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Wave This Flag Or Else

The New American Jingoism

It's the latest fad. The new craze. Flags, flags, flags. Get 'em

while they're hot. In volume and size, they obviously fully represent our patriotism. This country is still largely intolerant of free speech. The patriotic psuedo-Reaganism sweeping the nation comes with a component of institutionalized intolerance for any voice that does not sing wholly in chorus with the now numbingly ubiquitous God Bless America. Wave your flags, certainly. Tie dozens of them to your minivan or S.U.V or pickup. Blind drivers trying to see around you with your garrison flags snapping in the breeze in the bed of your pick-up. But, while we're at it, let's not be completely blinded by patriotism. In order to truly unify and motivate and inspire the nation, patriotism, in this politically correct era, has to be administered and packaged and dosed out to all of the people in a non-threatening, non-fascist way. Bear in mind this flag-waving elicits an involuntary shudder from many Black Americans and Jewish Americans and Mexican Americans and (certainly) Arab Americans and Other Americans. For many minorities, the Star Spangled Banner is just as often a confederate flag in white face, a means to similar ends of intimidation and marginalization. The flag can and often is received by these communities as very pro-white, which is not to say anti-minority. But the chilling prospect of these pod people with the eight flags tagged to their Chevy sends quite a different message to many within these minority folds. America The Beautiful sounds, to many, like America For Americans, patent code for White Americans.

Economic stimuli like low air fares and zero percent financing mean nothing to people who have nothing. Comforting many of these communities is simply beyond the power of a government so fully vested in well-to-do conservatives who have no clue whatsoever of the jungle rule of survival a great many Americans face every day. The gulf between Them and Us has never been wider, and the greater tragedy of this new war is the rallying of White America, in a plangent strum that is certainly heartwarming and glorious to behold, but is, for many of us, merely a spectator event. We applaud and cheer and are brought to tears by this great coalescing of America, but it's not our America that's being coalesced. And the sloganeering all sounds like code. Patriotism as observed through a chain link fence.

This is why I don't like talking about 9.11. Because a great many people who want to discuss it or want me to discuss it really don't want to hear what I have to say. They want another voice in the chorus. Wave This Flag Or Else.

I support my country, my president and my military. I hope they find bin Laden and his pals and beat the living snot out of them. I'm willing to make reasonable and unreasonable sacrifices in this effort to purge a terrible evil from the world, and build a new nation that is more terror-resistant. And I'll dutifully wave as the parade passes by.  READ ESSAY

A Year Later

The Michael Jackson Machine Never Got Started

Considering this is the first anniversary of Michael Jackson's

death, it's been remarkably quiet. Other than a few sensationalistic news retrospectives and a smattering of various tributes here and there, there is no album, no biopic, no major acknowledgement of the year that, for me, seemed to rush past as we now move into our second year of a world without Michael Jackson. While Newsweek is claiming, using pained and specious mathematics, that the Jackson estate earned $1 billion over the course of the year, from my seat, the estate's handlers seem largely unfocused and disorganized. I mean, the soundtrack to This Is It! the psuedomentary about Jackson's unfulfilled final tour, contained only a handful of alternate versions and demos of Jackson's hits and the disappointing and awful title track. The rest of the album was stuff we already have. You can't convince me Jackson doesn't have a vault stuffed with digital goodies—unfinished tracks and even completed ones like the suite produced by Babyface for HIStory Jackson shelved in anger when he discovered Face had also produced a childish (and pretty awful) attack song by Jermaine called Word To The Badd! Why, in twelve months, the estate could not pull together a real package, finishing tracks Jackson was rumored to have been working on and throwing in some of the vaulted goodies, is beyond me. Might be legal red tape, but it smells like incompetence. This Is It! was a fine tribute but it was a carefully edited propaganda film designed to show the musician in the best possible light. The soundtrack was not the live performances but a best-of collection we've seen a dozen times before. And, since last October—nothing. Which seems to make no sense considering, as Jacksons' fans' grief subsides, so does their enthusiasm for new Jackson product. I can't begin to imagine what the strategy at work here is, and Sony's new $250 million deal with the Jackson estate is the main ray of hope. Of course, if Jermaine, whose musical taste and business acumen have utterly destroyed his own career, is the major voice of influence in how Sony manages and releases future Jackson projects, we can likely expect more of the same (witness Motown's tacky and shockngly wrongheaded remix album). In which context, it's not even that the year went by so quick so much as there was very little of Jackson to show for it. There will never again be a bigger star than Michael Jackson nor hotter market or better opportunity to present Jackson's legacy. I can't begin to imagine how or why Jackson's handlers blew it so badly. I'd think the best way to honor his memory would be to not be stupid about handling his business. READ ESSAY

Rise Of The New Right

You should watch this.  Click here to view

Yes, we post a lot of links to videos and other things here, but

you really should watch this. Even if you aren’t interested in politics, Hardball’s “The Rise Of The New Right” is an important and scary look into the new political movement in America. This is a movement fueled by misinformation, intolerance, fear and racism. A largely whites-only, America For Americans throwback to the McCarthy era of the 1950’s. The fulcrum of this movement is their universal hatred and refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Obama presidency. It is a movement that uses increasingly violent rhetoric, advocating political reform by armed insurrection. You know, when George Bush was appointed president in 2000, I had to just take a seat and eat it. This conservative extremism goes way beyond my discontent with the Bush Administration in that, no matter what I thought of the man, I still acknowledged him as president. Even if I thought his “election” was illegitimate, what was done was done and I took my seat and ate it. These wing nuts are openly promulgating violence in the name of political change and doing so with nary a whisper of challenge from the black church or the black community. Where are we? How do we just let this mess go on?

This week, we are talking about the nature of compassion, about what our response should be to the suffering going on in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the oil spill disaster. Frankly, I do not believe we, the black church, are talking about it a whole lot. I am certainly convinced we are turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the hatred being spewed with alarming regularity from the right fringe, a group that is growing in political strength and influence. At my distance from them, it seems disturbingly clear the very nexus of their discontent is not the president’s policies so much as his skin color. As much as many of these same people disliked President Clinton, the rhetoric and, frankly, ignorance is now ratcheted up to unprecedented levels. This disturbs me. It should disturb you.

While I assume some small percentage of our pastors are discussing this to one degree or another, I would prevail upon the speculative majority of black pastors to, in their rush to collect their weekly paycheck, pause to spend at least a few minutes equipping God’s people with the disturbing truth about this mounting threat to our liberty, our civil rights, and our very society. The black church must wake from its coma. Lies must be challenged. And we must not allow anarchists and reactionaries to decide for us what is and what is not a legitimate election in this country.

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