December 2007 Archives
Barack Obama: What's Beef??
Tags: Barack Obama
One thing I've noticed about myself over the tenure of my existence, outside of the fact that I've historically sought out eyebrow-raising porn titles like "Dyslexic Asian Midgets", and my unsavory penchant for saying insensitive things like "Come on, the N*gga wasn't exactly Malcolm X!" after recently reading an article entitled "The Last Days of Pimp C" - is how I constantly keep a running tab of the disgruntled gentleman hoping to one day snatch me from the mortal coil. I'm a firm believer that life just isn't worth living if your head isn't always on a proverbial swivel, believe me - nothing makes a person feel more alive than anticipating an impromptu physical attack while very innocently going about your day. Since I'm not on the Christmas Card list of people ranging from local sub-par rappers whom I happened to be brutally honest with, husbands of the wives I've consensually sodomized against my muscle car, and random gentlemen that I sucker-punched for disrespecting the God Rakim - lets just say that I've found the fountain of youth, without wading in the murky "Cocoon" pool water with Wilford Brimley that is. But I'm a reclusive writer, one who hasn't had an intimate encounter in the past year that didn't involve a receipt, a son of a bitch so ornery that I recently threatened to bludgeon a DJ to death with "a pillowcase full of sodas" at my friends wedding if he played another Lil Wayne record - I'm probably the only individual who could get away with such psychotic behavior while still maintaining a respectable amount of friends.
I mean, I couldn't be a professional athlete, not with my temper - If some journeyman point guard decided to get into a rather innocent shoving match with yours truly during some meaningless game, I'd properly avenge that particular brand of disrespect during the off season. Finding the most inopportune moment, like the gentleman's golf tournament named after him or while he visits cancer kids in the hospital - I'd take it upon myself to administer a O.C styled beating where I proceeded to beat the "minerals and vitamin, irons and the niacin's" out of that motherfucker.
Watching Barack Obama navigate his campaign around a sea of abysmal smears over the past months, I've come to realize that my goal of becoming a respected politician is becoming less likely - and I'm not even talking about my pedestrian horticultural habits or the fact that I once attended two Farrakhan speeches just to see a woman's "fruit of Islam" under her hijab. I mean, every negative ad or slick comment that I happened to be on the business end of, would be met with me either interrupting one of their press conferences with my hands in the air screaming "Talk that shit now son!! What!!" - or possibly countering said smear with a profanity laced diss track produced by DJ Premier.(..possibly with Busta providing the hook) I guess that's why I support Barack Obama, of course I'm in sync with his political beliefs but also because more times than not he has taken the political high road - even if I do sincerely feel that he needs to take cues from yours truly, make a list, and figuratively chin check those who cause him to put his head on a political swivel. I'd like to think that his list would look something like this.
Hillary Clinton: For all I know, if Barack Obama had never been born - there's a possibility that I could be living my chubby existence in Virginia Beach, Virginia - with a Hillary Clinton screen-saver on my computer and her campaign signs awkwardly decorating my front yard like the weight benches you see in those West Coast "hood" movies. Even quoting the Governor's words verbatim as if she used one of her precious press conferences to read the lyrics to Rakim's "Mahogany". But by Barack Obama merely posing as a formidable opponent, it has opened my eyes to how phenomenally lame Hillary Clinton and her campaign have been - forget abut the fact that she scraped the bottom of the political barrel by coming out against violent video games(Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) and her voting to give the president the leeway to authorize one of the biggest strategic blunders in American History(Iraq War). From the reported nasty nature of some of her campaign staffers who have characterized Obama as "uppity", decrying negative campaigning when she was ahead in the polls and her abandoning of that philosophy the moment the race tightened, her cackle heard around the world in the last democratic debate that Barack quickly dismantled - not to mention the Clinton's campaign attacking Obama's kindergarten record, all that has done nothing but make a dreadlocked writer who talks about his penis too much be an even bigger supporter of the junior Senator from Illinois.
