I haven’t written about Cliven Bundy because I don’t really give a crap about him. I am not surprised to learn about his belief that blacks were better off as slaves, but it actually doesn’t lower my opinion of him. My opinion of him was already as low as it can get.
He’s really just a mirror for the conservative movement. He’s no different from the hundreds of thousands of white Kentuckians who complain about blacks on welfare while they are on food stamps and have subsidies that allow them to have access to quality health care for the first time.
Probably no president in history has done more to improve the quality of life for white Kentuckians than Barack Obama, but he doesn’t get due credit for it because he’s black and represents the “Black Party.”
Cliven Bundy won’t pay his grazing fees, but he complains about “negroes” who get government assistance. It’s no wonder he became a hero to the conservative movement. He embodies their beliefs.
Yes and thanks to Hannity, Fox OWNS all that is Cliven Bundy. Front and center and thanks to Jon Stewart’s documentations their hypocrisy frosts this particular Conservative cake.
Ha Ha Ha not anymore
under the bus
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/hannity-bundy-slavery-repugnant
It’s no wonder he became a hero to the conservative movement. He embodies their beliefs.
And Jonathan Chait looks stupider every day.
“Giving a crap” isn’t a good test for what GOP and rightwing propaganda requires push back from the saner wing of this country. The faster each new symbol of the right is beaten down to a pulp based on actual stupidity, ignorance, racism, etc., the sooner it disappears. Being polite, nice, detached, etc., is why Palin still commands attention years after she was functionally irrelevant (IMHO that dated from her 9/08 Schieffer interview). “Joe the plumber” should have been gone in fifteen minutes.
Palin commands attention because she is an attractive female. If Palin was a male, or wasn’t attractive enough that old men will turn on a show just to look at her she wouldn’t still be around and nobody would give a rats ass if she spontaneously combusted on air.
How attractive you are is the most important thing when it comes to your relevance and value on TV. You can be the smartest human ever, but if you’re not pleasing to look at nobody is going to suffer through hours of your ugly fucking mug on TV. But if you’re attractive, you can be the worlds biggest idiot and people will still stare at the screen.
Hence why the talking heads are usually fairly attractive. Joe the Plumber was an ugly mug, make him look like Brad Pitt and he’d still be relevant.
I see some conservatives are already defending it. “Proper context” obviously Booman. What he said isn’t different from what they typically espouse, and with proper context you’d understand that. Oh wait, is that the sound of conservative implicitly admitting they believe the same thing if said with the correct tact? Glad thy admit it.
Dude ranches increasing draft horses in their stables to accommodate larger tourists. (There are more correct words than “larger,” but they aren’t PC.)
Isn’t that why Americans ride around in big-ass, gas guzzling SUVs in urban areas?
I really only see three “big-ass gas guzzling SUVs” driving around “urban areas”. None of it has anything to do with weight.
Dude ranch tourists are “poors and olds?”
In most of the real world, urban SUVs aren’t limited to the high priced, luxury end and new. How many large Americans do you see driving/riding around in compact automobiles. Obesity rates may be higher among the “poors and olds,” but Chris Christie was neither.
Cops aren’t fat? Seriously? I’ve seen an abundance of “well-rounded” cops in my years on earth, and I really don’t think this makes me unique in any way.
Here in the Washington DC area, no they really aren’t. Most of the cops, firemen, soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, secret service, federal agents, are in amazingly good shape.
All of those organizations have fitness standards and pay well enough to afford proper food. No, fitness standards can vary wildly from local to local, but the standards here seem pretty damn good.
Most of the cops here are fit enough to pass soccer players or professional boxers.
Well, I congratulate you on your leaner police department. Here, in my little corner of Greater Boston, the cops seem to have been consuming more than their fair share of donuts. Sure, there are fit cops, but I would have trouble saying that they were in a majority. Likewise when I lived in New Haven.
Cars are a luxury in most areas with a fairly good public transportation system.
If someone is driving an SUV that means they’ve got to pay a couple hundred dollars a month for parking both where they work and where they live. If you drive your SUV downtown you better have cash. Parking is hard and expensive enough on the street in a smart car. If you’re an SUV you can forget it and expect to pay 10-20 bucks per hour in a garage or for the valet service to deal with it.
If someone is not part of the government and in an SUV they’re either the rich yuppie type who owns it to take all the kids out to a soccer game or skiing, or they’re a rich athelete/artist using it as a mobile party/groupie/women shuttle downtown going from event to event.
Outside of people with tags from bumfuck rural America, we really don’t get non high end SUV traffic. I see more high end stretch limos SUVs than crappy Asian SUVs or Grand Cherokees.
Your local and personal observations aside:
And:
That’s cars, not SUVs. And nobody owns “trucks” in the actual city itself. That’s talking the suburbs around it where cars are mandatory to get anywhere.
As someone who is rather overweight, I appreciate your not equating that with moral failings.
It has more to do with one’s diet in childhood and the industrialized food system. My mother’s sweet tooth notwithstanding, she was a genius at stretching a dollar and was fifty years ahead of Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Preferably fresh, in-season, and local. Learning to eat tons of squash, fresh spinach, broccoli, etc. doesn’t extinguish taste buds for candy bars, donuts, etc., but helps to resist junk food screaming, “eat me.”
Quite a bit about genetics too.
I am not the least bit surprised. Bundy’s standoff was no “Occupy for REAL”.
But it’s been better funded. They just forgot that racist, dumbass spokespersons need training not to sound like racist, dumbasses in public.
Cliven expressed himself perfectly. He simply failed to put it through the rightwing filter machine that preserves the meaning for rightwingers and can’t be heard by mushy-middle USians.
Well, Cliven are you “better off under gub’mint subsidy”, livin’ the big sky ranchin’ life (on the public’s dime) or would you be better off living unwashed in a filthy covered wagon while being unceremoniously driven out of community after community for espousing an unwelcome crackpot religion?
It just goes to show the land mines that poor Team Conservative coaches have to deal with when creating their modern day folk heroes—a deranged imbecile like Cliven Bundy doesn’t just stop with cute pronouncements that he “doesn’t recognize” the legality and “existence” of the federal government, he naturally also believes the 13th Amendment was a huge mistake, and probably against “natural law” as well! It’s basically all part of the crackpot “conservative” mindset.
