Nommo South: The Norm

Possible Opening Paragraph...

Yesterday I posted that I am working on a book tentatively titled "Boundless Limitations: The Empty Necessity of Reelecting President Barack Obama."  I asked what you all thought about the title--so far, one person says they like the title.  That's cool....

So, what do you think about this as an opening paragraph for my book:

Lost in the melodrama of progressive criticism of President Obama is the fact that he has had the nerve to be the man he professed to be and do the things he said he would do. Whatever you may think of the man, his policies, style and deportment he has not strayed from the maddening equivocation that is the cul-de-sac conclusion of his The Audacity of Hope.  That book so disappointed me after I had been elevated by his Dreams of My Father.  I remember thinking at the conclusion of The Audacity of Hope, “damn, a humanistic pragmatist. Is this guy trying to simultaneously channel W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington?  Humm, stay tuned,” I thought, “stay tuned.”

Okay, so what do you think about this as an opening parageaph?

“Boundless Limitations: The Empty Necessity of Reelecting President Barack Obama”

“Boundless Limitations: The Empty Necessity of Reelecting President Barack Obama” is the working title of a book I am writing.  What do you think of the title?  What would you expect to be in a book with this title?

I can tell you that I am not writing to support the anguished rhetoric of black and white progressives who say that the President has let “us” down; nor am I trashing President Obama in favor of who—the Herman (Negro Please) Cain, or the rouged siren Michelle Bachmann? 

So you now know what I am not writing about.  Tweet a brother at @emptynecessity to find out about what’s happening in “Boundless Limitations: The Empty Necessity of Reelecting President Barack.”

What Up

American democracy has always been a schizophrenic expression of inflated theory and repressive practice. So the current efforts to suppress voting rights through registration procedures and policies is a “back to the future” action intended to keep the body politic crazy—you know, debating a range of false positives, tilting towards windmills and otherwise assuming that the changing picture projected on a treadmill screen represents world travel….

Add to that an educational system that rationalizes structural inequalities as the price of progress and you have a perfect storm for feudalism. And why are two of the new network shows shaped by fantasy?  Grimm’s fairytales meet Alice in Wonderland, or, is it “Make them stand in fear” and stupidity?

Just a mo(u)rning thought as we gird our loans for another week of adventure….

What Up Frankenstein?

I caught the aftermath of the Republican Reality Show called the Republican Debates—or was it, White men shouting at a Black man, with a White woman looking like a confused cheerleader who showed up at the wrong game…. Damn, is this one possible future for our country, for our world:  A cadre of mean spirited people who seem angry that they were born human as opposed to having been born as the cold-blooded reptiles they emulate? Or, shall we explore this question: what happens when the frontal lobe becomes another medulla oblongata?  Let the nation say, “What up Frankenstein?”

Educational Reform: Healing the Schizophrenic….

America is a talented schizophrenic that thrives on rationalizing contradictions—particularly those contradictions meant to explain away historical inequalities and their under-developed offspring that live in the usual demographics of race, class and gender.  Americans are not born as talented schizophrenics, for this is a special kind of crazy that has to be taught and learned.  And it is American education that is situated right at the crossroads of human potential and the needs of the schizophrenic system to maintain itself.  Negotiations at the crossroads of human potential and the needs of the schizophrenic system to maintain itself almost always fall out in favor of the system.

But what of educational reform—those periodic eruptions of consciousness that are in fact variations of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”—or, is reform really a systems maintenance response to pressures from the “real people?”  Systems do behave like organisms, particularly when they feel threatened.  So when the “educational establishment” (those women and men who benefit financially, politically, and culturally by keeping the educational system as it is) feels heat from the “real people” they work feverishly to build furnaces around that heat in order to turn the heat into energy that fortifies their castles and deepens the motes surrounding them. You can call the process a variation of Muhammad Ali’s “rope a dope” strategy: the establishment gives the illusion of being hurt (“on the ropes” as it were), so that those landing blows feel that they are really getting through.  The compromise reached from this theater is not meant to develop human potential; it is meant to cloak the plan to limit human potential in rhetoric and to hide the fact that descriptions have changed, but power relations have not.

Certainly educational reform has resulted in improvements in access and achievement. But we have to ask: access to what?  Certificate programs in Feng Shui offered synchronously on the Titanic hardly seem like career opportunities. And integration as access succeeded most spectacularly in the deracination of African American institutions—a success that over time led to Black parents having less and less institutional control over the education of their children.

The achievement gap has for some time been the latest indicator used to assert the need for reform.  Generally, the achievement gap indicates that non-African American, and non Latino children score higher on standardized tests than do African American and Latino children.  The “gap” is extrapolated to foreshadow diminished life chances for the low scoring students.  By way of a personal anecdote, I want to illustrate the irrelevance of the “gap:” after having been admitted to Ball State University, I was given a reading test and my scores were so dismal that my college freshman counselor suggested that I withdraw from Ball State, and head back to my hometown of Gary, Indiana where secure employment awaited me at the now extinct U.S. Steel Corporation.  Because I was (am) a singularly hard-headed Negro brought up to be cool and confident no matter what, I found a way to move forward, ultimately earning a PhD in English from Indiana University, as well as a Masters degree in Political Science from Atlanta University—the institution where W.E.B. DuBois did some of his most important work.

