Friday, March 28, 2008

Friday Funnies

Perhaps it's time to get this dude over here across the Pond and unleash him on some folks. Here's the comics: as if our suffering under wingnut pundits rampaging on Fox et al isn't cartoonish enough, Uber Coon Bob Johnson and some heavy Hillary financiers have extorted Nancy Pelosi (and indirectly Howard Dean) stating that if she doesn't straighten up, no more $$$ for Democrat House races. Bawlamer princess Nancy just stated that superdelegates should try to stay true to what their state primary and caucus voters decided. Period. There's no evidence she's a an Obamite. Indeed, I don't know what ol' broad's thinking half the time. Damn. The GOP does it right. No superdelegates. Theirs are in the private sector hahaha. And only arrogant Democrats would publicly send something like this to the Speaker of the House. Lawd. Who's scripting this--Paul Mooney? When I was a kid there was a ribald sitcom on ABC called "Soap" (with Billy Crystal...and sadly it begat "Benson"). I used to laugh my ass off even though I didn't understand most of it. 2008 has become Soap, and America is now a giant snicker. Well, check out the smirk on homeboy "V"'s face. That's the kind of mirth we need now. Per Reuters: The signees reminded the House leader from California of their support for the party's House campaign committee and said "therefore" she should "reflect in your comments a more open view" about superdelegates."We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the party and hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters," the letter said.The Obama campaign said the Illinois senator would support the election efforts of House Democrats no matter what the outcome of the nomination fight."This letter is inappropriate and we hope the Clinton campaign will reject the insinuation contained in it," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Brain Candy 101

Literally 15 minutes ago, a Jewish friend of mine over watching NCAA Tourney games asked what's the difference between black readers and movie fans and white readers and movie fans. Hmmm. He must've been watching too much Fox "News" Network. Well to honor his favorite media outlet, let the gross generalizations roll:
I guess it comes down to aspiration and role replacement (for we negroes) rather than pure escapism. Mind you, everybody loves escapist entertainment, brain candy. It's better than the hard cold facts of the cold hard and complex world. It's tough challenging cherished stereotypes, comfortable creeds-prejudices-sacred cows-power-entitlements. But black folks will read a "street lit" novel or a watch a Tyler Perry flick and say, "Uh-huh, that's how it really is on the streets," and "Uh-huh, my family's just like that," and "Uh-huh, my pastor fell in love with a jezebel in the same way, have mercy," and so on... The trick is, too many of these stories are attenuated from reality and channel old hackneyed formulae. Pretty much they often like old Saturday morning cartoons...except for adults (supposedly). Yet we interpose and/or insert ourselves into them. Why? History, creolized African folkways, perhaps. Intellectual laziness inherited and parroted from dumbass white people, lest we forget. Escape for escape's sake? Not really. We have a need to somehow build ourselves up-- as we've been broken apart in real life. Sadly, too many of our authors, screenwriters, directors, music producers, artists etc. trumpet this crap in the same way: as if it's deep, as if it's real. You don't hear too many black authors echo the words of Stephen King: "I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami."
For white folks it's a bit more complex than escape for escape's sake, just as with us. So yes, there is that particular commonality/comparison element, along with intellectual laziness. Then the contrast takes over. Now, a white author can write the 987th inane book about Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and it'll be a bestseller. A white author can likewise write a dreamscape novel about a male butterfly who becomes a dude and tries to romance the blind chick who admired him in a Central Park utterly devoid of Puerto Ricans and empty McDonald's cups...and then the book's optioned and producers line up Dane Cook and Katharine Heigl--with Queen Latifah playing the voice of the sassy beetle who tells the butterfly he must come back to bugdom...perhaps a rapper as a cockroach. Even in those inspid examples, you see a subtext of subconscious denial, not mere diversion. They require entertainment that won't challenge sacred cows, that'll re-affirm stereotypes, cherished beliefs. Keep cognative dissonance to a minimum. That's why ignorant fat guys on sitcoms have hot wives, or explosions and long stringy blonde hair are good. Or that Ellen Degeneres isn't actually a dyke and a liberal. Or people can shoot semi-auto pistols with dead accuracy whilst flying through the air, or endings are always happy, and everyone's got great healthcare and no one's cashing out $300 Million in stock and outsourcing to East Timor whilst folks lose their homes, or criminalists and Homeland Security agents can use outlandish sci fi technology to catch evil pedophiles and shady Arab terrorists (and such agents are always hot, with killer outfits and pithy rapport--not overweight, underpaid civil servants working in cinderblock 1950s office buildings), or mythical wizards and warlocks talk trash like Cali skateboard punks, or the average ghost in a "supernatural romantic comedy" looks like Carrie Underwood, or black characters are always loud/dangerous/fat-n-sassy/mean, Jews are always overly "Jewish," gay men are always raging queens, Jack Russell terriers and tabby cats can solve the murder of the vicar's wife, female characters are always tough/fiesty/irreverant/pine for "McDreamy"/are skinny with big breasts. White people invented the ironic misnomer "reality show." White people invented Fox News. Give me the show. Give me three penny opera for Wal Mart shoppers. Give me Nancy Grace when it comes to criminal justice; give me Sean Hannity on issues of public concern. Dis-engage me. Disassociate me. Numb me. Don't give me alternatives. I want to be fat and happy. For if I'm not, the ice facade melts...
I don't know which axis worse. Bad portends for this nation, though. Hey...it at least explains why both black folks in the ATL and white folks in Peoria avoided The Wire...LOL.
So now can we go back to the damn Louisville game?! Tennessee's within 6 points now and have no clue how that happened...

