She's Super

Those from the Philadelphia area knew her well.  You, too, might know about her since I mentioned in my book that Arlene Ackerman, African American Philadelphia Superintendent of Schools, tried to blame Asian American students for causing an attack on them by their black schoolmates.  In fact, she resisted meeting with the Asian students, capitulating only when pressured to do so.  That pretty much sums-up the kind of superintendent that Arlene Ackerman was.

On November 29, 2011, myfoxphilly.com reminded us of Ackerman’s tenure.   According to the piece, she had been the highest paid government official in the city with $364,000 per annum.  When those who control the purse strings finally became irrevocably fed-up with the ill-tempered, cantankerous administrator, they gave her the boot before her contract had expired.   To do so, the virtually bankrupt school district had to buy her off with $905,000 and $86,000 worth of unused vacation/personal leave days.   According to myfoxphilly.com, “The school district had a $629 million deficit under Ackerman and it is still laying off employees as it struggles to make ends meet.”

Nothing new so far, many big city superintendents use, abuse, and discard the children and school districts about which they had professed unwavering love during their initial job interviews.  But Ackerman takes the scam-our-community rip-off to a new low.  Myfoxphilly suggest that Superintendent Ackerman has filed for unemployment benefits.

Guess the Superintendent has replaced the oft-spoken “give-back” to the neighborhood credo with the “take-more” philosophy.  What else would you expect from her?

The Legend of Barack Hussein Obama as Promoted with Taxpayer Dollars

Husna Haq of the Christian Science Monitor reported on October 27, 2011 that the United States State Department purchased $70,000 worth of Barack Obama books, mostly his autobiography, Dreams From My Father.  When questioned about the appropriateness of the action, according to Haq:

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told CNN it is "longstanding practice" to allow embassies to buy books, "to put them out in libraries ... give them to contacts, which they think will help deepen understanding of the U.S. political system, of U.S. political figures and leaders of U.S. history, U.S. culture."

Fox News pointed out, however, that the State Department did not disseminate either George W. Bush’s book or Bill Clinton’s.

Neither Haq nor Fox mentioned what I regard as the essential issue, however: the relevance of Dreams From My Father to anything remotely related to the State Department.  One could argue that John F. Kennedy’s best seller Profiles in Courage was the kind of book that warranted distribution by the State.  Profiles celebrated others—eight U.S. Senators who took unpopular positions of conscience in the interest of our country.  Dreams, on the other hand, amounted to a duplicitous, manipulative self-agrandizing fantasy—Barack Obama as a legend in his own mind. 

Obama, the narcissist, spent his time obsessing and writing about his favorite subject—himself.  And the State Department reinforced his self-absorption by helping to spread his self-serving identity propaganda as far and wide as possible.  Equally outrageous, Barack Obama will make a few bucks from the royalties that follow from the State’s purchases.

Nowhere could I find any information identifying the governmental official who made the decision to buy and disseminate the book.  I’m sure we never will discover who did so.  But we reasonably can speculate about that person. 

If it was not Barack or Michelle who chose use taxpayer money to buy and disseminate the Obamafuscation book, it clearly was someone enamored by the Emperor’s New Clothes, a person for whom fantasy of personal identity substitutes for hard-core reality, a person who REALLY wants to believe.  The person who made the purchase is the kind of individual who has made “President” Barack Hussein Obama possible, someone so intent on creating an identity-assuaging myth that he/she will do anything to promulgate it.   A little president-pandering probably played a part as well. 

Identities versus Issues

How does a society continue to develop and thrive?  We all know the answer:  through relentlessly and objectively discovering essential issues and problem solving our way through them together.  That is how America always has operated—issues before identities.

Then along comes Barack Hussein Obama and the problem solving process gets turned on its head.  The President does not think about problems that need solving, but subgroups who need placating—subgroups with whom he feels identity allegiance and/or to whom he is beholding.  

Consider the jobs crisis.  The old-fashioned American way would have been to discover tasks that must be addressed and means for doing so.  That process inexorably would have led us to discover the jobs that need to be filled, the skills and training that workers require, and the funding necessary to put the most qualified people to work.

Not so with Barack.  Obama listens to the demands of his favored interest groups, the group with whom he identifies and decides how to placate them.  Invariably, the identified-with groups share essential similarities with him, especially racial, ethnic, and philosophical similarities.  

So how about a couple interest groups to whom the pandering President devotes his attention, time, and resources?  

1.  Race-focused, especially black- and Hispanic-focused, programs of all sorts.  
Therefore, job-creation is not driven by needs of the market place, but by the kind of jobs that the favored groups are willing and capable of doing.  Low tech, low-skill, high-paying jobs tailored to persons with little education and limited English language skills do just fine.   

