That's Enough

While the title of this post is unoriginal, it really reflects how I feel about this election at this point. I'm legitimately angry, not for political reasons but because this country is seriously considering electing a senile 72 year old 4 time cancer survivor and his VP who is the political equivalent of a special needs child. McCain alone is a bad candidate to begin with. He is, first and foremost an idiot (as explained in an earlier post) who believes that staying in Iraq and possibly invading Iran are solutions for an already strained military. Aside from potentially starting the 3rd World War, McCain's fiscal policies are part of the extremely unsuccessful laissez-faire economic plan that the Reps have been using for the past couple years with no signs of slowing. All of this is well documented and there is no need to rehash it. His runningmate Palin, to me though, is both dangerous and insulting. Let's review the obvious stuff. McCain met this woman one time, ONE TIME DAMNIT and then suddenly asked her to be VP. In her 12 year political career this woman operated on a national level for less than 2 years. And this "national" level was as governor in the great state of Alaska, a state with a minuscule population. Even in her state, she supported drilling for oil and allegedly at one point contended that Global warming didn't exist (clearly she cares for the environment). For the other 10 years she was a city council member and mayor of a town of about 6,000 people. My neighborhood has more than 6,000 people. Most major Universities have more than 6,000 people. There's not much in life that's considered legit with LESS THAN 6,000 PEOPLE! This is a dangerous choice because she isn't qualified to be much of anything beyond Alaska and definitely not the person second in line for the presidency. John McCain has a decent chance of dying in office and the idea of this woman leading the most powerful country in the world terrifies me. I don't do the whole scared thing generally and I'm not one for sentimental feelings but I'm really concerned about this. Beyond that though, this choice insults the American voting public and particularly women. Is this the glass ceiling? Is being used by your party and brought in purely based on your identity as a woman, however unqualified you are, really what feminists fight for? I feel like the Republic party is laughing at Hillary supporters who they think are too stupid and caught up in the gender issue to recognize that not just any woman will do. And you know what the sad part is? They might not be wrong. This whole PUMA (party unity my ass) business is making a solid argument for that conclusion. The fact that female democrats could be so mad that Hillary lost that they vote AGAINST their right to choose is actually kinda scary. Also let me clear the record on that issue: when a woman of Hillary Clinton's influence, wealth and power is beat I can assure you someone went out and took it to her. She didn't get cheated, she got complacent and Barack got all in that ass (figuratively, duh) . She got what she asked for and even when she played dirty it was too late. Aside from that, Palin isn't even Hillary Clinton (and that's saying something). I think Palin said it best "What exactly does a VP do all day?" Great. Super. This woman should be the next leader of the free world. Absolutely. I honestly have had enough of this. Someone in my family recently suggested that Obama and Biden should focus on McCain and leave her alone so that they don't seem like they're bullying her. Now I love my fam but that is just incorrect. Shell her. Bomb her. Absolutely vaporize her credibility (not exactly a tall order). For example, her whole story about having a kid with down syndrome and having the experience of being a mother (something Cindy McCain cited I believe) doesn't make her a damn thing but a mother of a kid with down syndrome. That has exactly diddly shit to do with national security, the economy or really anything else. The dems cannot let this craziness slide. Democrats have been playing this spineless set of mind games for too long, by overestimating the intelligence of the voting public. All the while, Republicans have been able to transform all strengths into weaknesses by relentlessly going on the attack. That's how a draft dodging drunk was able to paint a vietnam vet with war medals as a coward (here's lookin at you John Kerry). It's time to play the same game. Demolish both McCain and Palin. It's time to take off the kid gloves because there is more at stake than just some political contest. These Republican candidates are dangerously unwise in their decisions (clearly) and to allow them to steal another one could actually lead to tragedy. I don't know about y'all but if Ameriicans are too stupid to recognize this shamelessly reckless ploy then I think it's time to move to Canada, who's with me?

P.S. For those of you who want more stats and facts on Palin and co. here's a pretty cool video my roomate found online and I think it sums up Palin's profile (from the perspective of anyone with sense). It's time to wrap up this reign of senseless political ineptitude and elect someone with some sense.