Nat Turner's back and in control

Sorry for the hiatus--travel (was up in Philly at U Penn and hung out with bestselling author Leslie "LA" Banks--musing on elections and the poor state of music, literature and love), house hunting.
LA Banks will be at Comic Con in July and Harlem Book Fair so check us both out. Speaking of Comic Con & comics, stay tuned for my interviews with Gary Phillips and of course Philly native Mat Johnson.

P.S. I was in 30th Street Station, Philadelphia (setting for my second novel, as fans know) and I noticed an old black women, Bible on her knee, banged-up suitcase and stuffed paper bag at her feet, watching Fox News on an overhead monitor. Laura Ingraham (is she an actual journalist?) was on braying about Obama, then Nancy Reagan...who knows? Anyway I swear this old lady clucked her tongue and said "Why don't someone at that channel slap the taste out that bitch's mouth? Ain't nobody on that station got no sense, or ain't mean 'n shady?" That made my crowded, late Amtrak ride home a little bearable. By the way, catch Rolling Stone's piece on Chris Rock this month.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Paul Scofield, RIP

That's Kenneth Branagh directing Paul Scofield, not that Scofield needed a lot of direction. What, another dead white dude feted by Nat Turner? Should I take a measure of reprisal for the Fox News/Billary snow job re: Barack & Jeremiah Wright?! I'm not so nasty, fanboys & girls. See, I respect genius. Unlike the braying fools and prettyboys we have acting today, this dude was a master. Won the Oscar for "A Man for All Seasons" (playing Sir Thomas More), was nominated twice, including for his portrayal of author/Prof Mark Van Dorn, daddy of "Quiz Show" whitebread cheater Charles Van Dorn. The man could convey a whole scene just by raising an eyebrow, or turning his head, frowning. Ever seen that in one of Tyler Perry's masterpieces? Umm...no.

Something else about that flick, A Man for All Seasons. Those of you who follow the softcore/soap opera version of Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More on Showtime's "The Tudors" might have an idea of what More was about. Lawyers are much maligned in our culture, yet in film a couple stand out, like Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mo"ckingbird), or Denzel in Philadelphia...or Scofield as More. See he would not bend to Henry's lust and lunacy (though admittedly without Henry we Episcopalians would still be Catholics). Law schools used to screen A Man for All Seasons to students studying ethics. Now that's seen as superfluous. I guess now it's Girls Gone Wild and Dancing With The Stars? More's shield was not his faith, but the law. Due Process...even Renaissance notions of equal protection. Scofield took one soliquy directly from Moore's writings, right before Henry put him on trial for treason. George Bush and his rogue's gallery of attorney generals and those who prop them up might want to check it out...and think.