My story is routine, and is echoed in both seminal texts like The Autobiography of Malcolm X and in the stories of many of my peers whose present success belies the relevance of the “gap” into which my college counselor wanted to push me. But what my generation had that the present generation does not have were a group of women, men and teens energetically engaged in trying to heal America “the talented schizophrenic.”  My generation had people engaged in pushing America to make the right decision at the crossroads between human potential and systems maintenance—decisions that embraced limitless nature of human potential.  We require a return to the future: we need a non-violent revolution.  

Until educational reform focuses on human potential in the way it plans, structures, presents and evaluates learning opportunities we will have more of the same: the application of various hues of makeup on a pig with the disingenuous assertion that the pig isn’t a pig.  And when the people wash away the pig’s makeup, revealing its essential “pig-ness” the rationalized contradictions will resume.

Our children deserve better.  Humanity deserves better.

Thoughts After Meditating--6 August 2011

I learned sentimentality through romantic movies and had that learning deepened in literature classes.  There I learned to associate growth with pain and focus with discomfort.  In general, progress was neither a process nor a result that carried or ended with a smile. Smirks were permitted as evidence of inside knowledge that made looking down on the infidels, serfs and pawns part of the initiation to the good life.

Deep pain of exclusion from both the assumed wholesomeness and clarity of the “Street,” the lumpen proletariat and the iced creamed smoothness of the others we saw routinely having it all together on the TV.  The “Street” too was learned fiction: Frankenstein meets Bigger Thomas as a real life naturalist character who will shoot yo’ ass for snacks, and laugh about it on the way to or from the store.

The “iced creamed smoothness” eschews the down and dirty action of the “Street” for the heightened pleasure of global destruction.  Drones room the skies routinely shooting innocents by mistake—a small price to pay for our freedom.  Polar bears sipping cokes on melting icebergs, bemused really, maybe a WTF look plastered across their mugs.  And what just swam by?  Salmons swimming downstream?

Life as a lived experience of isolation in the middle of Times Square, or bumping up against an imagined past in Atlanta’s Little Five Points.  Sad shit unfolding from enema’s prompts…. And where’s the Batman?

Love for Black people so strong it hurts: how do you hug a mother in Somalia clutching the ashen ghost of a child whose life has been slowly eaten away by the absence of food…make you wanna wholla…way dey do our lives…

And what’s this I hear about seeds to developing nations, seeds that grow and don’t replicate—so they must be purchased every crop season; seeds that gangster the indigenous eco-system so that it becomes a whore to agricultural imperialism.  No farmer’s market here baby, just the bitter looks of the indigene who were better off before our help.

Somewhere half a globe away serious men walk manicured lawns carrying a bag of sticks to hit little white balls into black holes. These are televised as real event horizons: “spacetime boundaries beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer.”  Has humanity reached a point of no return?

What Up Fool

Did you see Speaker of the House Boehner's face on the front page of this morning's AJC?  He's got, "Dang, why don't yall act right" look of the little boy who having fanned the fire now seems stunned that it's buring his ass up.  Aw yea baby.  It's on now: "Unleash the Kraken!"  Or should I say unleash, the "Tea Party."  Having provoked, encouraged and otherwise stoked stupidity's leaping flames, Brother Boehner is being burned. Meanwhile, just out of view on the "sidelines," the player, President Obama, puts on his "cultural cool" mask (now who "wears the mask?") and watches that Boehner wiener spin rotisserie style over open tea-party flames. 

"What up Fool?"  This would be the chorus, always ready with an appropriate lyrics.  It gets worse: Ludicrous just popped onto the stage, "I came, I saw, I hit 'em jaw."  And then, "Get Back MF, you don't know me like that... Get Back MF you don't know me like that."

Our firends in non-African American communities will have to learn to read cultural signs.

 

Time for the Grownups to Run This Thing

Petulant adolescents, headstrong toddlers possessed by the “Terrible Twos”… These are the infants dressed in adult clothes called Republican leadership.  Their descent, like the one President Obama inherited when he took office, threatens to take us all down the sink into the garbage disposal… Tired of reading media accounts that pontificate about “six in one hand, and a half a dozen in the other.”  Sanity and insanity are not equal expressions of human possibility.  Tell the crying infants that it is in fact naptime and they should go on to sleep.  Rest will leave them less cranky when they wake.  Let the adults (and that includes us taxpayers, as opposed to those individuals and corporations who get fat on our subsidies) come on down front and run this thing.  Peace.

Melodrama

Debt ceiling falling in… elites, spoiled and articulate thugs, use to having their way—running up the tab, leaving it for mommy and daddy to pick up; yea, well, we are mommy and daddy.  The taxpayer. Elites bask in the sun of tax breaks; rhetoric is their sun-screen, hiding behind budget negotiations. Time is closing in, doing the Ali-shuffle, “watch out suckah!”

Flirting With a Story...

Sitdown Boy, long known for his loose grasp on reality , had finally tried to stand up—only to find that the war had left him without legs.  Cold shit when dumbos decide your fate without consequences to their day-to-day cake eating lives. But Sitdown Boy was a stand up guy, a credit to the race who had long assumed that self-sacrifice was the necessary prelude to being draped in the American Flag and in that way made cool with those wearing strong credit ratings.

Mama Girl loves Sitdown Boy. Mama Girl is a conservative radical and is perpetually stressed. Aches, pains, undiagnosed discomforts had for her always been the norm, so her tortured love of Sitdown Boy was par for the course: what some unhappy ancestor had put on her ass.  Mama Girl is real pretty though, so any shortcomings were easily deflected by that beauty.

Later on, I will tell you the whole story….