RIP Frank McCourt

No Kelly Monday today. Today we mourn a great novelist, superlative human being. A lowly teacher. Imagaine that--not a video vixen writing a "franchise." A teacher, who inspired millions.

Bravo Francis. Bravo. Many folks couldn't care less unless you could appear on The Wendy Williams Show. But I do.

State Budgets and Convicts. Maybe it's time for Norplant?

State budgets are in the toilet. Prison populations are booming. Gangs--from La Eme and MS-13 to cracker meth cadres and teen family killers to numerous African American goon confabs...are taking over these places. So what to do? Maybe folks on the outside are getting more enlightened--relying on technology to patrol the cellblocks Yet more surprising comes common sense with regard to reducing the number of convicts out there. So says the Associated Press:

"Prior to this fiscal crisis, legislators could tinker around the edges - but we're now well past the tinkering stage," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to incarceration.
"Many political leaders who weren't comfortable enough, politically, to do it before can now - under the guise of fiscal responsibility - implement programs and policies that would be win/win situations, saving money and improving corrections," Mauer said
In California, faced with a projected $42 billion deficit and prison overcrowding that has triggered a federal lawsuit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to eliminate parole for all offenders not convicted of violent or sex-related crimes, reducing the parole population by about 70,000. He also wants to divert more petty criminals to county jails and grant early release to more inmates - steps that could trim the prison population by 15,000 over the next 18 months.
In Kentucky, where the inmate population had been soaring, even some murderers and other violent offenders are benefiting from a temporary cost-saving program that has granted early release to nearly 2,000 inmates.
Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is proposing early release of about 1,000 inmates. New York Gov. David Paterson wants early release for 1,600 inmates as well as an overhaul of the so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws that impose lengthy mandatory sentences on many nonviolent drug offenders.
"These laws have neither curbed drug use nor enhanced public safety," said Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union. "Instead, they have ruined thousands of lives and annually wasted millions of tax dollars in prison costs."
Policy-makers in Michigan, one of four states that spend more money on prisons than higher education, are awaiting a report later this month from the Council of State Governments' Justice Center on ways to trim fast-rising corrections costs, likely including sentencing and parole modifications.
"There's a new openness to taking a look," said state Sen. Alan Cropsey, a Republican who in the past has questioned some prison-reform proposals. "What we'll see are changes being made that will have a positive impact four, five, six years down the road."
Even before the recent financial meltdown, policy-makers in most states were wrestling with ways to contain corrections costs. The Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project has projected that state and federal prison populations - under current policies - will grow by more than 190,000 by 2011, to about 1.7 million, at a cost to the states of $27.5 billion.
"Prisons are becoming less and less of a sacred cow," said Adam Gelb, the Pew project's director. "The budget crisis is giving leaders on both sides of the aisle political cover they need to tackle issues that would be too tough to tackle when budgets are flush."
In contrast to past economic downturns, Gelb said, states now have better data on how to effectively supervise nonviolent offenders in their communities so prison populations can be reduced without increasing the threat to public safety.

A source close to a well known Georgia conservative state senator sighs, "Things we wouldn't have even deigned to discuss as recently as last session are now options we may have to stomach, okay?" [Thus ended my long-distance interview with the law-n-order crew...Maryland governor and General Assembly folk weren't anxious to talk to me.]

Diversion, enhanced drug treatment, family therapy/intervention, transition training etc--that will help. It's beyond axiomatic that this is cheaper than incarceration. And what to do about criminals who aren't even citizens? Perhaps that should be a new use for Guantanamo. Would be poetic justice if you aren't a Castro fan. But maybe another sacred cow is needs be examined. The one saying we can't nip the problem in the bud, so to speak?

I met a Dr. Strangelove-type cat--no wheelchair but round shades and a bizarre accent he says is Scandinavian--at writers' event in New York a few weeks ago. He reads my books; he follows the blog. The mad scientist (social scientist) composes thriller & sci fi short fiction. But he's bona fide academic who teaches at a major university within the NY-NJ-CT region and advises on human resources issues of all things. My new pen pal asserts we should offer prisoners early release if they consent to sterilization. Male and female. And early release--even clemency--for those who consent to pharmaceutical and other medical, etc. research (including dangerous space and undersea exploration). Yep. He says money should be set aside to pay young girls--and even housing, tuition, etc. assistance-- in "at risk" neighborhoods etc. to use Norplant and Depro. And extensive cultural interventions to keep the latinas from getting pregnant--like money or US citizenship in return for some tied tubes?