Roper (Thomas More's son in law): "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"

Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"

More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Bye Paul. We're left with Drillbit Taylor and Meet the Browns and Seth Rogen, but we'll manage...

Friday, March 21, 2008

(Good) Friday Funnies

I know a right wing blogger who used to live in Chicago and had no clue how huge Wright's congregation truly was. The Clintons do--that's why Jeremiah was partof the delegation of pastors who came to "heal" Bill of his lascivious tendencies (perhaps they know some rabbis, witchdoctors, herbalists etc who can help Elliott Spitzer). In any event, black people were disgusted and pissed off at crazed white people as of yesterday. Now we're just snickering at you. Let it go. If Obama wasn't a threat, then Hillary would not have opened Pandora's Box. Hell, besides, Barack, the person who looks truly classy here is McCain. He fired the ex Fox News scum who tried to leak this stuff--clipped together with snippets of Obama speeches, on YouTube. So yeah, now we're laughing. Let's get back to health care and housing folks. Fast.
Added -- Princeton Prof Melissa Harris Lacewell laying it down for you fools on Real Time with Bill Maher...

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Happy Maundy Thursday

It's not one of the "biggies." Yet to me it is. Oh, yes, there's Christmas and Easter--Easter being the embodiment of what it means to be a Christian. Some people say these are just random days, or times when you need to get to church, or dress in red and green or then pastels. Some people say the days and dates were fixed by divine direction. In actuality, they were pagan holidays (feasts of Saturn, Bacchus and all that jazz) to which a bunch of dudes in Nicea one truly random day decided to hitch the Christian wagon. And even those holidays were fixed to older, primordial events like solstices and equinoxes. So much for the redneck Christian edict that Islam is a "derivative" or copycat religion, but alas, I'm Christopher Chambers, not Christopher Hitchens, so I'll get to my point.
Maundy Thursday was supposedly the last night of Passover. The Last Supper, if you will. And here's my thesis: you are whipped, beaten and nailed to a piece of wood. Thats horror. But what stirs the soul is preparing for all of that in your heart, your year, your balls. You're told you're the Son of God, and yet you're a man, a normal guy, a poor working stiff with dark skin and wholly hair and deep chestnut eyes and you feel pain, love, yearning (yeah, I say Mary Magdelene was no ho'. She was his girl--so what?). Imagine knowing you are going to die, but not being able to share it with your family, your girl, your friends? Imagine this message passed to you by a being who supposedly could save you if he/she/it really wanted to? Talk about ambivalence!
And then there's this: betrayal. Judas dimed him to the local Jewish authorities (who had a tenuous hold on power) and the Roman occupiers who propped them up...no present Iraq allegory intended ;-), by the way. Yet was Judas evil? Imagine that cat's ambivelance. I don't he was evil, and apparently neither did Jesus. Judas was hardcore, true...he thought Jesus was taking the revolution down a weird primrose path. There was politics, there was personality. And yet Judas loved Jesus and vice versa and that Maundy Thursday Jesus even foresaw the kiss. Interesting. See, on that night of a kiss, of a meal commerating freedom from slavery, he gave us an Eleventh Commandment, one that superseded(though didn't totally erase) all of the rest. If you followed it, the other Ten were pretty much meaningless anyway, right? Love one another. No matter who, no matter what. Wow...
I'll differ with Hitchens here. Never before had such been the foundation of a religion, a creed, the superstitions of a tribe, the rules of a cult. Love one another. Couple with that this curious allegorical act: on Maundy Thursday, he washed folks' feet. He told his boys, and Mary his girl, to go out and literally and figuratively wash feet. Even the nastiest, poorest bastard or ugliest chancrous hag. Wash their feet. All the while, he's thinking, dreading, praying, hurting, peeing in his loincloth as the afternoon shades to night and night darkens and he knows something horrific is coming. He knows his friend Judas must do what he must. He knows he'll never touch his girlfriend's hand again, or kiss is mother, or see his brothers and sisters...
All on a Thursday. A stupid Thursday. Thursday's a blur to most of us in our modern blurry world. But it's my big holiday.
There's so much wrapped in it. Being born, being beate down, being killed, rising from the dead, preaching, saying good-bye--yes, that's the stuff that gets the folks in the pews, that makes for good ratings. But in the quiet day and night before, is what makes him immortal in my mind, and truly shows what a soul is, or can be.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Arthur C Clarke, RIP