Why is God’s name the US Attorney didn’t just sue him for all collectible past due grazing fees and then place liens on every bit of Bundy ranch property and assets is a mystery. Letting this Mormon militia nut stand up to federal officials was poor planning and strategy.
Having said that, the cognitive dissonance the American Right must operate under to wildly cheer non-payment of (comically below market) federal grazing fees and militiamen having armed stand-offs with federal officials, while bed wetting over Gitmo detainees and hatin’ on all other “gub’mint subsidies” (not exclusively for white western capitalist ranchers) is truly awe inspiring.
What I heard on Thom Hartmann this afternoon is that the BLM did sue him and the judge ordered that BLM seize the cattle for the debt. So that is what Fox News calls “theft” and conservatives are up in arms (literally!) about. Defying a Federal Court Order. If Holder wasn’t a eunuch he would have arrested them all for armed resistance to a federal court order and insurrection to boot!
Well, grazing benefits rangeland provided the grazing is managed; it can help to restore native vegetation in grasslands that have been farmed, so having ranchers make use of federal lands benefits us citizens in and of itself outside the $ from grazing fees.
Ah, but the wingnuts won’t be happy about this little Bundy nugget:
Via TPM.
If not for the Mexican Revolution, Bundy’s ancestors might have remained in Mexico and stolen land from indigenous peoples there.
Also damage control. Who’s going to pick his melons if Mexican farm workers boycott his fields of racism?
There is no room for this “logic” thing of yours in the wingnut world. They will excoriate him anyway. And I will eat popcorn.
Fiuggedaboudit, lacerda. These leftinesses have made up their minds that this guy is a racist and nothing on earth will change their minds. They are “racists”…collectivists to use the Paulist term…themselves. He is a white rancher with a big belly…who would I can almost guarantee express pretty much the same kind of distaste about any welfare-dependent system no matter what race comprised it, be it in W. Virginia, Texas, Maine or anywhere else. Someone who is obviously without the (usually quite false) bureaucratic-style kind of edumacation that teaches middle-class people how to parse their words carefully no matter how rotten their real feelings might be.
The leftinesses are on him like white on rice.
The MSNBC left is simply the Fox News right, only upside down and backwards. Both are full of shit.
AG
P.S. Lissen up, you kneejerks…I agree with what he said, although he said it very badly. Welfare as it operates now in the U.S.A produces…especially over the course of a number of generations…a gene sink effect. The smart ones, the industrious ones have already gotten out no matter what and the people who are left behind…of any race, mind you…sink ever deeper into a morass of despair. By the time a couple of generations have gone by they are in a situation where their schools are even more rotten than the middle class schools (which are at least fairly adept at churning out worker bees for the PermaGov), and the ones who are stuck in a ghetto are often literally incapable of performing the basic functions of well-societized human beings. By that time even the smarter kids…especially the smarter kids…wake up one day at about ten to twelve years of age and realize they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of leading a so-called “prosperous,” relatively normal (in a societal sense) life. I have watched this happen so damned many times I can no longer count how many, living in some of the harder streets of NYC since the mid-’60s. Once a kid gives up, what’s left? Quick highs and a criminal life. White, black, tan…it makes no fucking difference except a kid with white skin can at least “pass” as societized in this country if he has the self-control to look the part.
He said:
That goes for what’s happening in the NYC area as well. I see it here all the time, in Hispanic areas and families. It’s one main reason why I got so involved in NYC latin music. Why is it like that? Because Hispanics are by and large not cursed with multiple generations of welfare poison is why. If the other races who have come here had been the
beneficiaries…errrr, ahhhhh…victims of a welfare state, none of them would have escaped endless poverty either. Not the Italians not the Jews, not the Irish…nobody. You can still go to isolated sections of the NYC area and find the Irish/Jewish/Italian left-behind neighborhoods and the same welfare-produced gene sink results as well. Those races worked their way out instead. But the bone-deep racism that is left over from slavery times works against black people on a much deeper level.And don’t any of you try to run that “He’s a racist” meme on me. I have spent over 50 years emulating my musical and life models on every level possible…including speaking my mind as I see fit…and the majority of those people (as well as many of my closest friends) are not white folk. I’m living inside of that particular box, bubbas, and y’all appear to me not to have a clue.
Always remember the old black saying.
After several generations of “Get back,” people tend to get a little…discouraged.
So it goes in racist America, and so it has gone for hundreds of years. Racism…particularly anti-black racism…is America’s original sin. If we don’t find a way out of that sin, we are headed straight for some new kind of hell.
Bet on it.
Watch.
Don’t blame old man Bundy.
Physician…heal thyself!!!
P.P.S. That “gene-sink effect”of the welfare state? I am still not convinced that it was not produced quite consciously by the controllers in order to produce a reliable flow of low-wage workers. Mean streets indeed!!!
Ah, yes. When future President Rand Paul eliminates the federal minimum wage and cuts safety-net spending our corporate betters will rush to increase the salaries of low-wage workers. You have drunk deep, my friend.
I have lived deep, brother. This ain’t working. On plentiful evidence. Is anyone else proposing something better? No. Only the same old same old in new dresses. I do not think that Rand Paul will be elected because the media machine is still just effective enough to be able to continue hornswoggling the American public, but that effectiveness is wearing thin as the lies get bigger and harder to hide. After the next couple of (
s)elections and a continuing economic crisis? I dunno. Then the PermaGuns come out, I am afraid.That’s what I’m seeing, anyway. And I don’t like it much. I don’t like it much at all.
AG
“I have lived deep, brother”
Deep in self-pity, white privilege and a frantic refusal to look at the world through any lens but crackpot “libertarian” ideology, that’s for sure.
“I am for truth, no matter who tells it.”-Malcolm X
AG
Why thank you, Arthur. I’ll keep telling the truth and hope to wake you from your dogmatic slumbers.
A supporter of the Pauls supports a white supremacist? Color me shocked!
