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?