GriotPoet

Tribute

2012-02-12T14:30:00.000-08:00

© 11 February 2012, the Griot Poet

She gave us a reason to love ourselves,
Emerging in the 80s post-Civil Rights, post-loss of
Medgar, Malcolm and Martin, if Michael was the “King of Pop”…
She was definitely “Our Queen.”
What 1980 male college freshman
Didn’t calculate that we were just
One year older than the voice that
Belted from her lithe frame, fantasize
“What we’d do” with 5 minutes of our
Best Mack if we had a chance
(Past her Bodyguard) to step to her,
As if she was “saving all her love for []”…
Her faux feud with Maria Cary set the
Diva pattern for Rihanna, Beyoncé, Jennifer, Latifah and Eve…
Yet, didn’t we laugh (instead of pray)
When she married Bobby, and starred in a
So-called “reality” show, showcasing her
Private demons for public display?
Post-Bobby, with the baby (Bobby-Christina),
She could never hit “the notes” she used to,
Her interviews shaken versions of
Her star’s former hue.
The human voice has depth and range
That cannot be enhanced or explained
In a digital software mix program or
Corporate studio...
Some things of exquisite beauty are
Born in choir robes, Sunday solos and
Christmas shows,
Before the Clive Davis’ discover angels,
Among us,
When NAPHESH kicked first breath
In Eden
And Deity pronounced self-awareness
To a creation with mind, will, imagination,
Emotion and intellect – defining the
Earthiness that we would call…soul…
The best of Adam’s rib performs now…celestial shows.
Whitney Houston, 1963 – 2012

Colbert-Romney SC ad...

2012-01-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

MLK Celebrations

2012-01-16T10:38:00.000-08:00

MLK Celebrations: Austin Area MLK Celebration, NY MLK Celebration

Archbishop Desmond Tutu...

2011-12-16T00:02:00.000-08:00

A Message of Solidarity From Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Ouroboros

2011-11-21T17:28:00.001-08:00

© 21 November 2011, the Griot Poet

Elizabeth Warren is the thorn in collective political,
right-side assets, scourge of the 1%, they lobbied her
out of her job for Consumer Protection Advocate;
professor and author, compared to Scott Brown:
intelligence versus centerfold Cro-Magnon, yet...

Not a single hedge fund manager has been charged for
crimes against humanity:
tanking the global economy and sending 10 million souls
here and overseas into poverty.

Yet, they spray kids at UC Davis cavalierly with weapons grade pepper spray.

Sprayed hoses, batons and dogs were used a generation
ago on young people following a dreamer’s dream:
from Selma to Birmingham to the first genuine March on Washington DC.

These are the grandchildren that sit down now at the
“table of brotherhood”;
Arab Springs/American Winters are sparked by the
democratizing force of technology. The irony:
the hub-spoke model of military communication was replaced
by the Internet spider’s web such that destroys one node,
another takes over, like cockroaches or vultures.

“Get a bath; get a job” works in alternate universe dimensions,
like impeaching presidents for stained blue dresses while
simultaneously diddling the next missus on your list while
married to the second, and calling it “patriotism” when
your salute was Viagra-inspired!
Now, this book-pimping squire is a front-runner in the GOP.

The Venn diagram of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party
only intersects at dissolution and disappointment at
government leadership (an Oxymoron): they diverge that
one was local; the other global.

We have a two party fundraising system that only thinks
of the next election, it costs a billion dollars
to run for president. It cost one-hundred thousand dollars
just to set up an office to start running for the
senate or congress.

47% of our representatives are members of the 1%,
that don’t have any “dogs in the hunt” of the rigged
game being fair for the rest of us.

Yet they spray kids at US Davis cavalierly with weapons grad pepper spray.

We were downgraded not because of our economy; the drag
on it is from a do-nothing-but-argue-for-the-sake-of-argument
congress that’s only more popular than Fidel Castro,
and less than the notion of the nation going communist!

And a few in Congress are held unconstitutionally by a pledge
to not raise taxes by Grover Norquist,

Further stressing the system that’s on the brink to where class distinctions between 1 and 99 percent will soon be quite irrelevant.

Ragnarok: “the Norse version of Armageddon, the death of the gods
and a great battle foretelling the occurrence of various natural disasters,
and the subsequent submersion of the world in water.
Afterward, the world resurfaces anew and fertile, to be repopulated by two human survivors.” Ouroboros eats its tail...

For our sakes: I hope to only see Stan Lee’s 2012 Avengers movie exploiting the same theme!

Civil Rights and #OWS

2011-11-18T04:49:00.001-08:00

I am reading Why We Can't Wait, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spurred largely by the familiar tone struck on the budget debacle, and trying to pass laws to create jobs.

I was struck by the similarity of the police clashes, the blood on faces: all they are missing is the 21^st Century version of "Bull Conner," biting police dogs and fire hoses.

I embed a resource, and the third chapter of "Why We Can't Wait": Letter From Birmingham Jail:

Baal Out (Gangster Oligarchy)

2011-10-27T10:54:00.000-07:00

© 26 October 2011, the Griot Poet

Children sacrificed
In “cremations of care” through
Moloch’s outstretched arms.

One percent increase
Two-hundred seventy-five,
Ninety-niners flat-line…

Jobs created go
To the children of Baal, or
Global slave labor…

Democracy to
Thrive beyond Thermopylae
Youth does it favor!

Inspired by Glenn Greenwald: WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR SOME: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful

Dr. Cornel West

2011-10-07T06:34:00.000-07:00

The god of this world

2011-09-30T12:43:00.000-07:00

Two Golden Calves

(For the occupiers: stay strong! OccupyWallSt.org)
© 30 September 2011, the Griot Poet

Daniel 3: 10 – 11 "You, O king, have made a decree that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, flute, harp, lyre, [and] psaltery, in symphony with all kinds of music, shall fall down and worship the gold image; and whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.” ....................Matthew 4: 8 – 9: Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, "All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me."

“Satan runs Wall Street!”

“One day, the poor will have nothing left to eat BUT the rich!”

Signage rants scream out silently
of a protest impolitely not covered/ignored by the
limp-prick-no-help-from-Viagra media:

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED,
after this year’s demise of Gil Scott(Prophet)-Heron,
selectively missing smashed heads, broken ribs and cameras;
mace and pepper spraying demonstrating innocents
(save for You Tube witness),

as the same actors who sent our country over a ditch
BEGGED US for BAILOUT,
and like GM, instead of graciously building in the US,
after research into greener cars and better batteries:

their next manufacturing plants (and jobs) will be…in China!
(Our real benefactors’ address...)

If this was a “Christian Nation”:
it would not be based on oblation
and worship of the Sino-Phoenician god Mammon.

“One Market Under God,”
opined by Thomas Frank that
the market “had become deity,” and
the wealthy high priests of its altar.

One lawmaker on MSNBC without blink,
falter or apology stated:
“I can’t feed my family on just $400,000/year”
(after expenses for his business!),

and God bless, Bill O’Rielly may QUIT TV if he
has to pay one penny above the rate before the
1^st Bush tax cuts in 2001 at
Clinton-era levels…when we HAD a surplus!

Warren Buffet is their reluctant saving grace,
and public enemy #1, as he threatens their fun
by pulling down the veil between the outer court
and the “unholy of un-holies”:

- pin-striped Lear jets,

- five mansions and million dollar
New York Penthouse apartments,

- hedge fund managers’ daily cocaine habits

- and visits to the “Emperor’s (prostitution) Club”
expensed as “market research!”

Like modern-day Marie Antoinette’s,
they berate the frustrated, “tired and poor”
hordes, camped out “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”
(and be employed) with “let them eat cake!”

Like Arab springs, they light the candles for an
American fall and soldier winter that their best
Creel Commission public relations firms could not handle!

In my dénouement, I restate (with chagrin from the 99%):

“Satan runs Wall Street!”

“One day, the poor will have nothing left to eat BUT the rich!”

Honey Bee * Prophecies

2011-09-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

© 10 September 2011, The Griot Poet

We neglect the prophecies of fur coated wild men
eating honey, crickets and bees, voices calling
in the wilderness, modern day seers created by
Theodore Geisel₁ east of Who-ville

called “The Lorax,” whose command of scientific
environmental facts did not once impress Once-ler
oligarchs bent on harvesting Truffula trees and
other commodities,

Enriching his Grinch-looking family members who
could not remember a sunrise without “smog-shine,”

I am inclined to believe that Frank Drake’s equation₂
looking for SETI was statistical prophecy when so-called
civilizations become dumbed down by their own technology –
their ability to change their environment and enrich their
pockets with other people’s money leaving their economies
wrecked while their planets tear themselves apart with

-hurricanes,
-tornados,
-earthquakes
and tsunamis?

Is anybody out there?

Maybe flying saucers only exist as Frisbees in parks for
overweight kids using diabetic syringes to keep them alive
after a rousing day of video gaming addiction instead of
playing...oh! I forgot: smog-shine alert!

Stay in all day.
Don’t go out to play.
Text mommy cause you’re bored.
Be afraid!

Pedophiles, underground sex market slavers may steal your
child...does anyone remember when we had a Star Trek/Jetson
HOPE for the future?
Does anyone remember when you went outside to play...ALL day...
in smog free sunshine and played in water from lead free fire
hydrants? Our memories have been supplanted by million player
online realities, avatars and virtual lives we’re caught up in:

Deux ex machina, god out of the machine...

warned about by Quintus Horatius Flaccus (A.K.A. Horace, Roman Poet)
in Ars Poetica, programmed in the 21st Century by Horus
of the “all seeing eye” $1 bill at the 1% apex of the pyramid
oligarchy owning ninety-nine percent of the wealth, and he can’t
stand it when you’re either too poor to pay for your “fix” or actually

pick up a real BOOK, READ it and UNDERSTAND it!

And, if you happen to be a Harvard Law school graduate, in the south
you might be considered “uppity.”

Because the Ministry of Truth of cable news can’t have you using that
fatty, grey tissue between your ears: you may want rights, life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Hell, they gave you flat telescreens above your wall mantles and
charging cell phone cellblocks on your laptop sockets:

“where’s the beef?”

If we had warp drive,
we’d arrive at distant worlds to find husks and dust bowls like
Mars with remnants of seas.

The small number of smart “Little Green Men” bypass our oasis of greed.

Maybe the cloud the Lorax lifted himself through was a wormhole that
tunneled an Einstein-Rosen Bifrost bridge to some other parallel reality

where
love,
sacrifice
and sanity

were the only prevalent currencies!

1. Theodore Geisel = Dr. Seuss.
2. Drake Equation: R^* f_p n_e f_l f_i f_e L

a. N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;
b. R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
c. f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets
d. n_e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
e. f_ℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
f. f_i = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
g. f_e = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
h. L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

Elite by the Numbers (in 3 parts)

2011-09-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

Elite 1 a : singular or plural in construction : the choice part : CREAM b : singular or plural in construction : the best of a class c : singular or plural in construction : the socially superior part of society d : a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence e : a member of such an elite —usually used in plural (http://www.m-w.com/)

There are 435 members of the (now) infamous House of Representatives and 100 Senators (both numbers fixed by law). There are nine members of the Supreme Court and regardless of political party: one president and one vice president.

According to the CIA World Fact book, the US estimate of population in 2009 was 307,212,123.

Looking at this mathematically (in a deck-of-cards analogy), the odds of getting to be:

President/Vice President: 3.2550798784721135500241961480146e-7 ~ 3.3 x 10^-7%
307,212,123: 1

Supreme Court: 2.9295718906249021950217765332132e-6 ~ 3.0 x 10^-6%
34,134,680: 1

Senator: 3.2550798784721135500241961480146e-5 ~ 3.3 x 10^-5%
3,072,121: 1

House of Representatives: 1.4159597471353693942605253243864e-4 ~ 1.4 x 10^-4%
706,235: 1

NBA Athlete: 0.03%
3546: 1

Other than white male president: 2.2727272727272727272727272727273~2.3%
44:1

My last category I specifically made “other than white male president,” because prior to the 2008 presidential contest, the odds of a white male in the Oval Office was 100% regardless of political party.

The presidency of Barack Obama has opened up the category “other than” so that Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain despite their political views in anathema of his have the same odds – albeit slim – to win the presidency. Prior to his, it was a big, fat goose egg! Secretary Hilary Clinton, had she become the nominee and president, would have accomplished the same feat.

******

To be a black man in America is to be under [mentally] a constant state of “siege.” On the one hand, you have the peer pressure in your urban neighborhood regardless of the era of being “cool.” Cool then was Super Fly, impossibly high platform shoes, leopard skin coats, smoking reefer, selling it, graduating to cocaine like [crack cocaine] Ricky Ross; making a million dollars to “ride off in the sunset” (the end of Super Fly), and the obsession of a few friends that tried and failed: one executed; one waiting on death row. Cool now seems to be similar, updated music with the addition of sagging britches and You Tube reinforcement.

When you have an interest outside of sports, a talent for science, math, writing, thinking, literature, you know who “Jacque Cousteau” is, and up on his weekly undersea show, you might get labeled: weird or “white boy.” Cute girls ignore you, your solace being books, tools a microscope, a telescope and a junior chemistry set.

Making some academic attainment, you end up in areas where you are “the one” or “the first” to arrive. That’s not entirely true, just that a concentration of members in the National Society of Black Physicists or National Society of Black Engineers typically happens at conventions; not companies. Getting on elevators illicit purses shifting; catching cabs proves difficult despite lacking any criminal record.

Siege is a bubble you exist in: jowls clenched tight after swallowing hard at work at off-color humor – the psychological reason I wear a night guard; rants about “reverse discrimination” took less than a decade to legitimize when introduced in the lexicon, pointing out obvious unrighteousness marks you as “playing the race card,” successfully trumped by this Joker.

The other things you hear in the siege bubble are phrases like “meritocracy,” “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps,” “stop living in the past,” “post-racial” and my favorite: “a colorblind society.” Mouthed by most conservative talk show hosts, it’s a phrasing meant to sound agreeable allowing real conditions to be disagreeable, and essentially unchanged. Our society is a pyramid where equality and monetary wealth is enjoyed by the 1% oligarchs at the Eye of Horus: the 99% are left to divide ourselves into political parties.

A quick Google search yields this answer to the question: “how many blacks have run for president in the United States?”

Shirley Chisholm (Democrat) 1972
Jesse Jackson (Democrat) 1984
Dr. Lenora Fulani (Independent) 1988
Alan Keyes (Republican) 2000
Carol Moseley Braun (Democrat) 2004
Al Sharpton (Democrat) 2004
Barack Obama (Democrat) 2008

Forgive me when I make this admission: on seeing him on stage, after six predecessors, I just wondered “how long would this one last?” My confidence after six was somewhat jaded; not enough African Americans voted for the six previous black candidates, though they may have silently admired each one’s chutzpah. Senator Obama distinguished himself as being the first presidential candidate needing Secret Service protection while still a candidate in the primaries. It was not a forgone conclusion that he would win the Democratic primaries or ultimately the Oval Office.

The attacks became visceral and vitriolic: charges of “palling around with terrorist,” “terrorist fist bumps,” “socialist,” “racist” (against white people – despite the affection for his mother and his grandparents), death threats, vocal threats at rallies of “off with his head” and “kill him.”

Then, and now: I see a man in the “siege bubble,” having to be conciliatory to unreasonable forces that have sworn his defeat before his administration got beyond “President-Elect.” Questioning the qualifications of a Magna Cum Laude Columbia graduate and first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review; snubbing his intelligence as “too professorial”; labeling him “elitist” while ignoring every public official is. Bumper Stickers appeared saying: “Impeach Obama” before his January 20th inauguration. He has to grit his teeth, see his hair turn gray, his skin wrinkle, bear its weight else he be labeled “radical,” as was his former pastor when the majority world suddenly realized an inequitable system might produce a different archetype from majority evangelical churches that never experienced slavery, Civil Rights, church bombings or Jim Crow.

*****

Why I will support the reelection of President Barack Hussein Obama.

Rick Perry has thrown his hat in the ring of the GOP contest for the presidency, and he’s catapulted to the front of the pack. He’s aligned himself with the New Apostolic Reformation Movement. He’s essentially the male version of Michelle Bachmann/Sarah Palin and Dominion [ism], a hyper-spiritual form of Christian Nationalism that dominates the Republican Party. They take their mandate from the book of Genesis, where God says “[have] dominion over the earth,” and for these groups that means everything, inclusive of government, arts, science, technology…domination.

The Way Things Used to Be:

1954: Brown versus Board of Education, a 9 – 0 vote in the Supreme Court (when they were actually non-partisan) that mandated schools be desegregated “with all deliberate speed.” That swiftness didn’t occur for me in North Carolina until 1971.

What was introduced on our currency in 1955 was the phrase “In God We Trust” along with the flag of the rebel south in state flags like South Carolina, Georgia and Arkansas, hearkening to the war between the “Godless North” and the “Christian South.” Desegregation caused two phenomena: white flight to the suburbs and “Christian Private Schools,” an audacious attempt to exempt their children from integration with the benefit of tax exempt status.

Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann in her youth surprisingly worked on the campaign of President Jimmy Carter – a Democrat – for the notion of electing “one of their own,” making Carter our country’s first evangelical president, former nuclear engineer and peanut farmer. When he eliminated the tax exempt status of the Christian Schools to foster integration, they turned on him in 1980 electing Ronald Reagan.

Being the ever cognizant actor of B movies, it was easy for him and his speechwriters to sprinkle his wordsmith with calls to an America that Republicans and Reagan Democrats remembered: before 1954.

The Right co-opted religious rhetoric after the 1988 campaign of Bush I and Dukakis: noting the substantial mailing list of Republican Presidential hopeful and [still] 700 Club head of Pat Robertson: millions of “snail mail” addresses, pre-Internet, they peppered their speeches with what white evangelicals longed to hear: a return to the country they “knew” before 1954.

Fast forward to the present: it is no accident that Michelle Bachmann has appealed to not just Tea Party and evangelicals – the new word entering the lexicon is “Teavangelicals.”

It is no accident that Rick Perry staged a day of prayer in Houston, Texas to secure his bona fides with the most divisive group in Christendom that calls for execution of gays in Africa, that calls the Catholic Church “the whore of Babylon” and want every government program to help the poor turned over to: the churches.

I am not voting for Barack Hussein Obama because I am a socialist; I am not voting for him because I am a capitalist; I am not voting for him because I think he’s done a fantastic job in office; I am not voting for him because he’s a black man. And, I am not voting for him as “the lesser of two evils.”

I am voting for him because of Democracy itself that is under current clear and present danger of extinction, and something he said (quoting FDR): “make me do it.”

I think we miss out on “We the People.” We instead look for the avatar in every election cycle and forget we have a considerable amount of leverage to bear up our man in office.

Make him do it: the rallies that the world saw from the Tea Party during the healthcare debates were not matched by rallies from the energized left that opposed almost everything Bush proposed, every expansion of the security state, every death in Iraq and Afghanistan. All that energy disappeared. So…you don’t have a public option; you don’t have single payer: because you didn’t “make him do it.”

The “Community Organizer-In-Chief” needed our backs, and we turned our backs to the 5:1 ratio of corporate lobbyists to senators and congress members that have their and his ears. Corporations have organized AstroTurf rallies to look like grass roots, when we actually were not done working November 4, 2008. That was just the beginning.

Politics in the era after 2009 and the current Supreme Court’s oxymoronically named “Citizen’s United” ruling, giving corporate America not just clarified “personhood” under the 14th Amendment – ironically designed to give personhood to former chattel slaves – it gave them unprecedented power in our lives, the ability to flood money to any candidate of their choosing anonymously as “free speech,” elections can no longer be bench sport/armchair athletics: if democracy matters.

They are awash with money, making few loans to homebuyers or small business owners, and have no interest in creating jobs in the US since they have free rein to ship them to cheaper countries; they pay little or zero taxes; they do not invest in education here because they have no interest in paying salaries, benefits, and 401(k) plans to a continuous supply of replacement workers that they would eventually have to pay for their retirement.

“We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity; do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”

With a President Obama and an active citizenry post-election, I think we can “make him do it.”

Or…we can go backwards beyond 1954…not as a third world nation, but worse: a new Northern-Strategy/Southern-Strategy class cultural divide in the 21st century, and make the title: “UNITED STATES” of America… an oxymoron.

“Because the finance man's gonna be at your house on Saturday, right? That's exactly what the company wants - to keep you on their line. They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young; the black against the white - ANYTHING to keep us in our place,” Yaphet Kotto, as Smokey James in the movie “Blue Collar.”

Addendum Analysis:
1. Since the sample size is rather large, occupying the Executive Branch, Congress or the Supreme Court takes a considerable amount of chutzpah and some healthy narcissism to think one’s ideas could satisfy every person in the 307,212,123 sample size, which is getting far more diverse and bigger than anyone ever imagined. Because it’s such a small group, the system probably encourages the same types from the same colleges to run for the same political parties. Families therefore are encouraged by the system to establish dynasties in a democratic electoral system. By definition: rising to occupy any government position in such a system is elite.