AG just doubled down on Blacks may have been better off under slavery than today in the US with the stingiest of social safety net programs among advanced industrial countries. In addition to blaming the victims of discrimination in every aspect of their lives and that of their parents, grandparents, etc., AG also has the audacity assert that those who disagree with him, Rand Paul, and whatever ignorant asshole poster boy they champion are the real racists.
Cut him some slack, some of his best friends are non-white.
Amazing that over fifty years after Lenny Bruce busted the “some of my best friends are black” for what it is that anyone still tries to use it.
There is a difference between “Some of my best friends are [whatever]” and actually joining a true community. The jazz and latin music communities in NYC are as real as it gets, and I have been an integral part of those communities for just about an even 50 years now.
“Some of my best friends are Jews” would be one thing; becoming a Jew…and a rabbi as well…would be a whole ‘nother order of change. I teach these musics to all comers, just as I was taught by my own models. Black, brown or beige, it doesn’t make fuck-all of a difference. You can blah blah blah as much as you like about my interest in what is happening on the right as well as on the left. What you are saying and the juvenile snarkiness of how you are saying it only confirm your own leftiness collectivist faults. Remember that when the “progressive” left once again gets its ass thoroughly kicked by the centrist PermaGov in 2014 and 2016. Had you allied earlier with others who want real change, the U.S. wouldn’t be in its current predicament.
Read my new sig for my only real answer to these kneejerk taunts.
And try…please, just try…to wake the fuck up.
You be bettah off.
Thank you and goodnight from the real world…
AG
Somehow, I doubt being allied with Cliven Bundy would lead to the sort of “real change” I would find even remotely humane.
I can’t even read his dribble. (And a very little bit of jazz and Latin music goes a long way with me.)
Well…there y’are, Marie. Deaf to the real deal on every level.
AG
Deaf to the real deal on every level.
As is Cliven Bundy and every a-hole who follows his lead.
Well, I’ll give you this…betcha Cliven and his boys aren’t kicking back after a hard day on the range listening to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane. Culturally they are indeed from another planet than am I, although one side of my family worked as fishermen, farmers and horsemen…Long Island style…from the late 1600s right into the 1960s. Maybe I have a genetic hook into these people, strange as their lives may seem to a dedicated New York musician.
But that’s the problem, clif. They have a point, and it is their seeming “foreignness”…almost to the point of reverse time travel…that masks that point from many left-wingers. The point is that Big Gov…the Deep State, the PermaGov, Big Brother, call it what you will…has lost the human touch. In fact, it never had much human touch. Get in its way and it will run you over. And despite all of their seeming simplicity, they are the first people in this country since the late 1960s to effectively say “Hell no!!! Homie don’t play that game.”
As far as I am concerned that in itself is a recommendation to look more deeply…and with less prejudice… into their position.
Which I have tried to do.
We can’t go on letting Big Gov dictate to us. That way lies 1984. The left and right have valid meeting points, and this is one of the big ones. Let it go at your own peril.
AG
Pure unadulerated bullshit;
BIG GOVERNMENT was never as repressive as it was institutionalising racism in the form of slavery against African Americans and allowing the wholesale outright murder of the indigenous population of this country.
We are no where near that kind of big government repression.
The Clivern Bundy’s are the very same type of people (IE slave owners and those who actively STOLE Indian land) who demanded special rights for them and theirs, while actively repressing and murdering those that stood in their way ….
Bundy is mad because he don’t get to do as he damn well pleases on land that DOES NOT belong to him and has refused to pay the pittance the US government charges for the profits he makes off FEDERAL land.
The rest of the made up controversy is pure unadulterated bullshit, and your eating it right up along with the mainly racist supporters of his.
Yes — Cliven Bundy believes that there is but one true religion and Arthur believes that the world of music begins and ends with jazz and Latin.
Yes, what you’re saying here is racist, paternialistic, classist and pseudo-scientific. But that’s my opinion. It doesn’t matter if you spend 100 years living around POC or make 10,000 non-white friends, what you are saying is racist, not because you mean it to be, but because it’s a gross type of paternalism that acknowledges racism but then expects blacks to be super human, while also negating any impact that attitudes like yours have on poverty. And here’s another one that might come as a surprise to you, it’s not the government that keeps people in poverty. There’s a really good book about what life was like in America before welfare, In the Shadow Of the Poorhouse: A Social History Of Welfare In America.
Here is a quiz:
Who has been the biggest beneficiary of welfare policies?
What ‘racial’ classification of people in America are the majority?
Which group of mythologizes independence while being repeatedly helped by government programs that they want to exclude their fellow Americans from receiving?
I understand that your racism is informed by your lived experiences. So is mine, it’s not structural, nor does it have a majority backing like yours, but it is informed by living in our culture. Your problem is the same as Bundy’s, you don’t seem to understand when you’re benefiting from a system.
For instance, my lived experiences as a woman of color who grew up in the projects tell me that statements in your 4th paragraph about how you agree with Mr. Bundy, belie a minute understanding of the difficulty that people who are on welfare for generations face. It’s not the welfare itself that is a corrupting thing. It is the entrenched poverty at the behest of a classed society. But hey, don’t let causation and correlation get in the way of making a totally racist point about how welfare itself does something to people and not a system put in place to provide services for people who rarely experience the system they are administering.
Don’t let it stop you from making a totally classist point equating the seeming “goodness” and “smartness” of people with their ability to move out of poverty, while at the same time saying it’s not their fault because of the system. There are plenty of intelligent, smart people who live in poverty and they’d be in poverty today even without welfare.
This is also a pretty racist statement, if you were to travel over to stormfront, you could find 10 posts in 5 minutes that have this sentiment:
None of the people in those groups live in poverty now? Don’t use google to challenged these points.. I wonder who the majority of white people on welfare are? I guess they don’t fall into any of those groups and I guess whites aren’t the biggest beneficiaries of welfare corporate and government sponsored. That sounds like the welfare of whiteness.
I could go on about this for hours, but let me quote this from Yoni Applebaum:
Did Jewish people somehow become more hardworking and industrious once they were in America? No.
Does our history tell us why each of these groups who were never considered white, are usually considered white now? Yes.
There is nothing novel or new in racism that says you can’t “admire” one group of POC and dislike another. That’s actually the very bread and butter of racism and classism.
