his opponents without supplicating himself to his supporters. He was the man in the middle, the man around whom all the action is. He said, bring it to me. Bring it here.

Much like Reagan once did.

I know it’s only September of Year One. I know a fair number of people who believe that Obama is doing a fine job fending off those wascawwy wepubwicans, still a do-gooder against evil in their eyes.

I was honest throughout the campaign, and with, for example, Tavis Smiley on the eve of the election: My first reaction to Obama was that he turned me off.

Now mind you, I’m not a member of his target group. At 49 going on 50, I’m not a fresh face. Obama made his early inroads with the nation’s youngest voters, and craftily leveraged that momentum to win him some real support from the truly deep pockets. He at least kept many of them on the sidelines until he could show results in primaries, which he did, but his real success was in the caucuses, where he trounced Clinton and all other comers, giving himself a huge advantage in electorates that Clinton could only overcome by beating him that badly in the primaries, where instead they fought to a standstill.

It was brilliant primary campaign strategy. I distinctly remember that Obama himself originally thought it was too soon, but was advised by others that a change agent who didn’t have Hillary’s negatives had a real chance to overtake her, and in 2008 a Democrat was going to be elected President.

So Obama took the chance, and here is what he did with it: He went around the country repeating buzzwords, primarily Hope and Change. Every day this man’s face was on TV, repeating the same themes with absolutely no substance behind them. He’d been in national government for five minutes compared to Clinton, but he was already representing himself as the man who we needed to lead us to Hope and Change.

It didn’t even have any Sharptonian lyricism to it. In fact it was more like a professor in waiting. Or perhaps a father-figure. I’m not really sure. He talked about stature abroad and things like that, and I remember thinking, well I bet Hillary could handle that better. I kept wondering why Obama was considered more ready than Hillary to lead the country in any way.

But she lost that primary, by going on the attack. Yes, her front-runner status had been dented and her campaign was in a complete shambles, but there were other solutions. She could have asked her husband to call in some old friends and rescue Hillary’s image; hell, they’d done it before. But instead Hillary went rogue. I still remember a small skirmish when Obama used somebody else’s words without attribution, something that both men said was common between them, and the next morning there was Hillary, waving a piece of paper in the air and going on about “change you can Xerox.”

Now that could be a funny line, but coming from her it just sounded petty and irritated.

By January and the Atlanta debates, I knew this thing was over. Obama was sitting there with his jaw sticking out, legs calmly crossed, arms folded in front of him, and calmly batted away every attempt Hillary made to attack and go personal. It was clear that he was in control and she was desperate, and that’s when I knew it was over.

And so it came down to November, and I thought long and hard about a President McCain before deciding that there was too much work to be done rolling back the Bush excesses, to be trusted to a third consecutive Republican term. It truly was time for change, real change.

And to his credit, Obama did take some steps, albeit small and highly controversial, especially regarding Guantanamo and the definitions of torture. He learned early on that the idealogues who installed those policies were firmly entrenched in the political fabric of Washington and had certainly not gone away. And it should have served as a reminder that, however numerically absolute Obama’s current majority may be, it is idealogically slender and could easily be reversed, especially if his opponents are better prepared than he is. He is literally one administration against an entire machine.

Obama 1.0 has been an utter failure. The question is, can it be saved? I believe the answer is “no”. I believe that Obama 1.0 is simply the campaign formula carried into the White House. What an incredibly bad idea. You didn’t see Bush pull such a stupid stunt. He won the election, then he ran the country. Two completely different jobs.

So, kill Obama 1.0. Create Obama 2.0. It is time. It is past time.

Some essential elements of Obama 2.0:

- The everything at once strategy has got to go.

- Health care reform must wait. Use the next year to forge a true national consensus. Town hall meetings work best if you haven’t already made up your mind.

- Afghanistan must cease to be a slog. We need to be moving toward an exit strategy within a year. At most. And anyway, Al Quaeda is gone and the Taliban is greatly weakened, and a democratic government has been installed. Didn’t we already win?

- The economy is the most important focus. Specifically, making sure that every dollar spent to save the economy also, to the maximum extent possible, builds a new American future, and eventually a world future, centered around the Green Economy that Van Jones had been brought on board to champion. Obama needs to rally the nation to become the world leaders in renewable and planet-healthy technologies and advances.

The world is in a headlong rush toward its doom. The nation recognized that policies such as those espoused by the Bush Administration seemed to be pushing us closer to that doom, a head in the sand approach that recognizes only one thing: are you with me or against me? and knows only one solution: kill or be killed.