2. Since meeting the needs of almost 1/3 of a billion is kind of daunting, lobbyist with lots (and lots) of m-o-n-e-y are probably easier to digest and manage. Since “Corporations are people, my friend,” (Governor Romney) I assume you kind of punt and hope for the best, or muddy the waters – say what you think people want to hear – and hang on for the long haul.

3. It is statistically easier to become the first African American president than an NBA athlete (see 4 for the corollary). A pun on sample sizes: President Obama is number 44; “of the almost 156,000 male, high school senior basketball players only 44 will be drafted to play in the NBA after college.” See link above.

4. Conversely, there is a 97.7% probability of “other-than-other,” i.e. a white male of either party occupying the Oval Office either in 2013 or 2017.

5. Because the odds were once zero, and so small even now, the odds of “other than” repeating itself (after 2012 or 2016) are rather remote.

I sometimes wonder: if the people holding up signs at Camellia sinensis caucuses actually “crunch the numbers” before the inevitable painted signs titled “IMPEACH TEH MUSLOM?”

3 Charts to Email Your Right Wing B-I-L...

2011-09-01T18:27:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to Rep. Doug Lamborn on the subject "Tar Baby"

2011-08-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

tar baby

noun
a situation, problem, or the like, that is almost impossible to solve or to break away from.
Also, tar•ba•by.

Origin:
after the tar doll used to trap Brer Rabbit in an Uncle Remus story (1881) of Joel Chandler Harris
Ref: www.dictionary.com

*****

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or, fester like a sore,
and then run?
Does it stink like rotted meat,
or crust and sugar-over
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load...
...or does it explode?

*****

This is Langston Hughes' "Dream Deferred." I don't expect the congressman from Colorado has read it.

After hearing the 'tar baby' comment on the Michael Baisden Show in New York, I felt the heavy load. I'm old enough to recall a time at three when my mother and I got on a bus to go home in NC, dutifully moving from the comfortable front to the back. I recall the great civics lesson I received in my living room as my older sister and her friends marched to remove that Jim Crow law, for voting rights, Civil Rights. Her generation made it possible for President Obama to be elected. I've heard the situation he found himself elected to in 2008 aptly compared to someone running up the restaurant bill and sticking the next guest with the check! This egregious comment after Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords last night made her triumphant return to Congress: "Not a dry eye in the place," the cliché I heard from commentators over again. You denigrate that moment of unity after the most deplorable, divisive politics on a non-issue -- raising the debt ceiling -- with this comment.

I was irritated as I shopped; passing the same people I'd passed since moving to New York. I was internally defensive, almost ready for a verbal or physical altercation. I did not "explode," but I felt the heavy load of preparing myself academically; ascending from my humble background; presenting myself professionally; using the diction and syntax that a manager of technical personnel should use.

Then, I recall the dear friends I have of all cultures: Asian, European, Indian, Native American; races and political persuasions. I am friends with African Americans that probably voted the same way you did in the last election. We are fast friends. It is shameful that adults outside the beltway can behave maturely, and those with the responsibility of managing the country...behaving like over-stimulated juveniles.

Rep. Doug Lamborn: in one term, you've denigrated Alan West (FL), Timothy Scott (SC), and every conservative person of color in your district that voted for you.

You painted a broad brush over an entire culture that did not ask to migrate to this country in the first place, focusing on one man, who happens to be the fairly elected President of the United States. Whether or not you respect the man, respect the office he holds. You yourself may hold it one day: karma...sowing and reaping...reciprocity. The respect (or, lack thereof) you met out may come back multiplied. You have apologized, and that is warranted. It IS possible in your insular world; you had professional ignorance to its "other meaning." Consider yourself now, sir...educated.

Yes, you could get away with the strict definition of the phrase. However, you must represent all Coloradans and all Americans: those that voted for you, and those that did not; those that are republicans and those who are not; those that agree with you and those who do not; those who are part of your culture, and those who are not.

We are the United States of America, congressman. E Pluribus Unum: out of many...one.

The New Jim Crow...

2011-08-01T20:21:00.000-07:00

Bourne Amnesia

2011-07-21T19:37:00.000-07:00

© 18 July 2011, the Griot Poet

Did I miss the memo?

When we were brought to Plymouth Rock,
it wasn’t a voluntary vacation…down
in the bowels of overstocked ships,
sleeping in bile, human feces and piss,
separated through Goree Island gates
from our continent, languages and tribes
fulfilling Deuteronomy prophesies of
slavery in “a nation of fierce countenance,
which does not respect the elderly nor
show favor to the young.” 1

Did I miss the memo?

"Your sons and your daughters [shall be]
given to another people, and your eyes shall
look and fail [with longing] for them
all day long; and [there shall be] no strength
in your hand.” 2 Brought to a foreign land,
scarred by whips physically; eyes cast downward
mentally; “Willie Lynch” myth beaten us down spiritually…

Did I miss the memo?

When Harriet Tubman conducted the
Underground Railroad – at gunpoint – to those
that would decide to first blow their joint,
then change their minds and side with their
previous “Simon Legree” plantation masters,
the equivalent of going back across
seas of reeds to Egypt, bondage and slavery?

Did I miss the memo?

A Civil War was fought not for state’s
rights, but the right of
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
by original humanity deftly defined
constitutionally as three-fifths like
livestock to increase the stocks of landowners
and founding fathers fathering
Sally Hemming’s mulatto children.

Did I miss the memo?

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.”

“Where justice is denied, where poverty
is enforced, where ignorance prevails,
and where any one class is made to feel
that society is an organized conspiracy
to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither
persons nor property will be safe,”
wise quotes by Frederick Douglass,
playing out over decades in mind-programming
entertainment minstrelsy shows.

Did I miss the memo?

Medgar Evers murdered by Byron de La Beckwith:
one lone nut theory I can get with,
but Malcolm X and Martin Luther King
were not too long after their 1st
and only face-to-face meeting
(after public animosity) assassinated by
actors that should not have had access to them.

Did I miss the memo?

When we were lampooned in minstrel shows,
burnt cork face, step-n-fetch blows to
our woman and manhood, birth of Jim Crow
by Thomas D. Rice to Edgar Rice Burroughs’
not-so-subtle statement that
English Lord Greystoke-Tarzan is needed
to tame the African jungle.

The modern context is
Bankrupt Entertainment Television, birthed
when Rick James couldn’t play his videos
on MTV, now VIACOM owns the whole shebang;
we’re mentally/spiritually being programmed
to desire those things we once fought
against as labels of our libel.

“My people perish for a lack of knowledge.” 3

Did I miss the memo?

1. Deuteronomy 28:50
2. Ibid, 28:32
3. Hosea 4:6

Faux News...

2011-07-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand

2011-06-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

"Ayn Rand encapsulates in a very powerful way this drift [away from Christian values], especially with the rise of the tea party which is in many ways very un-Christian," AVN Executive Director Eric Sapp told Raw Story in an exclusive interview. "There's a lot of political pressure to combine the Christian right with that new, powerful tea party movement on the right. Ayn Rand kind of puts the point why Christians need to be very, very wary of those who are trying to do so."

I posted this link: [Badly] Needed to be Sad (Again) regarding previous VPOTUS Richard Cheney, regarding his telling Senator Patrick Leahy to go "f--- himself." I used the phrase: The party that "Co-opted God."

I've said, over and over, Republican politicians are pimping the evangelicals like Democratic politicians pimped latino and black voters. They say what everyone needs to hear to get their vote, then diligently and deliberately forget their promises and go to work for their real benefactors on Wall Street.

Ask yourself: is THIS what Jesus would do? Is this what a so-called "Christian nation" would do? Whether you believe or not, if they laud Ayn Rand, they are either fulfilling another agenda covertly and using religion as the "Opiate of the People" to manipulate crowds to their bidding, or they are idiots?

Poetry at the Whitehouse...

2011-05-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

Freudian Slips...Slips...Slips...

2011-05-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

You’re watching Obama / Osama Compilation. See the Web's top videos on AOL Video

Mother's day...

2011-05-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

Image Credit: IndieRockCafe.com

History of Mother's Day

"The first official Mother's Day celebrations in the United States took place in West Virginia in 1908, at the urging of Anna Jarvis. Anna's mother (also named Anna), who was active in her community, frequently organized women's groups to promote friendship and health. It had been her dream to reunite families divided by the Civil War with a day dedicated to mothers. When she passed away on May 12, 1907, Anna held a memorial service at her late mother's church in her honor. Her mother's idea of Mother's Day quickly caught on, and within five years of her death, virtually every state was observing the day on the anniversary of her death. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday of May as the official Mother's Day.

"Although Jarvis had promoted wearing a white carnation as a tribute to one's mother, the custom developed of wearing a red or pink carnation to represent a living mother or a white carnation for a mother who was deceased. Over time, the day was expanded to include others, such as grandmothers and aunts, who played mothering roles. However, what had originally been primarily a day of honor became associated with the sending of cards and the giving of gifts and in protest against its commercialization, Jarvis spent the last years of her life trying to abolish the holiday that she had helped establish.

"Mother's Day is celebrated around the world, either on this date, or at other times of the year. In 17th century England, those who had moved away were allowed to visit their home parishes and their mothers on Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent. This became "Mothering Sunday," now celebrated earlier in the year in England. Some countries have also continued to observe ancient festivals; for example, Durga-puja, honoring the goddess Durga, remains an important festival in India."

"You can do anything you want to do, if you set your MIND to it. You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you." Mildred D. Goodwin, sunrise 15 September 1925, sunset 7 May 2009, laid to rest 12 May 2009

Despite my challenging background, she said often and believed the quote I marquee above, and more importantly: she believed in me.

Mildred: Her name means "gentle strength." She was that.

Please honor your mother (while she lives), who assists you in fulfilling your dreams: http://www.e-cards.com/area/mothers-day/ (also source of "history of Mother's Day" above)

Madea's Wisdom

2011-05-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

© 2 May 2011, The Griot Poet

Mildred Dean Goodwin: sunrise 15 September 1925, sunset 7 May 2009

My mother hung
a sign on my
bedroom wall
which read:
"It isn't smart
to argue with a fool:
listeners can't tell
which is which."

I wish Lawrence O'Donnell read
this
before expecting maturity
and lucidity
from the mother
of birthers: Orly Tate.

Who avoided any
notion of apology
by berating the president
on supposedly falsifying
not only
his short and long form
birth certificates,
but his social security number
and selective service papers.

Hate
has no logic,
but it has many fathers.

Who don't bother
with facts or data;
fairness or balance:

because Hermann Goering's chancellor
said

“Make the lie big,
make it simple,
keep saying it,
and eventually
they will believe it”

(and Goering said: "Education is dangerous - Every educated person is a future enemy.")

So,
I wasn't miffed
or defensive when
a hair's breadth
after the news
a man named Obama
ordered the kill of
a man named Osama
(ironic and poetic)

that the same
fringe element
demanding long form
birth certificates
(now in the public sphere)

strove mightily
to credit
exclusively
the previous
president

(or, the statement
this one wasn't
"enthusiastic enough"
about the announcement
or the grim duty
of putting special
forces soldiers
in harms way)!

I smiled,
remembering
my mother's
wisdom;

Tom Joyner
& Jay Anthony
Brown's

humorous
rejoinders,

knowing truth,
and the knowledge
that sometimes
doing a good job
is ITS own reward,

God only
promotes
and restores.

I smiled:
in full strength
of my mother's
wisdom...

stood tall,
straightened my back,

and

walked...

away!

Sundress, part 2

2011-05-02T19:49:00.000-07:00

© 2 May 2011, The Griot Poet

Over 200 + photos
and my index finger counts
the costs going numb clicking “like”…

You floss a million dollar smile…
And the spring breeze lifts
your hair like you’re on a yacht somewhere,
And it gently lifts your…sundress.

I digress to Phat Cat Players lyrics,
Doing a Google search and You Tube
to see and hear it (again) to recall its essence:
I, Cyrano, write prose to you…

The Sword Saint, Myamoto Musashi
wrote “Go Rin No Sho”: a Book of Five Rings
On strategies he used to slay 60 men
in combat from the age of 13
(the first sword versus his boat oar),

My sword is not martial,
but Chaka Zulu’s IXWA: my pen.
As I begin, I implore the spirit
of muse to ensure that I explore
the method of his strategy in
this Sundress piece to you.

Ground

Yours is an elegance deficit
of younger generations,
you lie there confident,
regal and appealing.

Capable of dancing “The Wobble”
and stopping traffic with
your queenly entrance to any room,
I swoon over the luck of mother earth
to touch your frame and tickle your skin
with blades of Texas Augustine:
royal, pious; scene serene as you
serenade the photo artist
from your throne of silence.

Water

It has a singular mission:
To travel several thousand miles
from the stratosphere, to become
one with the fabric of your sundress.
Yet the drip-drop of its cousins
causes you no distress,
wet fabric cools skin unmarred
by middle passages past,
like incubi fairies,
di-hydrogen monoxide rides
the membranes of your pours to
explore the sanctuary of
your fair membrane’s nucleus,
an intimate masseuse
mere mortals on Nefertiti’s skin
can only imagine.

Fire

The dress clings to the orifice of your skin.
You come in and light the fire,
kicking off those sandals, red, gorgeous toes
fully painted and exposed.
Fire aspires by radiation to touch you
as he does – steam pours from both of you
and you embrace Christian as a red/yellow blaze
embraces you: a spiritual Ménage à trois
of humans and element: the dress and his clothes
canopies the floor like a patchwork quilt un-sewn
(wine glasses thrown across the floor)
as you pull him close to kiss and pretzel
with you forming and entering Aphrodite’s and
Shakespeare’s altar;

Fire crackles, live writing sonnets on
entwined legs and logs, radiation heating sweaty,
luminous African skin,
clinging, touching, breathing to climax:
your pyro Cyrano.

Void

“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.”

And following John 1:1,
the Word spoken was “light, be”
and a universe was born,
gases, accretion disks,
coalescing to planets,
forming firmaments and continents;
earth, water, fire – the spirit of void
represented by wind,
the same that lifted…your sundress.

In the beginning, the Word painted
the portrait of you in a sundress:
but first He had to create
a universe for you to reign in it.

Don't Believe the (Trump) Hype...

2011-04-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

Backbone

2010-09-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

For Hip Hop News & Entertainment at DimeWars.Com

© 7 September 2010, The Griot Poet

Country thugs spitting
country grammar trying to
hammer out an existence
while all the while being the
assistants to their systemized
destruction.

Exclaiming “fam” as if to rebuild
the community that used to be
when we didn’t have a reason
to put each other down.

We lost Medgar, Malcolm and Martin
and the vacuum has been filled by
clowns and fools that have
turned Minstrel shows into
their own personal bankrolls!

And like Amway entrepreneurs:
only less than 2% will make it
as a rapper,
baller,
shot caller:
and the rest will die as fools.

Now we insist on saggin’
when the reverse of the
word is the epithet shouted
at most Ku Klux Klan rallies,
now used to show ownership
as if “fam” now owned slaves!

Everybody wants to be a “G”,
when in reality, as much as you
admire 50 cent or Jay Z’s music:
you wouldn’t get past their
gated security or make their
exclusive guest lists.

You wouldn’t know how to
pronounce half of what their
master chefs prepped for
the shindig you can only
fantasize being in.

We are 35th in math
and 29th in science,
yet you insist on dropping
science in rhyming spells
you cast,
memorized street diction
instead of
paying attention in class,
flashing sets,
pimping and calling women
what you would FIGHT
another man for calling your mother
(if you’re man enough to defend her).

Education used to be the
“secular god” of the black community,
yet I went to school with your
parents and sampled abuse
for being less than obtuse
by being called “white boy.”

Technology became my
comfort and toys as
I worked like Steve Erkel,
to prove my worth in a field
that many like William Shockley*
used Eugenics to say we
weren’t worth it or
could not work in it!

We’re letting the world dictate to
us what being us means.

As long as we play along with the
presiding cool thugger themes,
we don’t present a threat to
the status quo that’s finding itself
superseded by people that
don’t worship the God we know.

As long as you drag your pants
below your waist,
you’re practicing for the
prison-industrial-complex
in which you will
eventually participate.

The thirteenth amendment states:
“S1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime whereof
the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any
place subject to their jurisdiction.
S2: Congress shall have power to enforce
this article by appropriate legislation.”

Your voting rights, your wealth, and
your health,
your manhood:

GONE in a fortnight of error!

Because:

Country thugs spitting
country grammar trying to
hammer out an existence while all
the while being the assistants to their
systemized destruction eventually
become what they behave and speak,
Flip-the-script on “saggin’” and see the
Jedi mind trick of which I speak of and
reverse the curse:

pull the pants up!

* William Shockley: Statements about populations and genetics.

Ode to Sinclair Lewis

2010-09-04T01:22:00.000-07:00

© 4 September 2010, The Griot Poet

Sinclair Lewis said: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

I am at a loss that his prose was prophetic…

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on the anniversary of “I have a dream,” Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin inaugurated a scheme of what previously had been the gathering steam of the lunatic right-wing fringe also known as the Tea Party, swiping Martin’s noble dream from the auspices of 1963, when we HAD no Civil Rights when we HAD no voting rights, totally using his niece in a public relations piece/peace effort…dismissing the plight of generations denied basic human rights and stating that “blacks don’t own Dr. King.” Well…we never tried.

The purveyor of fringe hate radio, recovering alcoholic and drug addict, twice dropped out of college and seeks to dispense his brand of knowledge online…for a (for him) prosperous fee.

A previous runner-up beauty queen, a college graduate that took a trip through five universities for one degree, a brief mayor of Wasilla and a half-term governor of Alaska, now we discover that even her Facebook updates and Tweets are “ghost written” can wink and nod at the camera, lambasting the “lame-stream media” for being sexist and pulls the Jedi mind trick of talking about the same being “impotent and limp” without so much as a demanded apology…because the abused stepchildren of the body politic, more concerned with ratings, sales than truth have lowered their self-esteem below being the critics of obvious lunacy.

Just-in-time for the 2010 elections!

The honor that needs restoring is declaring war against the cradle of civilization: Iraq, or as stated in the Bible, Ur of the Chaldea’s,

The Chaldeans had a high literacy rate the envy of Western nations, and UNDER Saddam despite his previously US financed tyranny had a paid paternity leave policy for up to one year…

Now, bombed back not to the Bill O’Reilly luffa sponge washed Stone Age, but a badlands created of our own lies and making.

The formula to create a fascist state by Jean-Marie Le Pen (from Freedom Fries France): “First, you convince the masses they are in grave danger (Le Pen used immigrants as his boogie men), then you promise to save them.”

Perpetuated in its modern incarnation by the Project for a New American Century: reborn like the Phoenix, or as I like to conclude, gum on civilization’s shoe.

And we will wink and nod, cry and preach ourselves into a weighted tyranny that will be a milestone around our necks. Even Jesus said: “For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.”

I am at a loss: Fascism has come to America: wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross!

50th Anniversary Gift

2010-05-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

© 28 May 2010, The Griot Poet

On the 50th anniversary of God giving you to me as a gift: we are free, we can proclaim our “year of Jubilee” as scripture professes: 6 years have we toiled as a couple, deflected and wounded by the “fiery darts of the enemy,” with the shield of FAITH; the Sword of the SPIRIT of God and many exit wounds.

It was the thirteenth year of marriage when the enemy came at us like a flood and dissolved your ties to Dell; mine to Motorola. We struggled as black couples are apt to, covering ourselves with sackcloth and ashes; trying to get Elohim’s attention from nebulae and spiral galaxies to our dilemmas. EXACTLY on the 4th anniversary of my beloved father’s death, a day on which I contemplated the madness of life without him; last year suffering the loss of my mother two days before Mother’s Day and a day before the fictional “Mr. Spock” suffered the same loss on Vulcan.

As the head of household, I am the subject of assault by demonic forces that only seek my final death and abortion of my destiny ABBA designed for me to walk in.

But, you prayed for me: when you didn’t even like me or what I was producing. You stayed on the promises even when your flesh felt like leaving. You, like the Angel of the Lord called me “a mighty man of valor,” when as Gideon, I asked God “if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where [are] all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying: 'Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt, but now the LORD has forsaken us and delivered us into the hands of the Midianites.”

Yours was the confidence of ABBA, who said to Gideon: “Go in this might of yours, and you shall save Israel from the hand of the Midianites. Have I not sent you? Surely I will be with you, and you shall defeat the Midianites as one man.” (Judges 6:14, 16) I could do no less but proclaim a Daniel fast against Midianites and principalities as one man…yours.

On the 50th anniversary of God giving you to me as a gift: we are free, we can proclaim our “year of Jubilee” as scripture professes: 6 years have we toiled as a couple, deflected and wounded by the “fiery darts of the enemy,” with the shield of FAITH; the Sword of the SPIRIT of God.

And on the seventh year, we WILL be set free. We will leave our Egypt richer than we lived in it, we will be given possessions, granted a release of debt, “for the LORD will greatly bless you in the land which the LORD your God is giving you to possess as an inheritance.” (Deut 15:4)

You have been more precious than rubies.
A Proverbs 31 woman that has taken the byword… from my life: as I stand on my enemy’s neck, Sword drawn in this might of mine uplifted by your prayers of FAITH.

Happy birthday, Cassandra:

Love, Reggie

Miss Me Yet?

2010-02-20T16:52:00.000-08:00

© 20 February 2010, The Griot Poet

Miss me yet?