Bill Clinton: I never subscribed to the philosophy of Bill Clinton being our "first black president", of course I'd prefer "slick willie" being the leader of the free world over the cluster-fuck who currently resides as 1600 Pennsylvania avenue. But him taking Sista Souljah's comments concerning the 1992 Los Angeles riots completely out of context still sickens me, making her his Willie Horton and desperately appealing to the indecisive Gomer Pile vote. So despite his off key sax playing on Arsenio, and his great oratory skills that seem to get to only pick up steam around black audiences - I was always hesitant to embrace the Arkansonian as one of my own like so many other black folks have, only white folks like Teena Marie and Darryl Hall get lifelong melanin-passes. That being said, of course Bill should be out there campaigning for Hillary, drawing legitimate distinctions between his wife and Barack Obama - I just have a problem with him trying to revise history in the process. Like the way he claimed that he was opposed to the war in Iraq from the beginning, a fictitious good will tour that him and Bush 41 would go on if Hillary is elected president - but you had to love the way he tried to highlight how ill prepared Obama is for the highest office in the land in his recent Charlie Rose interview by bragging how he had the forsight to admit how ill prepared he was in 1988.(At the time, rumors of his infidelity ran rampant - which many believe was the true reason he didn't run in 1988)
Hillary's Surrogates: Now that we are closing in on the Iowa primaries, and Hillary feels that she has gotten her hands dirty enough in this age of political mudslinging - she's been trying to exhibit a more of a softer side, campaigning with her daughter and mother. Heartfelt testimonials from lifelong best friends, things of that nature. Since her negatives are extremely high its important to humanize Mrs. Clinton, purely understandable - especially heading down the homestretch to the Iowa primaries. I guess that's why she has taken it upon herself to let surrogates administer genital crushing low blows that only Andrew Golata would be proud of, since she can no longer afford to do so based on Iowa's historic distaste for negative campaigning. From Hillary's senior strategist Mark Penn specifically using the word "cocaine" when addressing their smear of barack Obama's past drug use, Bill Shaheen, one time co-chair of Clinton's New Hampshire campaign, clumsily waxing poetic about how republicans would have a proverbial field day with Obama's said youthful indiscretions - not to mention former Sen. Bob Kerrey who endorsed Clinton but found a way to regurgitate republican talking points. Talk about him being a muslim and reminding people that "Hussein" is his middle name.
Throwback Civil Rights Leaders: What is up with ghosts of civil rights past, coming out of the woodwork and acting like their hesitancy in backing Obama or their unwavering support of Hillary means anything to the rest of us? When Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cryptically warn the rest of us not to break out the anointing oils yet for Senator Obama, what is meant to sound sincerely authentic actually comes across more as jealously from whining malcontents with unfulfilled political aspirations. As much as I appreciate the trails that brothers like Andrew Young have blazed for people like myself as he marched along Martin Luther King jr, but when he comes out for Hillary(which is his right) and dismisses Obama by saying "It's a matter of being young" - it just shows what a selective memory he has, thank God that no one gave a young Dr. King that same bit of ham-fisted advice.
Black Bloggers: One show that I listen to on a regular basis, thanks to my boy DanTres, is a program on NPR called "News and Notes" hosted by Farai Chideya - a beautiful black sister that I would have already made a serious play for, if my blog wasn't already a damning document detailing my sexual inadequacies and my emotional unavailability. Great show. But the one thing I loathe about some of the bloggers who have participated in their "Black Bloggers Roundtable", as well as some black bloggers I've noticed in general - is when they say something akin to the following: "I can't support Barack Obama until he addresses....*insert some isolated black issue*" For Christs sake, he's not running for Black Culture Club president at your local High School you ignorant shits!! - he's running for PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, grow the fuck up already.(For the record, being a black blogger, or a black person for that matter - doesn't mean you have to be a Obama supporter - I'm just opposed to the aforementioned silly line of reasoning.)
Barry Bonds, the perfect Hip Hop Metaphor
I sincerely can't explain it, maybe its exposing another one of my character flaws outside of my penchant for kicking women out of my residence the millisecond after I ejaculate - but if my memory serves me correctly, I have always openly rooted for the bad guy. My childhood was spent wondering why none of the residents of Sesame Street ever chin-checked Big Bird on general principle, hoping that Brutus would defeat Popeye at least one time - with a woman who makes Kate Moss look like she has a food addiction being the ultimate prize. Shit, I can't tell you how many times I desperately hoped that the Roadrunner would be too slick for his own good, accidentally blow himself up with one of Wile E. Coyote's dynamite sticks - with the closing scene consisting of the Coyote mercilessly dining on charred bird remains like it was Thanksgiving dinner at a soup kitchen. Every time I'd go to the movies with my parents I found myself hoping that the detestable villain would reign victorious over the clean-cut, do-gooder protagonist - even now I can't sit through one of the many popular crime drama's of the day without secretly hoping that the writer has a respectable pair of testicles and lets the perceived "bad guy" get off Scott free.(except for child molesters and the garden variety rapist that is) Even though I'm at the weathered age of 34 years, 3 months, and 10 days, and the sentiment that I'm about to subject you good people to makes my mother openly question my sanity while saying "You are such a motherfucking prick" - but I don't feel that all is right with the world unless I have a significant amount of individuals particularly loathing my small intestines. Outside of some mystical woman with criminally low amounts of self-esteem aligning my chakras with a spirited "sloppy yawn", nothing puts me at peace more than receiving an ice grill from some asshole I once punched while the both of us sit at a traffic light - me without a care in the world, primarily because I crave vehicular confrontations and my car doors are now bullet-proofed.