Obama would do well to remember that he is being judged on his ability to change the tone and tenor of his times. So, be the great mediator. Step to the lecturn on Wednesday and say you’re going to slow down and de-emphasize health care. That you consider health care reform essential, but that getting it right matters more than getting it quickly, that you realize that many voices want to be heard on this subject, and that they should have that chance. Now that is changing the tone and tenor.

And then please come up with a way to give Afghanistan back to its people and let them choose the government they want. Let them also understand that if they host those who intend to harm the U.S. or its allies, that we will be back, from the air, with devastating consequences. And let us look for a way forward in our Middle East policy which does not require us to choose sides in armed conflicts.

Green economy. Forward-looking foreign policy.

There’s your hope. There’s your change.

Obama 2.0. If not now, when?

BennettBlog has come into possession of the script for President Obama’s speech to Congress regarding health care on Wednesday. We can’t say how we got it. Our lives could be in danger.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, members of Congress, my fellow Americans, what a privilege it is to stand here before you, at the dawn of a new millenium, a new American age where anything is possible. And our imagination must rise to the challenge that future calls for, for we know that the excesses of the twentieth century must not be allowed to be repeated in the twenty-first.

“And so our generation, and generations to come, will be change generations. Where previous generational change was about doing things bigger and better, we must be about making things smarter and better. Speed is no longer a rare commodity; in the digital age, great ideas can come together in the historical equivalent of a nano-second.

“And so we must not fear change, for change will surely come. Rather, it’s about our ability to control that change, to chart our own destiny as a people and as a planet, and not have that destiny charted for us by the relentless march toward an unsustainable planet.

“And no, this is not my global warming speech, although that one is also coming, because if we do not learn to consider the long term consequences of our actions, then our destiny is truly a dice roll, and as most of us know, a gambler’s luck always runs out at some point.

“But before we can conquer the big stuff, like you know, saving the planet, we have to learn to handle the small stuff. You know, the stuff that is totally within our own borders, the stuff that we do already but we need to do smarter, because bigger is not better. You know, that stuff.

“Turn off the teleprompter. Turn it off. I’m going off-script.

{walks off of the lecturn and down into the well, in front of his seated audience.}

“OK, now I want one designated speaker from the left, and one from the right, and we’re gonna take turns asking and answering each others questions because this is too important. And I’m gonna stay here til they turn out the lights because I’m all about this issue. Lest we forget, we come here to help the American people. You’ve seen the numbers. You’ve seen the studies. Is this the best we can do? Is it? I want any member of this body who honestly believes that, to get up right now and walk out of this room. Go on! If you honestly believe we’ve already got the best system, well let’s see who has the more votes.

“Now the rest of you - you got your person? You got yours? - OK , now the rest of you, write your questions down and hand them to your person’s screener - you both pick a screener - and the screener will hand each spokesperson the next question. The spokesperson can also ask their own question at any time. We’ll stay as long as there’s somebody for me to talk to, and put the coffee on my tab.

“OK, who’s first?”

Ah, dreams…

I’m going to recite from memory the words that got Van Jones in so much trouble.

When asked why Republicans were able to push through an agenda with less than a super majority but Democrats seem unable to, Jones said (approximately):

Because Republicans are assholes (thunderous laughter). President Obama is not an asshole. Now, I can be a bit of an asshole. So perhaps some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama, need to get a little uppity.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it seems to me that the revolution will not be televised, just as we were warned. It’s just too difficult for people to hear things they don’t want to hear. Jones got a great response to what he said. He said a lot of other things to that audience in Berkeley, six months ago. If anything, it is surprising that it took this long for those words to gestate into political poison.

Republicans have chosen a path. It is the path of Most Resistance, and they are executing it brilliantly. They get to fight as dirty as they wanna be, not only because they are the minority party and therefore entitled to do a little “attacking”, but because they have absolutely mastered the art of getting others to do their dirty work. Notice how, already, several times, Obama himself has been declared a “racist”, for positions he has taken or words he has spoken. We want a black in the White House? We want to push back against racism? Here’s our reward: They will call us the racists.

How interesting.

But let me just say that the Van Jones resignation is just one more example of what Republicans already know: One-Term Obama has zero fight in him.

The good news for Jones is that he can now step out of the shadows. I would hope that Tavis Smiley will scoop him up for a PBS sitdown sometime soon, then Jones can write his next book and hit the lecture circuit. And he can serve as a vivid reminder that the best and brightest will never be allowed to sit too long in the halls of power, lest they make the statues too uncomfortable.

Adrian Walker is a black columnist at the Boston Globe. I’d never read any of his columns until this morning, when I went to Boston.com looking for any updates on GatesGate.

