Obama, Religious Knuckleheads and Trump

Well, so much has been happening that the time has come for our first synopsis blog …

My first question is whether out president was speaking in governing mode or in campaign mode when he made his speech regarding the federal budget.   He spoke passionately about the kind of society we are supposed to be: one that cares about the least of us.  The ongoing and, with the advent of the Tea Party, ever escalating battle in Washington continues to center around who shall benefit from the blessings and bounty of this society; everyone or just the wealthy.  The Republicans continue to push their agenda of empowering the already empowered while further disenfranchising the already disenfranchised. 

As much as I love President Obama, I, like most progressives, have been dismayed and alarmed at times at his willingness to compromise with the uncompromising Republicans whose goals are his destruction and the total demolition of any and all social programs for the middle class and poor of this country.  To put this as delicately as I possibly can, the Republicans are a bunch of liars.  They say they want small government, but only when it comes to helping the poor.  They have no problem with government involvement in a woman’s right to continue an unwanted pregnancy or in determining who has the right to marry whom.   They absolutely abhor budget deficits, except for the one they created with tax cuts for the wealthy while fighting unfunded wars.  Their contempt and disrespect for this president began with his inauguration ( remember Dick Cheney required a wheelchair for one day only, and could not stand during the ceremony)   on up to  Congressman Joe Wilson calling the President a liar, through to today.   As an African American man, I have personally felt emasculated at the disrespect heaped upon our first African American president, and at his response of turning an apparently never ending supply of other cheeks.

Yet on April 13, 2011, the president appeared to stand up to the right wing bullies when he said of their proposals,  “They want to give people like me a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that’s paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs?   That’s not right, and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m President.”

Good for you, Mr. President!!!!!!!

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Of all the forces at work on this planet, none is more powerful, for good or evil, than religion.  We’ve seen the power of faith at work in the lives of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.  We’ve also seen religion used as a justification and motivation for genocide, slavery, oppression and virtually every conceivable form of mayhem.    How can the same force produce such diametrically opposed results?   The presence or absence of spirituality determines the direction religion-any religion will take.  The spiritual religionist is humble, empathetic, and childlike in his or her approach to God.  The non-spiritual represents the opposite qualities, but rather than childlike they are childish. While the spiritual seek God within and compete against their own potential, the non-spiritual seek God without, and His approval by showing themselves more worthy than everyone else.

We saw a non-spiritual religionist at work when the moronic Florida pastor, who’s name I will not spread, just could not resist burning a Koran. (He kind of reminds me of the spectacularly non-spiritual Pat Robertson who gleefully attributed the earthquake in Haiti to divine retribution.) What he did was stupid, childish, and represented the worst in religion.  He knew his actions could lead to the loss of innocent lives and he just did not care.

Of course, if the Florida pastor is moronic in the name of religion, the Islamic lunatics who responded by killing at least twelve people  are absolutely insane!  They represent just another chapter in the long history of religion- minus spirituality-as the most dangerous force on the planet, and they  really need to grow up.   FAST! 

I’ll be speaking on the relationship between religion and spirituality at some length in the future, for right now, I just wanted to introduce that idea as a tool for understanding some of the insanity that continues to ravage our planet.

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The ridiculous gas price increases have sprung up, almost as overkill for providing proof that pure capitalism is as evil as communism is ineffective and naïve.  We’ve all been taught that free markets dictate the price of any commodity based on the simple concept of supply and demand: the greater the demand, the higher the price, the greater the supply, the lower the price.  Now we learn that that’s all another Big Lie.  Gas prices are soaring, threatening to wreck an already morose economy, despite a world wide oil glut.  Why? According to an ABC news story, the price is being driven up by Wall Street speculators (yeah, the same avaricious Wall Street folks who brought the economy down in the first place with bogus financial instruments) who are betting that oil prices will continue to soar.  This is a self fulfilling prophecy at its very worst:  they send the prices up by speculating that the price will go up!

The story on Wall Street’s culpability was followed up with an interview with Donald Trump.  His solution to the oil price crisis is to take over oil fields in the Middle East!  We all know that Trump is more interested in self promotion than he is in running for president.  But it’s troubling to know that people like Trump, Mike Huckabee, and the original slime master himself, Newt Gingrich, can gain traction in American politics by exploiting the ugliest tendencies in this country; tendencies that have made America hated around the world.