Mengele stuff, yes Lord. Scary. But...?

Listen, this might get traction. Stranger things have happened. I never thought I'd see a day when there'd be (1) a black president, period, and (2) hardcore Republican state legislators (who usually make the GOP pols in Congress look like Oxford dons) supporting all kinds of prison reform. Maybe this track--the mad scientist & eugenics track, will be a norm one day? Anything's possible, and we're running out of alternatives. Our president says "No excuses." Your thoughts?

Vacation Books! Not all all Beach Reads need to be mindless...

Three upcoming reviews on stuff to take in the car, the crowded Amtrak coach, the stuffy plane...so you can unwind and be enlightened once you reach your destination...Kiss the Sky, the debut novel by former NPR host and current MSNBC and CNN commentator Farai Chideya, John Wasik's The Cul-De-Sac Syndrome, which challenges us to rethink how we live & build our communities, so we can live better, and Triangular Road, American Book and Dos Passos award-winning author Paule Marshall's long awaited memoir. Come on...aren't you sick of getting sand or mustard in your Nora Roberts and Grisham books?

RIP Walter Cronkite, RIP Journalism

The allegory of allegories, the metaphor of metaphors. Walter, at least try to rest in peace. I know it's hard to rest when Fox, CNN and MSNBC and lord all of local TV news is urinating on what you tried to do.

Michael Jackson's face. If only...

What an average 50 year old African American man should have looked like. Happy, focused, cherishing the highlights of his amazing career. A sort of Springsteen of black music.

But no...

Goldman Sachs: maybe we should tax 'em to pay for some real health care?

Here's Robert Scheer's quick and dirty take on Goldman Sachs doing it up big while the rest of struggle. The dots Scheer expounds upon aren't imaginary. But the lines maybe a little scetchy. Still, argulably Scheer can make is point just on these dots regardless of the connection. Barack's done nothing yet to erase them.

Check it out here. And cheer for Goldman Sachs. Be glad someone's making a big ass bonus and access to a cool mortgage and the best docs and schools. Then weep for the rest of us. It's called ambivalence. Oh, and that's the Goldman Sachs tower, lording over the New Jersey shoreline...smirking at the wasteland that is Manhattan since the crash...

Jeff Sessions, Sonia Sotomayor and White Male Stupidity

Maybe this is what he and his bumpkin constituents were expecting?





Life is all right in A-merrrr-ree-ca/If you're all white in A-merrr-ree-ca...


Enjoy.

Kelly Miller Monday-Third Installment

Essay from 1909. Lots to extrapolate for 2009. And something in this for all points of view:

"Ridicule and contempt--both outward and within private conversations--have characterized the habitual attitude of the American mind toward the Negro's higher strivings...

A people who have made such sacrifice and run such risks for the sake of knowledge, who of their own scanty means were ever willing to support schools for the education of their children, although their property mad been taxed for the support of an educational system from which they were excluded, surely deserve a larger and fuller draught of that knowledge of which the regime of slavery permitted them to gain only a foretaste."

