Doing A Double-Take On American Double-Stardards

Community board members objected to naming a corner for the late rapper Biggie Smalls because, according to some, he was a criminal, a misogynist — and too fat to be honored.

CB2 committee member Lucy Koteen said she "looked up the rapper's history" and read what she had learned to the full board Tuesday night.

"He started selling drugs at 12, he was a school dropout at 17, he was arrested for drugs and weapons charge, he was arrested for parole violations, he was arrested in North Carolina for crack cocaine, in 1996 he was again arrested for assault, he had a violent death and physically the man is not exactly a role model for youth," she said. "I don't see how this guy was a role model and frankly it offends me."

I'm so glad you asked.

Johnny Cash, admitted long-time amphetamine addict and habitual drunk/drugged driver, only individual in American history to be successfully prosecuted for starting a forest fire, famously sang "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die." Part of Tennessee Highway 31E designated Johnny Cash Parkway.

Willie Nelson, convicted tax evader and marijuana enthusiast arrested numerous times for drug possession. Part of 2nd Street in Austin designated Willie Nelson Boulevard.

Joey Ramone, used Nazi imagery in songs like "Blitzkrieg Bop" and wore swastikas as a fashion statement, sang "I wanna sniff some glue." East 2nd Street in Manhattan near the former CBGBs designated Joey Ramone Place.

This is just white artists; major cities throughout the US are named after genocidal maniacs like Columbus and Jackson, and there are streets and towns throughout the south named in honor of Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest.

(I should add for the record that I am a big fan of Johnny, Willie and Biggie. All have made artistic contributions significant enough to warrant recognition through renaming of streets.)

And did you know Your Street May be Named After a Slave Holder?

 

Lessons For The Right From The World Of Punk & Rap

The K.K.K. Took My Baby Away: 

Trying to shake a shitty image isn't easy, but allowing blacks freedom in the party is an easy way to fix that. I can count the currently visible right-wing blacks on my hands. They get no time out there. That's shameful, considering A) it's my party, and B) it was a party started to free blacks.

Sorry, but only being free to listen ain't gonna cut it.

Yo! Bum Rush The Show: 

The Republican base should kick the leadership (minus Boehner, who's still the only adult) to the curb and allow whatever new voices, not enthralled with their bullshit, to be heard. Bust up the party, if necessary, but stop the fucking bleeding.

A "moderate" approach to politics is worthless.

Banned In D.C.: 

Fuck these gatekeepers who've convinced the rest of you - merely by being online first - their view is the only one worth hearing. Glenn Reynolds, and all the rest of these pseudo-men/gun-toting geeks who dominate the right-wing blogosphere should be dissed until they, literally, leave the stage for leading us to the grave. That was their calling, as evidenced by the results. 

I say, if they're claiming to be on our side, prove it by saying something original or going away.

 

The Ramones: First Punk Band (With A Conservative,...)

Johnny was definitely to the right of me, but then, I'm not a dick,...

 

I Probably Saved Some Blacks With This Post (And Damn If I Don't Feel Rich For Doing It!!!)

I've got to remember to occasionally shout out to black folks, so they'll know every nigga didn't vote for Obama, and to pay attention to cult shit, too.

Something like this:

Hey - black folks - every nigga didn't vote for Obama, and goddammit, watch out for cults or that People's Temple shit is gonna get you again! Don't drink the Kool-Aid! As a matter of fact, if I were you, I'd cut Kool-Aid completely out of my motherfuckin' diet, just to be on the safe side. Don't forget:

White folks won't tell you this, because they think it's a joke, until they leading you into some pit of Hell that don't make no motherfuckin' sense.

Like yoga.

Does anybody else remember that story about a black girl who killed The Ramones' manager with a yoga stick? Everybody was like "Aww, why'd she do that? She was so cool!" when all I was thinking was you can't put no black person with no yoga stick! Everybody will fucking die!

White people do yoga to calm down (why y'all always so nervous and jumpy?) But black people? Well, we won't even go into what black people are.

Anyway, another black girl done killed a yogi, but they ain't said if a yoga stick is involved yet:

On the night of Friday, March 11, Jayna Murray and Brittany Norwood both entered a well-trafficked Lululemon Athletica clothing store in the tony suburb of Bethesda, Md., where they both worked. They'd returned there after hours because Norwood had left her wallet.

The following morning, Murray was dead and Norwood was found tied up in the back of the store, which specializes in yoga apparel. Police said both women had been raped. The crime terrified the Bethesda community, which feared that two brutal killers were in their midst. Stores shuttered early; proprietors installed security cameras in their businesses and hired security guards to walk employees to their cars at night.

Then the real-life murder mystery took a surprising twist: On March 18, police charged the second victim, Norwood, who is African American, with the murder of Murray, who was white. It's a story that national media, from Good Morning America to the Daily Beast, quickly jumped on as speculation rose from all corners about the primary facts and motivations in the crime. But there are a few angles that have not yet been discussed.