Like a grinning Cheshire cat that WON’T disappear, his jeering face grinning, bending over to look under God-knows-what. His image displayed on billboards and selling out on coffee cups from conservative, tea party Internet hook ups.

Do I miss you, yet?

I did not miss my wife’s layoff or my own and the struggles we’ve had to maintain the semblance of an “American Dream” that doesn’t make me “wanna holla and throw up both my hands” like Marvin said, but scream running into the dark economic night.

Do I miss you yet?

You left me a present after only one year in office: a deficit BEFORE 9/11 after coming into a set up surplus for the first time in generations and it only took you a few months to spend that?

Do I miss you yet?

I thought we were in for change, but… the current Attorney General has been taking “I don’t recall” lessons from Alberto Gonzales as he’s now listed the three torture memo conspirators as suffering from “poor judgment.” After all, we can’t lock them up in prison with weak street creds like that can we?

Do I miss you yet?

It’s amazing that someone can blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma and they look for…the first Arabs they can find and arrest before they attest that it was one of our own: brown-haired, blue-eyed, G.I. Joe American boys that created the death and mess. It reminds me of the dark Thursday a disgruntled country singer set his house on fire, screamed for 3,000 + words on the Internet and turned his plane into another Federal Building in Austin, Texas – the IRS – and this violent act not be called: terrorist?

Do I miss you yet?

You left your so-called photo-op ranch in Waco, Texas for an exclusive cul-de-sac in Dallas that our current President; nor your former Secretary of State nor the current Attorney General would probably not be welcome in – other than as your domestic servants…

What do I miss?

-Gas at $0.98 a gallon.
-Conducting wars with countries that actually attacked us…
-Having a surplus to hand over to our children…
-Jobs, jobs, jobs NOT being outsourced overseas when the need is right here…
-Having more money after my month than month after my money…
-401…what? Retirement: what?

The fact there is a tea party means our educated citizenry (and our democracy) is in danger of extinction.

And the most intelligible sound that your former den of clowns can make is to align themselves with the fringe elements of society that can’t bring them selves to say they are uncomfortable with a black family in the White House coming in the front entrance to sit at the boss’s desk. No, they have to question his citizenship, his state’s status as the 50th star on Old Glory; socialist, communist, terrorist without cracking a single Webster to compare definitions.

And ignorance is gaining ground. As often misquoted from 1984: it is bliss, and let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good story line: decry the Recovery Act and show up for the ribbon cutting in your own districts. Debase and take credit. Another Grand Old Party in 2004 labeled that act “flip-flop”, but not when it’s them selves.

As I pull no punches in my spoken word analysis:

Miss YOU yet?

Hell-to-the-nah!

Notes on Haiti

2010-01-18T11:35:00.000-08:00

© 18 January 2010, The Griot Poet

Despite Rush Limbaugh’s and Pat Robinson’s insistence:

Haiti as a nation did not pray to Satan for assistance in their war of independence from the French and the most powerful army of its day, led by Napoleon Bonaparte.

After all, Rush and Rev: “The thief comes to kill, steal and destroy.” (John 10:10)

The slaves fought against Louis XIV and his Code Noir, according certain human rights to slaves and responsibilities to their masters:

to feed, clothe, and sanctioned corporal punishment, employing brutal methods to instill docility, while ignoring human rights and decency. Henry Christophe’s personal secretary chronicles the true curse:

“Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, and crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?” [1]

In truth: a one-armed slave named François Mackandal prayed only that the Haitian warriors fight bravely, his association with the occult the result of his knowledge of herbal poisons and remedies and being neither Christian nor Muslim… [2] So much for Rev and Rush’s command of historical facts and data.

But the Haitian’s insistence for human decency freed them and was catalyst for the Louisiana Purchase being…so cheap for America’s Manifest Destiny and expansion to Western territories.

They have cousins… in New Orleans.

If there is a curse,
it is the result of a system that dehumanizes them and makes light of their deaths.

Tears shed more for dogs electrocuted than
“bodies marred by dogs and crocodiles, piled in stairwells like logs…floating downstream!” [3]

But that is Haiti and was… New Orleans.

The French insisted that the Haitians pay them reparations
for the loss of their former contribution of “free labor”
…until the 1930s.

Couple that with a few coupes
and corrupt governments
and you have the recipe
to bankrupt a republic...

before Richter 7.0.

Cubans make landfall and have immediate asylum
and Haitians under the Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama administrations…are turned back!

If there is a curse,

it is reciprocity,

karma,

reaping what you sow:

sow mercy and flowers

to obtain mercy

when the disaster is ours!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Haiti, [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Mackandal, [3] “Near the Levy” (author)

A Ton of Bricks...

2009-12-21T06:44:00.000-08:00

"Hit me like a ton of bricks": a colloquialism that expresses missing the obvious when it is staring at you right in the face.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/19/health.care/index.html: an apparent deal has been reached in the health care debate, one that probably won't look like the one Independents and Progressives voted for last November.

I asked myself: "Why?"

What follows is admittedly, a "Conspiracy Theory." I am postulating something I have no data on, no research, etc. I am just applying common sense and putting it in the public record (this blog) to invite comment.

"Why?" The answer: "The body politic."

The health care debate has put in plain sight the fact that Republicans and so-called "Blue Dog/Conservative" Democrats are in the pockets of the health care industry (an oxymoron) for campaign donations. They therefore, serve their masters (the true body politic), not us.

That means: if you're conservative, you can have eight years of Reagan, four years of Bush the Elder, eight more years of Bush the junior, sandwiching 18 years around 8 years of Clinton and NOT eliminate abortion rights in the United States...because they can't.

The Supreme Court decided Brown versus Board of Education on a 9 - 0 vote. Eisenhower sent troops to Arkansas not because he LOVED black people: it was the law.

As much as anti-abortion has become the "litmus test" of conservatives, a shred of common sense would say it's a push-button to get people to vote their way without doing anything about their concerns.

Bush the junior supported Roe vs. Wade not because he believed in it...it's the law.

If a lower court were to argue successfully to the Supreme Court, still with its 5 - 4 Conservative Majority, Roe vs. Wade would be overturned as far as federal support.

President Obama would probably have his misgivings, but he'd have to support their decision nonetheless.

Then it gets complicated: it would go to each state's Supreme Court for a decision that conservatives have always championed: "states rights." Some would opt to continue abortion; some (like Utah, I'd expect) would not.

Back to health care reform: a lot of Independents and Progressives are outraged at the Democratic Party and the President for not using their majority in the House and the Senate to pass some muscular legislation that Republicans would do - moderate and conservative - in lock-step with each other.

Why are the Democrats taking the risk of losing so huge in November 2010 and 2012 when they won so huge in 2006 and 2008?

Answer: neither party are hurting for jobs.

Harold Ford (Democrat) was defeated for reelection to his congressional seat in Tennessee: he's an MSNBC political commentator. Pat Buchanan ran for the Republican presidential nomination: he's an MSNBC political commentator.

Abortion (both parties - for/against); War (both parties - for/against); the Economy (both parties - don't have a clue): these are water cooler conversations we have at work. We get sidetracked by these conversations that don't put a DIME in our pockets or JOBS in our country. It's bait-and-switch: the parties "change," but the outcome for industry stays the same. Do you think Big Insurance is paying 1.4 million a day to lobbyist and sponsoring the buses for the anti-health care reform rallies...to lose?

Yaphet Kotto said in the movie "Blue Collar" (1978): [Smokey James] "They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white - ANYTHING."

Each party's members want desperately to hold onto their offices because they get a healthy retirement for LIFE and a cost-of-living adjustment: http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/uscongress/a/congresspay.htm; http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/RL30631.pdf. President Obama's not going to be hurting either, whether he completes his presidency in 2012 or 2016: http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/98-249.pdf.

If the Democrats truly are swept out of office in the midterms and general election, they'll wind up working as "consultants" for some of the very entities: Pharmaceutical and Insurance - they were voted in to "oppose."

And, of course, they can always resurface on CNN, FOX and MSNBC as...

(WELL paid) political commentators!

Fire

2009-12-21T06:34:00.000-08:00

© 1991, The Griot Poet (an oldie)

It came to him quite by accident.
Rocketed from the heavens
On a bolt of lightening,
It hit the branch of a dead tree in an otherwise barren field.

His was a “fools courage” that allowed him to pick it up.

He soon became chieftain.

He used it to drive the Moors from Europe and raze the Holy Lands of the Moslem infidels.

He used it to destroy the Mayas during the Spanish conquest, erasing a once great history.

He used it to conquer the Native Americans and drive them from their rightful lands.

He used it to rape the continent of Africa, siring Mulatto children in the New World.

All the while, masking his noble ambitions as “God’s Will.”

His IS a fools courage.

Now,
The fire is electronic;
Chemical-Biologic;
Thermo-nucleonic
Poised to destroy worlds at a press of a button
To ensure his status as chieftain.

“And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
“With Ate by his side come hot from hell
“Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
“Cry Havoc - and let slip the dogs of war
“That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
“With carrion men groaning for burial.”

Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene I. The end of Mark Anthony’s soliloquy.

Kinder, Gentler

2009-12-07T04:35:00.000-08:00

© 7 December 2009, the Griot Poet

“Well I am moved. I want a kinder and gentler nation.” George Herbert Walker Bush said in his elation as his acceptance address at the RNC in 1988,

How does this relate to Willie Horton and now the “chickens coming home to roost” with Arkansas Governor Mike Huck-a-buck?

Benign: etymology: Anglo-French, “of a gentle disposition,” “of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life” (e.g. benign tumor).

Benign tumors are usually removed from the host body before becoming rancid and…cancerous using drive-by chemicals HMOs infuse.

We live in a benign fascism, accepting exported barbarism from our shores done in our name, purposely averting our eyes and our turning backs to attacks on others’ homelands that we would not stand for on our own.

It was our sins in Eden that raised the ire of Osama and gave recruiting fodder to Al Qaeda, the estimated killing of 1.5 million children in Iraq due to carpet bombing in “no fly zones” (not by Bush II, but by Bill Clinton).

In comedy clubs, one attempts not to gain the attention of the craftsman on stage, otherwise you become the fodder for their freestyle material as they serially slay you in effigy for your own momentary lapse into stupidity.

We define left and right as if we have a choice of the course guided by the wings of a global, corporate Moloch, all-seeing wise guy owl sacrificing children on funeral pyres in “cremations of care.”

We live in a benign fascism, accepting exported barbarism from our shores done in our name, purposely averting our eyes and our turning backs to attacks on others’ homelands that we would not stand for on our own.

Like we did so express when we lost 3,000 souls on 9/11.

For a moment, we came together, not realizing the benign tumor was now rancid and at the point of…breaking.

We spent ourselves into a deficit before September the 10th, the attack icing on a bloody cake.

What was at stake was “civilization itself” an old warrior quaked even before his deplorable display at the United Nations.

We live in a benign fascism, accepting exported barbarism from our shores done in our name, Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan because revolutions and revolutionaries are not “comfortable.”

We stare at interactive “boob tubes,” equipped with keyboard, mouse, booming speakers and Internet access: populating FACEBOOK, MYSPACE, Twitter and YOUTUBE with information gathered on massive Cray computer databases detecting threat patterns to protect the global whore of Babylon system… from ourselves.

Father to Son

2009-12-06T14:25:00.000-08:00

© 5 December 2009, the Griot Poet (a.k.a. Pop)

Son: I could quote Langston Hughes and tell you “Life ain’t no crystal stair,” (so cliché), and by the way, the squiggly line that automatically infused by Microsoft Word under the colloquialism and urban English, I might be remiss not to correct my sentence.

Yet, that does not change your situation that you seem to run into each and every day you strive to achieve the prize that God has for you. And every level you conquer, there is another that wants you to QUIT.

It wants you to give up, go away, accept mediocrity, nap, pity your circumstance, let some man/woman/system/institution define and demand what you are.

I could run to your rescue and baby you, get in someone’s face and defend you, yet… it was stress that caused you to go from rolling/to crawling/to bouncing/to standing and taking your first steps.

You fell when you tried to ride a bike. You fell when you first tried to skateboard. You failed to make your first basketball team in middle school. You failed at your first karate break. You have since mastered all of this!

I could protect you from the forces that will label you “threat,” “mugger,” “rapist”; “n----r.” Yet, these were the same forces that made your Aunt Mamie march in the streets and brave fire hoses, police dogs and beatings. She survived.

And when the Apostle Paul asked God to remove the splinter from his side, Omnipotent’s reply was: “My grace is sufficient for you, for MY strength is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

And you have dedicated hours and hours of study with people you could not have probably met had God not been in your corner – Luther “Ticky” Burden, Richard McMullen, Marquette Wilkins – for He is Pro-video/provider, the One who “pre sees” your needs before you do.

I could minister to you and quote scripture from the ONE who made you, and remind you your name exemplifies your purpose on this earth “God has given.” So, let’s do some IMAGINEERING, as coined by Disney – a fitting job description for creating a park of fantasies:

You could get recruited by a D1 school before May (or in the summer in AAU after June);

You could get recruited by a D2 or D3 school and still make history in the Cedar Park city as the FIRST to do so.

You could one day play for the NBA… or OWN a team of your own.

You could be a walk on and defy the expectations others have tried to label you with.

You could triumphantly (as I), go back to where you were despised and say: “see, I did it, despite you.” Living well is truly the best revenge.

No son, as Langston said in his poem “Mother to Son”: life ain’t no crystal stair.

But as long as I’m alive, from your first breath to my last, know that I’ll do my best to represent God in the earth and be there for you… I love you.

Holiday in Afghanistan

2009-12-05T00:42:00.000-08:00

© 1 December 2009, Thom the World Poet, © 5 December 2009, the Griot Poet

and while we are there-take some holiday pix-
of civilians handcuffed to bars being struck with rifles
while post-traumatic stressed soldiers bomb wedding parties
Maybe we will in-curse into beautiful Pakistan
fly in on a drone with a camera in its nosecone
and bomb people in their houses
Perhaps we can cross borders undercover
in that phantom zone where guerrillas meet
In caves near Tora Bora, where the bones of Osama
are splattered beneath 500 lb bunker busters
We have the freedom to invade for no reason
send more troops in like those before us-
British, Russians-both of whom lost
They withdrew when their overseas jaunt grew deadly
They imported their weapons back to their front line homelands
Now we have terror bombs going off in Britain
when all the bombs we sent out overseas
want to come back home
to deal like our National Guard with New Orleans
Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City
so we might never have to worry about terror again
we exported it(it returned to us!)
now we holiday at home(nervously)
Take off our shoes and belts and laughter on airplanes
and try not to remember when
we were free to holiday in foreign lands.
Without fear or favor/greeted as saviors
now no longer the flavor of the month
and all our dollars turn to Yuan.
and we cannot afford even to live at home.
WE ARE CIVILIANS! on December 1,2009

© 5 December 2009, the Griot Poet

we voted for change...
other than melanin, we get more of the same
clap trap gunboat diplomacy
encouraged by those less evolved than
intellectuals, scientists, poets, prophets...

instead...

ditto heads, hockey moms, birthers, deathers...

volume transcends reason
past summer "tea bag rallies" and
in this Yuletide season they shout:
"I want my country back!"

When the sad news is... it has never been.
Democracy is a dream we've lacked for a long, long time
that disappeared when the first robber barrons
used lawyers to interpret the 14th Amendment
to give person-hood to ex-slaves
for themselves

Corporations=corpus=body=person

isn't it so self-evident-obvious?

Corporations=corpus=body=person

which has more influence over our so-called politicians than votes
which is why health care reform is not a "no brainer"
but, a shouting match joke
invoked by insurance companies (busing in roughnecks) that require us to carry same
and blame the person
seeking care
for continuation of
their lives and welfare
of defrauding a system
they set up only
for maximum profit.

but, I digress...
in a country that broke ground on a "creation museum"
instead of planetariums
or presidential libraries
for C+ students-cum-motivation-speaker ex presidents that left us with a massive deficit…
brains are what we're lacking!

Bubble

2009-12-04T23:45:00.000-08:00

© 3 December 2009, The Griot Poet

It is called a “deluxe water ball assistant,” ninety-nine cents; “Made in China.”

It is a holiday scene suspended in liquid medium under an inverted aquarium. Solid figurines attached vertically to a horizontal faux base floor.

The only thing animated in clear, pristine silence are white faux snowflakes animated by shaking the bubble and letting each flake fall gently on the mannequins and the floor within.

So are our worshiped “American Idols”:

“Oh! If I could just touch a hem of his garment”; a lock of his hair/DNA sample/YOUTUBE unauthorized video performing God-knows-what (in the nude).

So are our worshiped “American Idols”:

Pop stars like:

- Lindsey Lohan;
- Britney Spears;
- Todd Bridges;
- Michael Jackson…

Politicians like:

- Mark Sanford;
- John Edwards;
- John Ensign;
- Bill Clinton…

Sports figures like:

- Dennis Rodman;
- Michael Jordon;
- Kobe Bryant;
- Tiger Woods…

We insist they behave in our preconceived parameters of their caricatures in our minds.

We participate like paparazzi vultures with the 4th estate in yellow journalism, hypocritically scripting their lives (and not our own).

We do not appreciate the blessing and gift of walking into a mart, a mall; a grocery store without thought of where our security detail is because we might get MAULED (or our lives threatened/our reputations blackmailed).

We assail them as we shake their bubbles.

Eventually we shake…
And shake…
And shake…

Until lateral forces starts a quake in the very structure of the mannequins’ unsteady base. Micro cracks and fissures appear at the microscopic level and manifest macroscopically in listing one side or the other, then eventually: both – sometimes all at once.

The cracks get larger until…

The figurine teeters and falls, like the flake, acceleration due to gravity cushioned by the viscous fluid as it falls gently to the faux floor.

And,
Since we can’t reach into their watery other world,

Where other rules of physics and reality apply to affect repairs:

We shrug!

And
We
Throw
IT

Away.

Beware of Pleasant-Sounding Bumper Stickers...

2009-11-17T21:05:00.000-08:00

See: Beware of Psalms 109:8 Bumper Sticker

You'll see tea bag crowds touting these bumper stickers and the catch phrase: "Pray for the President" or "Pray for Obama."

Here's what Psalms 109:8 (and 9) says:

"Let his days be few, [And] let another take his office.
"Let his children be fatherless, And his wife a widow."

Who could have the nerve to use these verses out of context and call themselves CHRISTIAN?

I'm tired. Tired of the way the Bible is twisted to beat over the heads of the people and manipulate the weak-minded among us.

How is this any different than Al Qaeda or the Taliban twisting the Koran to justify murder?

In verse 3: "They have also surrounded me with words of hatred, And fought against me without a cause."

This is the mental state of the tea bag fringe that feel they've "lost their country," or their vaulted place in the pecking social order (don't give me money or a job: just make me feel superior).

Sarah-"Going-Rogue"-Palin manipulates this to great effect at her rallies after she repeated the lies:

"Obama doesn't live in our kind of America." (paraphrased)
"He palls around with terrorist." (at EIGHT?)

...and never once challenged anyone that said "terrorist"; "kill him."

This is a recipe for assassination, JUSTIFIED by the Bible out-of-context.

Please note:

Protect President Obama from Right-Wing Menace

"30 death threats a day..."
"400% increase in threats from President Bush..."
"We have half the number of agents we need, but requests for more agents have fallen on deaf ears at headquarters,"

This is a long haul campaign. It didn't end on November 4, 2008. It won't end until the country is repaired from the damage of the last 8 years; Obama winning a 2nd Nobel Peace Prize and he, Michelle, Malia and Sasha SAFELY back home in Chicago in 2016.

Speaking of the Bible, when they throw you Psalms 109:8 - 9, hit them with this:

"Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence."

1 Timothy 2: 1 - 2

Grace, Peace and ACTIVISM!

Facebook Collab with Drake Jibril Eszes: "Tonight"

2009-10-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

“Love should never expire faster than a Walmart return policy.” –D.J.E.

“Tonight” (A “Quickie” Poem)

Sudden winds of change
Envelop me
Like a hibernating bear’s arms
Snuggling her cubs

Love’s discovery
Cut strangely
By scissors
Held by Umbilical cords’ revenge

Unprecedented silence
Speaks louder
Than love
Ever confessed

Now I sit here
Pastime scars
Testifying uplifting lessons
Band aids on this open wound

How could something so real end so fast?

This chapter I’ve already read
365 days ago
Thought I put it in my
Epilogue of discontent

…

But, tonight
My scars of love
Will speak mental voo-doo tones
Commencing last laughs chant

As they lock eyes
With their penis role-model
My vulnerable words
Forgotten

As they position nakedness
Above his
Fulfilling his dreams

Blindness will be your karma
For this moment you fulfill
Things will not be
What it seems

Drake Jibril Eszes

**********

TGP's Quickie response:

Above the storms of life
after I've Spoken Words:
"peace, be still"

to the crashing waves above
my common sense

when you ended it
your eyes cut through
my masculinity like
Ginsu knives
on my male genitalia.

My source of testosterone
dropping to the floor
like Samson's locks

and Delila mocks me
paid by Philistines
and I was blinded
to her treachery
by her sheer beauty
and gorgeous pouting
that melted me like butter...