Mandela! The Graphic Novel

Nelson Mandela: The Authorized Comic Book (W.W. Norton 2009 hardcover $27) comes out July 17 in the US. It's the latest in a newfangled genre of graphic nonfiction bios. The range of subjects is stunning: from Malcolm X to J.Edgar Hoover. And most are of amazing quality: crisp and informative narrative, vivid artwork, clean lettering. This bio of Mandela is likewise amazing, appropriate for all ages. But what sets it apart is that is a collaboration. The author is the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The artist is Umlando Wezithombe. Umlando is a group, not a person. A collective of many young South African artist-illustrators. Imagine what you'd have in the typical American graphic novel/sequential art orbit: superstar writers, tempermental artists, anal retentive letterers and inkers coming together, eschewing money arguments and ego? Ha! But it happened here. All for the love of this man. Listen, it took 35 years and a civil war's interruption to build the obelisk to our comparable icon--George Washington.
The book steps over but doesn't leap-frog controversy (ANC violence, ties to Communism, ANC corruption and the elephant in the room--Winnie Mandela). Likewise, the narrative is more episodic rather than a straight line from birth to prison to freedom and detente with De Klerk to the split with Winnie to the marriage to the First lady of Mozambique to the formation of the Foundation. By necessity, most graphic bios don't have that leeway. Imagine David McCullough's John Adams in this form. You can't? Well this is why the story must arc in this manner. Here, the story doesn't suffer. Here, the story shines, figuratively.
As for the art, even the lettering and quality of the panels, the word is shine. Literally. It's hard to imagine that a group, not an individual, created this from penciling to inking.
The book is wonderful for younger people, yet retains a look and read adults will appreciate and enjoy. Fanboys and girls will like this too. Nothing amateurish about it. Indeed, it may be the first graphic coffeetable book, which is not a bad thing given our seeming revulsion to things educational in some circles.
So impress your friends this summer. And learn something.

Kelly Miller Mondays-Part Deux

Here, Miller's responding to a white politician in South Carolina, who was quoted in several Northern newspapers (including Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's Herald) saying some not so nice things about black folks in Haiti, and some conflicting things about Booker T. Washington. Many prominent whites at the time--including President Theodore Roosevelt--considered Washington the de facto leader of black America, and admired his philosophy of punting social, political and civil rights for a vocational and small farming foundation (for African Americans in the South not even a generation out of slavery).

"Your position as to the work of Booker T. Washington is pitably anomalous. You recite the story of his upward struggle with uncontrolled admiration: “The story of this little ragged, barefoot pickaninny, who lifted his eyes from a cabin in the hills of Virginia, saw a vision and followed it, until at last he presides over the richest and most powerful institution in the South, and sits down with crowned heads and presidents, has no parallel even in the Tales of the Arabian Nights.” You say that this story appeals to the universal heart of humanity. And yet in a recent letter to the Columbia State, you say you regard it as an unspeakable outrage that Mr. Robert C. Ogden should walk arm in arm with this wonderful who “ appeals to the universal heart of humanity,” and introduce him to the lady clerks of the dry goods store. Your passionate devotion to a narrow dogma has seriously impaired your sense of humor. The subject of your next great novel has been announced at “The Fall of Tuskagee.” In one breath you commend the work of this great institution, while in another you condemn it because it does not fit into you preconceived scheme in the solution of the race problem.

(referencing Liberia and Haiti) Whenever a lower people overrun the civilization of the higher there is an inevitable lapse toward the level of the lower. When barbarians and semi-civilized hordes of northern Europe overran the southern peninsulas the civilization of the world was wrapped in a thousand years of darkness. Relapse inevitably precedes the rebound. I suspect that the million of Negroes in Hayti (Haiti) are as well governed as the corresponding number of blacks in Georgia."

Your dose of Kelly Miller for 7/6/09. Savor and digest...

The Retort is Here. CNN beware. Fox News--scram!

Launching today is The Retort. Our first factual & analytical exploration: CNN's Black in America II. Here's the inaugural link. Here's an excerpt from the press release:

July 6, 2009
Your mother always told you about talking back -- mainly not to do it. To keep your
mouth shut. To mind your manners. To keep your head down and be happy with the
scraps life tosses at you. After all, talking back could get your hurt. Talking back could
get you in trouble. And historically for black people, talking back could get you killed.
But times have changed. They've had their say. Now it's time for a response.
Welcome to The Retort (www.blackretort.com), launching July 6th, it is the place for
political discourse and plenty of "talking back" on black representation in the media. The
site will kick off with CNN's latest installment of Black In America. Last year the cable
network premiered the controversial series to much fanfare and derision. Reported on and
hosted by CNN correspondent Soledad O'Brien, many criticized the series for having a
detached, anthropological approach to black culture. But was this critique warranted?
Was it a true-to-form examination of black life, or was it a primer for the uninitiated?
What was CNN's motivation? How could they make it better? Or was it necessary at all?
These questions, along with critical analysis, satire and more, will be answered on The
Retort, featuring the work of bloggers Jay Anderson of AverageBro, Danielle Belton of
The Black Snob, Christopher Chambers of Nat Turner's Revenge, Cheryl Contee of
Jack & Jill Politics, Charles D. Ellison of The Ellison Report, Gina McCauley of
Michelle Obama Watch and What About Our Daughters, Vernon Mitchell Jr. of Negro
Intellectual, Baratunde Thurston of Jack & Jill Politics, Lamar Tyler of Black and
Married With Kids, Elon James White of This Week In Blackness, Poet, writer Bassey
Ikpi and more.
The Retort will take a critical eye to the representation of blacks in the media. It's also a
chance for you to sound off on your opinions.
It's time to stop being silent and start talking back on The Retort. The time to speak up is
now.
Danielle C. Belton
Editor
blackretort@gmail.com
661-364-5450

