Rush to Judgment

Bobby Rush, that is.  You probably noticed Bobby when, on March 28^th. he wore a “hoodie” on the floor of the House Of Representatives and rambled half-incoherently about the Trayvon Martin shooting, only desisting after being “bum’s-rushed“ off the House floor.

The inimitable Mr. Rush had tried to lecture America about racism and gun control, two subjects on which he, admittedly, can speak with some authority.  Racism, because this congressman of nearly 20 years had been a militantly racist Black Panther, and gun control because in 1969 he  served six months in jail for illegal weapons possession.  Apparently, since becoming a legislator, Rushy has gotten religion.  But, then again, don’t they all?

Rush asserted that Trayvon had been shot because he wore a hoodie.

I beg to differ.  Trayvon was shot because of the bimp subculture.  Those who read Barack Obama, Identity, and Racial Hypocrisy in America know that I coined the term “bimp” to mean black inner-city male persona, a persona mostly referring to so-called “gangsta” lifestyle. 

The gangsta subculture celebrates crude, racist, sexist rap music, hyper-masculine, criminal behavior, misogynistic treatment of women, and, of course, rap garb of which the hoodie is the essential marker.  Skim through NBA magazines or watch a couple surveillance camera videos of crime scenes and you undoubtedly will see a snarling hooded face staring back at you. 

You might now be thinking that all bimps, by definition, are black, but, if so, you are wrong.  Ninety-eight percent of black people are no more bimp than I am.  There certainly are whites and persons of every race and ethnicity who qualify for bimp “status.”  Not skin color or ethnicity, but behavior makes a bimp a bimp.  Even some females fit the criteria.

Bimp is associated with African Americans because it was pioneered by a handful of them and reinforced by an army of mostly white media and mostly white elitist opinion-makers.  Media and elitist whites always are on the prowl for any way to garner attention and make money.  How could they let the attention-grabbing bimp subculture go unexploited?  Even if they had, there always are black identity slavemasters—the Bobby Rushes, Jesse Jacksons, and Al Sharptons—who will define as black-obligatory any money-making persona, behavior, or activity that draws a sharp distinction between what is black versus white, anything that divides rather than unites the races.

If  Bobby Rush wants to spearhead a movement to counter the senseless murder of Trayvon Martin, I suggest that he organize against the bimp subculture.  That would require him to switch sides as he claims he had done about possession of illegal firearms, to figuratively speaking, take off his hoodie, and encourage his constituents to do so as well or, in Spike Lee’s words, simply to “do the right thing.”

Lest you think that I do not agree with anything that Bobby Rush ever has said, I want to quote what I believe are some of the most perspicacious comments ever spoken regarding Barack Hussein Obama.  To quote Mr. Rush in the year 2000: “Barack Obama went to Harvard and became an educated fool.  Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it."  

“You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”

Every year thousands of adolescents are raped, abused, or murdered.  Virtually none of them look like our President.   Barack Obama never makes public comments personalizing their tragedies.  So, why now and what is he really saying when he says, “You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”?

Of course, we need a little context.  First, the comment occurrs in the midst of the President’s latest sustained campaigning-rather-than-governing blitzkrieg.   Second, at this moment, every media outlet in America is  suffused with items devoted to the senseless killing of Tryvon Martin.  Third, every civil rights race monger in the country is either saying or strongly implying that Tryvon died because he was black.  And fourth, Bill Lee, the white chief of the Sanford Police Department, is being excoriated because he did not arrest the alleged perpetrator quickly enough.   In short, the Tryvon Martin “case” provides a perfect opportunity for Obama to do what he does best:  exploit a racially-charged situation for his own personal political gain while displaying uncharacteristic emotional sensitivity in the process.

When President Obama asserts that he sees Tryvon “looking like” the son he never had, what does that mean?  Perhaps the statement is nothing more than Barack’s typical preoccupation with race as the defining element in personality.  After all, Barack Obama calls himself “a black man,” always conveniently forgetting that his heritage at least back as far as the Neolithic Period is as much white as black, and that every chromosome in his body contains as many white as black genes.  Given his irrational racial mentation, then, we should expect Barack to find communion with a black boy senselessly shot down in the street.   On the other hand, what if Tryvon had been white?   Would Obama then have perceived a white 17-year-old as the son he never had?    Would Obama have been so strongly moved?