Hip-Hop on Life Support

Let me establish two things before I get into the discussion proper: first, Hip-Hop is musically my first love (I’ll come back to that later) and second, I generally try to avoid cultural topics because of the relativity of values and opinions but for this one i will make an exception. Hip-Hop is hurting me. She is like a bad girlfriend and I’m steady looking at other women because she keeps breaking my heart. She’s cheating on me with Soulja Boy. Look, at some point I was 17 too and I liked really silly stuff but I don’t think I ever strayed into minstrelsy. Soulja boy and the paradigm that allowed him to become successful have taken the bite out of one of the most powerful types of social protest music. Hip-Hop even in the days when it was about fun, had a form of social commentary that was particularly relevant. From obvious critiques like “The Message”, through less clear forms of commentary like the albums of NWA, Hip-Hop has always had something to say and usually it was something sorta relevant. Soulja Boy and his contemporaries are in the process of destroying that. Hip-Hop isn’t just going pop, it’s transforming into music whose sole purpose is to sell irreverent, irrelevant music to stupid people from the suburbs. One of my friends offered this opinion: Soulja Boy is saving Hip-Hop and making it relevant. If making bad music with no legitimate content is relevant, well you get the idea. Though this subject doesn’t really change a lot politically, I do think that Hip-Hop has a relevant history of being politically important even when it just expressed rage, indifference or violent lack of regard for the norms of western society. These expressions took the temperature of urban black life and that in and of itself was important because it allowed older generations to better understand the children they rejected or abandoned to die in inner cities across America. I don’t mean to pick on Soulja Boy but he’s the best example that I can find of this sad new movement of Hip-Hop. He’s a kid and he wants to sell records, yeah yeah yeah I’ve heard all the reasons (read: excuses) but the fact of the matter is that much of our leadership is based on celebrity and we’re really not in a position where we can afford not to hold people accountable for their garbage. Soulja Boy doesn’t raise kids nor does any other rapper but in many cases nobody raises these kids and to ignore the responsibility of those with so much power over youth culture is frankly being ignorant. Nas was right, Hip-Hop is on some silliness now but it isn’t dead it just needs to be reminded why it became relevant in the first place. In the words of my first girlfriend, Lauryn Hill, (everybody has dreams, right?) “Hip-Hop started out in the heart, uh, now everybody tryna chart…”

Don't Wanna be and American Idiot

Ok so as a christian I felt like it made sense for me to watch the special with Obama and McCain at Rick Warren's Saddleback church. McCain did his usual thoughtless extremism bit: "Evil exists and must be defeated". Yeah, John evil does exist. Evil like going into third world countries, using extreme poverty to pimp the people, setting up dummy regimes into order to exploit natural resources and watching the regions rip themselves apart. Hmm, sounds like evil to me. Well McCain's (and America's) preposterously idiotic and amoral (not to be confused with immoral) pretensions of foreign policy aside, I found the relevance of the program in Obama's message. Obama scares me, not because his policies aren't acceptable or because there's anything wrong with his personality, etc. He scares me because he's too mature for America. Barack Obama seems like a profoundly reasonable man in a completely unreasonable age in a country where punchlines seem to all too often become realities. Haha, the president is an idiot. Haha, we're killing people over natural resources and not even doing a good job pretending we're not. Haha, if we continue down this road we really might be responsible for the end of the world. Oh wait that's all true. But Americans eat it up. John McCain said that he would "hunt Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell". What kind of crazy ass rhetoric is that for any grown man, much less a candidate for the leader of the free world? What Bin Laden did (well we all seem to forget that there isn't any verifiable proof that he was specifically responsible but anyway) was abhorrent. It was morally abhorrent and if he is responsible for the deaths of those people, he should be brought to whatever justice is appropriate (read: dragged into the street and shot in the head). The point is that I can say this because I am not suggesting that I should be allowed access to the preposterous number of nuclear warheads that the American military holds. In this day and age trying to bully the world is just silly because there are some people (evidently) whose countries you can bomb into parking lots and they will not stop coming. Let me make this clearer: THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE WITH WHOM DIPLOMACY IS A GOOD IDEA. So installing and overthrowing regimes in their countries in regions that are already unstable is a good way to start World War 3. The problem is that Americans are so fat, lazy and spoiled that the idea of bullying the rest of the planet seems like a legitimate option. We have all been fed the notion that American ideals are innately superior to the ideals of other countries and that America has never lost a war along with many other myths and bedtime stories. This faux superiority is the basis for American warmongering enthusiasm. I guess everyone skipped US AP history in high school and forgot that we got our asses kicked on our own soil in 1812 and a foreign army marched through Washington and burned the White House to the ground. So clearly we aren't so vastly superior in terms of our military history (let's not forget Somalia, Vietnam and the other skirmishes in which we demonstrated our mortality) but what of our ideological superiority? Clearly American democracy is the best in the world right? Umm naw, not exactly. Democracy here is cool but we so regularly put it on hold. Japanese internment, Black slavery, cheated elections, the patriot act, national security legislation, all examples of people America putting democracy on hold on American soil, no less. We won't even get started on what America does abroad with its "democracy". What I'm basically saying is that this is all completely bogus. This superiority complex is a joke but its what keeps American idiots "safe" and happy. This is exactly why a reasonable adult cannot be president of the US. I'm not saying Obama can't win per se but I think that the only reason a senile old man who mistakes one country for another is still in the race is because of he plays into that complex. His black and white view of the world is shared by much of the rest of the country because they think that they can afford it. He who has the biggest gun makes the rules right? No, not these days. In the age of suicidal extremism he who cares less about his life makes can make the rules too, and if Americans don't start recognizing the need for reasonable foreign policies, we'll find out the hard way again. Obama, God willing, will be the next President because if he isn't another regime of intolerance and ignorance might just lead us to our last regime at all.