Whither Journalism: Vibe is folding

This is from Gawker.com. Note the irony that an online "news" service for peabrains and short attention span folk breaks it...and that they quote Wikipedia:

Vibe Magazine—one of the biggest music magazines in America—is folding. The entire music magazine landscape is full of the dead and dying.
Wikipedia sums up Vibe unexpectedly well:
The magazine owes its success to having a broader range of interests than its closest competitors The Source and XXL which focus more narrowly on rap music or the rock & pop-centric Rolling Stone and Spin. It also differs from the more staid Essence, Ebony or Jet publications by attracting younger readers of many ethnicities.
It was essentially the black version of Rolling Stone, and its readership grew broader as hip hop became pop music. (Kind of fitting that their last issue had Eminem on the cover). But Vibe hasn't been doing well for a while now; in February, the magazine cut its circulation and frequency, and salaries. Now the music industry is crumbling, and the magazine industry is crumbling, and the music magazine industry is really crumbling.

And I like this quote from theRoot.com: Vibe wasn't always right, but it was one of the good guys."
OK. Recall when music journalism was one of the major fonts of feature writing. Sharp, engaging, insightful? So basically we're saying all we want is TMZ.com-like gossip and tawdry images of cameltoe on redcarpets, screeds, bullcrap fed by publicists of these so-called "artists?" After watching the BET Awards Sunday (and hey, getting the buzz on the landscape of African American prose publishing from BEA) I guess I have my answer.

Kelly Miller Mondays

This is the first Kelly Miller Monday. Kelly Miller was a journalist, writer, mathematician, dean of Howard's College of Arts and Sciences, co-editor of The Crisis.
And he laid down some common sense that, perhaps, our wingnut friends and the T-Pain crowd alike, should heed. Every Monday for the rest of the summer, Kelly's gonna lay down some knowledge. Pay attention, and derive what you can for 2009.



Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr. 1902

To Thomas Dixon, Jr.
…[F] or Southern White men to berate the Negro for failing to gain [as of barely 40 years after slavery and the midst of Jim Crow and terror in the South, de facto segregation and neglect and abuse in the North] the highest rounds of distinction reaches the climax of cruel inconsistency. One is reminded of the barbarous Teutons in Titus Andronicus, who after cutting out the tongue and hacking off the hands of the lovely Lavinia, ghoulishly chided her for not calling for sweet water with which to wash her delicate hands…
(referencing Tom Watson) “The advance made by your race in America is the reflection of the white man’s civilization. Just that and nothing more. The Negro lives in the light of the white man’s civilization and reflects a part of that light.”
Here again we come across the threadbare argument of advocates of suppression and subordination of the Negro. The aptitude of any people for progress is tested by the readiness with which they absorb and assimilate the environment of which they form a part…Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch is handed from race to race , and from age to age, and gains brilliancy as it goes. The progress made by the Negro has been natural and inevitable . Does Mr. Watson expect the American Negro to invent the alphabet before he learns to read? The Negro has advanced in exactly the same fashion that the white race advances, by taking advantage of all that has gone before. Other men have labored and we all have entered into their labors. The Japanese did not invent the battleship, modern artillery, or the modern manual of arms, but they use them pretty effectively [noting Japan’s burgeoning conflict with Tsarist Russia and it’s conquests in Korea]...

