Nommo South: The Norm

The Known News

Here is a known news flash: Senator Barack Obama leads Senator Clinton in popular votes, pledged delegates and has attracted more super delegates since Super Tuesday than has Senator Clinton. And by universal account, there is very little chance that Senator Clinton can surpass Senator Obama in either the pledged delegates or popular vote counts. Having known this for some time, Senator Clinton adopted a kitchen sink campaign that in no way addresses the needs of the American people.

Again, all of this is known news. So why do the media continue to report campaign news as if Senators Obama and Clinton are tied? Close is not tied. It is as if the media is employed by the Clinton campaign to put the most positive spin on the fact that not only is she losing, but that she has little chance of overtaking Obama in terms of pledged delegates or in terms of the popular vote.

The media does not report the news; it instigates and poses possibilities as news. “If Senator Clinton wins Pennsylvania by 15%, then all bets are off.” “Why can’t Obama close the deal?” And so on, and so on… In Pennsylvania, Clinton picked up 83 pledged delegates. Obama picked up 73 delegates. The current count: Obama, 1726 Pledged Delegates; Clinton, 1592 Pledged Delegates.

A different headline coming out of California might read, “Despite Clinton Victory, Obama maintains a 134 led among pledged delegates.” Various pundits noted that Pennsylvania is a demographic Eden for Clinton, and then these same pundits wonder why Obama couldn’t break through in Pennsylvania.

There is more: Some pundits assert that Obama has not been successful in attracting women voters. There are two problems with this assertion: one problem is that the assertion ignores African American women and other women of color? Are they not women? And haven’t they voted for Obama in greater numbers than for Clinton? A second problem is that there are in fact white women in Iowa, Vermont, Georgia, South Carolina, Illinois—well, you get my point.

Jesse Jackson asserts that the media routinely seeks to frame how Black leaders are portrayed by telling the story of a Black leader who walks on water, but the media blares its headline of the story, “Black Leader Can’t Swim.” It is worth reiterating Tavis Smiley’s observation that white folk have been the grand inquisitors at all the Presidential debates.

To keep your eyes on the prize, one need only embrace the known news.

by Norman Harris, PhD

Keystone Gravestone: Where Success Marries Failure

“Huggy Lowdown,” also known as the “celebrity snitch,” said that Hillary Clinton is like a bad date who won’t stop ordering food—you both know the evening is not going anywhere, but she refuses to wrap it up, call it quits and take the doggy bag back to the crib for reflection and later nourishment.

Having proven that she can rise by riding in an elevator made by others, Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary by a nine to ten point margin. She of course began the Pennsylvania campaign with a 20-point led, and the backing of the governor, as well as the mayors of the state’s largest cities. Despite Senator Clinton’s Pennsylvania victory, Senator Obama’s lead in pledged delegates and in the popular vote has not significantly altered.

The math is mean to Clinton because she cannot overtake Obama in the popular vote or in the pledged delegate count. So her campaign’s answer is to continue going primitive by appealing to the twin towers of American electoral politics, fear and ignorance.

Fear is a calculated political tactic that is used to get elected. The republicans have become so good at this that many Americans are still convinced that they—the republicans—are better than democrats concerning issues of national defense—never mind the unprecedented debacle in Iraq, and the daily revelations of trickery and deceit concerning how the Bush administration has used the war to transfer billions of tax payer dollars to Bush friendly firms. At the very least, the war profiteering ought to be a basis for a congressional investigation.

But more to the point: Senator Clinton, as Keith Obermann and others have noted, is running as a republican and she is attracting (Ohio and Pennsylvania are examples) the same demographic as the fear mongering republicans attracted. Who are these people? They are Americans who have been convinced to vote against their own best interest. Senator Clinton assails the job loss, and plant-closing consequences of NAFTA while her husband merrily rakes in cash for consulting on how best to create similar arrangements with other countries.

In response to a reporter’s question about a possible conflict of interest on this issue, Senator Clinton laughed eerily, her eyes suggesting a nascent logical, or perhaps moral disconnect between the tune she now sings compared to the one she sang as First Lady when she supported NAFTA. Coming as close to composure as possible, Senator Clinton’s brain, feelings and thoughts leaked through her mouth when she finally answered the question: “You tell me? I mean, how many angels can dance on the head of pen…” What?