Your reasoning is too close to the idea of a culture of poverty of dependence, a simplistic understanding of the world in which, there’s a “gene-sink”… instead of a reality of policies (yes welfare – but not for the reasons you say). Like Yoni, here’s what I believe about that kind of thinking:
The logic of attributing certain behaviors to people to ignore the fact that legislative policy helped just about every group of white immigrants — the same opportunities we now seek to deny to blacks and latinos under the guise that it’s them, and not the attitudes and actions of everyday well-meaning people like yourself and law makers who continually make cognitive leaps about an imagined pathology of poverty and dependence.
PS. It sounds so weird to hear you using your cultural cache as a reason for non-racism. it would be pretty difficult to be friends with a person growing up in this culture who didn’t have strange ideas about race/sex/class/gender. That’s less of a nod to you and more of a nod to POC/Women/LGBTQI people who are apparently not as sensitive as everyone makes us out to be since we’re stilling hanging out with people like you.
And no I’m not ignoring the other things you said about how white, black, or tan this is what would happen. I’m simply telling you it’s not happening that way it’s much more complicated than that. To use race to illustrate how the ethnic group you prefer to chill with stick together is indeed racist. People who are identified as “black” have very strong family ties and in fact we are more likely to help our relatives and to continually provide support as people who are labeled white.
Cliven was speaking from a place of stereotypes, he says he never even saw blacks until he was a teenager. Nevada isn’t exactly a black mecca. Do you think he knows about black wealth in Atlanta? Or what black people do, the myriad of ways we celebrate, the very different cultures that fall under the label of blackness? No. What he is going on is not his personal knowledge of black people, so why should I except that as a truth? To me, these kind of cultural assumptions are no different than Herodotus: describing a people you don’t understand, a culture you can’t see, eye-witnesses who are not there, a political system that only exists in the reality of a man who has learned to interpret it through the lens of America. Over 70% of Black americans don’t live in poverty, and those that do each have individual stories, circumstances, and problems.
Neither you or Mr. Bundy have the prescription for what ails us, unless you’re willing to look at the myth of independence America has constructed for itself.
All of this is a result of a classed society. How do you know you are middle class without the poor? The classed society in itself isn’t the problem, but it’s what we handle it and how we pretend that we live in a merit based society where people get what they deserve. What is there to be in the middle of if not poverty and wealth?
Sorry to post an essay here guys. But I just wasn’t sure how to address all his points.
If anything, it was a breath of fresh air.
Forgive me, Project Monday. I am out of time at the moment and cannot answer you in great enough detail to equal your own effort. Maybe tomorrow. Gotta go make some music now.
Later…
AG
I am going to answer you point for point, PM:
You say that my points are racist, but you do not accurately reference how. When and where did I say that I expect anybody to be “superhuman?” I actually consider almost anyone of color who has managed to live a life in thjs racist culture without going essentially mad to be something akin to superhuman, to tell you the truth. Sometimes I think that I myself am going to go crazy with all of the racial duplicity that I see, and I can still fairly easily pass as part of the Northern European ruling class if I want to do so. So how does my rejection of white America…I left it in the `60s for a multiracial community of musicians first in Boston and soon after that in NYC…and my choice to live in whatever financial state necessary in order to play the music that moved me translate into some kinds of “attitudes” that have an effect on poverty? Hell…when this music first transported me at about 14 years of age I had no idea what the races of its players were. Really. All I knew was that whoever was playing in the quintet that produced the classic Bird and Diz Concert at Massey Hall was who I wanted to be. It took about 6 years of struggle to even begin to get out of the suburban white middle class hell in which I grew up and into the mainstream of the cultures that produced the music.
And it is indeed “the government”…the corporate-owned government and its media enforcers…that control the overall view of minorities by the Northern European majority here in Omertica. That racist view…subliminal in some people, much more overt in others…is the guarantor of poverty for whatever races are caught in its glare. The only way out of that position is to assimilate, which is how the majority of each and every whitish/tannish immigrant race reached mainstream economic status inside of a couple of generations in the U.S. Darker races cannot so easily disappear into the mainstream, and the U.S. capitalist system has used that fact to construct a permanent underclass here that is almost as rigid and inviolable as were the Indian caste systems.
As far as being “paternalistic, classist and pseudo-scientific,” once again I ask you to cite exactly where I evinced any of those attitudes. Define your terms while you are at it. I am in some real sense one of the adopted sons of the black and latin U.S. cultures; I walked away from my inherited class system to be something else, and “pseudo-scientific” is a meaningless phrase here. I am not being “scientific” at all, I am simply stating my lifelong observations. To tell you the truth, I do not have much use for “science” of any kind, seeing as how most of its so-called conclusions seem to have been regularly toppled by new, hottest-thing-ever conclusions at a steady rate throughout human history. What amount of science can figure the human heart or soul? None. But we persevere.
The people who control the government and the economy. By far. They have a steady stream of low-wage workers at their disposal.
By whose count?
The census? The census is bullshit. I can guarantee that its “count” is loaded with inaccuracies., and most of them have to do with poorer neighborhoods. And what does that figure…even an accurate one…have to do with what we are discussing?
So you are saying what, exactly? That the welfare or other government systems that lay money on people help whites more than than they do minorities? Turn that on its head. “Welfare” and other giveaways rather than jobs, honest work and adequate pay hurt whoever they touch in the long run.
I am not racist, and that has been informed by my life experiences.
If you say so.
What on earth does that mean? “Structural?” Define your terms.
As I said above. I am not racist. And if I have not made myself clear, I am decidedly not in any majority in the U.S. or anywhere else. I can pass as being in one, but I generally do not do so because frankly, it turns my stomach to do so.
,
And how would you know that if you do not know how I live? Bundy’s problem is that “the system” no longer works for him. It’s changed. It wants its land back, land that has been freely used since the 1870s. He built his life on a system that now wants to blow his scene, and he’s not alone. My only “problem”…other than sheer personal survival as an artist… is that I think the entire system is about to implode and I do not want to see my son’s life ruined in that implosion.