Amid Frenzy over The King of Pop, don't forget the "Queens" who died in a mangled subway car

Outside UCLA Medical Center, and the Jackson Family state in Encino, there thousands of people gather. Some truly moved and paying their respects, some wanting to be part of a happening (this is wacky California after all). They mourn with an intensity not seen since Elvis departed this Earth for peanut butter-bacon-Qaalude sandwich heaven, and Mark David Chapman gunned down John Lennon.
I get it. But there's no frenzy, tears, sighs or 24 hours coverage for the working moms torn to pieces, smashed and broken in the Metro crash outside of Ft. Totten station, D.C. "Blanket" Jackson will inherit millions. What of the kids of these women...working moms. Single working black and Hispanic moms breaking their backs? What's being devised or legated to them other than sorrow and financial ruin? And Metro, existing on a pittance because the governments of DC, Maryland and Virgina want to keep it a feudal vassal (and GOP Administrations who see mass transit as a little too populist), is at a loss as to how to keep this from happening again. Some of our suburban jerks even sneered that the dead train operator, Jeanice McMillan, was likely yapping on her mobile phone and not paying attention. Jeanice's phone was found in her crushed backpack, turned off. And her family has to endure that dig. The kids of another mom, Ana Fernandez, are apparently receiving anonymous harassing calls about their dead mother's immigration status.
Let's lay some digital flowers, then, on some graves--not just these women, but the men who died, too. Real Dads. Real couples, like the Whereleys. No not single black moms struggling to feed their kids. Just as tragic. General David Wherley and his wife Ann were on their way back from Walter Reed, where they visited DC National Guardsmen--90% of them African American, wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's no 90 minute Today Show coverage for the Wherleys or the people they were visiting. Meredith Viera--who was once a real journalist--isn't here to prattle on about how she danced to "ABC" in her bedroom as a little girl.
Nope.
In a subsequent post I'll show you photos and bios, memorial funds. Real people. Real problems. No face-altering plastic surgery. But let's start.



This is Veronica DeBose, single mom of two little kids. Going to night school to become a nursing assistant. Once she got her certification, she was going to move to North Carolina, buy a little house, re-start her life.

Impeach Sanford: Does the national or South Carolina GOP have the balls?

First Sarah Palin becomes a national joke: a wingnut MILF albatross for John McCain. Nuff said. Then comes Bobby Jindal--as the GOP's Obama clone; forget Vishnu--how's about an exorcism? Crash, burn. Out parades Newt, Rush, Beck and the rest of the loonies exhorting tea parties, attacking Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the basis of...well...they've shut up. Next, the recurring self-immolation of Michael "Lexington" Steele. But a bright spot was S.C. Governor Mark Sanford. Aren't Red States, scions of the old Confederacy (to whom the tea partiers pid such cupidity during these mumbled maniacal secession discussions), a bit behind the 8-ball in education, infrastructure, health care? Sure. But Mark stood up to that rascal, that arrogant mulatto President and said NO WAY. No stimulus money here. Sure we'll take defense spending, and a kicker for all our rednecks on Medicaid...but we're too proud to take money from that one in the White House to improve our schools and build our vital infrastructures. Hooray!!! A potential national candidate is born.

But the GOP state legislators in Columbia were not so happy behind closed doors. Seems it IS, the economy, stupid. It IS the budget, eclipsing efforts to make sure public schools teach that Jesus created the dinosaurs 15,000 years ago, or that blacks were just over sensitive about that slavery thing.

Mark disappears. Poof.

His staff lies or is told to lie. His wife, well, we all know that pathology. Yep, he's hiking, or we don't know where he is, or he's clearing his head.

No. He's not hiking. He's having his ashes hauled. In Argentina. He's having an affair, this typical family values Republican. This son of the South. This hero in the face of Obamaism. In Argentina. Hope he got some good meat. Hope he brought his kids back some bolos. Hope he got tango lessons.

Don't cry for me, Greenville-Spartanburg/The truth is, I pretty much f'd you

This is misconduct. Time to own up in Columbia. Time for the national GOP, the rapid pundits, the lying bloggers, to admit yet another comedy. Another crash and burn.