Over the years I have found myself rooting for the "perceived" bad guy in the sports world as well, I'm probably the only person in existence who feels that Mike Tyson could be Heavyweight Champion again if he took up Tai Chi and perhaps shock therapy - to even out his temperament. Even though he grew up just a couple of towns away from me, I've never been the biggest Allen Iverson fan in the world - but for some reason I always felt the need to defend the brother through his more turbulent times as if I was Johnny Cochran on steroids. I'm a dedicated Kobe Bryant fan who more times than not find people's hatred for him both misguided and regurgitated from the media's two year "swift-boating" of the man with 24 on the back of his jersey - in my world the media has pulled off two successful coups on peoples intelligence over the past 5 years, the selling of the Iraq War and injecting a hatred for Kobe Bryant that most people embarrassingly struggle to articulate. So I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that I'm a huge Barry Bonds fan as well, its this writers humble opinion that Bonds is one of the greatest players to ever touch a wood treated bat - every time someone mentions how big he became over the course of his career, alludes to the book "Game of Shadows" or anything else suggesting steroid use, I always calmly point out that he has never failed a drug test and give them that instigating "What?! Bring-It!!" face.
But with Bonds, and to some extent this applies to the other athletes I mentioned as well - most of the time their actions were indefensible and not above reproach, but the level of media scrutiny surrounding those incidents always had that stale aftertaste of racism. Its like those BASF commercials, "We Don't make the golf-clubs, we make them more powerful!": Sure, there is a black cloud of steroid speculation that follows Barry around the same way that dirt-cloud followed around the "pigpen" character in those Peanuts cartoons - but watching the coverage, and most times the manufactured outrage from a vast array of sports pundits, you would have thought that the guy went on a killing spree inside of a convent. "We Don't make the black athlete, we make him more detestable"
One thing I've noticed over the last two years is how people who generally hate Barry Bonds for the color of his skin, were able to masterfully cloak their racial bias with legitimate arguments that even the most ardent Bonds supporter couldn't scoff at - rhetoric consisting of stuff like "the sanctity of the game" and Bonds' clear association with Balco and Greg Anderson. Granted, I'm sure that there are scores of people who exist that despise Barry Bonds for a multitude of reasons, none of which has anything to do with race - but its my opinion that those miscellaneous individuals are few and far between. Whenever I hear people like Keith Olbermann and Bob Costas dedicate segments of their respective shows to bashing Barry, I cringe, not because their arguments don't have any merit to them(because usually they do) - but because they are giving ammunition to the millions of people who site Strom Thurman as an idol, and play "Mississippi Burning" around Christmas time to feel more festive.
People do the same thing to Hip Hop, right-wing pundits who feverishly masturbate to Mein Kampf when they are not collecting black-face miniatures in their spare time - conveniently hiding behind the unmistakable violence in certain rap songs, not to mention the rampant misogyny, so they can claim that they are concerned about black youth while masterfully maintaining a concerned look on their collective faces. That goes for all of those ambulance chasing "black leaders" we have as well, not to mention the other out of touch black people of prominence who probably mirror the dais on Oprah's disastrous town-hall special on Hip Hop. Frustrated with the social ills that plague the black community, and because they are too intellectually lazy to break down the real culprits that ravage our people - they hang the blame on Hip Hip, conveniently quoting some simple monosyllabic rapper with a platinum encrusted smile who happens to average 48 "bitches" per song and has a rap sheet as long as Rihanna's forehead.
So yeah, in a weird way - Barry Bonds is the perfect Hip Hop metaphor.