You can go back and read the rest of the article if you want, but you can probably guess that the shit I want to discuss ain't the same shit they want to discuss, nor am I all broke up about this, because they were yogis, or there's a black girl involved, or any of that kind of shit. I mean, first of all, let's be clear:

A motto of this blog is "The only good Yogi is a dead Yogi" so, unless your ass is Yogi Bear, I'm probably not going to get all misty about your passing.

Not to mention, this particular crime has lots of "extras" for me, because (I don't know if you caught it but) this was at a Lululemon Athletica clothing store! And what is Lululemon Athletica? It's part of The Landmark Forum cult! Yea! So this is like a fourfer! We got rid of two yogis and two cultists and didn't nobody have to do shit but leave them to their own yoga cult devices.

Man, some days, you just can't ask for anything more,...

Sir Bob Geldof: It Takes One To Know One

It sounds (and looks) like Bob Geldof and I have been sharing the same sippy-cup:

The irony of some of keynote speaker Sir Bob Geldof’s remarks on Thursday morning at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, were palpable. As thousands of musicians of all sounds, shapes and sizes converged on the festival to sing, rage, bellow, croon and dance, inside the Austin Convention Center, Geldof, the singer, songwriter, humanitarian and honorary knight of the British Empire, complained about the sheer volume of music being produced today, comparing the combined output to “the half-witted mutterings of the village idiot in the dark corner of the local pub.”

Given that a majority of bands over the five-day music showcases are, quite literally, performing in dark corners of 6th Street pubs, it was hard not to make a connection, and that Geldof was there to rain on everybody’s parade. Over the course of his hour-long keynote, the singer, who’s best known as the organizer of the 1985 Live Aid concerts for African relief, looked the music of today straight in the eye and found it severely lacking.

Expressing outrage at the economic inequality that's permeating the lives of the many, Geldof wondered where the voices are to convey that feeling: “What’s music got to say about it? I don’t hear it. Maybe I can’t hear it. Maybe this hyper democracy of the Web simply gives an illusion of talent. You can download a studio. Download any instrument. You can pick up any instrument for nothing. You can make, cut and paste to create fab artwork to make your CD. Everybody has got the means to say anything they want, but nobody has anything to say. We need to talk about it."

Courageous stuff, delivered as it was from a podium from the smartly dressed, witty, eloquent Irishman who, 36 years earlier had defiantly introduced himself to the world with the line, “The world owes me a living.” The song, "Looking after Number One," wasn’t about selfishness per se, but about the feeling of a perfectly able man standing in line for his dole check and wondering what the hell he ever did wrong to deserve such a fate.

Music, he explained, is the best tool to deliver this message of outrage, and throughout the address Geldof walked around on stage, comfortable and in his element, citing the musical heroes of the past who transcended individualism to speak for entire populations, from Howlin' Wolf to Mick Jagger and John Lennon to the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Ramones. He drew a distinct line between "good" music and "bad" music, and suggested in so many words that we're currently living in a world with a lot of bad music, and that somebody needs to step up and overthrow the proverbial institution that rock 'n' roll has become to send shockwaves across the world.

It's hard to argue with his point that we lack unifying voices, and that the music world is so fragmented and saturated that it's hard for anything to be heard. And that in times prior, music has helped frame political conversations in ways that artists never imagined, and that it has power to impact not only individuals but entire constituencies. The problem, he said, was complacency. "I don’t hear the disgust in music, and I need to. It doesn’t have to be literal. It has to suggest it."

He then declared music to be "the most powerful cultural tool that has been invented in a dozen lifetimes. Music is dangerous." That being the case, Geldof concluded, "We need someone to pause, to reflect, to consider, to be wise, to make decisions, or to interpret, to stop time for a moment, and suggest. And that seems to be the function of the artist."

I've been saying I'm that person, and - down to the details of "good" music and "bad" music - delivering that very same speech, for years.

And that's all I'm going to say about it now.

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Click the "soundcloud" tag, below, for more of my music.

And Now We've Got To Do It All Over Again,...

"Most interesting fact about punk that you weren’t expecting?

I had no idea how hostile they were to the hippies. You look at the Ramones and they all had this long hair and what I didn’t realize is how in England, New York and Los Angeles, how they were all breaking with the hippies. Johnny Rotten hated the hippies. Both the Ramones and the Sex Pistols saw the hippies as an unfortunate detour from the heart of rock 'n' roll. They said: We are going to reject peace, love and understanding."

-- Nick Rombes, author of The Encyclopedia of Punk, kind of explaining why so few turned out to be NewAgers, in The Los Angeles Times.

Thinking About Being Nice (Not Just Believing It)

“...The 'We need God to be good' case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren't exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

So, this is a puzzle. If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well—better, in many ways, than devout ones.

...The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don't believe in God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice, have strong communal feelings, and tend to be well-behaved.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that [Arthur Brooks] cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, "[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them."

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones,...find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.”

-- Paul Bloom, trying to explain the conundrum of atheism in a religious society, for Slate.com.