And that poverty is in no way connected to the entrenched and totally racist social system in general? The almost total incompetence of every Big Gov system that has to do with poorer people of any color? The grinding stupidity of the welfare system in general? Of the inner city educational system? The police and justice system? I am beginning to think that you are some kind of social worker or other Big Gov employee trying to justify your occupation. Did I guess right? I got news for you. The system ain’t working, and it has not worked for at least 50 years. It simply keeps a bad scene in stasis. That’s not “working,” it’s just treading water.
Causation and correlation, eh?
If the overall system is used to create a stasis, to let people barely survive so that their children can only dream as high as being a clerk in a ghetto Walgreens? One of my brightest young students…her name was “Fanta,” like the poisonous orange soda…could see no further at age 10. She was really gifted, but the school was a prison. Nothing more and nothing less. A prison, as was her project which was named after Thomas Jefferson, a white slaveholder. I could barely stop myself from crying when she said that.
“Goodness had nothing to do with it” said Mae West. Not necessarily, anyway. Intelligence? Yes, along with some good luck, more than likely. Generation after generation, the smart ones who do not go crazy from the contradictions implicit in this society make it out.
But I am saying that.
Let us imagine that there was no racism of any kind in this country. No institutionalized racism particularly. That’s a long stretch but try to make it. Until fairly recently non-minority, non-poverty level kids haven’t had to be able to do much more than show up and do “C” level work in school to pretty well guarantee at least a working class income and life for themselves. Can that be said of welfare kids? Of course not. Average abilities usually translate in the ghetto to big life trouble.
And there’s that `welfare” thing again. As if it exists in some sort of magic world, unattached to the system in general. It allows the system to continue to discriminate, PM. “Who us?” the controllers say. “Why…looka here. We’re taking care of these poor, poor people!!!” And then they miseducate them, feed them poisons on a monstrous basis, imprison the one who go batshit nuts and put the rest of them to work at McDonalds or other low-wage, low interest jobs..
C’mon.
None of this exists in a vacuum.
Fuck stormfront!!! Their context and mine have no intersection whatsoever. I believe that genetically imbued capabilities run in an equal curve through every race on earth. Every race has its dummies, every race has its geniuses and every race has a median point where the majority of people’s talents lie. I want to see a system that treats inequality among human beings as an ecological problem that needs to be solved if we are to survive.
That “welfare” sucks, too.
“From each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs” is my aim.
That’s about enough. I did not “use race to illustrate how the ethnic group [I] prefer to chill with stick together.” The group with whom I have choosen to “chill” for 50+ years is multiracial. If you can play…or even working hard and honestly at learning how to play…you’re OK. End of story. The Bundy thing? They fronted The Man and they backed him down. Good on them. I wish it happened more often in other scenes. Are they moral heroes up and down the line? I doubt it. But neither are they as bad as the kneejerk left have been painting them, Bundy included. Did you read what he had to say about his experience with Hispanics? I’ve met some real white racists, and most of them don’t have a damned good thing to say about anybody who isn’t exactly like them. This whole “Bundy is a racist” brouhaha is just more PermaGov smoke to stop people from seeing what really went down there.
Like I said…enough.
Later…
AG
I wonder who would ever say a thing like that. Could it be…Marx? That slogan does appear in The Critique of the Gotha Program. Of course he was the one who popularized the slogan. Its source was another socialist, Louis Blanc, back in the 1830s. I’m sure a few of my old Liberation Theology friends (also socialists, back in the day) would claim a Biblical basis as well.
It’s a good principle to live by and work toward. There are right ways and wrong ways to move toward that principle. Encouraging right-wing nationalists (whether the tantrums of the likes of Bundy, or the politicians who cater to the basest prejudices of the Tea Party, such as the Pauls) is not the way – see the experience of the National Bolsheviks in Russia over the last couple decades (now there is an awful bunch).
I write something from the bottom of my heart and this is all you can come up with? A comment fit for the banal Twitterverse in which we most of us currently live? I know who said it, Don. It has been said in many ways by many people in the history of the world. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is another variation. So what? Is it more or less true because Karl Marx said it? Of course not. How about Groucho Marx? How about Moses or Jesus? Why even point this out?
Weak snark is some tired old shit, brother.
Drop it from your repertoire.
You be bettah off.
AG
It’s more like you got caught saying something racist after years and years of blogging here supporting all manner of right-wing pols, and most recently supporting the actions of Bundy (who really is little more than a petty thief). You got called on it, by at this point multiple people here. Now you are trying to dig yourself out of the hole you created. It really is that simple. End of story.
I have never supported any manner of “right-wing” pols here or anywhere else until it became plentifully clear that Obama was simply a front man for the same PermaGov for which Bush II worked…unless of course you count my support for HRC against Obama, which was based entirely on her experience plying the levers and gears of DC as opposed to Obama’s utter innocence on that level. i still think that the country would have been better off with a professional hustler at the helm instead of a rookie.
Other than that? I kept the left-wing faith until I began to choke on its lies.
Bundy?
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. (Until further notice, of course, as it has always been in the history of mankind.) Necessity make strange bedfellows. I believe the defeat of the Permanent Government/Deep State is an absolute necessity if the human race is to survive.
Of course, that survival thing is only important if said human race has some special, exceptionalist position in the scheme of things.
I am beginning to wonder about that, as well.
So is Gaia, on plentiful evidence.
So it goes.
AG
Deflect all you want. I know what I’ve read over the years here. Maybe I truly stand alone in my assessment, but I doubt it. And at the end of the day, I’ll stand by what I said just a bit earlier. The reasoning behind the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” is itself fallacious, by the way.
The enemy of my enemy may well yet also be someone I would not trust and sometimes the friend of my enemy may be under certain circumstances an ally. There is more nuance to activism and advocacy than the false dilemma (or false dichotomy) would on the surface indicate.
No, you obviously do not know what you have read here over the years. But that’s OK. A leftiness kneejerk doesn’t need reality. It only needs the reflex.
AG
Doesn’t change the facts. Deflect and insult all you want, but it won’t change what you were called out on. So it goes.
AG, your worldview is flawed, and your methods of argumentation to defend it are disintegrating in front of us.
First, worldview. You:
“”Welfare” and other giveaways rather than jobs, honest work and adequate pay hurt whoever they touch in the long run.”