Another master, gone. Score one for mediocrity, for mass production, for posers and pretenders. Too bad the average schlub only knows 2001: A Space Odyssey from the film...and even then, all they know is five notes from the movie score. No one knows the marvel of the novel, the themes--melding sci fi, philosophy and religion. Yes, religion. Not the wing nut evangelical stuff, or the jihadi perversions of Islam or the dogma of the Vatican or the insouciance of conservative Judiasm. Oh much more primodial than that: there is something bigger than ouselves "out there"--you just don't need a preacher or imam or rabbi to tell you what it is. Clarke was 90 years old, stricken with polio-related and other critical maladies--and yet still writing. As with Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury or even sista Octavia Bulter and weirdo Ursula LeGuin, Clarke's imagination is responsible for literary conventions that have migrated to popular culture (again, beyond sci fi). I was heartened, at least, when my text-messaging, Rihanna-listening 19 year old niece on my wife's side commented: "Didn't he, like, invent the [telecommunications] satellite?" There is hope, Arthur--see?
He lived in on a lush Sri Lankan tea plantation yet kept himself plugged into the western world; he wasn't a fan of Thatcher, Reagan or Bush/Cheney yet found folks such as Al Gore and Desmond Tutu "gimmicky." I think we all should read Childhood's End, and heed its themes.
Tell the Monolith we said hi, Arthur...and we'll be a part of it soon.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Tracey Morgan redeems himself...

...for all those "Astronaut Jones" skits:

Saturday Night Live, 3/15/08

"In conclusion, three weeks ago, my girl Tina Fey went on the show, she declared that “bitch is the new black”. You know I love you, Tina. You know you’re my girl. But I have something to say. Bitch may be the new black, but black is the new president, bitch."

Friday, March 14, 2008

Friday Funnies



This dude is the new mullah of the Republican Right. Even McCain (grudingly) gives him a pass. Where in the Bible is it written "Thou shalt be a douchebag?" Not quite as amusing as the Papal Edict this week that due to Easter coming early for the first time in 50 years, folks should NOT got f-ed up on St. Patricks Day, but it's close.

Second moment of laughter: one of my author pals, far more famous than I, called me and said that her agent and several others were in a war to fetch the Spitzer Ho (I call her a ho, even though in this country if you're white and your tricks involve govenors and CEO, you're a "call girl" Sorry Geri Ferraro...)

Monday, March 10, 2008

RIP, The Wire

The best show on TV ended last night. Critics and a lot of black folks opined that it didn't get the ratings and the Emmy's etc. it deserved because there were too many black people in the cast, and that David Simon relished his "outsider" role too much. I disagree. It was too real. No happy, pat endings. It was politics, crime, human beings as they are-- and we Americans don't like that. We love our candy. Watch The Wire's last season onDemand. Buy the previous 4 on DVD. It's the stuff Edward R. Murrow said TV could be. Indeed, I know right wing nuts who love the show. Can't say the same for Dancing with the Stars....

Sunday, March 09, 2008

"Mammie...mammie...what be dis?"