I shudder
first against millstones
grinding wheat,
gathering my strength
my hair reappearing
(but not my sight)
then against columns to Dagon
mocked openly by three thousand souls...

"Fulfilling MY dreams

"Blindness will be YOUR karma
For this moment *I* fulfill
Things will not be
What they seem..."

Dr. Cornel West: "Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud" (interview)

2009-09-30T16:40:00.000-07:00

A Choice of Totalitarianism

2009-09-26T19:28:00.000-07:00

The first president depicted as the fictional super-villain “The Joker” was George W. Bush: Bush as Joker, the outrage happened when the tables were turned on the first African American president: Obama as Joker. The outrage was that Obama is just beginning his administration, while Bush was… a lame duck.

Bush was compared to Hitler: Bush as Hitler. Now, Obama is compared to Hitler: Obama as Hitler.

Perot was initially blamed for costing George Herbert Walker Bush votes in the ’92 election; Nader blamed for Gore’s loss in 2000.

When Karl Rove wanted to foster a “permanent Republican majority,” for those with that philosophy, it was heaven on earth. However, the rants from the right stem from the thought of being in the political wilderness and PREDICTIONS they’ll be in the political wilderness: 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.

What is this?

I call it: “A Choice of Totalitarianism.”

Totalitarianism: 1: centralized control by an autocratic authority; 2: the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority

Autocrat: 1: a person (as a monarch) ruling with unlimited authority; 2: one who has undisputed influence or power

A “two-party system” is synonymous to describing the universe in more than three spatial dimensions (the fourth being time, possibly eleven or MORE theoretically in String or now M Theory): we conceive the political universe as ONLY two parties and allow corporate interests to influence both to their wishes. Corporations, if “persons” have been personified as psychopaths. Thus, we can’t have a reasonable debate about health care; we can’t pull out of wars that drive up the national debt; we can’t possibly foster the education and jobs for people in this country; we can’t discuss how to get the Third World out of debt (and thereby take away a trump card for terrorist recruiting); we can’t balance the budget and give our children a debt-free future.

Alas, Steven Covey: there is no “win-win” scenario. We are in a “winner-take-all” system that the other side will always be the “sore loser” and claw, scratch, defame, heckle, humiliate, denounce, disrespect the leader of the other side until they return to power. Then the cycle of absurdity repeats itself as the rich 1 – 2% gets richer and pulls the strings of “AstroTurf free speech exercises in futility.”

I will be a good Malthusian slave… as long as my side “wins.”

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama, Back to School Event

2009-09-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

As I format this, I am preparing to read this address to my seventeen year old son: his district, www.leanderisd.org has opted NOT to show the broadcast in his government class. I am woefully disappointed in that decision as a parent and taxpayer. The precedent for this address has been set by President Reagan, President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush on 9/11. I believe the Office of the President must be respected by citizen, veteran or soldier alike, no matter who or what party occupies it.

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama, Back to School Event

Arlington, Virginia
September 8, 2009

The President: Hello everyone hows everybody doing today? I'm here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we've got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I'm glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, its your first day in a new school, so its understandable if you're a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you're in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer and you could've stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn't have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn't too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, Id fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever Id complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I'm here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I'm here because I want to talk with you about your education and whats expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now Ive given a lot of speeches about education. And I've talked a lot about responsibility.

I've talked about your teachers responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I've talked about your parents responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don't spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I've talked a lot about your governments responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren't working where students aren't getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. And that's what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You're going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You cant drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You've got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn't just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You'll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You'll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don't do that if you quit on school you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country.

Now I know its not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn't always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn't fit in.

So I wasn't always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I'm not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn't have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don't have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there's not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don't feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren't right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home that's no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That's no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No ones written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That's what young people like you are doing every day, all across America. Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn't speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I'm thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who's fought brain cancer since he was three. He's endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer hundreds of extra hours to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and hes headed to college this fall.

And then there's Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and shes on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren't any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That's why today, I'm calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you'll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you'll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you'll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you'll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don't feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you're not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You wont love every subject you study. You wont click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you wont necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That's OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures. JK Rowlings first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you cant let your failures define you you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn't mean you're a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn't mean you're stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No ones born being good at things; you become good at things through hard work. You're not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don't hit every note the first time you sing a song. You've got to practice. Its the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before its good enough to hand in.

Don't be afraid to ask questions. Don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn't a sign of weakness; its a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don't know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you're struggling, even when you're discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you don't ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. Its about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

Its the story of students, who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, whats your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I'm working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you've got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don't let us down, don't let your family, or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Obama’s not the first president to address nation’s schoolchildren on live television

2009-09-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

The article points out (click on link in title above) that there is precedent set for presidents addressing school children: FDR brought it to the modern era with Marconi's radio and "fireside chats." President Obama is the first to use all forms of media: cable, radio, Internet and social networks to effectively communicate, and that method will likely be imitated by political operatives of majority and third parties in the near and distant future of this country.

For those that are concerned: the text of the presentation will be released Monday, yet schools in various states (sadly, Texas being one) are either not going to allow the broadcast, or parents in those states are going to keep their children from school.

It reminds me of the lessons our kids are supposed to learn from playing organized sports: "you can't win them all"; "be a good sport." Sadly, the only persons not following that advice are the parents that voted McCain/Palin.

If this were John McCain, I doubt you'd see parents that voted for Obama complaining or holding their children absent from school. That by the way is an unexcused absence that counts against the student and proves/solves nothing. The homework assigned that day will still be due, so to miss a day when the leader of the free world wishes to address "education" is a bit oxymoron.

"We are a country of laws, and not men," is paraphrased from "Thoughts on Government, Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies," written by John Adams during the spring of 1776, where he fully states: "there is no good government but what is republican. That the only valuable part of the British constitution is so; because the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'"

The presidency is an office we as citizens SHOULD respect, regardless of the occupant in the office. Who, if you're keeping statistics, he represents 1/44 or 2.27% of the total population of presidents, 97.72% of the time; it's been white males from Washington to Bush. It is highly likely to revert back to that established paradigm in 2012 or 2016.

I will admit, the president is an effective politician and persuasive speaker, but I have no evidence of his expertise at hypnotism. To paraphrase Charles Barkley "you ARE your child's role models," and the most important persons in shaping their maturity and character.

Strength in the Broken Places: Ted Kennedy, 1932 - 2009

2009-08-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

© 26 August 2009, The Griot Poet

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” Ernest Hemingway

Ted M. Kennedy died in the comfort of his home in Massachusetts with family and friends surrounding him. He died to the date of his speech at the Democratic National Convention nominating (now) President Barack Obama as history’s first African American candidate endorsed by a major political party. He’d supported (then) Senator Obama in January of 2008 before succumbing to a seizure and the diagnosis later of a malignant brain tumor.

Strength in the broken places: despite getting expelled from Harvard in 1951 for cheating on an exam, he managed to get elected Senator in 1962.

Senator Kennedy championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He authored more than 3,500 bills, the Family and Medical Leave Act; the Americans with Disabilities Act being among them.

Strength in the broken places: Ted Kennedy lost older brother Joe in battle in WWII. John he lost to Lee Harvey Oswald. Robert was assassinated while running for president by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (mainly) for his support of Israel in the six-day war one year prior to pulling the trigger.

Chappaquiddick was one of his many “broken places.”

At 37, the young Senator drove off a bridge while in the company of Mary Jo Kopechne. Ms. Kopechne drowned. The Senator was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident with a two-year suspended sentence. Had the Internet been active and fully tabloid, his career and usefulness would be over.

In 1980, he ran a failed, bitter campaign against President Jimmy Carter, ultimately losing to him and then supporting him.

Republicans that are ardently against health care reform, bitterly opposed his support of Roe vs. Wade, counted him as a dear friend.

A “Lion of the Senate” builds a life from repeated failures. He finds strength in the broken places and gives the remainder of his life to service for others. A tombstone listing his accomplishments would be as large as the Vietnam Vets Memorial.

If America is truly a “Christian nation” as is oft quoted in our sound bite, 24-hour news cycle: then the lesson of Senator Kennedy’s life would be that there is redemption after failure and great sin; that the sun ascends and sets on all and as Hemingway also stated: “Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died [that] distinguish one man from another.” His service and his boisterous, back-slapping laughter were his roar and his strength.

Hierodule, ("sacred servant")

2009-08-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

© 10 August 2009, The Griot Poet

You were the reason
Zeus came down from Olympus
Making Hera, his older sister/wife jealous
Yet, that god/human communion birthed: Hercules
One of mythologies greatest heroes

You are Alcmene
"the tallest,
"most beautiful woman with wisdom surpassed
"by no person born of mortal parents;
"her face and dark eyes as charming as Aphrodite's."

Lady of Cyprus,
Myrtle,
Dove,
Sparrow,
Swan,

All her;
all you;
all goddess;
all sacredly...

...sensual...

Past Prologue Strategies

2009-08-09T22:07:00.000-07:00

The ghosts of Atwater past: birth(er)s, death(er)s; mendacity
© 8 August 2009, The Griot Poet

Lee Atwater, God rest his soul (a fatal tumor revealed he HAD one), developed and patented divisive identity politics – the mantle taken up by Karl Rove – to get George Wallace “segregation-now-segregation-forever” Dixiecrats to Republican polls.

“The Southern Strategy” opposed the Voting Rights Act abstractly:

Atwater: “You start out in 1954 saying ‘n----r, n----r; n----r’” (when Brown vs. Board of Education received a 9 – 0 Supreme Court pass with the vigor of Thurgood Marshall’s judicial rigor to implement at all deliberate speed), “by 1968 you can’t say ‘n----r’… that hurts you. So you say stuff like”:

- “Forced busing;
- “State’s rights;
- “Tax cuts;

You keep it abstract, but the result is “blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Now: they say the fight is “health care,” while many of us are unemployed, laid off, on food stamps or welfare. Tabloid journalists insisting on reporting debunked after debunked after debunked FAKED birth certificates (because an exotic name found [Aramaic] 24 times in the King James Bible can’t be from Hawaii!). Governor “good hair” has the highest rate of uninsured of ANY state; he berates stimulus funds, punches his fist high and shouts at treason-speaking, secession-leaning tea bagger rallies: “State’s rights!”
But now: it’s not just color: it’s class! Follow-the-money to the K Street lobby and see [who] are the true masters of republicans and blue dog democrats!

Thomas Frank asks “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” We tax cut and war mongered our way into this huge deficit.

- “Forced busing;
- “State’s rights;
- “Tax cuts;

The only point changed is the first!
Lied ourselves into two wars in Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein and sons Uday and Qusay, bombing Ur of the Chaldean’s back into the Bill O’Reilly stone age (which had NOTHING to do with 9/11 per DUBYA),
Instead of stating: “we don’t want that n----r in the White House” (built by the way on the backs of slaves),
We have “birth(er)” knaves and republican sponsored-for-20-years “Living Wills” transformed to “Logan’s Run” euthanasia, “death(er)s” shout down and stifle Congressional Town Hall Meetings in industry-sponsored Astroturf rallies,

Because 40 plus years later (from 1968), you can’t say: n----r, n----r; n----r!

Atwater said: “you got to be abstract.”

Forced busing becomes:
- “Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex” (what Ike meant to say),
- “State’s rights;
- “Tax cuts;

A quote from “The Price of Loyalty” by Ron Suskind: “Deficits don’t matter, this is our due,” from then Vice President Richard Bruce (Dick) Cheney!

On Anarchists and Socialists

2009-08-05T21:13:00.000-07:00

Anarchist: 1: a person who rebels against any authority, established order, or ruling power2: a person who believes in, advocates, or promotes anarchism or anarchy ; especially : one who uses violent means to overthrow the established order

Anarchism: 1 : a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups

Socialist: 1: one who advocates or practices socialism 2: a member of a party or political group advocating socialism

Socialism: 1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods 2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

With those definitions out of the way, the poster depicting President Obama as "The Joker":
Obama Joker Poster

Is uninformed, dumb and ill-advised.

I don't quite understand what the endgame is regarding the GOP: if the goal is to expand the party base beyond Southern conservative whites and evangelicals, I'm not so sure these groups would be anymore comfortable with this caricature than the one of George W. Bush as Anarchist-in-Chief (same article above, see link to Vanity Fair at the end of the article).

African Americans and Hispanics are probably the most conservative, church-going group the GOP has decided in its best interest to alienate with the childish attacks against Eric Holder as Attorney General, President Obama as a fictional psychopath and Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, arguably the most qualified to approach confirmation.

Tellingly (in some historical references), after slavery the first thing husbands did was go looking for wives and families; wives went to look for husbands and children, so our love of family runs pretty deep. After Lincoln's assassination, President Jackson pulled out troops from the South and the Klan and Jim Crow laws bloomed in its aftermath.

George W. Bush solidly carried Hispanics as Texas governor and pulled the group during his 2000 and 2004 campaigns, along with conservative African Americans nationwide.

http://blackmenformccain.com: is a blog by such a conservative African American. His URL says it all: he was solidly for McCain during much of the primaries in the 2008 election. His tragic last entry on October 18, 2008 discusses something we're debating, have been debating for 61 years now: Health Care:

"My father is not well. He readily admits his time is short, and the encroaching spectre of The End has made him a more reflective man than I have ever known him to be.

"Dad is a self-made man who came up from nothing. To him, personal responsibility is the foundation of our society. He didn’t believe that men, black or white, should rely on anyone, especially not the government. But as he watched his life savings drain away with his health, and the dreams of his children fade as we struggled to pay the bills to keep him alive, that ideology began to feel disconnected from reality. The Conservatism he taught me encouraged unrepentant faith in the Free Market–if you believe, you will prosper. But we believed. And we are not prospering. We are withering away."

The title of this last entry: "Barack Obama for President."

Anarchist: 1: a person who rebels against any authority, established order, or ruling power2: a person who believes in, advocates, or promotes anarchism or anarchy ; especially : one who uses violent means to overthrow the established order:

THAT sounds like the disrupted Democratic town hall meetings by "mob rule" sponsored by special interest groups and republican (and blue dog democratic) operatives beholden to the insurance industry:

Health Care Industry Sabotages American Town Halls
Reviewing the History of Fake Conservative Protests

And the ridiculous, oft-sited claim that President Obama was not born in Hawaii (now with an obvious FAKE birth certificate from a man in Australia):

Obama: the Australian?

So my question: how does THIS make me CONSIDER voting for the GOP?

If you have alternatives; propose them and debate them with FACTS, not mad mobs, dogma and childish pranks done in photo shop and posted anonymously (& cowardly); felonious forgeries of official documents of countries and municipalities.

The obvious embarrassing conclusion I foresee to the "birther" movement and this lunatic fringe the GOP feel beholden to coddle is the only "gag" that will shut them: a lawsuit brought by injured parties for copious amounts of money. (If it means anything, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Fox News and RNC Chairman Michael Steele are desperately trying to extricate their party from this thorny "birther" association.)

I'm told a few degrees at the beginning of any journey can decide whether you hit the mark of your destination or miss it be several miles. The "few degrees" that lost the republicans control of the White House and Congress were:

-NOT reacting to a CIA brief clearly stating "Osama Plans to attack America with Planes"
-NOT capturing/killing Osama Bin Laden for 9/11
-Stalling/Stymieing the 9/11 commission
-Outing CIA agent Valerie Plame
-NOT indicting Scooter Libby (what GROWN man calls himself "Scooter"?)
-The voluntary war in Iraq costing the country billions a month
-The atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
-Giving credence to Intelligent Design and the lack of support for science and science education, thereby lessening our global competitiveness
-Denying global warming and its affect on climate and the global economy
-The Economic meltdown
-Being in control of the White House and Congress 6/8 of the Bush Administration years, taking us from a surplus to a deficit within months (and before 9/11); signing off on everything W ever wanted, the housing bubble that BURST...

I'll stop here. I COULD go on and on.

The GOP's main problem: you administrate without thinking, your dogma has become your religion to which you are more devoted to than common sense or democracy. I personally KNOW republicans that voted for Obama because like the gentlemen that wrote the blog: http://blackmenformccain.com, they were disillusioned by your administrative performance (or, lack thereof) and preferred to exercise a right afforded them in the constitution:

Democracy: 1 a: government by the people ; especially : rule of the majority b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.

"We the people" grew tired of tripe, trysts (Vitter, Ensign, Sanford) and circumstance. You lost. Instead of inciting (false) grass roots riots, find out why. Stop pouting; stop manipulating; start thinking and above all: start listening!

Shadow Dancing

2009-08-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

© 2 August 2009, The Griot Poet

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” Carl Sandburg

My shadow was Mr. Tedford: science teacher from my middle school past that on my lack of completely grasping the principle of linear expansion shouted his bearded disappointment:

“No, You big dummy...!”

I faked an obviously faked laugh as the dagger he stabbed me with sunk deep.

I never told my parents, I never demanded an apology for his pomposity and his mendacity,

I self-sedated; I ate [more] massive amounts of potato chips: comfort food to medicate internal wounds.

My shadow is JROTC Cadet Colonel Wall: Aryan, standing tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, bedecked in ribbons, highest ranking Brigade Commander of Winston-Salem, Forsyth County schools that at a casual question shot back:

“YOUR kind will NEVER get to this rank!”
(“No, You big dummy…!”)

My heart sank and I expressed my stress and angst to my parents.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” my dad said with a knowing glance and genuine pain in tearing eyes that hoped I’d never have this experience.

“You go back and tell that booger-bootch you can do anything you set your mind to with GOD on your side,” mom said parodying Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

I did: “In three years,” I said, “I’ll be wearing your rank.”
“I doubt that,” he said in arrogant confidence.

3 years hence:

Veni; Vidi; Vici!

I stood tall, African son, black-haired, brown-eyed, bedecked in ribbons,
Making history in the Winston-Salem Sentinel (no longer in circulation),
My dead mothers’ scribbled note on the article to my Uncle James Dean:

“This is Reggie… your nephew… my son.”

And I, have lost both of them and the innocence of the mythology of my beginnings,
Insurance claims, death certificates, will probates crowds out my time for grieving, economy not allowing me to evening mourn over their sealed graves,

On anniversaries of his death and my corporate denouement: August 26, 1999 and 2003;
On her recent demise two days before Mother’s Day weekend 2009:

One dagger remains:

Tedford/Science/Certification

I did not tell them;

And now I’ve lost them,

I stagger as I attempt to remove (alone) the dagger!

William Shatner Recites Sarah Palin’s Tweets

2009-07-31T22:15:00.000-07:00

Article: Shatner reciting Palin on Conan

On "the Birthers" and Lou Dobbs

2009-07-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

See: Dobbs Joins ‘Birthers,’ But CNN Pushes Back

I'm curious: would this controversy have any legs where his name "President Barry O'Bama" and his father were from Ireland?

Barack means "blessing" in Arabic, in Aramaic it is spelled Baruch and occurs 24 times in the Bible (for all you Christian right-wingers)!

5/27/2009 Briefing by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs

The White House Press Secretary, Mr. Gibbs states:

"MR. GIBBS: Lester, this question in many ways continues to astound me. The state of Hawaii provided a copy with the seal of the President's birth. I know there are apparently at least 400,000 people -- (laughter) -- that continue to doubt the existence of and the certification by the state of Hawaii of the President's birth there, but it's on the Internet because we put it on the Internet for each of those 400,000 to download. I certainly hope by the fourth year of our administration that we'll have dealt with this burgeoning birth controversy."

Snopes.com debunks it: Obama Birth Certificate

Here's a link with the seal of the 50th state of Hawaii:

Hawaii: Obama Birth Certificate with the state seal

Racism. A narcissism of self-centered, paranoia resulting from the notion that right or wrong, all things are "good" when someone like "me" is in charge.

No Prayers

2009-07-20T22:02:00.000-07:00

© 20 July 2009, 11:59 PM, The Griot Poet

I have no prayers to utter to God…
It is not that I don’t believe in Him,
I’m definitely beset by some demon
Assigned to my overt oppression and demise…
I pray for others healings and they do recover
I slack and their marriages suffer…
Like Moses, my arms get tired sometimes
Like Elijah, I suffer depression after dueling with the prophets of Baal and Ashtoreth in groves.
Like Paul, I have thorns in my side; I am left for dead many times
Like today: on the anniversary of seeing earth from God’s front porch
I am defeated by nineteen points
Separating me from bidding on a classroom this fall…
What sin can I not be forgiven?
What sin spews back from the sea of forgetfulness?
Back to shore to chagrin me again and again?
What blocks my prayers so that after ravens feed me?
I am seeking for God… to kill me?
GIVE ME AN ANSWER!
So I can declare to my disciples that there are “more with us than there are with them.”
So I can ride a chariot of fire, translate death and give a double portion of my mantle to my sons
As I ascend before Apollo 11 beyond the sun to God’s front porch.

Rachel Maddow Correcting the Record

2009-07-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes...

2009-07-03T07:39:00.001-07:00

...Who Watches the Watchmen?

(Last page of the comic novel, "The Watchmen," from Juvenal, Satires VI, 347, used during the Tower Commission Report in 1987)

See: Meltdown 101: Unemployment by the Numbers

The markets were pummeled by the news that unemployment was its highest in 26 years: 9.5 percent.