2.  Benefits based on the sexual orientation of the citizenry.  
Thus, the military should respond to sex-driven appetites of soldiers, sailors, and marines.  For instance, homo-erotic needs come first and the mission comes later.  In civilian life, work benefits must be provided for “life partners” of homosexual employees.  Why not provide equal benefits to the biological parents and siblings of all employees, if the workers live in a household with them?  Or is copulation, rather than blood-ties, the premier criterion for life-long commitment?      

3.  Unbridled, long-term government sponsored and funded health care for the Obama-defined “needy.” 

I guess we should expect that people given unlimited access to any and all extravagant medical procedures will show proper restrain in their use.  There are no hypochondrical, alcoholic, or drug-abusing “poor folks.”  No poor people whose own maladaptive lifestyles contribute to their ailments.

Occupy Wall Street: Notable Subgroups

Without a doubt, there are some sincere occupiers with noble intentions.  But, I am sure, these comprise a small minority.  Most streeters fall into several broad categories as follows:

 Retros  - “Folks” who have drunk the Jesse Jackson juice, causing them to become inebriated with the suggestion that the Wall Street protestors are heirs to the black civil rights movements.  Devoid of self esteem, the poor bastards need something to give them a bogus sense of value.

Quackos - More to be pitied than censured (as my grandmother used to say), these are persons terminally deficient in common sense.  They believe that the best way to lift themselves up is to drag other people down.   Like Jeremiah Wright, they also think that the United States created Aids to harm black people and that Paramount staged the 1969 moon landing.

Wackos - Flat out crazies.  Paranoids, psychopaths, and others of that ilk attempting to cope with their own psychotic-like confusion.  First, they project their delusions onto convenient targets, and then they do battle with them, thereby absolving themselves from personal responsibility for their own misery.

Smackos - Heroin, alcohol, and other substance abusers who regard Occupy encampments as nice places to conduct their drug business, have a bite to eat, and catch some Zs. 

Slackos - These are people who think that work is for saps.  They just love “hanging out.”  They wouldn’t stoop to doing any job for which they are qualified.   Many aspire to the NBA or NFL.

Bandidos – Criminals in the crowd, tingling with the excitement of kids in a candy store.  They single-out easy, naïve marks to rob or abuse within the relative anonymity of the teeming throng.

Subtract the retros, quackos, wackos, smackos, slackos, and bandidtos and what have you got?  About two dozen people who have genuine grievances and genuine desire to make a positive difference.  These are ones who you can talk to, the ones you can work with, and the ones who can help us make constructive social changes.  It would be nice to find a way to separate them out from the miscreants.         

Heavyweight Racial Hypocrisy

He called him “a gorilla.”

No.  The maligner was not a virulent white Southern racist.  It was Mohammed Ali, narcissistically attempting to contrast what he regarded as his pretty, brilliant self with Joe Frazier, the man he perceived as ugly and dumb—essentially subhuman.

Lonnae O’Neal Parker, an African American journalist, quoted Jelani Cobb, Rutgers Professor of African Studies at Rutgers University: “There was something searing and non-evolved about this tall, light-skinned black man calling another black man a gorilla. With the rest of America, especially black America, co-signing it.”  (Imagine if a white man had referred to Joe Frazier as a “gorilla.”)

The Parker article sometimes stated and sometimes implied how hurt and angry Frazier remained even in his later years; for instance, when Ali lit the Olympic Torch at the 1996 Games, Joe said that he would have liked to have tossed him into the flame.

Of course, as one would expect, Ali, the “real” black man, had to racialize his disdain for Frazier, calling him, “an Uncle Tom,” for only God knows what.  Parker quoted Janks Morton, Jr., whose father trained Sugar Ray Leonard, as saying,

“I can still see [Ali] sitting next to Howard Cosell punching that [rubber] black gorilla, saying, ‘It’s going to be a thrilla in Manila when I kill that gorilla.’ ”

Morton, 48, a documentary filmmaker from Laurel, says that “what Ali represented, that black-power vein, everybody was rooting for him. But we didn’t stop and pause to understand that was a painful period for Joe.”

Since Frazier died, Ali has decided that he will always remember Joe Frazier with “admiration and respect.”   Touching isn’t it?  This is a typical self-serving raceketeer trick—racially batter black identity non-conformers until there no longer is an advantage to continue.  Then take the high road and the bows appertaining.

Now there is a new black heavyweight on the scene.  He doesn’t box, but he has been a life-long fighter.  You might have heard of him—Herman Cain.  And, as one would expect, the black racial identity slavemasters are swarming. 

Long before accusations of sexual impropriety surfaced, Harry Belafonte, Jon Stewart and scores of others mocked Cain as being racially inappropriate, and some flat-out call him an Uncle Tom.  Chauncey DeVega on Salon.com wrote a piece called, “Herman Cain: Lover of Jim Crow, Apologist for White Racism."

The 21st Century slavemasters are trying to denigrate Cain’s racial credibility, just as Ali and his henchmen did to Joe Frazier.  When Herman dies, maybe they will conclude that he wasn’t so bad after all.