Walker tried to sound reasonable, tried to come across as looking for balance.

Well, he fell flat on his face.

The title of his column, published on Friday, was encouraging: “Hey, Let’s Talk”.

But he didn’t really want to talk, he wanted to lecture.

He wrote this, which I think is a neat little summary of the problem:

If you’ve ever wondered why a national conversation on race is so hard to pull off, this week has furnished an answer. It’s just too hard for everyone to get past their preconceived ideas of what’s going through everyone else’s head.

Then he wrote:

I don’t know Gates well, but I know him well enough to categorically reject the caricature of him as an arrogant, entitled elitist whose big mouth was the only problem here.

Crowley I don’t know at all. Those who do vouch for his professionalism. He hasn’t done himself any favors by refusing to apologize or to acknowledge that he arrested someone who hadn’t done anything remotely criminal. If he really believes he didn’t do anything wrong, he’s clueless. Note that I did not say racist; I said clueless.

Do I believe race was part of this? Of course it was.

I don’t believe for one second that Alan Dershowitz, in the same situation, would have ended up with a mug shot. First, his neighbor probably wouldn’t have called the police, even if she didn’t recognize him. Second, Crowley probably would have gone away.

So add Walker to the list of those who know that Sgt. Crowley’s behavior toward Professor Gates was influenced by Gates’ blackness. And add him to the list of those who know that this is not about Professor Gates’ behavior, nor about the professor’s conditioning.

Gee, Adrian, thanks for being willing to talk about it.

I make the opposite assertion: This house had been broken into recently. A neighbor sees another force-in of the door (the original break-in was the cause of the door being jammed when the professor returned from his trip) and calls the police, who respond quickly based on the previous incident. I won’t rehash the particulars except to say in the strongest terms, as I said yesterday, that if a white man had continually berated the police, he too would have been arrested and possibly tased. Sgt. Crowley showed Professor Gates unusual deference, owing to the professor’s “stature”. Sgt. Crowley also conducted this last piece of business in full view of every other officer on the scene, including black officers, all of whom supported the arrest. And Sgt. Crowley, who teaches racial sensitivity to other officers, was accepted by President Obama as a good human being and a fine officer.

And still he and we must endure these heavy-handed assertions that he treated this black man differently than he would treat a white man. “But we’re not saying he’s a racist!” they assure us.

No, they’re simply assuring us that Sgt. Crowley unwittingly treated Professor Gates a certain way because of the way the sergeant was conditioned by his life experience to treat black people.

Racial Profiling, but subliminal.

As I said over at the mokelly blog, so in other words, heads it’s racism and tails it’s racial insensitivity?

And in no case does it have anything to do with the professor’s conditioning and with the professor’s behavior?

Uh huh.

SO glad we could “talk about it”…

Adrian Walker doesn’t even understand how much a part of the problem he is…

How about we stop accusing the cop of being too dumb to know what a redneck he is?

How about we stop being so offensive to a fellow human?

Any takers?

For all his efforts to make things better, the more that president Obama says on the matter of Sgt. Crowley and Professor Gates, he makes things so much worse.

It is time to start questioning the innate decency of a man who cannot utter a simple apology, who can speak for 6 minutes and admit, in so many words, that he was the stupid one for saying what he said, without ever actually taking blame. If that’s not enough to make you question this man’s innate decency, try this: Based on his own words, Obama knows that Crowley is not a racist. Obama made a point of flattering Crowley’s character. And yet, Obama will not condemn Gates for repeatedly calling Crowley a racist. In fact, Obama went out of his way to suggest that Sgt. Crowley should have deferred to Professor Gates more than he did, simply because blacks may, based on history, have a suspicion towards a police officer who is doing his job.

This would be the President Of The United States declaring that the policy of law enforcement should be to defer to blacks more than they would defer to whites, to prevent a misunderstanding based on history. This would be the President telling the black community to rise up against any police action that you, in your subjective perspective, deem unacceptable. You are not responsible for your actions. You do not have to comply with his orders. You may carry on at will.

I’m nearly at a loss for words, which is where I find myself most of the time with this embarrassment of a president.

That the chief law enforcement officer of this country could categorically justify disobedience in the face of lawful police activity, that he could further assert that the police ought to defer more to blacks than to whites in the name of “sensitivity” - I hope that any thinking person of any color would stand with me and insist that this president answer for these allegations.

At one and the same time, he has gone much too far and not nearly far enough.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

The reason President Chicken took no questions:

“Mr. President, do you believe that Sgt. Crowley is a racist?”

“No, I’m sure that he’s not, and in fact I’m confident that his actions were not racially motivated.”