From the article:

"How bad is the current recession? Here's one measure: the United States now has fewer jobs than it did nine years ago, even though the work force - the number of people either working or looking for work - has grown by 12.5 million people since then.

"It's the first time since the Great Depression that a recession has wiped out all the jobs created during the previous business cycle, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank."

I'll let you read the rest at the link above, but some thoughts as to how we're in this mess:

1. Fewer jobs: from a techie standpoint, a lot of that has to do with automation and the Internet. Remember "The Jetsons"? George's job at Spacely's Sprockets was to "push the button": he seemed the only employee needed. Jobs that had to be done in the US can now be done overseas in cheaper labor markets, results delivered in hypertext transfer protocol. (I don't support this, I'm just trying to wrap my mind around it and offer an explanation.)

2. Also, births. That is, those in 1983 - 1990 or so, those kids are now 18 - 25 and looking for something to do.

3. Lifers. I was one of them. And because the lifers are happy doing their part, their "cog" in the great wheel of industry, even though their talents and skill sets may have in many cases atrophied, they don't up and quit and start businesses: they pad their 401k and wait, hopefully for retirement (instead of layoffs = the elephant graveyard).

4. Nine years ago, we weren't as bad off as we are now. The election cycle for 2000 started with a surplus that got spent into a deficit rather quickly.

5. 9/11. Enough said.

6. War in Iraq. A "billion dollars a month" (an estimate I've heard on the news). Hm: March 2003 - July 2009 = 76 months X 1,000,000,000 = 76,000,000,000 of significant deficit reduction.

Our "Brave New World" is here, and we were not at all ready for the rapid changes that would mean. Automation may save "The Big Three" and put out green Hybrid vehicles, but a robot may be able to do what Uncle Billy used to do to put his family through school, making a upper middle class wage without a degree.

The old school sci fi flicks had us all with ENORMOUS heads and small bodies, that was obviously countered and documented in The Assault on Reason and Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. We obviously are the diametric opposite: small brains and large, grossly out-of-shape bodies.

At this point: the only advice I can offer is to read, read, READ and be ready at a moment's notice to DO something else! I had to learn that lesson the hard way, as many of you are now experiencing the lament of jobs and security that will probably never come back, until we discover Warp Drive.

Niel Postman commented on where we are (from the "boob tube" perspective) in his insightful book: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. When it takes the National Enquirer to bust John Edwards having an affair, we're at a place where only bloggers scoop the news on the street, because we're not driven by the market, ratings or stock valuations. We are the very expression of democracy, which is a contact sport, not a jingo, market-driven slogan-fest of litmus tests of how "right" or "left" one is. That doesn't come up on my monthly grocery budget, my bills, my mortgage. I've changed and rearranged things in anticipation of less for the time being, ready to evolve into something on the horizon that will be different than any economy we've ever known... for the better.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes...Who Watches the Watchmen? WE do!

After All: Al Jarreau

2009-06-28T20:12:00.001-07:00

Jam-The MJ's

2009-06-27T22:45:00.000-07:00

Jackson 5 singing I want you back - see if you recognize "Skip Newsworthy"

2009-06-27T22:08:00.000-07:00

Food, Inc. : The Movie

2009-06-26T18:47:00.000-07:00

More at: www.foodincmovie.com

Threes

2009-06-26T06:29:00.000-07:00

© 26 June 2009, The Griot Poet

They say that death comes in threes:
First, my cat Felix died quietly, as mysteriously as she’d appeared on my doorstep fully grown 15 years prior, she expired after mewing on the front stoop and curled up as if to nap – from which she did not come back.

Two weeks later: my mother, Mildred Dean Goodwin expired two days before Mother’s Day weekend. Which is like her: I’ll bet I’ll never forget this anniversary as I had hers and my father’s wedding anniversary. For that, Mother’s Day will always have meaning.

David Carradine: this generation knows him as the Bill of “Kill Bill” with the enigmatic Uma Thurman, but despite his personal demons off camera, he was the star from the Bruce Lee inspired “Kung Fu” series (Bruce was a little too “oriental” for 70s producers back then)…

This week: we lost the perennial “side kick” Ed McMahon, after suffering from breathing problems and cancer. He and he only could laugh at an obviously unfunny joke by Johnny Carson and have the audience guffaw with him.

The modern-day pin-up girl Farrah Fawcett was published in Life in ‘76; it is the best-selling pin-up poster of all time, with more than 12 million copies purchased (exceeding her weekly TV salary)... her show number one because the Corpus Christi beauty admitted “we’re number one maybe because we all don’t wear bras,” lost her life, the fantasy girl of “Charlie’s Angels” to colon cancer…

Now Michael Joe Jackson: the poor boy in the stereotypical crowded black family from Gary, Indiana who’s father was a failed musician who became the “King of Pop,” became the first to star and aligned himself with a sports star – Michael Jordan and “Jam” became the standard of video and performance excellence, became the inspiration of Usher and Justin Timberlake (they were in diapers when he did “Billy Jean” and “Thriller”). His was a “rags to riches (to rags)” story. His was evidence that any dream is possible if you work your behind off and pursue it, despite your culture, color, demons or personal struggles. His is the record of best selling pop album of all time. Any goal, no matter how outrageous is worth pursuing because despite spiritual traditions to the contrary: I suspect we only have this life to pursue it and then oblivion and judgment.

They say death comes in threes:

“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.” (1 John 5:7 – 8)

If this is truly our reality, then let us pursue our talents and serve Deity and humanity as we walk out our destinies – our judgment of the impact of our storied pasts will be what is said about us when we’ve breathed our last.

Meditation 17 (1623 - 1624) by John Donne

2009-06-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

CNN Story: Teen Beating

I put the link because, apparently, their embed code doesn't work. When you go on You Tube and put in "Teen Cat Fight"... let's just say you get interpretations bordering on the profane.

Slowly... we are walking towards the guillotine, happy at our own demise as a civilization. The very thing that frees us - the Internet - enslaves us. We are detached from emotion, affection, true feelings, empathy. We carry on relationships at light speed with people distant from us. The beating of a child only prompted the announcement: "this is going to You Tube" from bystanders that wouldn't call the police.

Our knowledge is incredible; our education suffers; our respect for self and others absent; our wisdom lacking.

We die, with Cheshire smiles as we disappear - TGP

Meditation 17 (1623-1624)
by John Donne

Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris.

Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.

The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

As therefore the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest.

If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery or a borrowing of misery, as though we are not miserable enough of ourselves but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.

If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels as gold in a mine and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction digs out and applies that gold to me, if by this consideration of anothers dangers I take mine own into contemplation and so secure myself by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

Richard Pryor-40th President

2009-06-23T21:35:00.000-07:00

A comic genius that was prophetic - TGP

Synapses

2009-06-21T00:20:00.000-07:00

© 24 November 2008, The Griot Poet

I dreamt I made poetry to you in Milky Way Galaxy arms surrounded by swirls of stars in an expansive blackness that had no beginning, no ending…

I dreamt I made poetry to you [by] composing sonnets on comets passing by, the ice melting in the sunshine of your sharp gaze, your smile, its trail marking orbital passage…

I dreamt I made poetry to you as you defied physics and I heard you like a siren, serenely reciting poetic prophecies that made each area of my brain light up on an MRI screen like a Christmas tree…

I dreamt I made poetry to you in timeless space-time, so we experimented with cosmic compositions; haiku as short burst of deep and poignant rhythm and rhyme, sinusoidal wave equations, quarks and quantum, Hydrogen to Helium fusion, Schrodinger particle/wave duality… a reality beyond human comprehension.

I dreamt I made poetry to you as my last act in life, my denouement, a solar moth attracted to a red giant flame, mesmerized by all-seeing eyes, pulled in by the third that is a gravity well that heavy particles of lies cannot escape.

I dreamt I made poetry to you and like Shakespeare, heaving my last sigh in the valley made by clockwise and counterclockwise swirling nebula pouring to an abyss of nothingness into the substance of the surrounding universe of teeming life…

Then, I awoke and stared at Venus and the rays of dawn.

Voyeur Exhibitionists

2009-06-19T20:51:00.000-07:00

From: TheFreeDictionary.com

Voyeur:

1. A person who derives sexual gratification from observing the naked bodies or sexual acts of others, especially from a secret vantage point.
2. An obsessive observer of sordid or sensational subjects.

Exhibitionism:

1. The act or practice of deliberately behaving so as to attract attention.
2. Psychiatry A psycho sexual disorder marked by the compulsive exposure of the genitals in public.

At addiction recovery meetings, it is customary to begin with the admittance to the sin before any discussion can begin: "Hello. I'm John/Jane Doe, and I'm an alcoholic/addict."

Hello. I am The Griot Poet. I am a blogger.

That, of course, is not my real name. However, many who know me know me as "The Griot Poet," literally meaning "A storyteller in western Africa who perpetuates the oral tradition and history of a village or family."

At a deeper level, I'm not too different from a voyeur. I get links sent to my profile possibly because my disclosure of age attracts anyone with curves and a web cam: the game is to get me to "look" for free, then for a fee. I typically block them (though I have looked, then blocked them).

And, why am I so "high and mighty"? Am I not writing in Cyberspace to be "looked" at? Aren't we all trying to be "discovered" and famous? Who wouldn't like to make as much as the top-seed bloggers? Be interviewed on CNN, MSNBC for your pontification and comments? I don't actually have a qualification to my audience that might "look" and show interest, benign or lewd. Did Bathsheba accidentally bath in an open window where David could see her? Was it all his idea? I get the idea (translating it into modern speak), that the lady and the king after cutting gazes at each other engaged in the modern equivalent of "the hook up" and "booty call." It takes two to Tango.

That brings up a related point: The very fact I want someone to "look" makes me an exhibitionist. My genitalia are sentences, phrases, quotes and paragraphs. I, and others are voluntarily giving personal parts of ourselves to the world wide web in what once would have been a private diary. Some of it is insightful, lewd, brilliant, crass, thought-provoking and lately, dangerous.

Some of the comments I see posted, for example, at White House Correspondent's Dinner on You Tube are from other bloggers that obviously DON'T like the president. I see the words "n----r" and "b---h" bandied about and F*CK the president.

Yet, I cannot judge them. They, like me, have a "handle," and are probably our co-workers that we respect their output (if we're still employed, that is).

So, they express their First Amendment rights in a medium the Founders had no concept of. They connect with like-minded individuals and comment anonymously with abandon and freedom. The words are on Facebook and Myspace and Twitter and YouTube. And one obsessive compulsive will read them all and repeat them over and over... like a mantra.

And like the doppelganger antimatter equivalent of Langston's "Dream Deferred..." they explode.

The First Amendment: Comments

2009-06-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

See: Who Called Michelle a Gorilla?

The Founders had no concept of the Internet, 24-hour news, emails or Radio Talk Shows (Marconi wasn't born yet).

They also had no concept of 3/5 of a person occupying the Oval Office (women couldn't vote before the Suffrage Movement).

That being said: Letterman's comments were written FOR him and in poor taste. The joke writer should be fired, not Letterman: he's going from a script he's given and teleprompter he works from. He apologized to the governor. Move on.

The email was equally in poor taste. Demographics is working against the Republican Party. They have to retool from the party of religious conservatives - a brand they picked up after the '88 run of Pat Robertson - and white males. This email and their insistent attacks on Sotomayor, without doubt the most qualified to ever approach the nomination to the Supreme Court, will turn off moderates and ethnic minorities, WHICH THEY NEED if they have a chance of getting back into power. They're own pundits advise it, but they're not listening. Ironically, Matthew 5:5 states (in RED): "Blessed [are] the meek: for they shall inherit the earth."

Eighty-Eight

2009-06-14T14:48:00.000-07:00

© 13 June 2009, The Griot Poet

He is 88… and 8 is in the English alphabet the letter “H.” So to shout his age, Vonn Brunn also gave homage to his muse and dark sage: “Heil, Hitler!”

He coldly mowed down a gentle giant, Stephen T. Johns, whose only real crime was “HWB”: helping while black.

Now the brazen act is celebrated in hypertext transfer protocol on sites reflective of his dark meditations, disavowed by the heralds of T.E.A. parties: what twisted, dark, demented dreams does Vonn Brunn have while in critical condition, the consequence of his sick mission?

“44” is not the Messiah. At 2% of the total population of presidents, he is the pariah of groups that blame their conditions on “the government” or “the other,” failing to read the first words of the Preamble of the Constitution: “We the people” are what they despise! Their conditions are the result of decisions “We the people” make in November and don’t follow-up in December (and beyond)… Elections matter!

And, it matters if your country’s leader has a C average throughout a pampered, academic career or graduates Magna Cum Laude and edits the Harvard Law Review.

It matters if your country’s leader was bailed out throughout his life by “Pappy,” or pulled himself up as the son of a single mother by his own academic bootstraps.

It matters when your wealthy friends play the same games around Memorial Day and summer vacation with the price of gas.

It matters when lay offs and outsourcing makes the middle class last FAST!

It matters when the sheer concentration of wealth never “trickled down” in David Stockton’s wet dream fantasies, but steadily for eight long years TRICKLED UP!

It matters…
It matters…
IT MATTERS!

I pray that as he dreams Vonn Brunn has vivid visions of Paradise and Tartarus (the latter the result of his choice extreme), and that he is not the root of a salvo aiming at low hanging fruit.

I pray that his generation ages, demography and eschatology favors the “meek inheriting the earth,” and like former Hebrew slaves before he possibly lives to see Canaan: his kind and his hate passes away.

Homegrown Terrorism and Low Hanging Fruit

2009-06-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

I voted for Obama. I did not wear any buttons, banners, bumper stickers to identify me as an "Obamaite." Yet... my neighbors give me as wide a berth as they do my other white neighbors that PROUDLY displayed their "Obama for America" banner on their front lawns. I guess I am my own banner. If they are Supermen, my family is Kryptonite.

I had neighbors that had Obama banners complain that other neighbors...Palin/McCain supporters - came in to either steal, debase, damage or toss their banners from their yards. And, this is supposed to make us vote Republican?

I remember the accusations of his being a Muslim. The McCain rallies where his supporters announced "off with his head"; "kill him." I'm old enough to remember the deaths of Medgar Evers, John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

The spike in hate groups since his inauguration. The question about his birth in the US coming in the thinly-veiled GOP sponsored birthers bill. The "audacity of dopes" that follow the likes of Hannity, O'Reilly and boss Limbaugh, who compared Von Brunn to a leftist, see: Limbaugh blames liberals for Von Brunn.

How practical is it for them to go after Obama, with a contingent of Secret Service dedicated to his survival?

My fear is we are the "low hanging fruit" of the deranged, the nutcases that are threatened by a world that does not favor their right to power engineered from birth throughout the twisted history of this nation, to favor them. Somehow, their sense of self-worth is based squarely on our debasement, that our second (or third class) citizenship is tantamount to their own sense of well-being. The one thing Limbaugh and I can agree on: this mentality is deranged. The one thing we will never agree on is he and his kind feed the knuckle-draggers.

My prayer is that they consistently MISS their targets (us), and eventually, like the first generation of Hebrews freed from Egypt - die out.

Domestic Terrorism

2009-06-10T20:49:00.001-07:00

See: Quitting, this blog, © 22 January 2009, The Griot Poet

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

[Badly] Needed to be Said (Again!)

2009-06-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Originally on this blog:
Monday, November 29, 2004
[Badly] Needed to be Said

© 28 June 2004, The Griot Poet

"I think that most of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue."

VP Cheney, defending his use of vulgarity in remarks to Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy in the Senate chamber.

Fornication
Under
Consent
of the
King... George W. Bush
and his
"Fellowship of the Ring"
of Ali Baba thieves
Conceived a
Project for a
New American Century
That needed
No ties to
Reality or
Democracy
In the hypocrisy
Of FOX-y’s
“Fair and Balanced”
JedI
Mind trick
Declaration of
The latest KKK
Florida
Election
Fix!

We were
Dick-ed as
Harris, Jeb,
Baker-Botts
And Cheney
Fixed some election
Chicanery
Tossing out the
Sons and daughters
Of former slaves
Ballots
That weren’t going
To vote for them
Anyway!

Yet,
These are the
Adults
Who
Promised
“Honor and integrity”
And a return to
Civility
After a
$54 million dollar
Kenn Starr
War
Witch hunt
That took our eyes off
The ball of
Twin tower
Fires planned
By former
Bin Laden
And Saudi family
“Friends”
Closely tied
In oil business
And government
Cabals.

“We the People”
Have no right at all
To read those
Who YOU felt
Needed on
Energy policies
WE pay for!

I deplore
Garrisoned
Governments with
Snipers on the
People’s house
Resembling
Ancient & fallen
Babylon governments
Making death
Covenants
With
Orwellian
Perpetual wars
And bogeyman
Threats.

Yet,
These are the
Adults
Who
Promised
“Honor and integrity”
And a return to
Civility…

I have not
Found the
“F-word”
In the
66 books of
The canonized
Bible.

Yet,
You
Vet vulgarity
Without libel or
Apology,
As my brother and sister
Astrologies
Put star dreams
On hold
Fighting over
Sands of Eden
For an ancient
Resource: OIL!

Yet,
The party that
“Co-opted God”
Won’t apologize
Or recoil
From the obvious
Avoidance
Of Halliburton
Contrivance
In no-bid
Contracts.

Since
“Honor and integrity”
Are locked away
On a dark shelf:

Mr. Cheney -

Why don’t you
Make a plaster cast of
Your
Napoleonic,
Less-than-an-inch long
Insignificant
Male member,

Pull your pants
Down in your
Secret bunker
And joyfully

SCREW yourself!

Rachel Maddow & Keith Olbermann Shows-Words and Murder

2009-06-02T03:48:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

For Tossed Salads, and Other Human Wastes

2009-06-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

© 1 June 2009, The Griot Poet
(Written assisting a middle school class in East Austin)

I
Am
Infuriated at
Seed donors
That for one night’s
Pleasure
Refused to measure beyond
Liters
Or
Years
The
Impact
Of
Their
Actions…
They might as well as put the gun to their son’s heads.

1 in 3
Will spend their
Time in the penitentiary
(Instead of a university),
Becoming a useful
Member to society…
Rather than a menace and dark
Statistic…

1 in 4
Will follow 2 PAC
& Biggie,
Unraveling the mystery if “Heaven’s got a ghetto” (not!).
I want 5 minutes with
The WANNA-be
Gang-banger,
That measures his manhood, by collecting “baby mammas” repeating the desperate, death drama

Making Martin (like Marvin) “WANNA HOLLA, and throw up both his hands…,”

Laying hands on him SWIFTLY,

With the background of intellectually coming out of this kind of hell and a full 30 years of martial arts FURY!

Your baby is still crying, brother!

In a harsh world:

Bloods, CRIPS, Latin Kings, Gangster Disciples, MS 13s…

Bluffing and Bogarting his way through because he doesn’t understand: his model is “missing in action” on HOW to be a man!

George Orwell rolls in his grave

2009-05-20T00:07:00.000-07:00

We Are The Ones We've Been Waiting For...Remember?

2009-03-28T18:38:00.000-07:00

Related_Article

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.'' 1 Corinthians 13:11

I attended Galilee Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, NC well within the cultural demarcation point of US Highway 52, a.k.a. ''the hood.''

Every November, like clockwork, we'd get a visit from a local white politician. You can imagine, they weren't hard to miss.

They'd invariably get time at the pulpit, courtesy of our Pastor, Reverend Dr. Warnie C. Hay (deceased). Some of them had mastered ''call and response'' preaching, yes PREACHING and could really whoop! After getting us excited, calling forth Lazarus and every other near-do-wells for the power of resurrection, they would shake hands and leave... until next November. The politicians that mastered this methodology of voter registration were Democrats.

Noting the success enjoyed by their political rivals, Republicans began ''walking the walk'' after Pat Robertson's failed presidential attempt in 1988, noting his vast mail lists (pre Internet) and the power of the right placed ''spoken word.'' Never mind that the things they promised evangelicals never materialized: a ban on gay marriage (unconstitutional); a ban on abortions (would be abrogated to the lower courts if no longer federally supported); conservatism that never conserved anything except the status quo. My premise is that we all have become - Democrats and Republicans - the willing participants of a class war that pits us against one another for the sole purpose of control. As long as we have the attitude of ''us''; ''them'' we never get anything accomplished.

''We Are The Ones We've Been Waiting For''... remember? The $5, $10, $25 here and there we gave to the Obama campaign when we all decided, he might, just MIGHT have a chance. We were right. However, as vastly profound as pundits like to make the Founding Fathers, they had no political parties, Internet, 24 hour news, Talk Radio (Marconi hadn't been born yet) nor K Street Lobbyist to deal with. And yes, like those politicians of my early formative years, Prez can whoop a speech when he wants to!

So he won't forget his promises, don't forget to call your Senators and Congressional Representatives. They take polls of the for and against calls. It's relatively cheaper and just as efficacious as a lobbying firm. ''Be the change you seek in your world.''Gandhi

A quote by Dickens and thoughts on the joint address to Congress...

2009-02-27T06:28:00.000-08:00

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, English novelist (1812 - 1870)

I had two very strong reactions to President Obama's speech to the Joint Session of Congress last night: weeping and cheering.