Allegory Alert #2. As in, for what's wrong wilth Hollywood...what's wrong with so-called "liberal" whitefolks (i.e., as Hillary has proven)...what's wrong with us...and what's wrong with Robert Downey, Jr. (yeah, that's him) --given that his dad directed one of the all-time great counter-culture/Black Power films, Putney Swope. I guess we're too busy loosing more brain cells watching Tyler Perry in drag to care. This is a new movie by Ben Stiller with Jack Black called Tropic Thunder. Lawd-have-mercy...

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Election reprieve: Terrence Howard Funnies

For you Terrence Howard fans (especially the sistas), I offer this wacky quote. It says it all. Read and lament (snicker):(that's Terrence and his girlfriend, FYI)

“There were some women who pushed for sex and sometimes, they won,” he confesses. “Afterward, I would feel unclean, like I’d compromised my own values… so I had to let them go.
If they’re using dry paper, they aren’t washing all of themselves. It’s just unclean. So if I go inside a woman’s house and see the toilet paper there, I’ll explain this. And if she doesn’t make the adjustment to baby wipes, I’ll know she’s not completely clean."

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Another Frankenstein's Monster dies on the ice floes. Now may we PLEASE kill Dr. Frankenstein?!



Allegory alert. I felt compelled to reprint this piece from the New York Times in it's entirety, no link, before the election news takes over. Of course, the Times reviewed the book. Of course, the book was feted by Missy Ann whitegirl editors and agents and phony-ass literatti. That makes the bosses happy, for they must answer to the hedge funds that own the stock and control the bonuses. But hey, whatever sells, right? An check out the cover. Screams in a Lil'Kim coarse cry: "I am the white voice of the ghetto, of the hood." Ha! Edgy, gritty--those words white people just love. You see it these reviews of black books in Kirkus and PW, right? Often written by...certainly published by...the same white people who were super liberals before Barack Obama turned the tables. The same white people who promo sex novels and thug lit and spoon them like crack and mental junk food to our all-too-passive folk. Yes...edgy, gritty. The true story of a mixed white/native American chick raised by black folk n South-Central...stirring suburban blood as if she was Mowgli raised by the wolfpack. Imagine the editorial committee meeting during the pitch session! Imagine the glee of the literary agent! And now imagine so much of what's wrong with book publishing, with journalism and media corporations and the very philosophy of our marketing, not market, economy. All wrapped up in one m-fing fiasco. A true story? Hmmm...good thing it didn't make it to Oprah. Lessons will not be learned. Minds will not open. This will happen again. Oh, that's the author, her daughter and her pit. Big yucks. Big, big yucks.
Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction
By
MOTOKO RICH
In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.
The problem is that none of it is true.
Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the
University of Oregon, as she had claimed.
Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.
In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.
“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”
The revelations of Ms. Seltzer’s mendacity came in the wake of the news last week that a Holocaust memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was a fake, and perhaps more notoriously, two years ago
James Frey, the author of a best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” admitted that he had made up or exaggerated details in his account of his drug addiction and recovery.
Ms. Seltzer’s story started unraveling last Thursday after she was profiled in the House & Home section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Ms. Seltzer and her 8-year-old daughter, Rya. Ms. Seltzer’s older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw the article and called Riverhead to tell editors that Ms. Seltzer’s story was untrue.
“Love and Consequences” immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”
In the vividly told book, Ms. Seltzer wrote about her African-American foster brothers, Terrell and Taye, who joined the Bloods gang when they were 11 and 13. She chronicled her experiences making drug deliveries for gang leaders at age 13 and how she was given her first gun as a birthday present when she was 14. Ms. Seltzer told The Times last week, “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot.”
Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied.
“It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said.
“There’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one,” she said.
Ms. Seltzer said she had been writing about her friends’ experiences for years in creative-writing classes and on her own before a professor asked her to speak with Inga Muscio, an author who was then working on a book about racism. Ms. Seltzer talked about what she portrayed as her experiences and Ms. Muscio used some of those accounts in her book. Ms. Muscio then referred Ms. Seltzer to her agent, Faye Bender, who read some pages that Ms. Seltzer had written and encouraged the young author to write more.
In April 2005, Ms. Bender submitted about 100 pages to four publishers. Ms. McGrath, then at Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, agreed to a deal for what she said was less than $100,000. When Ms. McGrath moved to Riverhead in 2006, she moved Ms. Seltzer’s contract.
Over the course of three years, Ms. McGrath, who is the daughter of Charles McGrath, a writer at large at The Times, worked closely with Ms. Seltzer on the book. “I’ve been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story never has changed,” Ms. McGrath said. “All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks.”
In a telephone interview, Ms. Seltzer’s sister, Ms. Hoffman, 47, said: “It could have and should have been stopped before now.” Referring to the publisher, she added: “I don’t know how they do business, but I would think that protocol would have them doing fact-checking.”
Ms. Seltzer said she had met some gang members during a short stint she said she spent at “Grant” high school “in the Valley.” (A Google search identifies
Ulysses S. Grant High School, a school on 34 acres in the Valley Glen neighborhood in the east-central San Fernando Valley.) “It opened my mind to the fact that not everybody is as they are portrayed on the news,” she said. “Everything’s not that black and white or gray or brown.”
She said that although she returned to Campbell Hall, she remained in touch with people she met at Grant and then began working with groups that were trying to stop gang violence. She said that even after she moved to Oregon, she would often venture to South-Central Los Angeles to spend time with friends in the gang world.
In the book, she describes her foster mother, Big Mom, an African-American woman who raised four grandchildren and a foster brother, Terrell, who was gunned down by Crips right outside her foster mother’s home.
Ms. Seltzer, who writes in an author’s note to the book that she “combined characters and changed names, dates, and places,” said in an interview that these characters and incidents were in part based on friends’ experiences. “I had a couple of friends who had moms who were like my mom and that’s where Big Mom comes from — from being in the house all the time and watching what goes on. One of my best friend’s little brother was killed two years ago, shot,” she said.
Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks” in South-Central, where “I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not.”
“I’m not saying like I did it right,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I did not do it right. I thought I had an opportunity to make people understand the conditions that people live in and the reasons people make the choices from the choices they don’t have.” Ms. McGrath said that she had numerous conversations with Ms. Seltzer about being truthful. “She seems to be very, very naïve,” Ms. McGrath said. “There was a way to do this book honestly and have it be just as compelling.”