How about the assailant?  Imagine if a black man had shot down a white teen, as so often happens.  Would there have been the outrage, media attention, and political posturing that we see today?   Would the President and his handlers have calculated that this is the time, place, and situation for Barack Obama to reveal his intense personal anguish over the crime?

One last thought. 

“You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” might remind you of a previous racial Obamafuscation.   Roll back the DVD.  After a Juy 16, 2009 temper tantrum-like tirade, Barack's black buddy, Henry Louis Gates, was detained on suspicion of breaking into a home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.   To paraphrase myself, every civil rights race monger in the country was either saying or strongly implying that Gates was bullied by police because he is black.  That is, all the political, race-pandering conditions surrounding the Trayvon Martin situation obtained in the Henry Louis Gates situation.  And Barack Obama, how did he respond on July 22, 2009?  Just as he is responding today.  You probably remember: Barack  personalized the event, suggesting that he, his self, would “probably get shot” trying to “break into” the White House or into his house in Chicago. 

Given the life-long, extreme, race-based deprivation and oppression that Barack Hussein Obama has suffered at the hands of the wicked white establishment, we can understand his obsessive race-oriented ruminations.  And we can accept that he never fails to remind us of his racial heartache when the reminding can be twisted to his political advantage. 

Race: The Obligatory, Ubiquitous Issue

Ten Ideas That Are Changing Your Life: the March 12, 2012 Time cover story. 

Intriguing title.  Is this a must read for anyone interested in taking control of his or her well-being?   Will we find here information worthy of deep contemplation and life-altering insight?

The magazine issue discusses topics such as our increasing over-dependence on computers for access to basic information, what we can do proactively to improve our ecosystems, and how science is using health-friendly ways to  promote the shelf life of food that reduces waste, and, therefore, helps to feed an increasingly hungry world.

Now, the punch line.  Big idea number five is “Black Irony,” or “People using blackness as a text to comment on and perhaps critique or reconfigure it.” Now there’s a topic deserving top 10 status in the pantheon of life-changing ideas. 

Why would Time include black irony in this particular issue?   Perhaps it is purely a marketing ploy.  The black identity lobby is so relentless and so successful in attracting the attention of the general American population that any money-hungry media manager who fails to exploit it in order to drum-up sales is guilty of malfeasance in office.  Second, a black irony article indicates, ipso facto, the intellectual cachet of the magazine itself, since it demonstrates superlative insight implicit in including a black topic in its “Big Ten.”  (Do I detect a college basketball metaphor?)   And, third, by talking black, Time sucks-in those—white, black, and all in-between shades— whose own identities derive sustenance from the intellectual gravitas and swaggering with-it-ness tethered to black identity issues.

What is it about the Time article that irks me?  

The racial pandering of placing Black Irony in the big ten list is as gloppy as breakfast at Pancake House, but that is rather trivial complaint in the grand scheme of things.  The real tragedy is that the Time article elevates and reinforces the pathetic notion that racial minutia is something about which we All (“Ten Ideas That Are Changing Your Life’) must obsess.  Even when merely framed in terms of the intellectual gymnastics of irony, it is patently absurd to think that race is critical to everyone’s everyday well being, that it demands such an obsessive-compulsive focus.  I can only conclude that race truly is the OCD content of American media psychopathology.

The Time management hierarchy either do not realize or do not care that racial preoccupation is not the solution, it is the problem.  Every year for a minimum of one solid month, they bludgeon us with Martin Luther King, Junior’s admonition to judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  Next February—Black History Month 2013—the media needs to listen to its own racial propaganda and to spend the remainder of the year heeding MLK’s advice.

Decoupling Individual Success from Societal Success: A Prescription for Disaster

What’s good for the individual is good for society and what’s good for society is good for the individual.  It’s an intuitive logic that most of us accept, at least implicitly.  It’s how the world is supposed to work.  When individuals do the “right thing” society flourishes and flourishing societies create the conditions necessary to nurture its members.  The formula is as old as civilization itself.  For instance, presidents and parents advise the young to stay in school and work hard to succeed.  In the aggregate, well-schooled individuals comprise a superior work force that competes favorably in the international worlds of commerce and science.