I teared a little at the beautiful young lady next to First Lady Michele Obama: "We're not quitters." As a nation, we're not quitters, but we have been cowards, meaning we have not as Attorney General Eric Holder stated, acknowledged the impact of our past on our present global competitiveness.

Langston Hughes said in the poem "I Too": "they tell me to 'eat in the kitchen' when company comes. But I laugh and eat well and grow strong. Tomorrow, I will set at table when company comes, no one will dare tell me to 'eat in the kitchen' then."

Company has come. In the Jim Crow, segregated past, our economies were segregated as well. The world wasn't as interconnected as it is now. We are in competition with European and Asian countries that for the most part are homogeneous and had no need for a Civil Rights or Voting Rights movements due to that fact and the structure of their governments. One noted exception would be China's human rights struggles in general and specifically Tienanmen Square.

The president articulated such in his speech last night. We need "everyone at table" to be competitive globally. A failing school in a predominately African American or Hispanic district is a failure for America as a whole. To use a sports metaphor, there are less people to compete on the floor of the global basketball court and the same players are getting outrun and outgunned. When the drop out rates increase in such municipalities, the recidivism of the prison-industrial-complex is not the solution. So, everyone at table means we're going to have to solve the legacy of segregation and "Separate, but (Un) Equal" not only for this nation to be competitive, produce and sell, but to survive.

I cheered when President Obama stated we're going to stop giving tax breaks to companies that outsource American jobs. I have an Engineering Physics Bachelors from North Carolina A&T State University. I am a US Air Force veteran. I worked in the semiconductor industry in Process, Device, Manufacturing. Yield Enhancement and Product Engineering for 15 years. I was laid off August 26, 2003, my wife May 31, 2001. Our income has never recovered from our highest earnings at that point in time.

I now run into a lot of engineers and tech types that can't find employment. They may hear as I have that I'm "overqualified based on my years of experience." Technically, that's not saying I'm old, but the result of the twisted flattery is I'm currently underemployed as a commission-only sales rep and drawing on unemployment benefits. That's not the best usage of mine nor my fellow comrade's considerable talents.

I can be and a lot of others can be better utilized employed in this country, paying taxes and buying STUFF! This economy has slowed to a crawl because a lot of people like me - tech, HR and management types - have to do the delicate balancing act between dwindling assets, gearing up to pay for college and keeping a roof over the heads of our families. I honestly don't care how much cheaper you made it overseas: I eat and live over here!

I wrote an open letter on another blog regarding this to the previous administration. It's also published in the book: "Unemployed: A Memoir." I end this essay with the link to it. I doubt President Bush nor Congress read it. My hope is that it makes us all think about what we're creating for our grandchildren:

Chapter 19: Open Letter

Self-Portrait

2009-02-02T13:21:00.000-08:00

(Homage to Langston Hughes and his poem, “I, Too”) © 31 January 2002, The Griot Poet

Langston Hughes said: “I, too sing America.
I am the darker brother.”

I am the one
Burning under the hot sun
You derisively nicknamed
“Buffalo soldier”
Because of my Afro?

I am also the Cherokee:
Befriending the runaway,
Giving my daughter to him in marriage,
Joining him to my tribe,
Creating the Seminole.

I am the Irish overseer:
Bursting into the slave quarters,
Raping my own great-great grandmother,
Siring Julius Goodwin and a host more mulatto children.

I am the offspring of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemming:
Some of us destined for the last class,
Others hair so straight; skin so bright to crossover as white

So, when you call me “n----r”
You obviously
Can’t see
You vituperate
A pureed pedigree
As everyone has had
Their piece of African me!

As would be the case
Someone related to Egyptian race
Would decipher the hieroglyph
“America”
Into three distinct words:
“I am race?”

Check your attitude!

For pride in
My negritude
Allows me to enlighten your case

As you point your
Jeering finger
At me through space,
You will inevitably
Pimp-slap your own damn face!

Without me, though you wouldn’t hear it
Would you have the hairstyle “The Bo Derek?”
Would dreadlocks, locks and fades have left the east side venturing to the west side?
And hip hop become hip POP?

Forced here in chains and cargo crates,
It was you who gave me great chase
Bring me to this place
That by GOD’S
Grace
The cane came together
Where Ezekiel’s dry bones
Dotted the landscape:
“Son of man: can these bones live? O Lord GOD, thou knowest! *”

I am the darker brother:

I am the Mende; the Ashanti; the Yoruba; the Igbo.
I am the Seminole; the Cherokee; the Choktaw; the Sioux;
I am the Irish; the Italian; the German; the Arab; the Jew.

I am the melting pot: I am all of you!

As Langston Hughes said,

I say again to you:

“I, too sing America.
I too am America.”

I, too!

* Ezekiel 37:3

A Ground-Breaking Opportunity-A Ministry of Commerce and Wealth Transfer

2009-01-23T22:47:00.001-08:00

Quitting

2009-01-22T15:10:00.000-08:00

© 22 January 2009, The Griot Poet

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Unfortunately: there are some really sick people. That can look at the First Family – Barack, Michele, and our little angels Malia and Sasha – that look more like the Huxtables than the Sanford’s or burnt cork face Step-in-Fetch stereotype fantasies and pronounce the head: Antichrist.

From pulpits and talk radio shows over airwaves and the Internet… yet, I didn’t hear these self-righteous ingrates berate: Enron, World-Comm., Tyco, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Wall Street, AIG and Bank bailouts!

While modern-day Robber Barons and fat cats made out like greedy fat rats and fleeced the economy negatively affecting both Republicans and Democrats!

Idolatry is a dementia that ascribes non-human status so that threats to the life of the current Commander-in-Chief INCREASE after a landslide election and an economic recession caused by the Junta cabal that preceded his administration whose only current sin is an inclination towards the promise of CHANGE.

The slew-footed, knuckle-dragging, un-evolved, deranged Cro-Magnon cavemen that listen to Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Sean Hannity (minus Combs), like their every twisted, politically-poled-to-manipulate-the-base word came from Mt. Sinai on holy tablet writ!

I QUIT trying to make sense of people whose twisted self-esteem is based on my Step-in-Fetch debasement.

Speaking of Holy Writ: The Scriptures says Antichrist appears after the rapture of the church from the earth, so my question to all those esteemed, evangelical, political biblical scholars: “Why are YOU still here?”

Shaun Boothe-Unauthorized Biography of Martin and Barack

2009-01-19T19:00:00.000-08:00

Something to chew on...

2009-01-01T08:42:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year!

Long live "the Boogie Man!" TGP

After Jericho

2008-11-06T21:15:00.000-08:00

(c) 6 November 2008, The Griot Poet

The significance of the election of the first African American president holds meaning in the biblical story of Moses and his protégée Joshua.

Moses could not go into the Promised Land but was allowed to see it from a mountaintop. The nation of Israel, freshly freed from Egyptian slavery, still had a “slave’s mentality.” They esteemed themselves “as grasshoppers” in the sight of their adversaries as ten out of twelve spies reported. The minority – Caleb and Joshua – said for all intents and purposes: “Forget that! We can take them!”

The new nation’s lack of faith gained them the chastisement of wandering the wilderness for 40 years until Joshua and a new generation walked through a parted Jordan in similar fashion to parting the Red Sea into the Promised Land. The land “flowing with milk and honey” was rich in resources that needed workers to harness them, and had many battles – starting with Jericho – to maintain their claim to it. The new, younger nation had to WORK for their reward.

A wall has fallen, just as significant as the Jericho wall that a new nation marched around in silence for seven days, increasing their circuit proportionately matching each day’s number, shouting on the seventh and fighting to claim their prize.

I was five-years-old and a month from graduating Bethlehem Community Center, a still mostly all-black kindergarten in Winston-Salem, North Carolina when Martin – our Moses – ended his address to the Sanitation Worker’s Union in Tennessee with “I’ve been to the mountain top.” History reports he afterward collapsed in the arms of his aids, exhausted and depressed due to death threats and self-inflicted stress from his extramarital affairs. Tearfully, my class would learn from our teachers our Moses prophesied his own demise to the coincidental annual date of his opposition to the Vietnam War.

It has been forty years since Martin, and Obama is inaugurated the day after we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Joshua. Obama as our first man of color as Chief Executive represents a mere 2.3%: 1/44 presidents in the office.

We are the remnant that has wandered the wilderness after forty years of measured progress in Civil Rights post Emmitt Till: separate water fountains and schools, forced integration, prison recidivism, black exploitation films, de facto re-segregation, the Rodney King Riots, O.J. Simpson, James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, questionable police killings, Oscar snubs, negative images in the media and seeing others progress their own agendas – women, immigrants, Hispanics, Gays and Lesbians – using the same tactics birthed in the basements of black churches. Now they with us are a coalition along with seventeen percent Republican voters that supported the candidacy of Obama and are the first evidence that maybe, we as a nation have “grown up” a little from our ignorant past.

However, Google “anti-Obama sites” and see what you pick up. The right-wing is in a dual quandary of an identity crisis and the open sores of a significant political loss. No less than Newt Gingrich is poised to oppose any Obama policy that is even center-right. As I see it: the identity crisis Republicans suffer are from the confusing mix of (1) traditional fiscal conservatism (a stance I think they should return to), (2) evangelicalism and its aversion to science, (3) neo-liberalism and its devotion to laissez-faire “trickle-down” Stockton, Chicago Friedman style economics and (4) neo-conservatism and its now defunct “Project for a New American Century” which staffed much of Bush 43’s foreign policy philosophy in the quest to expand the American Empire in a post-modern version of the Pax Romana (Peace of Rome) to a Pax Americana by force of arms.

So, it’s up to us.

As Maya Angelo stated poetically, we are truly on this new “Pulse of Morning,” the black, the white, the straight, the gay, young and old, men and women that supported this historic election can’t just shrink away and think Obama can govern by himself. He can no more do that than raise record sums in campaign contributions by himself.

Walls fall after a might shout. Victories are won after effort, struggle and a fight. You’ll still need to be engaged after the glow of the election is over. Email President Obama from www.whitehouse.gov after January 20, 2009; call your local Congressional Representatives and Senators.

Stay engaged: pray for Obama. We have a history of martyrs and a culture of violence that must change. Politics in the age of the Internet is no longer a bench-warmer sport; you can’t just vote and hope everything works out OK. Blog and email; chat and post; write poetry and essays. Your ideas are viral contagion, as has been observed and can be spread and shared by all of us benefiting all of us.

The old model observed by Noam Chomsky – Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at M.I.T. – was defined as “the bewildered herd” reacting to sloganeering, mantra, rumor and dogma versus making informed decisions as an electorate. This, of course, benefited business interests that controlled the electoral process with their well-heeled dollar donations to the campaigns. YOU shattered that. This was without a doubt, the most informed decision as an electorate we’ve made for our future. We survived the specter of Jeremiah Wright and charges of socialism, communism and “Joe the Plumber.” That herd was expected to respond like Pavlov’s dogs, then “fade away” after the election and let the business chosen elites govern them. You are not helpless anymore and President Elect Obama needs our help. The economy is in a shambles, the jobless number is bound to be terrible tomorrow and since two-thirds of our economy is dependant on consumerism, it’s unfortunately going to get worse before it starts to get better.

Your mission is simple: make President Obama not only a barrier breaker, but he and Vice President Joe Biden the most successful administration in the history of this nation that proved on November 4, 2008 that we are as good as our promise to all peoples; “We the people.”

Tomorrow

2008-11-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
”To the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!

”Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Tomorrow.

Not just tomorrow: November 5th.

I explained to a friend: Martin for all intents and purposes became "Moses" with his "I've been to the mountaintop" sermon. Prophetically uttered the day before his assassination.

In "April 4, 1968" by Michael Eric Dyson, Martin was said to be suffering from depression. Possibly preaching lifted his spirits a bit, but the constant death threats and juggling what was by history's reckoning a very recreational extra marital sex life, he was approaching a nervous breakdown.

40 years.

We've likened ourselves to the ancient Hebrews in so many ways: about 12 million Jews in the entire world today; we're about 12 percent of the US population. They were enslaved in Egypt 400 years; we were enslaved in a new Egypt 400 years. God sent Moses; we assume He sent Martin. Joshua and Caleb took the remnant into the Promised Land after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.

40 years ago I was five years old. Mrs. Wooten and the teachers sat our kindergarten class down and explained "Dr. King was killed."

I learned later, coincidentally it was one year to-the-date he spoke out against the Vietnam war. I knew that this significant personality would not be around to see my formative academic years: we all cried at the news, and graduated the next month in May. We all started the fall in a world without our saints: Medgar, Malcolm and Martin.

Forty years: Blacksploitation movies, Vietnam protests, all-volunteer force, recession, Reagan, "trickle-down" economics, the Republican Revolution, 45% of the prison-industrial-complex, recidivism, lack of self-help, still lacking education, not taking care of the babies we make, blamed for welfare while giving corporate welfare, the usual suspect for rape, murder, theft, frisked in King's Department store at 14 ("shut up, boy! I know niggra's steal"), a reprieve from the Bill Cosby show, booty-call-I'm-gonna-get-you-sucka-blacksploitation-movies (again), a few Oscars from liberal Hollywood, a brief solace under the Clinton years, "Oruborous [the world eater] unfettered" as every crazy Friedman/Stockton/trickle-down theory got its day under DUBYA.

400 years. 40 years. 8 years in purgatory. Moses. Martin. Joshua. Obama.

We have this reverential fear of "tomorrow." What will it mean on November 5th?

Rain

2008-10-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

© 29 October 2008, The Griot Poet

I hear the coming sound of rain…

Rain touches my face
after 40 years of wandering the Wilderness of Sin – lynch ropes to frighten us from education, beatings for votes, bombing churches and buses, police batons, German Shepherds, pressure hoses, poll taxes and marching – round and round Mount Sinai,
outside the Promised Land promised by
Moses

who had "been to the mountaintop"
and prophesied
his own demise
but that you and I
Vickie
would see
this Promised Land.

But, we were "as grasshoppers" in our own sight
and we assumed, those of our adversaries,
those that would use devils devices
and apothecary
to defame
a new Joshua
that would refrain
a hope that the slaves
of previous generations
could not conceive
because their yoke
could only be thrown off
by a "renewal of their minds"

for in the economy of God
what is unseen is more real
than Wall Street

Main Street
is under His sovereignty and
CEOs
His feet.

Your husband and your children
rise up and call you blessed,
and you are the wife
dressed in white
of Leon's youth.

What the world will see
is what you have taught
the fruit of your womb
that when they are old
"they will not depart from it"

for we/they are this new
generation

that finally emerges
from this Wilderness of Sin
into a future
of

HOPE.

For Mrs. Vickie Nowlin’s birthday, NC A & T Alumni, English Major, Principal, and friend (I was best man in their wedding)...

James 5:7 "Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain."

Enough!

2008-10-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

© 25 October 2008, The Griot Poet

First: he’s accused of being a “closet Muslim” (no one asked my NOI cousin),

Then: a pedophile (for a while).

They’ve run the gambit: eight-years-old when Ayers was so rudely bold and “pals around with terrorists,”

Explaining his heart to “spread the wealth” to “Joe the plumber”: Aha! He’s a socialist!

Even though the Berlin Wall (like Jericho’s) did fall: he’s now a communist!

They haven’t tried Satanist (yet), though after previously being labeled “the antichrist” on right-wing blogs, I think technically that would be a demotion!

A former, noted military man and statesman’s devotion to his party turned on its head as he endorses without fear or dread: “one with style and substance,” “a transformative figure,” “steadiness” with “intellectual curiosity”

According to Rush, though the general wrestled for months before his decision, obviously racially motivated (And…: Scott McClellan’s endorsement?).

We have experienced eight long years of an “Oedipus complex” run amuck. Ross Perot’s “sucking sound” now NAFTA plus 10 billion bucks a month to a war that shouldn’t have been, nearly 5,000 lives and 500,000 mortgages owned by the bailed-out banks (still failing), potentially replaced by another who’s grandfather and father finished their naval careers at flag ranks above his Captain.

He MUST one-up them and insight the nightmare of President George Washington’s “warring factions” invoking the worst in us, skewing unity beneath the Orwellian sign: “Country First.”

This is a referendum on 25 plus years of Friedman/Stockton “trickle down” schlock economics, divisive politics birthed from “the great communicator”: “welfare queens,” “Willie Horton,” “the ’92 LA riots,” “the lesser of two evils,” “right-to-life,” “PNAC Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” “tax cuts for the wealthy,” “swift boating,” “lipstick politics,” “ROBO calls from Giuliani,” “Unpatriotic,” “Traitor,” “terrorist…” ENOUGH!

I invoke Langston Hughes as I say to you all:

We too, are America! VOTE!

Epiphany

2008-10-24T22:35:00.000-07:00

http://blackmenformccain.com/2008/10/18/barack-obama-for-president/#comment-747

Stephen King in "On Writing" often referred to writing, or the process of writing as I believe "excavation"; "sculpting."

Ray Bradburry in an interview on the 50th anniversary of "Fahreinheit 451" noted a lot of his stories "wrote him," and that he relied on his "secret voice" to make sense of the worlds he created.

There is a boldness in penmanship that you otherwise would find yourself tongue-tied to express. In politics, that makes you "unsure," 'unsteady," "not ready." In academia, you may just be thinking of a reply.

I do not know this writer at all. He is/was a black republican. I respected his views as I read them even if in many cases I did not nor could I not agree.

He (the writer), like a lot of pundits and republicans, struggled mightiliy to excavate the "2000 maverick McCain" from now distant memory. Once labeling the religious right as "agents of intolerance," McCain embraced them at Jerry Farwell's Lincoln University. Once saying he "fought for the stars and stipes, not the stars and bars," McCain allows the vilest vitriol to emanate from his supporters: "terrorist, kill him, socialist, communist," evidence of a campaign that like the man at the helm of the ship has clearly lost control of the rudder that should guide it. A cool iceberg, unrelenting is in front of him off the bow of the sinking ship. He need not hit the behemoth: his Titanic is sinking.

The writer knows this, and I sympathize with him because of the mention of the pending death of his father. Mortality has a way of taking the sureity out of your lifespace, the inevitable memory of the last conversation you had with your loved one before their demise, the helplessness of staring at a coffin when the essence of themselves - their laughter, their warmth, their smile, their hugs and their tears - no longer exists in this realm. Reviewing the tape over again in your mind: "this person used to be alive, and I loved them." It births anger and raises doubts.

What is poignant is the evolution of his whole person: political, emotional and yes spiritual.

Like Bradbury, this blog "wrote the writer." One of the reasons I [personally] voted for Obama was frankly how well he wrote in "Dreams from My Father." I feel if you can write, you can think, therefore reason and then apply critical thinking skills to a myriad of situations. The political and sadly, the American education system "soundbites" this process into meaningless "gotcha" momemts.

I also voted on a cool Monday morning at 7:10 AM in Cedar Park, Texas because http://outsourcedamerican.blogspot.com is more than my story now. It's no longer just me and doubts about whether I "played the game" or "pleased the right people." No. The system is broken, and someone needs to fix it.

Writing is almost a lie detector test even in fiction: the worlds you create must have rules, "make sense" in those rules and follow them to the end. In nonfiction, you try to be narrative and honest and trust where the story leads. The writer swung wildly from blind support, to doubt about Sarah Palin, to applauding her speech at the RNC, to doubt again and to switching his support.

He has excavated the corridors of his mind and found more questions than answers. The whole blog, good points and not-so-good, irreverant, reflective and sometimes funny, is a scuplted masterpiece. Don't just read the most recent post: take time to paruse them all.

One-Fifty

2008-10-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

© 3 October 2008, the Griot Poet

What was socialism on Monday became capitalism on Friday.

What we needed was some pork barrel spending to sweeten the stinking pot of gruel:

- A provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children.

- subsidize renovations of restaurant franchises

- cut import duties on wool and wood

- Virgin Island and Puerto Rican Rum (Section 308)

- American Samoa (Sec. 309)

- Mine Rescue Teams (Sec. 310)

- Mine Safety Equipment (Sec. 311)

- Domestic Production Activities in Puerto Rico (Sec. 312)

- Indian Tribes (Sec. 314, 315)

- Railroads (Sec. 316)

- Auto Racing Tracks that will save Nascar track builders $109 million this year(317)

- District of Columbia (Sec. 322)

- Wool Research (Sec. 325)

- A research tax credit worth about $8.3 billion PER year for:
- Microsoft Corporation
- Harley-Davidson Inc.
- and subsidies for the overseas financial services earnings of U.S.-based multinational corporations such as General Electric Co. and Citigroup Inc.

also known as: the same old offshore SHELL game!

Do they take us for fools?

Hank Paulson originated this while chairman in thief of Goldman Sacks.
And, he's ransacked
the futures of our great-grandchildren knowing full well this will only delay the inevitable:

recession.

"Dick" is currently at an undisclosed location adding up how he's set up

the economy to fund his retirement.

Check Bush and Cheney's exchequer after "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" ride off into the sunset.

What was socialism on Monday became capitalism on Friday
with bipartisan support from both parties
as they flipped-the-script
and made this
150 BILLION dollars
MORE of our tax dollars spent!

And yet: I can't forget the prophetic utterance one of the Founding Father's advised:

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty."