Big Ups to All My Haters...

You're a hater. Don't hate on me. Stop hating. Recently a couple of my friends and I had a discussion about haters. We thought about most of the people who talk about haters and we realized something. We as Black people only claim that people are hating when they critique us while we're doing stupid shit. Think about it, most rappers complain about getting hated on because they drive a "car the color of watermelon with the bubble gum inside" or some such inane statement. God forbid someone suggest that you spend that money on your family who're still stuck in the projects or yourself so that when your bubble bursts you'll have legitimate investments and not just that magical combination of jewelry and debt. This doesn't only apply to rappers though, we have allowed ourselves to fall into cultural and intellectual sewage because everyone is scared to call dumbness exactly what it is. Beyond that, we have developed this strange moral relativism in which the ends justify the means so much that we celebrate people who are (or were) legitimately evil all in the name of not hating. Men who use womens' bodies to collect payment should be hated on. Dudes who sell concentrated, addictive death to their people should be hated on. People who shoot other people over blocks that belong to no one but the US Government (it's not your block, stupid, you just live there) should be hated on. These people are in many cases the equivalent of urban terrorists and they need to be hated on! Look, there are differences between people in their situations that make drastic and morally abhorrent actions seem necessary and I can understand that. It's only the grace of God that kept me from those situations but that doesn't justify people who can avoid it engaging in those activities or seeing something stupid and saying it's cool because they don't wanna hate. To combat this, I'm starting the "hate-on-em" movement. If you forever rap about selling drugs and killing people and then get all shy or angry when someone asks you why you portray negativity, then I'm going to call you on it, not because I'm a hater (what do you really have that I would need to hate on?) but because you are being a dummy. I grew up in the hood too so all that "i rap about what i see" garbage is not gonna fly because let's be frank, you were not that dude (the killer, superhustler, pimp, etc.) if you made it in the rap game because you'd still be in the hood right now if you were. I'm not only going to go after rappers, this applies to intellectuals and politicians as well. I'm hating on Marion Berry for smoking crack. I'm hating on Cornell West for wasting his monstrous talent on Rap CD's and strange misguided attempts to be a rock star intellectual (aka pretending to reach out to the youth) . I'm hating because it seems like no one else will. Everyone is so concerned with the concept of being a hater that we've allowed our standards to fall to dangerous levels in many areas of Black life. Now suddenly, entertainers are our intellectual standard bearers and anything that requires more than 2 minutes thought is "deep". Enough is enough. It's time for us to take back a culture that has been hijacked by greedy, sellout Black people and large corporations. We have become slaves to the almighty dollar in so many areas and now that Blackness is a commodity, "hating" has become public enemy number one. Everyone is a hustler nowadays and by suggesting that what they do is illogical, stupid, morally wrong or anything other than "their unique hustle" is hating. Sorry y'all, but if y'all think that this craziness is justified and that calling it craziness is hating, then I am a hater to the bone gristle. And if you are busy worrying about being a hater with the AIDS rates in the Black Community (comparable to third world countries), the homicide rates among young black men (15 times more likely to be killed than any other group), and the fact that many other ethnic groups have come to this country after we did and surpassed us in terms of measurable progress (not all our fault but a problem nonetheless) then I AM HATING ON YOU!