“Followup, sir: In that case, do you condemn Professor Gates’ allegations in that regard, and do you think that he owes Sgt. Crowley an apology?”

“…………”

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

In 1968, when I was 8 years old, Adam-12 came on the air. It lasted seven seasons and made household names out of Martin Milner and Kent McCord. Many of you have probably seen it on Nick At Night or TV Land.

The premise of the show is that seven year veteran Pete Malloy (MIlner) is a mentor to probationary officer Jim Reed (McCord). Milner had last been seen living the road life in the TV series Route 66, but that show had been off the air for four years by 1968, and Milner came back as older and more grizzled than his chiseled partner. There was no denying McCord’s eye appeal.

The show was basically a “day in the life” saga about two L.A. patrolmen, with very little connecting narrative between episodes. The show was half an hour long, or 24 minutes of air time. I remember looking forward to the show every week, although at age eight I probably did not see the first season much if at all.

And so I have taken up the idea of watching the series from start to finish, which totals 175 episodes, and which I can do for the price of my Netflix subscription, but which you can do at Hulu for free, if you don’t mind the commercials.

I’m here tonight to recommend episode 17 from Season 1, It All Happened So Fast. Without giving too much away, there is only a single story line, and it all takes place at the scene of a crime and then back at headquarters, and there are no more than half a dozen speaking parts. McCord does a brilliant job as Reed in a very high strung situation, and as I watched it I began to wonder if he’d been nominated for an Emmy Award for the episode. He was not, nor was he ever nominated for any acting award.

The series itself is a quaint throwback to a time when people smoked whenever and wherever they wanted to, women were “dames” and, of course, teenagers were all stoners who loved to commit crimes for the sheer thrill of tormenting the pigs.

Still, it moves along well, the characters are clearly defined, there is a quirky sense of realism that shows such as “Hill Street Blues” would later seek to replace with earthiness and chaos, and no matter how you slice it, Milner and McCord work well together. I’m having a great time watching it.

And I highly recommend the above episode. You don’t need to watch the preceding episodes to appreciate it, at least I don’t think you do.

James Franco

You may not know James Franco by name, but you almost assuredly know that face: Tristan in Tristan and Isolde; Pete Parker’s friend/nemesis Harry Osborn in the Spiderman saga; zoned out pothead/dealer Saul Silver in Pineapple Express; Harvey Milk’s young lover in Milk. He is currently filming Howl, in which he plays the famous beat poet Allen Ginsburg.

Such diversity of roles for such a young man. Franco is only 31 and has demonstrated a strong capacity to stand out in any sort of genre. He is his generation’s Matt Damon, solidly good looking in his own unique way, utterly charming, and an undeniable screen presence.

He was scheduled to give a commencement address at his alma mater, UCLA, on June 12. He will not be giving that address, and although he came up with a reason for pulling out, the truth is the kids didn’t want him.

How’s that?

Oh yes, it seems that in all their worldly wisdom they had determined that Franco was not yet world wise enough to advise them.

Where are the adults when you need them?

Let’s see: a highly successful film star, ready to burst like a Super Nova, kept up his degree program while achieving these heights, finally earned his degree in 2008, and somehow these 22 year olds think he has nothing to share with them?

The truth is, these students would rather be told what to expect from the next 50 years of life, not from the next ten. They would rather hear from somebody who is not of their generation, a generation so different than any other, it might as well be an alien life form. Quite frankly, I think these kids are spoiled rotten and refuse to give their classmate the credit he is due. They still feel competitive with the man, still all believe they will be the next great star; in other words, they’re still a bunch of dreamers.

Here comes someone of their generation, who can make it real for them how he found his way in this new world, how he managed to juggle everything at once and still come out on top.

And these kids want nothing to do with this message?

Spoiled, rotten, these kids.

If I was Franco I would show up anyway, and stick it in their faces how good looking, relaxed, funny, self deprecating and interesting a successful 31 year old actor can be.

End-note:

The kids chose to replace Franco with Brad Delson. That’s 31 year old Brad Delson, guitarist for the band Linkin Park, who was praised by the Dean In Charge Of Saving Face On Short Notice: “Brad Delson is not only an innovative musician, but he is also a social activist who is committed to change through education.”

So a 31 year old actor wasn’t good enough but a 31 year old rocker is. Well, he did finish his degree in 1999, and he did endow a scholarship at UCLA. Slightly thicker resume.

And, evidently, all the difference in the world to these kids.

In the United States of America in 2009, what does it mean to be a black man?