No society in the history of the world has ever provided full employment. Many societies, this one included, provide shamefully poor levels of compensations for many jobs. The idea that compensation for employment in the U.S. is determined by a rational free market is a preposterous sham. In decrying “giveaways,” you betray your complete ignorance of the fact that the majority of Americans who benefit from almost all our social welfare programs are from WORKING FAMILIES.
We have allowed compensation for “honest work” to be undermined so severely in this country that a person working 60 hours or more a week at two or three jobs is often unable to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families without government assistance. Your disparaging of the Walgreens and McDonald’s jobs in your City and Nation betray that you hold a nasty lack of respect for their work.
I concede that service jobs are not always the most challenging or spiritually enriching ones, but they are important and valuable, and there is no reason that they should pay starvation wages. No reason, other than the easy acceptance of people like you who seem to feel that those people deserve it somehow. Your warped economical and moral view also seems to suggest that we should rip away social welfare programs, which in your fantastical mind would cause enough starvation and death to correct perversions in the labor market.
Finally, your methods of argumentation: At some point, you should take responsibility for your near-complete inability to persuade others on this blog. Coming here obsessively and blaming others for their distaste for your conclusions will not bring on the revolution you so, so childishly dream is right around the corner.
Lionizing Bundy while simultaneously laying claim to the heritage of Coltrane and the mantle of Malcolm X is pathetic of you. Have you noticed that the only people who say “I’m not a racist” are racists? This is true whether or not we are to believe that “Fanta” made you weep with sorrow. Because, really, if you want to allow impoverished people to starve in the street, who gives a fuck about your self-pity.
Thanks for the response AG. I’ll respond back to you, but don’t want to take over thread with a super long response again so I’ll probably try doing it privately or something. Is the email you list here accurate?
Yes, I read what he had to say about Hispanics and it seems to me that people who can exploit others always prefer the ones they can exploit more vs. the ones they can’t. But the stats say that welfare for blacks and latinos are roughly the same.
Perhaps I’m able to parse it in a different way because I’m quite familiar with white people having a “chosen POC” and model minority they like to tout (Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, etc), all the while being racist even towards the same groups they just praised. I guess for them it creates a balance in which they can’t possibly be racist because this other group is okay. And for people who don’t exercise critical thought that is enough. It’s not for me, I know that the way racism functions in our society is complex. It is perfectly easy to harbor racist thoughts against black people and marry one, have sex with one, or praise one.
I heard what he said and it sounded just as racist when I read it. I don’t think it’s Permagov smoke.
I don’t fear the state of the federal government. States rights have been used to terrorize people of color. Local governments can be some of the worst when it comes to recognizing violations. That’s not to say that the feds don’t do terrible things, because they do. It’s to say that the federal government is received pretty positively by people who have had to struggle for the right to be included in this dominantly white, male, propertied culture. Do I want the federal government or the state’s government enforcing my civil rights? Based on history, I’d be better off with the feds.
There’s still 2 issues here 1. He should pay his grazing fees. 2. Even if he never pays them, what he said was racist informed by a white world view that’s appealing to you as a white man. You’re willing to overlook what he said, because it doesn’t bother you, because it’s not aimed at you, because it’s not your reality to have to carry the slings of that.
I’m at least 30 years younger than you, with a background in critical anti-racist theory and loosely dabble in cognitive behavioral stuff. We have a difference of opinion, I personally see your ideas as very racist and outdated. For me, you’re living in a world where you think you can give up the benefits of being white simply by disowning whiteness? That’s laughable. There’s no dropping out of society or the privileges that whiteness gives. That’s not an ideology I accept. Though I do believe that race is an illusion (and I heard you expressing that as well), I don’t think that you can escape the benefits of being part of or mistaken as one of the dominant group.
It’s a new world. You and Mr. Bundy live in a different world now where other people can directly tell you that whatever thoughts you may have and you’re dismissing that he heard directly from that group of people that his half-formed ideas on race are not acceptable anymore. That’s paternalism. We don’t need a left-wing media to hold or hands or blow it up for us because we can read, bro. The first thing I heard of his comments wasn’t in left wing media but in right wing media.
He has a limited world view on black people, what our economic situation is, how our families work. If I drove by his farm and saw him and his family sitting on the porch, would it be right for me to make an assumption of how much he works and what he deserves? Like you I could make the assumption he finished a hard day’s work, or he’s just enjoying himself as he’s free to do. I could make an assumption about whether he owned that land, and I could make assumptions about how he got it.
If you don’t understand why it’s racist to make a snap judgment on driving into a housing project and saying that “they don’t have anything to do” and wondering if our family lives were better under slavery because you have a gross puritanical view of work and morality, that’s fine but don’t expect us to go along with it….
How many people did he talk to? Did he know they don’t have jobs or side hustles? Did he know that since they’ve been measuring employment in the black community it’s always been higher? He knows nothing. He made an assumption and you’re making another one in attempting to defend him.
I don’t have to paint Bundy as anything, his words speak for themselves, he painted it and maybe the picture is in a color you can only see if you have seen it before. His opinions aren’t that far off from Ryan’s, Charles Murray’s, Strom Thurmond’s, John Derbyshire’s and other respected intellectuals and politicians on the right. If you can’t hear the dog whistle, it’s because you ain’t the dog it’s aimed at. I recently bought a vintage Klan magazine on the killing of civil rights martyr, Viola Liuzzo,
Night Riders: The Inside Story of the Liuzzo Killing. What I find so interesting about this magazine is that there’s the same sort of “care” and “paternalism” for the negro there as was expressed by Bundy. I plan to actually scan the magazine, so that it’s preserved online for other people to see and compare and contrast with what’s being said about blacks politically today.
you’ve broken out your gene-sink theory before the explain why rural white America is degraded as it is. Basically, your idea is that all the smart people with skills and initiative have already left the rural areas for the city, leaving behind a genetic wasteland.
It’s a pretty crude argument, but I can’t say that it is wholly without merit. The people who stay down on the farm are largely people who don’t want to see or know anything else. The incurious breed with the incurious, and maybe over time there really is a genetically reinforcing loop.