This bizarre moment passed like gas through the national media—something smelled rotten (in Denmark, or was it Scranton) but there was no follow-up. And this has been a constant with the media coverage of Senator Clinton: like her Republican brethren, she seemingly overwhelms reality through lies and embarrassing behavior. The media seems to want to protect her and/or they do not seem to have a vocabulary to adequately describe the train-wreck of logic, truth, consistency that trails her like bad air: We all see the burning building, but Senator Clinton and her increasingly nutty husband ask in tones that oscillate from solemnity to outrage, “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes.” Hopefully, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time…

Senator Obama always asserts that America has a choice between the old politics of cynicism that caters to special interest, and a new kind of politics that places the needs and aspirations of the American people at the center of all discussions. The Republican-Democrat Hillary Clinton is an amalgam of old politics and she should do something constructive with her old ideas—find a hobby and embrace life as the vibratory essence of audacity and hope, not the shivering darkness of ignorance and fear.

by Norman Harris, PhD

Learning in the Digital Age

What does the future hold for digital education? This is a placeholder for a later article

Musing About the Story of Ausar

In Volume One of the Metu Neter, Amen discusses the individual and societal meanings associated with ten key events in the Story of Ausar. Before listing the events, here are some links to the various versions of the Story of Ausar:

1. http://oneworldarchives.org/Metu%20Neter/StoryofAusar.htm
2. http://members.tripod.com/sunbull/id35.htm
3. http://www.theafrican.com/Magazine/Cosmo.htm

There are slight differences among them, primarily around the question of Auset’s immaculate conception of Heru wherein some versions—like the one found in Ishmael Reed’s “Mumbo Jumbo”—emphasize Heru’s immaculate conception as a spiritual act enacted in a carnal manner while others see it as a purely spiritual act. For Amen, the conception is spiritual and symbolic in that it illustrates the spirit carrying out an act without first having to condition itself (the spirit) to do so. This absence of conditioning is what we are all after, for it attests to our original state as being unconditioned potential.
Here are the ten events used to generate individual and societal meaning. I’ll comment along the way:

1. Ausar establishes order, harmony and prosperity:
2. Ausar is killed by Set who usurps the kingdom
3. Ausar’s body is cut into fourteen pieces and spread over the land giving rise to shrines
4. Auset and Nebt Het (Het-Heru) collect the pieces of his body and bury them at the bottom of the river, and protect it with the serpent Kematef
5. Through the use of words of Power, Auset immaculately conceives and gives birth to Heru who is heir to the usurped throne of Ausar
6. Set sends his agents to look for and kill the boy-king
7. Heru engages Set in battle and they fight to a stale mate—which is really a victory for Set because he likes conflict
8. Heru is able to defeat Set with Tehuti’s assistance
9. Set’s penalty
10. The reestablished kingdom of God

You can download the table below. The table provides a way to use the Story of Ausar as a way to understand both our individual and the development of society as a whole.

Download story_of_ausar_table2.doc

The News You Can't Use

My subscription to a satellite television service provides more channels than I can reasonably watch. Yet I cannot find one station that reports news about the Democratic primaries in a manner that reflects the assumptions, perspectives, and analyses of, well, normal people.

Instead, what I get is hyperbole, spin and endless hype. What passes for analysis is pure opinion. CNN seems to have the best graphic artists, so they are endlessly depicting scenarios that might, under certain conditions, given unique circumstances, led to Hillary Clinton being nominated. On MSNBC, a gaggle of soothsayers speak with an artificial certainty that each morning’s rising sun dissipates like mist. Pat Buchannan should be allowed to speak in the same way that cigarettes are sold: a warning from the Surgeon General about toxicity of his message.

“Morning Joe” is my latest addiction because I prefer the casual cynicism of that show to the upbeat idiocy of the CNN Morning News (the Today Show and its various relative on the other networks do news as an afterthought or by accident…). But cynicism does not mask the pedestrian nature of their drumbeat: first it was Reverend Wright who would doom Obama. Now it’s the “bitter” comment. Obama used the so called Wright controversy to elevate a discussion of race and class. And the so called “bitter’ comment—it too taken out of context—has not had the kind of impact the “reporters” seem to hope for.

As for the Sunday news talk shows, they proceed like (con)scripted soldiers goose-stepping off a cliff.
And Fox News is so bad that even their own reporters complain about the manufactured shortcomings of Obama and then the dumbass piling on that ensues. One blogger writes: “*Hell officially froze over at the right-leaning Fox News Channel Friday when one of its anchors complained live on the air about the unfair and biased reporting of Sen. Barack Obama by his Fox colleagues.” (March 26, 2008).