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ANALYZING THE HISTORY OF JALEN ROSE'S DUKE COMMENTS

The hooping and hollering over Jalen Rose’s comments about Black Duke students has subsided, but the underlying issues remain.  As I’m sure you know, during the documentary on Rose’s college basketball team, the Fab Five, Rose commented that he hated Duke for not recruiting players like him, and that the Blacks who did go there were “Uncle Toms.”  It turned out that Rose was referring to kids from two parent homes, rather than those who believed themselves to be inferior to Whites, when he used the term “Uncle Toms.”   

Clearly, the most obvious issue here is jealousy.  Yet even the most universal of all human emotions takes on a different hue when viewed through the peculiar lens of the African American experience.  The economic divide between the Haves and the Have Nots goes all the way back to slavery with the house slaves and field slaves.  The house slaves generally wore better clothes, ate better food and lived in better quarters than the field slaves.  They also identified more with Massa.  So much so, that when Denmark Vesey, a free man, planned his slave uprising in South Carolina in 1822, one of the rules of the conspiracy was that no house slaves be involved.  Regrettably, a house slave found out about the revolt and promptly told his master. 

As wannabe revolutionaries in the sixties, we came to glorify the field slave and demonize the house slave.  Yet, there were house slaves who ground glass and fed it to Massa, as well as field slaves who would sell out their own mothers for an extra piece of cornbread.  None-the-less, the stereotype persisted, and becoming a Have became equated with identifying with the oppressor. 

Education came to be regarded as a means of becoming a Have.  Because education was such an incredibly scarce resource, only the brightest (along with the middle class) were afforded an education.  So now we have an equation that reads: Smart equals Educated equals Uncle Tom.  This is the point at which the logic becomes excruciatingly convoluted, and self hatred begins to dominate the equation: Acting smart (being articulate, having a vocabulary, doing well in school) now equals trying to be White! Proponents of the acting smart equals trying to be White ideology must always stop themselves halfway through their own equations.  For, if being smart means being White, then obviously being Black must mean …

I have had more than my fair share of the Smart equals White mentality.  Growing up as one who naturally gravitated toward words, it was not unusual for me to face a hostile encounter simply because an innocent, but multisyllabic utterance had carelessly escaped my lips.  I have been accused of thinking I was White or, even more telling, thinking that I was better than somebody because of my vocabulary more times than I care to remember.  Once again we see the self hatred equations mounting as white equals better than!

Of course there is a flip side to the smart equals White syndrome.     There is also the ongoing notion of denying selfhood (or identity or race) to appease Caucasians.  To be a race traitor is to deny one’s own cultural heritage.   When I was a kid, I think the most obvious example of black folks’ assimilation efforts could be found on those rare occasions when African American performers appeared on television.  Invariably, they would bleach the soul and feelings out of their songs to make them palatable to White audiences.  Even though African Americans felt betrayed by this treatment of our music, we were so elated at the very presence of people of color on television that we dared not express our disappointment.  (If we really wanted to trace the origins of our speech as assimilation, we would probably have to go back to Kunta Kinte being whipped until he repeated his name as “Toby.”)

The ongoing issue-one of the many legacies of slavery- remains a conundrum wrapped in an enigma:  how does a people maintain any sense of identity (existential autonomy?) within a context in which survival/success is predicated upon the denial of self?  Ironically, this tension does not exist for the descendants of the extreme house and field slaves.  For someone like Clarence Thomas, the assimilation is complete and there is no identity to protect.  Conversely, for many members of the now permanent underclass, no compromise is needed because they were defeated before the game even began.

For many members of my generation (like me,) the only response to the “assimilate or perish “ quandary was to become bilingual.  We had our slang and our own lexicon, which was part of our own private culture.  We also changed our speech patterns drastically, when we sent for job interviews.   Long before Don Corleone said it, we, “never let anyone outside of the family know what we were thinking.”

So, where does all of this leave us now?

We must continue to redefine ourselves as pursuers of excellence.  Our community has to nurture and honor our young scholars as much as it does our athletes.    Ultimately we are going to have to find ways to close the divide between the African American Haves and Have Nots.   But we must ultimately recognize that this divide may be more psychological than financial.

These are just a few of my thoughts.  What are yours?