So, in theory, at least, individuals and their society constitute a mutually-reinforcing, self-sustaining system that is “good.” 

In the first half of the twentieth century, opinion makers and media tended to support ideals that seemed healthful both for individual citizens and for the nation as a whole.  Television “propagandized” morality in the guise of I Remember Momma, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and Lone Ranger-like programs.  Everyone knew who the “good guys” were.  And the good guys not only came out on top, but taught lessons in the process. 

Some considered the shows a bit corny, but virtually everyone admitted that the virtual morality plays reinforced ideals and behaviors that the family and state championed.  On television, no guys or gals said the “f word” or grabbed their crotches. The stars invariable were the good guys and girls.  Parents could trust the media to support, or at least not to undermine, child-rearing scripts that they, their religious organizations, and their government regarded as good for individuals and for communities.  Children knew who both their parents were, where their parents were, and what their parents stood for.  Children did not see crotch-holding, expletive- spewing, bling-ladened Neanderthals reaping lush adulation and financial remuneration for their miscreant behaviors.  Society-wide messages about proper behavior — marriage, parenting, education, constructive work habits —were so consistent then that, at best, most people were reluctant to act in a blatantly unlawful or immoral manner, or, at worst, they attempted to hide their infractions, since there was no benefit and plenty of risk in doing otherwise.

Over the decades, the good media-good child rearing practices synergy began to erode.  Like the proverbial snowball accelerating down a ravine, the pace has quickened so that today’s parents search mostly in vain for family-friendly media.  Critically, this is much more than a matter of mere entertainment; it will determine how long our nation can continue its preeminence.

My point is not that America faces serious social challenges.  Our nation has managed to overcome past potentially debilitating crises—prejudice, war, recessions, and natural disasters, to name a few.  The current crisis is different, however.  Heretofore, citizens understood the enemy and united against it.  Today, on the other hand, there are determined subgroups advocating and advertising all types of culturally self-destructive social practices.  The advocates, of course, do not see the practices as corrosive.  Rather, they view them through the prism of their vested self-interests; they have a stake in promoting the very practices that our parents and grandparents would have immediately, soundly and widely condemned. In fact, the promoters of American disintegration try to make us believe that democracy requires us not only to tolerate but to celebrate morally offensive behavior.  To their ways of thinking, for instance, there is nothing inherently “bad” with racist, misogynistic rap music or with serially-impregnating and absconding males. Rather, those behaviors are freely chosen ‘lifestyles” and no one should attempt to “dictate” lifestyle to anyone; it’s a matter of “personal freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.”  In fact, since those “choices” tend to be more greatly associated with inner city, low-income persons, speaking out against them is a form of insensitive, reactionary bias against “poor folks.”  Only racists, Nazis, or racist Nazis could speak out against freedom to enjoy hate-filled rap music or unbridled sexual liberty.

We find in our country today, then, a perverse discrepancy between what is “good” for individuals and good for society.  An army of elitist intelligentsia led by Barack Hussein Obama-like generals are on the offensive, fighting to advance personal freedoms contrary to the moral and social traditions that made America America.  The elitists believe that by championing their self-defined individual “human” rights, they will create a new, more tolerant 21^st Century America. 

To my way of thinking, however, President Obama and his legions are undermining the most essential element in the machinery of our country: the synergy between what is good for us as individuals and what is good for the nation as a whole.  Barack Obama seeks to decouple what is good for each of us from what is good for us collectively, individual character divorced from national character  If he succeeds, we will lose the very self-correcting self-reinforcing, I Remember Momma, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and Lone Ranger-like engine that has driven our progress to date.  Obama’s assault on America’s legacy culture is not limited to one or two issues.  It is not just a matter of requiring all citizens to subscribe to Obama’s version of universal healthcare.  Obama and his band want to immediately disassemble the very mechanisms that created and sustained America.  They, however, will accept a steady, sustained corrosion of our ideals because they see that method as most likely to achieve their ultimate ends.  We need to be alert in order to detect and counter elements of the corrosive process that they already have set in motion.