The god of this world

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

© 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)

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...

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

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...

Bourne Amnesia

© 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...

Ayn Rand

"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...

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

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

Mother's day...

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

© 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

© 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...

Backbone

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

© 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

© 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?

© 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

© 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 to 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 on human decency freed them and was the 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”: $21 billion dollars until 1947.

Couple that with a few coups 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 FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, 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)