ABC news correspondents George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson elevated tabloid journalism and articulate foolishness to new levels. Each seemed determine to dig deep ditches from which rhetorical hand grenades could be lobbed. In retrospect, more of these blew-up in their faces than landed in any way that was useful or revelatory. While Obama was the clear target—an apparent result of being the light and thereby drawing myopic moths to his luminosity—Hillary was provided the opportunity to repent her Bosnia lie, her having said things that she knew not to be true.

Given the incredible weight under which most Americans are struggling—from home loss, unemployment, underemployment, insufficient or non-existent health insurance to the cancerous tumor called Iraq that the current administration affixed to this nation and the world with caviler disregard—why is Senator Obama’s “flag pin” given such weighty presence? And what is the fascination with Reverend Wright?
There needs to be a community based content analysis of Broadcast news coverage of this campaign.

by Norman Harris, PhD

Analog Conversations in a Digital World: Broadcast Media Lemmings by Norman Harris

Part of what Senator Obama did in his 18 March 2008 speech on race was to provide America an opportunity to step away from the analog age of straight-line conformity and to interactively engage current events from an historical perspective. This was not a Black/White issue. It was and is an issue about the role of history and education in shaping the quality of political discourse about race in America

Though it may seem oxymoronic, ignorance is a learned behavior and part of what most Americans learn is that history is an analog: “An information form that is represented by continuous and smoothly varying changes over a certain range.” Contradiction and complexity are smoothed out in this view of history-sometimes to the point of learned amnesia.

Learned amnesia has consequences: to pretend that Reverend Jeremiah Wright is not part of an historical tradition of Black Liberation Theology is both a-historical and runs the potential of dehumanizing not only the individual, but also the entire tradition of which he is a part. So when those orchestrating broadcast news conversations ask, “Has Senator Obama done enough to distance himself from Reverend Wright?” what are they really asking?

Are they asking has Senator Obama decided to void the soul of his Presidential Race by choosing historical amnesia and a simple-minded, analog view of history in which time marches along a single, unbroken line? As Senator Obama rightly asserts, “I can no more disown him, than I can disown on the Black Community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” He goes on to say that among those who love him and those he loves, there are contradictions. In other words, it makes no sense to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The contradictions Obama notes in Reverend Wright, in his grandmother, and in all of us are at America’s founding core: the unfinished business of race and equality always on the agenda of successive generations motivated by the idea of forming a “more perfect union.” Contradictions and complexity are not terminal afflictions; rather, they are opportunities to push America towards the realization of those unrealized “words on a parchment.”
The success of Senator Obama’s presidential campaign rests in part on his ability to communicate a vision of possibility that resonates with a nation saddled by the open wounds and sores of the Bush years. Americans seem to know instinctively that to jettison the Bush saddle requires a communal effort, and that such an effort requires “Change.”

Though infatuated by the “Change” message, many in the Broadcast media are tethered to sound bites or a convenient hook on which the news story can be hung. Senator Obama, and others have rightly noted that to remove the nation from the ditch the current administration drove it into requires people working together. And what is more, underlying structural problems in the economy, the housing market, healthcare, and infrastructure require immediate and sustained attention.

As a rule, broadcast news media lemmings do not have faith in American people’s ability to handle perceived complexity and so they, the broadcast news lemmings, dial up old ideas to explain new phenomenon and possibilities. The trained, fearful and vacant looks imitating from many broadcast news castors eyes’ suggest an awareness that in the Obama campaign—and all that is surrounding it—something new and different is happening. But reporting the “news” requires leaving scripted comfort zones, stepping out of the line headed over the cliff. This is a trip many in the broadcast media are not willing to take.

The broadcast media lemmings want Senator Obama to be Topsy with testosterone—an understandable figure for whom aging scripts have long ago allocated shelf space. The broadcast media lemmings have been trying to “capture” Obama from the start. And this capturing is very different from understanding because the latter requires reflection. Capturing is all about tactics (the “gotcha” moment that can be put on a loop) and, most importantly, confirming comfortable prejudices.

“At midnight on Feb. 17, 2009, the rabbit ears and the rooftop antennas that still guide television signals into nearly one of every five U.S. homes will be rendered useless - unless they are tethered to a new device.”
Perhaps the broadcast media lemmings will moonwalk into the future by getting rid of their analog ways in advance of the mandate.

Norman Harris, PhD
http://www.oneworldarchives.org
nharris@oneworldarchives.org
404-384-3615