Month: June 2008

Stick it in your pipe and smoke it

Spike Lee, criticizing Clint Eastwood for not putting black soldiers on Iwo Jima for his “Flags of Our Fathers,” wants him to rewrite history, says Eastwood.  Neither should Lee

be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood’s next picture [reports UK Guardian in an interview]. “Changeling” is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city’s make-up was changed by the large black influx.

“What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin’ story about that?” he growls. “Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I’m not in that game. I’m playing it the way I read it historically, and that’s the way it is. When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like “Bird,” I use 90% black people.”

He has “a last word of advice” for Lee:

“A guy like him should shut his face.”

Later:

Lee responds, denying he wanted a black Marine in the flag scene and claiming backup to his critique (UK Telegraph cites other sources) but not helping his cause by tossing “not on a plantation” chestnut and “angry old man” accusation.

Cripes, he’s only 78.

Tags: ,

News that fits

Telling:

“The New York Times won the Pulitzer for revealing the fact of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Now, with all due respect to being here in the National Press Club with a lot of my friends in the press, I thought the idea that The New York Times would win the Pulitzer Prize, one of the highest awards in journalism, for revealing one of the nation’s most important secrets and telling the enemy how it was we were intercepting their communications, frankly was less than honorable. It bothered me, greatly” — Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking Monday at the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize Luncheon.

It’s the narrative, you see: U.S. bad, we citizens of the world, comfy except when Spider Man climbs on our aerie roost.

Tags: , , ,

God bless Scandinavia

ALCOHOL REDUCES ARTHRITIS RISK: “People who drink alcohol are less prone to the sometimes crippling disease called rheumatoid arthritis compared with non-drinkers, according to a Scandinavian study published on Wednesday.

People who had a moderate alcohol consumption were 40 and 45 percent less likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis compared with people who did not drink or drank only occasionally, it found. Among those who had a high consumption, the risk was reduced by 50 and 55 percent respectively.”

Thanks to Instapundit, a law professor with an eye for the good life. 

Prosit!

Tags: ,

Finding the father while running for office

This could be the first presidential campaign dedicated to a candidate’s finding himself.  Obama dreamed of his lost father and wrote a book about it, and thereby hangs the narrative.  In it he exposed himself more mercilessly and more literately, indeed literarily, than any other candidate.  His book has become a gold mine for non-M.D. analysts and may yet be for M.D.’s if he loses and his supporters go into tailspin.

There is none better of the former than Shelby Steele, whose A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win draws forth from Dreams the stuff of personal travail.  For instance, the young Obama, faced with being either black or white, chose black.  His white girl friend in New York, after Harvard Law, had it out with him in the matter of racial identity, feeling bad that she couldn’t share his.  He admits he treated her badly.  They broke up after a year.

Earlier, at Harvard, he had mildly hit on a mixed-race coed, asking if she was going to the black students meeting.  Not on your life, she said, giving him an earful about being both white and black and in no way about to downgrade her “sweet” Italian father by buying into black power.

In Chicago Obama chose his church as conferring on him or initiating him into Afro-centeredness.  Street credentials (“street cred”) were not as much the issue, Steele implies, as the need to belong to one race.  Steele knows about that, having been a sort of Obama character himself as a young man with white mother and black father. 

We read and hear of the choice as motivated by the need to succeed as an organizer.  Steele ignores that.

As for the coming campaign and a search for identity, it seems that Obama has more to lose than an election.  At stake also is his blackness, which Steele persuasively analyzes as a social construct with its own rules.  These include black superiority and white perfidy.

So there’s the candidate with his need to be black and his need to be the man of the hour for us all.  The father matters, but so does getting elected.

Tags: , , ,

Rev. Wright prophetic?

What’s prophetic and what isn’t in a preacher is nicely covered in this comment on “The role of the American pastor,” posted at The Political Inquirer, in which the writer says Rev. Wright’s comments were “prophetic.”  Not so, says the commenter, blogger at TotalTransformationTest.  Wright’s

primary audience is not the American public, but his predominantly black congregation. Don’t forget that prophets usually are disliked by their own people because they condemn their actions.

What part of blaming the white man for everything from inventing AIDS to commit genocide on black folks to the idea of the government peddling drugs in black communities makes the men and women in his congregation uncomfortable with their own moral failures? Quite frankly, it is exactly the opposite.

It is as if an Old Testament prophet had told the Hebrews to blame the evil in their own hearts on the surrounding nations and not on their own individual inability to remain loyal to God. Rev. Wright certainly doesn’t deserve the application of the term “prophetic” to anything he does. Unless the only requirement for such an appellation is simple demagoguery.

Quite a good point.  When you massage audience sensibilities, as I say below, you are not quite prophetic.

Tags:

Pfleger, Wright tell people what they want to hear

It’s been a banner few months for preaching, something that’s not much discussed by daily newspapers but regularly performed for and imposed on worshipers.

What a teaching moment for homiletics professors it has been.  The word is academic for preaching and close to “homily,” which is a Scripture-based sermon of generally shorter length.

This is as opposed to stem-winders for which Fr. Michael Pfleger of Chicago’s St. Sabina — now on leave — has become more famous than ever, not to mention his big brother in the ministry, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United.  These are neither short nor Scripture-based, except in sound-bite snippets tossed off in entertaining fashion.

But that’s a fine point.  The essence of Pfleger’s and Wright’s better known preaching has been less Scripture-slicing-and-dicing and more bringing of coals to Newcastle.  Preaching against white racism to black people?  Really?  Bold fellows!

The preacher is supposed to do more than massage preconceptions.  When these two reverend gentlemen preach against marital infidelity or cheating in business transactions or telling lies, do their people rise up in joy and holy pandemonium?

Not hardly, to use a popular double negative.  Do they ever preach this way?  Probably not.  Few do.  Do they preach against black racism, except as a throwaway line, saving fervor for condemning whites?  Probably not.

Anyhow, the stuff we read about that makes the news is basically preaching to provide a feel-good experience for people who now and again entertain bitterness in their Christian hearts. 

For a few short hours on Sunday, they can hear their bitterness confirmed by the messenger from God.  It’s a sort of purgative, from which they emerge more convinced than ever that white folks just don’t get it.

Tags: , ,

By their friends you get a pretty good idea

Steve Rhodes in the matter of chickens coming home to roost in Big O’s back yard:

Barack Obama officially disowned Trinity Church on Saturday but remains associated with a far more sinister organization with a long record of divisive misdeeds and criminal behavior that is likely to become an issue in the general election: The Cook County Democratic Party.

Among other things, it’s the party of winning one for the Kennedy fellow in 1960.

Tags: ,