"It's alive...alive!"--Dr. Frankenstein

Monday, March 03, 2008

They Love a Horserace...

The pundits and the media they serve love a horserace. As pundit Matt Taibbi once said--echoed so often on the right by clowns like Hannity, Beck, O'Reilley--you don't have to be right. You don't even have to try to be right. You just have to sound sure.
Well, allow me to punditize and say regardless of what happens in the Democratic Presidential Primaries, Hillary Clinton will continue. If she wins both Texas and Ohio, she must win them by huge margins in order to truly make up pledged delegates. The "wins" might get her some superdelegate dap against Obama, but who really knows what these pols are going to do? And Obama might tunr around and cloak himself as the underdog, beset by assholes, and everyone loves the underdog. Indeed, the superdelegates and Howard Dean, even Gore as deus ex machina, might be the machine working against her, as behind closed doors what can this witch possibly promise them versus reality: even against McCain, she will lose. Then again, when did the Clintons ever care about anything other than their own personal aggrandizement, rather than a party's evolution and cause, a united goal, a movement, a revolution (whether right wing or left), changing a paradigm? In that, yeah--Bill Clinton was the first real black president, for as we've seen from our black leaders (pastors and prophets to entertainers and politicians) it's "L'etat est moi" and "Apres moi, le deluge."
Accordinly, I for one will not be watching the returns, because I already know the outcome--the long term outcome. We Americans seem to hate that word. "Long term." Almost blasphemous, and of course not conducive to the horserace. Long term is boring. Long term doesn't sell. Long term ain't about ratings, audience share, readership spikes, marketing and cross marketing. Long term is thus, sadly, un-American...