According to the Bureau Of Justice Statistics, 4,777 black men out of 100,000 are in jail or prison right now; for white men, that number is 727. A black man is six and a half times more likely than a white man to be in jail today, right now. SIX AND A HALF MORE TIMES.

Whatever the reasons are for that, none of them are good enough. This is an outrage, an epidemic, and all you need to know about it is this: We ain’t doin’ a damn thing about it.

Well, not nothing: we are building nicer juvenile detention centers.

Dirty Red posted on this general topic recently, and in response to a comment I left, he suggested that I post on this subject as well.

I think he’s right.

And what I’d really like to see is many more people post on this topic. Why is a black man more likely to go to prison than to college? Why is that acceptable? Why aren’t we talking about it? Why did we elect a black president, only to watch as he studiously avoids dealing with racial issues?

Many of my heroes are black men, some for their talent, some for their contributions, some for their struggle. Dwane T. guest posted on this very blog about his good friend Johnny Gammage, who had a fateful encounter with police from upscale suburbs surrounding Pittsburgh one day, an encounter which led to his untimely death, for which several officers stood trial and for which they were all acquitted.

In other words, you may be a highly educated, highly successful black man, never have had the slightest problem with the police, no criminal record and no criminal intent, and you may end up dead because you are a black man.

If that’s not something to think about in the United States of America in 2009, there’s the comment box: Tell me why.

The big three made their pitch to Congress yesterday. They were all about appearances, too. Driving from Detroit in hybrids instead of flying in separate corporate jets, as they did several weeks ago. Promising to slash their own salaries to one dollar, and to cut executive pay and bonuses.

Just please, please, throw them this lifeline. And do it soon. Real soon. Is this week possible? Next week at the outside?

So, it’s the same pitch, only now several weeks more urgent. Each company is still bleeding red ink, still locked in a credit freeze, still unable to sell vehicles. GM lost over 40& of its sales in November, and other automakers, including venerable Toyota, all saw sales fall off a cliff.

Welcome to the latest chapter in this saga, where the government bails out an industry only to see it collapse further. First the financial sector, and now the manufacturing sector.

How long before steel, rubber, plastic and other manufacturers come running to Congress, begging that they be allowed to live,too?

The question remains the same: exactly when do these companies expect to become profitable again? This meltdown is months old; the recession is a year old, but sales did not drop sharply until the last couple of months. The meltdown is the disaster on top of the slowdown. Capitalism was already trying to grow its way out of the recession. A typical recession lasts 18 months, and they tend to begin and end months before they are recognized as such. Just another example of voodoo economics: they tell us that the recession started last November. They didn’t know that til now?

Of course Congress will cobble together some sort of rescue package, to keep these companies afloat through the spring. Come spring, when the economy is in even worse shape - far worse shape - than it is today, these three companies will be back on Capitol Hill, explaining that they have done everything that was asked of them, but these darn tough economic times just keep hammering away at them, and therefore Congress must, it simply must, extend the lifeline.

Between now and then, through one mechanism or another, they will destroy the compacts they have spent years building with their labor force and retirees. This will be an “at all costs” bailout, the object of which will be to make the case that a dead company is no use to any workers at all, so compromise is the only option.

Well, no.

This isn’t about compromise, it’s about capitulation. The workers are going to be expected to bear the pain of this inept attempt to salvage an industry that for too long lines its own pockets while stonewalling every effort to make them more accountable. More accountable for safety. More accountable for efficiency. More accountable for enviornmentalism.

All along the way, their paid lobbyists and paid Congressmen played hardball. Now, they come to the people’s house and dare to insist that they must be saved, at the expense of the workers who built the industry that they spent years undermining.

So, one option is to let the workers take over. The government assumes ownership of the industry, consolidates the not-so-big three into a single entity, and allows the workers to buy it from them. With financing, of course.

Who do you trust to right this industry: the fat cats who enriched themselves while the business model they created collapsed from beneath them? Or the workers who know that their livelihood depends on building cars that people want to buy?

Cheaper, more efficient cars. That would be a good start. Why was Japan able to see this need but the U.S. wasn’t? You already know the answer: SUVs made more profit than smaller vehicles. That is, until they couldn’t sell any more SUVs.

And showed up on the peoples’ doorstep.

…the new Britney! It’s called Circus and as of track 6, it’s the best album Gwen ever made.

Hey, at least she’s updating her style. Give the girl credit for stretching as an artist, even if it is directly up somebody else’s alley.

Well made formula is alright in my book, for what it’s worth. I can absolutely see her performing the shit out of these songs live. This record has a chance to break huge.

What do you think?

If you don’t have it yet, you can listen to the whole thing for free at her web site.

“Time Stand Still” by the Hooters.

How about you?