In this case, however, you are arguing that the black population of our cities has been degraded by generations receiving government handouts. Those with smarts, skills, and initiative have already figured out a way out of the ghetto, leaving behind a degraded remnant that is basically helpless.
This is even harder to posit. For starters, the northern migration took place because there was work to be had in the cities. People didn’t pick up and travel north to lay around on their couch all day. The people who moved north had ambition and gumption, and they expected a decent job and a better life than sharecropping.
So, the black population in the North started out with the same work ethic of the European and Asian immigrants. They didn’t necessarily start out with the same level of skills, however, having been enslaved for 400 years. They didn’t have the same level of capital. They didn’t have the same cultural memory of what it takes to succeed in business. So, they were at a disadvantage. And then the jobs left and this lack of entrepreneurial experience and access to capital became very marked. The Irish, the Jews, the Italians, and the Chinese all had a better ability to pool their assets and take advantage of their experiences to start businesses.
I think this difference does a lot more to explain why blacks have trailed behind other immigrant groups than the idea that they were trained to be lazy by government handouts that really only began in earnest about 50 years ago.
If you know anything about genetics, you know that it takes many generations to create the kind of changes you are asserting here. If you are looking for genetic explanations of black behavior, you’d do better to look at the 400 years of slavery when people were selected on an auction block for certain “desired” characteristics, and the systemic rape in the American slavery system that resulted in a new race of people less black than brown. No one wants to talk about that issue, at all. There is a lot of psychopathic white rapist blood mixed up in the gene pool of the black community in America. If you believe in inherited characteristics, that’s not a story any one wants a piece of.
The bottom line is that these kind of lazy genetic arguments are usually proxies for confirming some pre-existent and tangential bias. In your hands, it’s simple pseudo-science. You’re an Irish-American. My great great grandparents considered you black and thought we should enforce our borders against an invasion of drunken papists. But your daddy probably got a leg-up with the G.I. Bill and created a decent home for you to live in so you could indulge yourself with Duke Ellington records instead of toiling in the mines.
Consider yourself lucky. You’re not black anymore.
You write:
Gee!! Thanks, Booman.
It’s crude but meritorious.
Nice.
As they used to say back in the 1930s, “That’s mighty white of you.” Even if I didn’t know who and what you are I would peg you as either a leftiness “progressive” or some sort of lame academic from that statement alone.
It don’t get much more centrist than that shit.
Then you say that what works “down on the farm” does not work in urban ghettoes, and you use the northern migration of black people in search of work as the beginning of an effort to prove this. Both are crude statements without any merit whatsoever.
I have close contacts with some people who still to this day live “down on the farm.” Mostly northern New Englanders who stayed true to their upbringing, working with their hands as farmers, fishermen, craftsmen etc. Until the progressive collapse of this society started in earnest…I peg it at the moment someone’s bullet killed JFK, myself…many of the best and brightest stayed “down on the farm” because it was a hell of a good life. My paternal grandfather was someone who did the same thing. Bright as a pistol, he also became a successful local businessman in what was then rural Long Island, but he never took his soul out of the land. He kept livestock, rode his horses for pleasure, boarded horses in his stable and was happiest out in the saddle room with his lifelong buddies, smoking pipes and telling tall tales. He was hardly someone who wanted “to see or know anything else.” His family had been doing the same things since the mid-1600s in the same area, and he was rooted about 20 feet deep into that land.
Yes, that northern migration took place because there were opportunities in the north for black people that did not exist in the south and yes, “people didn’t pick up and travel north to lay around on their couch all day.” I caught the tail end of the surviving urban culture that resulted from that migration when I came up as a jazz musician in the pre-(so-called) civil rights ’60s…I lived and worked in black neighborhoods (Boston’s Roxbury, NYC’s Harlem, Atlantic City before its fatal casino infection and for a time in Indianapolis as well) that were very stable and very well balanced despite…or quite possibly as a result of…the rancid depredations of the racist white culture in general. The people bonded in mutual self-defense, and they bonded tight. There was a sense of order in those communities, a sense of mutual love and affection that was buttressed by strong familial bonds, strong church ties and an unofficial “local government” that took care of business its own way. If you have not read the wonderful book “Black Like Me” by the white journalist John Howard Griffin, you really should. In the late ’50s he dyed his skin dark and went undercover in the ghettoes of America for 6 weeks, and he was astounded by the fine structure and life-affirming caring that he found there. He was totally unprepared for it because until he did this he had only an outsider’s view of what was going down, a view promoted and protected by the white racist media. It is a beautiful, life-changing book. Read the oeuvre of the (supposed) “crime novelist” Walter Mosely for another take on the same riff, especially the books written around the character Easy Rawlins and also…for me the best of the bunch…”Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned” about an ex-con named Socrates Fortlow trying to go straight. Deep societal stuff, camouflaged as crime novels.
When the urban riots of the ’60s broke out in Newark, Boston, Harlem, Detroit etc., the whole welfare system was minuscule compared to what it is today. The Deep State government of the U.S…and this is plentifully documented in so many ways I won’t even start to do your work for you…decided that the urban black culture had to be broken up because it was a real threat to the JFK coupmeisters, and they cooperated with the Mafia in flooding those areas with cheap, totally destructive drugs. Within 10 years that society was all gone, replaced by a welfare state that has presided over a still-continuing downward spiral of a once well-balanced and proud culture. In the ’30s brilliant musicians like Duke Ellington and Count Basie were black cultural heroes. Today? Gangsta wannabes and get rich quick music have taken their place. No more than that need be said about the decay of the system if you still have the ears that God so generously gave you.
As you say, the “government handouts…really only began in earnest about 50 years ago.” That takes care of the “people didn’t pick up and travel north to lay around on their couch all day” argument that you wanted to pin on me. The welfare state post-dated that migration by decades.
You also say:
I believe this to be true. Maybe even a greater work ethic, because they were quite conscious that they were starting with more than two strikes against them out front. I must have spent upwards of 300 hours traveling in my car from NYC to Washington DC (We both worked in the once-great Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra for many years) with the amazingly gifted black trumpet player Joe Wilder…the Jackie Robinson of the NYC musical world in many respects because he was the first black player to effectively break the color line in the recording scene…who came up in the ’30s and ’40s in Philadelphia. His tales of “the way it was” as opposed to “the way it is now” should be made into a an oral history book.