President George Washington, 1796 farewell speech

Bootleg

2008-09-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

[paraphrase] ..."when he gets in trouble, you see the razzle-dazzle... the bootleg play..." Chris Matthews, Hardball host on the Rachel Maddow show...

© 25 September 2008, TGP

Chinua Achebe would say “Things Fall Apart”:
Big government bureaucrats become socialists and print $700 billion dollars not supported by gold or mint and give Hank Paulson a blank check with no oversight attachments…

When you have no spirituality: you enlist an evangelical leggy, ex-beauty queen; political Viagra for a limp, flaccid campaign as your poll numbers had you fading from the scene, that’s herself under an investigation for ethics violations: either firing the top cop for not firing her ex-brother-in-law or his zeal to appeal to Congress to redress the impact of sexual predators in Alaska – take your pick! “Roads to nowhere” end where “bridges to nowhere” should have begun!

Three interviews – Charles Gibson (Hard); Sean Hannity (Soft) – avoiding the Yin/Yang calamity by using leggy photo ops with Heads of State at the UN (talked about Hamid Karzai’s new baby to my chagrin), Katie Couric made the girl WORK because she couldn’t pull her usual Jedi skirt-above-knee testosterone mind trick…(“Why don’t I research that, Katie and get back with YA!”) avoiding at all cost tête-à-tête with the diminished 4th estate, now known in its epitaph as “yellow journalism.”

- Cheney first on the search committee for his candidate, then changing his residency from Texas to Cheyenne, Wyoming so HE could run (for shadow president);
- Hurricane Gustav used to conveniently “un-invite” Bush and Cheney from their own party’s convention;
- Palin selected as last-minute intervention after one meeting, a phone call and calling that vetting a Vice Presidential Candidate;
- The deregulator-cum-regulator-cum-“the economy is sound”-cum-“I meant the American worker is sound”-cum-current crisis manipulator…

Throws his most recent “Hail Mary” pass because he’s a PUNK running completely scared and out of gas faster than price-gouged pumps on the east coast! Winning, not “Country First” is what matters to him most.

Because: political life is scary when you bootleg a “mandate for change” because you were part of the need FOR it, that’s why lipstick politics, bitter comments and charges of elitism – when YOU have 7 houses and 13 cars – matter more than reality, and you have on your own, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to say!

No apology for Hillary...

2008-09-10T08:22:00.000-07:00

Some hypocracy
requires poetry not
too long to the point. TGP

A Very Selective Amnesia

2008-09-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

© 5 September 2008, The Griot Poet

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dear John: One of the first stages of dementia is a mild case of amnesia.
So, it was unpleasing to me NOT to hear anything about the economy during the RNC
Spiteful spit fest that jested against community organizers trying to fix this mess that bureaucracies like yours and Karl Rove’s attempted permanent Republican Majority rule chose to ignore…

So, John:
How do you implore us to “throw the bums out”… when you were ONE?
Voting 90% of the time on tax cuts, oil drilling and what you have intimate experience with: torture. Each of which you were against before you were FOR (flip-flop)!

With a draft-dodging drunk and a punk that had “other priorities” during the same war you refrain again and again that shaped you.

It was quite a coup using Gustav to make them “stay away.” (Wink, wink) They did less this time with FEMA than Katrina, but at least you kept The Penguin away from booze, buckshot; his best friend’s face: and quail hunts in Austin, Texas!

As you tortured our common senses with some uncommon verbal Ju-Jitsu:
You both praised George W. Bush and Dick-the-stick Cheney and damned the last eight years of their administration: 6 of which YOURS was the dominate party!

So, you and the e-Bay, hockey mom, beauty queen, “Hot Governor/Cool State (slogan button), born-again DOMINIONIST that you picked at the last minute are supposed to ignite your party base – Rural, Suburban and Blue Collar Archie Bunker on the street – while Cindy McCain wears $350,000 of dress and jewelry and Barack and Michelle are the uppity elites?

Did you think we forgot the last 8 years and 7 houses that you can’t remember?

Unlike my cousin, your father’s station gave you a choice to leave your Hanoi Hilton. The same privilege that got you into Annapolis and graduated in the bottom fifth!

And, Cindy was your 25-year-old hootchie when your first wife Cathy’s injuries no longer made her worthy to be married to you: for better or for worse; in sickness and in health. You had to BEG Nancy Reagan for her endorsement she’d locked away on a pissed-off shelf!

But, like Bristol Palin’s teen pregnancy, that spiritual baggage has been put on the shelf, even James Dobson and Bill O’Reilly has had second thoughts about the subject, when if the teen was named Sasha or Malia Obama they’d be having conniption fits!

One of the first stages of dementia is a mild case of amnesia.

So, John:
How do you implore us to “throw the bums out”… when you were ONE?

I guess that’s what fits when your real fear is what year 2050 demographers and Public Enemy prophesied:

“Fear of a Black Planet”

Sarah Palin-Gender Card (Comedy Central)

2008-09-04T20:51:00.000-07:00

Doublespeak Good

Originally published on this blog: © 20 November 2004, The Griot Poet

Inspired by Jonathan Schell article, “What Happened to Hearts?”:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2014_

we will fight
with the steadfast resolve
of an unusual, artful draft dodger-in-chief
along with his veep
who both couldn't be bothered
when they were young men
to shed blood
for a war in Vietnam
that they steadfastly
believed…
in others bleedings.

we will fight
with strong delusions
guiding our common sense,
lies becoming truth
as greater than seventy percent
still believe Saddam was a threat
and involved in the attacks of 9-11
despite his rival Osama
referring to him
as an infidel.
oh, well!

we will fight
the constitution
with Patriot Acts I, II, and III,
calling it democracy.

we will fight
and twist words of peace
from Palestinian Prophets
into what Cornell West would call
"Constantine Christian"
diatribes, slogans and dogmas
to shepherd
Noam Chomsky's
"bewildered herd"
into the accepted
brainwashed,
corporate-controlled
network germ:

"war is peace.
"freedom is slavery.
"ignorance is strength."

we who bubble forth like fountains
see George Orwell's prophesy
becoming reality,

and General Tacitus'
observations
becoming most poignant in this season:

"they made a wasteland, and called it peace."

Sarah Palin-Wonder Woman

2008-09-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

Source: Moveon.org email.

Transcript follows (TGP):

TRANSCRIPT:
Mike Murphy, former McCain advisor: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor work. Engler, Whitman, Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. And these guys, this is all like how you want to (inaudible) this race. You know, just run it up. And it's not gonna work.

Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter: It's over.

Murphy: Still, McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

NBC's Chuck Todd: Don't you think the Palin pick was insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too (inaudible)

Noonan: I saw Kay this morning.

Murphy: They're all bummed out.

Todd: I mean, is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?

Noonan: The most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political [B.S.] about narratives and (inaudible) the picture.

Murphy: I totally agree.

Noonan: Every time the Republicans do that because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at and they blow it.

Murphy: You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism and this is cynical.

Todd: And as you called it, gimmicky.

The Reluctant Eulogist

2008-08-10T17:48:00.000-07:00

© 10 August 2008, The Griot Poet

Like "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card
I find I am a "Speaker for the Dead"
speaking of endings
and beginnings
in two days having lost
Bernie Mac,
Now Isaac Hayes

"He was a bad mother... shut your mouth!"

He brought style to baldness before MJ,
Chocolate was never as sweet as when he sang,
Back in the day
If you HAD no luck with babes... you played a 45" by Isaac Hayes,
And she, felt gorgeous for his refrain...

He wore chains before Run DMC, Mr. T or gangster wannabe's,
He rapped before Ludacris or Nelly,
He was the foundation for disco, urban contemporary music,
midnight love videos, Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross and Barry White...

Yes, I am a speaker for the dead,
and something about us is passing fast
into the past,
into oblivion,
into the cloud of witnesses...

I quote myself in the piece "Last Days":

I lament the death of soul music:
born of marches,
riots,
Civil Rights songs.

It was OUR marching music,
the beat of OUR drums,
when we sang out
we gave NEPHESH *
back in spirit-filled medley.

I lament the death of soul music
and the architects of its pentameter,
journeymen and master musicians
as capable of 'da FUNK'
as arranging a Philharmonic Orchestra
without sampling past hits,
shocking lyrics
or "lip sync."

I lament the death of soul music
with the sincerest tears...

In twenty years:

Music that calls our women "hootchies, B's and 'hos,"
Music that calls our men gangsters, N's and thugs,

Lyrics so FOUL as to attain the label "parental advisory"...

will

BE

the oldies!

* NEPHESH - Etymology, Hebrew: "Living soul."
Soul, self, life, seat of the appetites, seat of emotions and passions, activity of mind, activity of the will, activity of the character

Soul Music
Date: 1961
: music that originated in black American gospel singing, is closely related to rhythm and blues, and is characterized by intensity of feeling and earthiness

Bernie Mac - Celestial Effervescence

2008-08-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

© 9 August 2008, The Griot Poet

Heaven just got a little funnier,
For a time, our memories
of Bernie will be the only sunny
things that brings smiles to our
visages.

He
was on a mission
to dismiss
his previous
existence
in poverty:
raised on Chicago's south side
by mother, grandmother, Deacon grandfather,
being "from the 'hood" he wore with pride
and a badge of honor:
not dropping his drawers
and acting thuggish
(OK, a few films in a sophisticated way, maybe)
but acting and making people laugh
that garnered him and fellow comedians Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey and DL Hughley
nomination for a Grammy.

Doting father and grandfather,
he carried himself with dignity, honor
and wide-eyed
delight
with laughter
and a joke behind
each smile:
"I ain't scared of nobody!"

And nobody need be afraid:

Heaven just got a little funnier.

The Chitlin' Era: an essay on TheRoot.com article

2008-08-03T15:16:00.000-07:00

On the Chitlin' Era: I never ate them as a child, having the notable experience of seeing (and smelling) fresh-slaughtered bowels at a family reunion: as I recall, flies avoided the aroma. Hot sauce does not cure every taste.

On Obama: I was a late convert to the "Obama bandwagon," and I never viewed myself as a swooner, nor a disciple looking for a political Avatar to follow. I decided on his first book: "Dreams From My Father." Recall that our first stab at commentary about him was that he wasn't "black enough." My observation is the same as Carter G. Woodson [paraphrased]: we are well-conditioned to “know our place,” and react almost violently (Jesse’s “cut his nuts off” comment) when one of us looks to move beyond the crab bucket. It takes all the excuses away for sure. Anyone who can write well is a person with organized thought patterns that can take new information, make an informed decision and go in a particular positive direction. Also, that same intellectual prowess allows one, president or pauper, to admit to mistakes and learn from them.

We've had eight years of "stay-the-course-steadfast-non-flip-flopper-decider" mentality from a person who's not the least bit intellectually curious, the only person in his family (from Connecticut) to speak with a southern drawl; an economy that's been a boon for his REAL masters and our reputation abroad evidenced by the boos and cat calls when our president shows up and the rock star attendance when Mr. Obama speaks in Europe.

Michael Eric Dyson said on Larry King that Mrs. Clinton all but had the nomination sewed up except that "history broke out in the person of Barack Obama," and you want to label this the "Chitlin' Era?"

Forty years ago, we lost Martin; a few years before that Malcolm and Medgar. We owe a debt to them as well as the women in the movement for the kind of world we have now: not perfect, but without the overt signs on bathroom stalls and restaurants.

What will change with an Obama Administration? Nothing overnight except the possibility of young black males growing up to be president and not "ballers and rappers"… An Obama Administration should be held accountable to the US Constitution, unlike the current one that circumvents it almost daily and at will. Pulling the lever, filling the square, punching the chad is not the end: politics is a participatory sport and there are no bench warmers when your premise is rule by the people. If he fails, that's called a term limit and it has no reflection on us as a people or culture. Senators and Congressmen fail and get reelected: that's called apathy.

Though I found your comments witty, “Chitlin’ Era” is almost an apology: a conciliatory mea culpa to the waning majority now moving from the suburbs back to gentrify the inner city to feel a sense of control and lower their outlay of money at the gas pump, and that [majority] will be decidedly browner by the year 2050. It is apologizing for a black man having the audacity to run a credible presidential campaign raising funds and breaking records with the power of the Internet.

If Mr. Obama wins it will be because the last eight years gave him the framework to “break out in history”: now was his time. If McCain wins, then the US richly deserves the inheritance it will get from that decision and the continuation of Bush’s policies: the whirlwind.

“Chitlin’ Era” is on par with his opponent comparing him to Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton: it’s what you say when you’ve run out of material.

Father's Day - a Letter to Sons of the Promised Land

2008-06-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

Fatherly angst blogged - TGP

I grew up in a ghetto, glorified in rap videos and CDs that demonstrably are urban reservations for the systemic problems of a society that hasn't grasped the concept of cause and effect, reaping and sowing, chickens coming home to roost.

I now live in a suburb with better access to more expensive drugs and white high school students convicted of counterfeiting - a federal offense - and not serving a day in jail.

I live in a time where the office of father is camp buffoonery in "Good Times", "All in the Family," "The Cosby Show," "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," "The Wayans Brothers," "Family Guy," "American Dad," "The Simpson's" and "The Boondocks." I list them as I've watched them and laughed at them all, similar to blacks laughing at the minstrel show "Step-n-Fetch" in burnt cork faced self-derision.

Then, I demand respect.

But I do live in a time where the Democratic Party decided to be the first to field an African American as their candidate - the Republicans had their chance with Colin Powell in '96 (his wife's mental illness a litmus to his "fitness to command," despite having been National Security Advisor and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan and Bush), and Alan Keyes who said and believed what evangelicals like candidates to say and believe - was summarily thrown out of the Republican National Convention in 2000, though he "still believed in the party." I applaud his faith.

My motivation to be a father was from my example of fatherhood: a man who had no recompense when the supervisor called him "nigger Bob" at work. Human Resources did not exist. They had personnel then, that only served as on-site bean counters, intervention only solicited when things at the workplace got almost hopelessly bad and out of control. I treated him with respect in his home because outside to bring a paycheck home, he literally went through hell...

What do I want for father's day?

I don't want to feel like I'm living by myself anymore.

- If the lawn needs mowing, mow it.
- If done with the computer, shut it off (before midnight preferably).
- If done with video systems, turn them off.
- If done viewing television, ditto.
- If the sink's dishes need washing, wash them (and put them up).
- If your clothing in the laundry room needs folding, fold them.
- If done, then ask "what's next?"

All should be done without thought of compensation. No one calls me "nigger" to my face as my martial skills are well known and respected.

I am the only one in a small company that does not have much in the way of diversity training. Since we're tied to the defense industry, I am not political at all as my candidate is insulted daily, especially since he won his party's nomination. I am making 20% less than my pre-lay off salary, but I have a mortgage and college tuition to pay. My daily hell is less overt than grandpa's, but I, like he, have responsibilities.

You will each be fathers someday, managing your own households. How you behave now is what you [should] tolerate from your own offspring without complaint.

All I ask is not extraordinary or expensive. In a 24 hour day, we each have 1,440 minutes. All I ask is a few minutes of your time, 20 per day at the least of tasks listed above, 120 for the lawn. 1,320 - 1,420 minutes left to sleep, eat, play videos, surf the Internet and generally lead your lives as the values your mother and I model should govern you accordingly.

That is more priceless than a Hallmark card given on a contrived day of "respect."

1 Corinthians 13:13
"And now abides faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these [is] charity (love in action)."

November 5, 2008

2008-05-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

Today is May 29, 2008. I am blogging this in the San Diego Airport on business.

I passed a newstand that had a Newsweek cover: "Obama, Race and Us" with Barack's smiling face on the cover. As I broused the bookstore, I saw predictions like "Will Michelle Obama hurt her husband's chances in the fall?" I opted for a Chai Frappacino at Starbucks (fattening, I know).

I title this November 5, 2008. It is meant to save as draft and on that date I will post it after Obama's election. I boldly make this claim after my business trip with two very staunch republicans that don't mince their words about: Saddam having the capability of becoming operational with regards to weopons of mass destruction, finding Sarin gas, which most experts state have a shelf life of two years (this was manufactured in 1991 or 95), because we're in the business of war, they wholeheartedly support this was that drains our economy and cost us $4 at the pump and increased cost at the grocer.

I am not the result of Obama's victory. My vote is one.

No. Mr. Obama won because of the youth he mobilized that suddenly realize the maddness their parents' made will inexorably be their world.

I type this because I will be charged up, challenged on my vote as much as Mr. Obama can expect to be attacked, threatened and lampooned for the next 8 years as he tries to rebuild from the ashes of the economy, the rubble of Katrina "a more perfect union."

I type this because my vote is one and his win is the result of cumulative votes, cumulative angst and cumulative hope for the future. Oprah didn't cast a spell on us. Michelle didn't embarass us. Jerimiah Wright didn't appaul us. We were better than that.

So I formally thank Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney: without your favoritism of the rich, without your gutting of the abundant surplus, without your invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 (that the Pentagon and 600,000 PROVED didn't and you've even said it yourself on many occasions), Mr. Obama's win would not be possible.

By fear and tyranny, you've made us a "more perfect union." Democracy isn't automatic: we found it to be a team sport.

Parsec's Measure

2008-05-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

Bush on the Constitution: ‘It’s just a goddamned piece of paper’

2008-05-16T05:53:00.000-07:00

I spoke on this 1/17/06 in the piece "Imperious Unum." Since he's an "expert" on foreign policy ala his comments in the Israeli Knesset, I thought we should review his thoughts on the US Constitution:

From Capitol Hill Blue

The Rant
Bush on the Constitution: ‘It’s just a goddamned piece of paper’
By By DOUG THOMPSON
Dec 5, 2005, 07:53

Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.

Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”

“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”

And, to the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that “goddamned piece of paper” used to guarantee.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the “Constitution is an outdated document.”

Put aside, for a moment, political affiliation or personal beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. It doesn’t matter if you support the invasion or Iraq or not. Despite our differences, the Constitution has stood for two centuries as the defining document of our government, the final source to determine “in the end ” if something is legal or right.

Every federal official - including the President - who takes an oath of office swears to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says he cringes when someone calls the Constitution a “living document.”

“Oh, how I hate the phrase we have “a 'living document,'” Scalia says. “We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean. The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete’s sake.”

As a judge, Scalia says, “I don’t have to prove that the Constitution is perfect; I just have to prove that it’s better than anything else.”

President Bush has proposed seven amendments to the Constitution over the last five years, including a controversial amendment to define marriage as a “union between a man and woman.” Members of Congress have proposed some 11,000 amendments over the last decade, ranging from repeal of the right to bear arms to a Constitutional ban on abortion.

Scalia says the danger of tinkering with the Constitution comes from a loss of rights.

“We can take away rights just as we can grant new ones,” Scalia warns. “Don’t think that it’s a one-way street.”

And don’t buy the White House hype that the USA Patriot Act is a necessary tool to fight terrorism. It is a dangerous law that infringes on the rights of every American citizen and, as one brave aide told President Bush, something that undermines the Constitution of the United States.

But why should Bush care? After all, the Constitution is just “a goddamned piece of paper.”

© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue

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Period

2008-05-14T06:28:00.000-07:00

© 14 May 2008, The Griot Poet

The best description of our dilemma was spent by the candidate’s “magnificent other,” to coin a phrase from the prophetic sage known as Rev G:

“Black America will wake up,” Michelle said. “We have a problem with self-esteem.”

It seems I hear that from the young – too young to recall Medgar Evers, Malcolm X or Dr. King except from a term paper essay assigned to them – or the old, that think “he’s too young and/or black” to run their country.

Somewhere in the middle are the intelligent white liberals, the educated black masses, the McGovern Democrats that pundits say can’t win: so, the political salvation of this nation is in the hands of – as his opponent has stated – white, uneducated, blue collar workers that can’t do the math on gas holidays?

Don’t let FOX-Y, MSNBC, 60 Minutes, CNN, and ABC (especially) or Disney, try to sell us on the notion that we are casting our vote because Barack is “black.”

Recall that at the outset, he wasn’t “black enough.” That he didn’t have the stuff of growing up in the south, in the ghetto, in the Civil Rights Movement, in the black church. That he was possibly a closet radical Muslim (an oxymoron), or the latest rift: the antichrist. See: www.bushisantichrist.com or your current bank account and wallet!

That he’d be the stuff of other candidates in the past like: Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Alan Keyes (Republican) and currently Cynthia McKinney for the Green Party – all show and no substance.

But his campaign has had the panache of seasoned veterans, the strength of gladiators and the grass roots organization that can only stem from immersion in Chicago politics.

So, please don’t let the news, owned by only eight media conglomerates that the only time African Americans are in the Board of Directors meetings are with Hispanics as janitors, that cheer about the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Wall Street and haven’t talked much about YOUR Main Street, that lecture us on the “good things outsourcing accomplishes,” which have ties to the military-industrial-Congressional-complex, that sanitize the lasting effects of the middle passage, slavery, Jim Crow and discrimination – Amadu Diallo and Sean Bell – that cheerlead us into a war in Iraq with no weapons of mass destruction present tell us that we are casting our vote because Barack is “black.”

Tell them to “step back.”