But then you write:
Bullshit on the face of it. Their “skills” had been honed and passed down from generation to generation because that was all they had to use in the interests of survival.
As whom?
The immigrants who came here…most of them unable to speak English, with the clothes on their back and not much more? Get real.
Again…utter bullshit. They had the “cultural memory” of what it takes to survive as slaves and the despised-by-the-white-culture sons and daughters of slaves. They and their ancestors had survived by their wits and their skills. Bet on it.
Their only real “disadvantage” was the color of their skin that made them unable to pass relatively unnoticed into the mainstream white world, Booman. Dassit. They were marked as untouchables and then used as such by the economic system. Slavery redux. Bet on that as well.
More bullshit. Only their color barred them from “access to capital”…or access to power through politics, which is really the same thing. The Chinese had the same problem, but as I posted above, the following black aphorism was in effect up and down the society.
The Chinese also had a language and ancient culture that gave them valuable shelter from the American language and culture. They could remain ‘apart,” keep their own counsel and defend their own territory by secrecy and racial cohesion. The Irish, Jews and Italians, etc? They integrated more or less seamlessly over about three to four generations. They were hired as workers first, ascended to positions of relative power as they got educations and formed a working class/middle class that was fairly integrated (among themselves and their white predecessors here) within three or four generations at the most. Of course, some portion of the Jewish population isolated itself from that movement by holding onto orthodox religious beliefs, but by the ’50s and ’60s the integration of the European migration into the American white population was pretty much a done deal. That’s where I came in, living in a Long Island suburb of NYC that was almost totally evenly split amongst Protestant whites, Catholic Irish/Italians and Jews. On my mother’s side that movement took three generations, from Irish immigrant to suburban housewife/teacher. Same with most of my non-Protestant friends. Three generations and in like Flynn.
Then you really hit your stride:
What a load of crap, Booman. I am not talking about genetic mutations here, I am talking about both nature and nurture. It does not take “many generations” for two relatively stupid people to produce equally relatively stupid children. If the parents can’t read with any degree of comprehension, if their lifestyle is one of some sort of degradation and despair then their children are crippled from the getgo. There will still be gifted children born to that particular line, but if they are not taught how to use their gifts by their parents and the culture in which they come up they are quite likely to be doomed to repeating the same mistakes that they see around them. Take your young child…the son of gifted and responsible parents. If he had been placed from birth in the same back of the bar/trailer/sheep shit milieu as was the poor, fucked-from-the-outset little Abu Ghraib criminal Lynndie England, what are the chances that he would grow up healthy and sane?
You apparently want a piece of it. As your hero Barack Obama said to the most recent tomato can that was appointed to run and lose against him, “Please proceed, Governor.” I would love to hear your genetic theories on this subject in greater detail. Please proceed.
What wonderful academic gibberish, Booman!!!
“…proxies for confirming some pre-existent and tangential bias.”
Magnificent. Of course the phrase has no discernible content, but what the hell. The form is truly masterful. You grew up in Princeton, you say? Must be something in the water.
As I said, I am not using “genetic theories.” I am simply stating what I have seen in my lifetime among any and all familes belonging to any and all ethnic groups, religions or classes. Dumb people generally produce dumb children and vice-versa. Duh. Nature? Nurture? Let the talking head scientists debate that until the cows come home. It’s good for their tenure ambitions. If all the cattle are spotted, so will be most of their calves. If all the cattle are good milk producers…or not so good milk producers, for that matter…the same will hold true of their progeny. If they have a number of herding dogs working them, the same plus or minus tendencies will evince themselves in the dogs’ puppies. This is not high science, it’s just the way things operate. Will there be a few puppies out of a number of litters that do not learn or herd well? Yup. What will happen to them? They will be neglected in some way. Maybe even “euthanized” as the Bureau of Land Management Nazis so gently refer to it. Will there be some that are exceptionally talented? Yup. They will be favored by their controllers. A good worker is a valuable commodity for the bosses. So it goes, up and down the scale of creation.
I will repeat what I said to Project Monday above.
” ‘Pseudo-scientific’ is a meaningless phrase here. I am not being “scientific” at all; I am simply stating my lifelong observations. To tell you the truth, I do not have much use for “science” of any kind, seeing as how most of its so-called conclusions seem to have been regularly toppled by new, hottest-thing-ever conclusions at a steady rate throughout human history. What amount of science can figure the human heart or soul? None. But we persevere.”
The rest of your post? Equally way off.
I am Irish Catholic on one side, Scots/Anglo/German/Dutch/Spanish/Native American Protestant on the other as far as we know. Neither side of my family had much use for the culture of other side until my parents met. Not a whole lot of use for each other after they met either, truth be told. But they were working class on both sides of the family all the way from the early 1600s with one or two exceptions. I experienced a miracle when I found jazz. I was headed out of the scene anyway…musician lawyer, writer, poet…something. Jazz defined my road. “Indulge myself?” You obviously don’t know shit about what happens to an artist when an awakening of that sort occurs.
I do consider myself lucky.
Lucky I’m not “white” anymore.
Not black either.
“Black,” “white”…more two-dimensional thinking.
There’s always a third dimension…except of course in the cartoons.
Y’oughta try it.
It’s very…liberating.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
Waiting for the investigative reporting to expose which DC consultants engineered this media spectacular. Even the anti-government anarchist Occupy people who talked about going apparently reconsidered. There is astro-turf written all over this event, including the picture of the guy with the gun who could have — in EuroMaidan style opened fire on both the sagebrushers and law enforcement just to stir up the rubes.
I am sorry, Tarheel…I wish that it were otherwise but the people I saw in Zuccotti Park had neither personal wherewithal nor the stand-up-to-police mentality to have been any help whatsoever in that standoff. It was guns against guns (It always seems to end up that way eventually, doesn’t it?) and clever posters on sticks weren’t going to cut it.
AG
It will never cease to amaze me how terrified the “self-made” preachers of personal responsibility are of the idea of a nondiscriminatory meritocracy.
Maybe someone should ask him if Mormons were better off in Missouri…
Another perfectly phrased response from Harry Reid