We’re casting it because like any American with sense, we’ve been convinced by his fundraising, his business acumen and his management style he can DO the job of president… period.

The Tie That Binds - Commentary

2008-05-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

First, a review I posted on Michael Eric Dyson's web site regarding "April 4, 1968":

I was exactly 5 years old April 4, 1968.

It was April 3, 1968 I was sitting with my dad listening to Dr. King deliver "I've been to the mountain top." I remember asking my father "what does longevity mean?"

I also remember seeing him, a man that had been a golden gloves boxer in his youth and in the Navy, crumpled over in front of the television. It was like someone had punched him hard in the gut. His eyes were red. I remember my mother wailing like Rachael. April 4, 1968 was a Thursday.

That Friday, I was dropped off at my daycare, Bethlehem Community Center in Winston-Salem, NC. I later learned when I took my youngest son there on a home visit, the United Methodist Church designated "Bethlehem" to kindergartens on the east/black side of town and "Wesley Community Center" to facilities on the west side of town.

The teachers sat us down and explained what happened. I think it was more for them than for us. Amazingly, we understood and responded with hot tears, anger and genuine hurt. I personally felt like I'd lost an uncle or close relative. We were to graduate from kindergarten that June. I thought "I don't have him with me," and I knew that fall I would start first grade and the beginning of my academic life, still in a segregated society - forced busing would integrate us in the fourth grade - without him. I tear up as I type this.

Everyone I graduated college with has a memory of that day and the reactions, the gunshots, the news coverage. We are the last generation that will hold such memories.

I remember confederate flags flying and horns honking as others were happy apparently that Dr. King had died. This was also repeated apparently in Vietnam, a war he spoke out against, according to black veterans I've spoken with. What they could not have fathomed is the seeds planted by the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King would germinate into a harvest in history in the personage of Barack Obama.

I bought the audio version of the book and listened to it at work. I plan to expose my sons - 25 and 15 - to your words. Thank you.

***************************

Since the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, I've picked up my copy of James H. Cones' "A Black Theology of Liberation." I bought it while home in Winston-Salem, NC at a local black bookstore. I'd thumbed through some pages and like many books I mean to complete, other priorities took effect. It's an interesting read.

I've also read commentary about the so-called apostasy of "prosperity gospel."

(I mention this because Dr. Dyson lists himself as an opponent of it and opines/personifies Dr. King as one in his final chapter.)

Lastly, by Karl Evanzz "The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad."

So, what is the tie that binds Liberation, Prosperity and Nation of Islam theology?

Racism.

In "The Messenger," the crucible that built The Nation was the racial climate of the times, even to the point Evanzz (yes, his name is spelled with 2 z's) suggests that the Klan helped finance them since their stated goal is (still) a separate black state or states within the US.

In a lot of the commentary about prosperity gospel, like Dyson in "April 4, 1968," the author and the commentators site quite clearly what they think the ministries are doing wrong as in: the display of wealth, a God that only cares for the wealthy, etc. Absent from their critique is what they actually think and can admit the ministries are doing right.

TD Jakes preached to about 14 people for over a decade until a conference he thought he'd do one time called "Woman, Thou Art Loosed." He wrote it up and tried to go the conventional route of publishing. He ended up self-publishing it, and that was the start of his business empire. Had that fortune not occurred, we probably would not be hearing about a TD Jakes. He rightly points out the 50 ministries his church sponsors like HIV/AIDS, the reduction of recidivism and financial education to name a few.

Cone sites only that prosperity gospel makes you feel good but "fails to help those in need." He also fails to site - other than Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church of Christ - where the Black Liberation Theology model yields similar results.

My Socratic question:

What if: our so-called Founding Fathers freed the slaves? Would that not typify a "Christian nation?"

Our founding fathers were "deist," which Webster defines as " a movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe." The perfect religious philosophy for defining Africans as 3/5 human in the Constitution. Jefferson went so far as to write his own bible, excising every miracle Jesus ever performed: http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/.

Manumission was granted to Africans in the United Kingdom in 1872. There are no "African British" or "African English" as they've had full citizenship as Americans of African descent have experienced the Jim Crow version of apartheid until recent history.

The answer, in my mind, is that typifying the Christian values of mercy and charity, the seeds of a Nation of Islam, Black Liberation Theology and Prosperity Gospel would not have been planted and these "chickens would not have come home to roost," and these variants would not exist on US soil.

It is hope that we reach for. History and self-esteem (Nation), Liberation and Prosperity had so long been denied us, we will gravitate towards centers of worship that answers those vital questions. It is acerbic to suggest the Nation is only populated with hate speech, since they have by all regards an effective ministry towards the reduction of recidivism in the black community. It is a sound bite we hear when Reverend Wright says "G-D America" without the supporting text to the sermon that he was preaching post 9/11/2001 (9/16/2001), albeit over-the-top, it took a journalist and researcher to FIND this sermon seven years later and loop it on You Tube. It is naive to suggest prosperity ministers have no care for the poor since many of them have the same type of ministries as their Liberation Theology brothers, as Liberation Theology has to concentrate somewhat on financial wealth building techniques. The "Balm in Gilead" are the constructs we've made to bind the wounds we receive as numerical minorities in Corporate America and in political races.

No repudiation asked of the Clinton's for their pastor - convicted for pedophilia with a seven-year-old girl LAST year, or John Hagee - the Roman Church as the "whore of Babylon" and "Jesus never claiming to be the Messiah" has been asked of McCain.

So I say: if the establishment wants the monies to these ministries to dry up, if they want them to cease to function as they do against white supremacy, a bumper sticker says ERACISM.

Obama would be questioned if TD Jakes were his pastor. If he wore a tie pin every day, the news would be the one time he didn't!

And, if our deistic Founding Fathers had made like Spike Lee and done "The Right Thing" would we be having this conversation at all?

Remember: the president that got us into this war that's cost us $4 per gallon gas, increased grocery and utility bills wears a flag pin and supposedly goes to church.

"Uppity" - poetry piece

2008-05-06T21:02:00.000-07:00

Kinda late - apologies. TGP

© 20 April 2008, The Griot Poet

Sound bites like nanotech NANITES flip-flop through cyberspace at light speed pace, “elite” is the twenty-first century code for “uppity” Negro. So let me be the first cultural hero to admit:

I am bitter!

Because you see, I didn’t turn the other cheek on August 26, 2003 – date of my lay-off and coincidentally the four-year anniversary of my beloved father’s death. So, though I bravely ventured into the unknown, I was baptized “kicking and screaming” into the Dead Sea of depression, landing on the sandy shores with the taste of salt on my tongue,

I “walked through the valley of the shadow of death” as “fiery darts” wickedly assaulted my dreams and my means to survive, giving me a plausible script for my own demise. No help from my spiritual mother and father who at the time had their own issues…

I was alone.

Until I was challenged to wrestle from sundown to morn,

I mourned less the life I led and would not let Him leave me until I said: “bless ME!”

I walked away, limping, battle-scarred and with the title of P-R-I-N-C-E.

To keep my mind and my sense,

I recorded my angst on blog-to-book: “Unemployed: A Memoir.”

LOOK!

I’m not white. I’m not blue collar.

My father was, and he had that and the other side of the double-edged sword in his back how he was treated: starting with “n” and rhymed with “figure.”

The gas pump;
The checkout line;
My bills;
My mortgage doesn’t really give a rat’s whether I’m an Independent, Republican or Democrat!

So, just maybe I’m a little “uppity” to think Richard Dawkins has NOTHING for me, even though he may number me among Whitman’s “fleas”: Cambridge professors-cum-NY Times bestsellers can’t list on their curriculum vitae:

- Bus boycotts;
- Marches on Washington;
- Nobel Peace Prizes;
- Opposition to Vietnam/Iraq;
- Poor Peoples’ Campaigns…

So, maybe I’m a little “uppity” clinging to my spirituality (and sometimes my guns) because the three functionalities left to me of dysfunctional PNAC governments the unholy trinity of:

- Apathy;
- Suicide;
- Or Anarchy

From which we are a hair-trigger, so let me be the first cultural hero to admit:

I’m an “uppity” Negro that’s bitter!

Last Stand for Jonah

2008-04-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

Jonah’s not backing down!
Having been divinely clowned in the digestive bile of Orca,
He’s had a revelation
Praying in the belly
Of the beast
That the only thing
More unpleasant
Than disturbed digestion
Is for the full cycle manifested
And he
Recycled
As fertilizer for
Seaweeds on
Corporate
Coral
Reefs!

Barack's Former Pastor on a Roll - Stay Tuned!

2008-04-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

I admit: this has been an exhaustive campaign, even for one that claims to be a "political agnostic" (or, at least I did) because I didn't want to be bothered with office debates and vitriol. So, the following email posted below was my "fresh breath of political air."

However, the comments below are not mine: Reverend Frank Garrett, Jr. runs http://www.garrettradio.net/, which evolved from a local Austin, Texas talk show "The Wake Up Call" that still plays in the city.

So, he has the perspective of being a political and social rights activist as well as a commentator on the body politic.

The Kerner Commission said we were becoming two Americas: Black and White, separate and unequal http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6545/. Recent data suggests in our school systems, we are no more integrated now than we were back then and/or resegregating by dropping court-ordered mandate http://theintegrationreport.wordpress.com/2008/01/.

Restrictive covenants have been removed and some of us rise to the middle and upper classes due to education. So, we can hide a problem behind class and preparation now, make those lucky enough to have prepared to feel "special," significant "the one."

Go to a school on the east side or the south side of any major city: go to the computer room, the locker room, the library. Then go to the same facilities in the suburbs to complete the experiment.

Then, go to a gas pump for $4 a gallon, a grocery store for $80 worth of food in fewer bags than you remember it covering. Call your loved one in the Iraq War we should not now or ever be fighting. Ask someone who's lost their job and has to file for bankruptcy. As someone whose house hasn't sold in over a year and their carrying two notes. If one thing has unified us now, is the boat we find ourselves in together...

*******************************************************

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is enjoying a second helping of 15 minutes of fame, and many Americans are seeing it as detrimental to Barack Obama's race for the presidential nomination. The Internet is loaded down with posts by blacks online lamenting the preacher's effort to defend himself against a barrage of media coverage very negative and racist. Rather than wring our hands and wish he would shut up and sit down, I feel invigorated by his candor, intellect, and yes, showmanship. Of course we all know white folk looking for a reason to not vote for Barack will use this as an excuse, but they never intended to give him their vote in the first place. Let's at least be honest about one major thing here - America is still a very racist nation.

Senator Obama is smart enough, ready enough, and organized enough to ride this tide to a conclusion in about a week or ten days when escalating gasoline prices will replace Rev. Wright as America's biggest problem. All you have to do is listen to right-wing talk radio to know who is most affected by the reverends dialog - rednecks and intellectually challenged white Americans too stupid to determine for themselves what truth is. Those are the useful idiots listening to the likes of Rush, Sean, Laura, Mike, Bill, and the troglodytes on the FOX News network. Intelligent white people don't take their cues from bombastic racist, sexist, homophobic draft dodgers on talk radio - only the brain dead gun loving, Bible thumping redneck hicks do that. Unfortunately, they all have voters registration cards too so it poses a problem.

Mainstream media is now fully engaged in the "beat back Obama" movement so you can expect them to keep Rev. Wright front and center long after he goes home satisfied with his effort to exonerate himself. Dogs that they are, mainstream media has become nothing more than electronic tabloids more interested in sensationalism than national security, health care, housing, and education. Sick puppies that a lot of us are, we wring our hands and watch the boob tube religiously. Now is the time for we the people to do the smart thing and keep up with the issues that impact our pocket books, homes, and employment, rather than what a retired preacher said about America in one of his sermons. What is America saying to us is the question of today - do we matter or has Iraq replaced our nation as the governments responsibility?

I personally have no problem with what Rev. Wright is doing now. I agree with him - preachers must do what God wants done regardless of the impact it has on those running for office, or trying to win the Super Bowl, or the Lotto, or the Masters. The Lord's thoughts are not our thoughts, and our thoughts seem to border on what others think rather than what God thinks. That is why pundits and dunderheads are saying Rev. Wright is hurting Barack Obama's campaign. If our nation is stupid enough to not elect a man because of his skin color, or former pastors rhetoric so be it. Barack Obama's biggest liability is not really Rev. Wright - it is instead his honesty and lack of baggage. He is not a phony. In a nation of phony patriots, phony Christians, phony politicians, and phony citizens - he is odd and hard to compromise. That is why guilt by association is being used against him - if you can't pin something on the man you want to beat down, blame it on his former pastor.

Peace - RevG

Directive 51

2008-04-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

© 19 August 2007, The Griot Poet

Directive 51 might as well be Order 66 given by an Emperor bent on shredding the Constitution and his Dark Lord apprentice…

We started this with a night of cyber-terror: the error of throwing out thousands of African American votes, calling all criminal rogues when no such records existed, (thanks to Choice Point, Incorporated), overseas military ballots mysteriously vanished, arguments over hanging chads and chaff, disenfranchising their rights as Americans…

The vote count was halted by the Supremes, five of which deemed themselves more qualified to select a president than “We the people…”

Then, we had 9-11, birthed by a poet named Osama Bin Laden, knowing the international code for distress and that in the Koran, “darkness was created on a Tuesday…”

Remember when gas was .98 a gallon?
Remember when we had a budget surplus in 2000?
Remember when a house on the market selling in more than one week was… too slow?
These things weren’t that long ago…

Then we had “Code Orange” alerts, Hurricanes’ Katrina, Rita: when fear is your diet, you’ll gladly allow your civil liberties violated by the NSA/CIA military-industrial-complex in violation of Posse Comitatus!

Now, to my point: Google Directive 51 on your own computer and it will take you to www.WhiteHouse.gov…

It was posted without fanfare and knowledge that you wouldn’t search or care…

The gist of five pages of legalese is this: if there is another catastrophe, which is the president’s – and not Bobby Brown’s – prerogative to define what catastrophe is, HE becomes the government!

And will restore governmental powers at such time in the future as HE deems fit.

“If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, (chuckle) just so long as I'm the dictator!”

All hail, Caesar!

And now we have the sixth anniversary of a “day of darkness, horror and dread”; we’ve lost more dead in Iraq that had nothing to do with 9-11 than we lost in those twin towers.

The chatter increasing as that Monday on August 6, 2001 when the grinning chip heard from his intelligence brief “Bin Laden Determined to Attack US with Planes” and refrained from doing anything except… get back to his chores and photo ops at the ranch.

On this particular anniversary, 9-11 reoccurs… on Tuesday.

“In the Koran, DARKNESS was created… on a Tuesday!”

Directive 51 might as well be Order 66 given by an Emperor bent on shredding the Constitution and his Dark Lord apprentice!

"Uppity" - Article

2008-04-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

An article e-mailed to Daniel in the Black Democratic Coalition for publication. VERY insightful.

With this - and the inspiration of the so-called "debate" last night - I will compose a poetry piece of the same title as Ron's article. Well Done! TGP, 17 April 2008

A bonus: very FOXY news...

**********

Daniel-

This thing with Hillary Clinton accusing Obama of being "elitist" reminds me of the shenanigans they pulled in South Carolina, only worse. So, please consider the following for publication:

Uppity
By Ron Horne
April 15, 2008

Interesting how Senator Hillary Clinton paints Barack Obama as an elitist. This son of a Kenyan, fatherless at the age of two, raised by grandparents of a teenage mother, is elitist. This Harvard Law Review editor who, instead of going for a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship or quarter million dollar wall-street law firm salary, worked as a civil rights lawyer and community activist in the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago for a fraction of what he easily could have made, is an elitist. And Sen. Clinton? She’s lived in the White House, has two posh homes on the east coast, and, between her and her husband, the former President of the United States, has racked up $109 million in the last eight years. Folks, that’s $13,625,000.00 per year on average. According to Reuters News Service (3/25/08), “Obama's income with wife Michelle jumped in 2005 with the re-release of his first book ‘Dreams from My Father,’ which brought him $1.2 million, and in 2006 when his second book ‘The Audacity of Hope’ earned more than $500,000.” So, he went from a quarter million to nearly two million in five years. The Clintons make over $13 million every year. Hillary and Bill-$109 million; Barack and Michele- $2 million. Sen. Clinton ran as the Democratic incumbent to the presidency, like she was the heir to the American throne of the Clinton dynasty . . . until, of course, the American people said otherwise. And Obama is elitist? Clinton said that the caucuses and primaries in the small rural states, those states where Obama won, don’t matter, don’t count. Rather it is the large, populous, urban, cosmopolitan states that matter. She basically said that rural America doen't count and Obama is elitist?

Hmmm. $109 million vs. $2 million. White house v. brick house. First Lady v. first brutha. The elitist argument may work for Clinton in the “Alabama” portion of Pennsylvania (James Carvilles’ characterization, not mine), but in North Carolina, as well as other highly populated Black states and cities, Black voters will read her attack as code for something many accomplished and aspiring Blacks have been called by their White counterparts in both high and low society: Uppity. You know, uppity, as in Uppity Negro. For those too young to be familiar with the phrase, it means a Black man or woman, who doesn’t realize their “place” in the social fabric, i.e., beneath whites in terms of what he or she is “allowed” to do. He’s elitist, she says, thinks he’s better than you. Translation: despite his hard work and educational and professional achievement, you are better than him. Here I have been living and working in Washington, First Ladying in the White House, getting funding together from lobbyists to run my coronation campaign, waiting my turn. Then all of a sudden, this young buck comes in, unknown to most, hasn’t lived in the White House, hasn’t “suffered” under the trappings of the presidency, hasn’t paid his dues to be known, yet he comes in here with his Harvard degree and law professorship, holding those big tent rallies like some kind of black Baptist minister getting people all stirred up when it is MY turn to be president. Who does he (that BOY) think he is?

Uppity. Black people of a certain generation know exactly what that means: second class, lower class, racially undeserving, ambitious beyond your station, not knowing your “place”. As the first Black “post racial” candidate (a term that, to my knowledge, has never been applied to White candidates), Barack Obama cannot, and will not, say what many Black people will inevitably take from the latest Clinton tactic. Frankly speaking, he’s cool like that. He will do what he usually does, make simple comparisons and appeal to the basic fundamental needs of all people of all races that are not being met by the current political and governing system where the Clintons are heavily entrenched. It is no wonder that in a poll last week more than 25% of women who had supported Clinton now think less of her as a result of her campaign tactics. It is no wonder Clinton is losing to Obama by margins of 7, 8, and 9 to 1 among Black voters. It is no wonder that Clinton trails in delegates, votes, and states as of this writing. She says what she needs to say and does whatever she needs to do to win. And while they may not fall cleanly and distinctly into the categories of lie, cheat, and steal (i.e. lie about sniper fire, cheat on the Michigan and Florida primaries, steal pledged delegates), her campaign has and is effectively burning a bridge between herself and the Democratic party’s fundamental constituents: Blacks, Hispanics and Women. She continues to pursue the Rev. Wright issue (while his statements have been labeled as “hate speech”, no one has addressed the truth of his statements [we did bomb Hiroshima, Vietnam, and Iraq; Blacks have been medically experimented on by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) from 1932 and 1972, there is resentment in the Middle East due to the effects of our funding of Israel on Arab Palestinians]), the 3 a.m ad (there’s a Black man lurking around the corner in the dark), and whether he is Christian or Muslim (“so far as I know”). She decries NAFTA and the Colombian Free Trade Agreement (which appears to have benefitted Hispanics, although some may differ on this point) and flip-flops on issues, displays emotional schizophrenia, and relies on her husband’s record (the good parts) as her curriculum vitae, something many women, and feminists in particular, find especially irritating.

As for Obama’s statement itself, according to MSNBC.com, he was trying to explain his troubles winning over some working-class voters, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:

"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Like the statements of Reverend Wright, his explanation also has a historical foundation. The Rosewood Massacre (http://www.displaysforschools.com/rosewood.html) resulted, in part, from the economic hardship of the white segregated town of Sumner and the economic success of the black segregated town of Rosewood, Florida. The catalyst was common for the south: black man accused of violating a white woman. But the economic climate between these two towns in the same county led to the massacre and abandonment of Rosewood by its Black residents and businesses. Today, this country is filled with segregated “sundown towns” where blacks cannot live despite the money to do so. And numerous towns in this country have instituted or tried to institute anti-immigration ordinances to prevent immigrants from getting jobs or renting property including Riverside, New Jersey, Valley Park, Missouri, and Farmers Branch, Texas. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/nyregion/26riverside.html).

Despite these documented circumstances, Clinton chose to do the politically expedient thing: parse the words instead of the facts. Certainly, if she learned nothing else from her husband’s campaigns (or the Bush campaigns thereafter), she had to have learned that Presidents win elections via their base first, even if they need swing and independent voters. The take-no-prisoners conduct of her campaign could leave her bereft of a large portion of that base support were she to somehow garner the Democratic nomination. Of course, on the bright side, since Senator Clinton has clearly opted to utilize the tactics expected to come from the Republicans in the general election, after the last primary in June Obama will be able to argue, as he already has on occasion, that having weathered the Clinton storm he has proven that he is vetted and electable. Ironic since, by her own actions, Senator Clinton may succeed in putting this uppity Negro in his place . . . The White House.

GriotPoet

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