What Richard Iott’s Nazi Re-enacting Really Means

A bit late on this one, but well worth it...

The Republicans and the Tea Party are the gift that keep on giving. In one party we have quite likely to be mentally ill Christine O'Donnell, secessionist kook Sharon Angle, Republican Senators such as Glenn McConnell who attend galas (with happy slaves and auctions) set in the "Good Ol' Confederacy," and now a Nazi role-player in Richard Iott who dresses up as a Waffen SS officer for weekend sport. As someone with more than a passing interest in military affairs and issues of historical memory I was going to chime in. But, I am also practical.

Why do something yourself, when you can have a friend--one who actually has a forthcoming book on Weimar-era Germany--do it for you?

As always, Werner Herzog's Bear has kindly obliged us by emerging from his comfy cave to bring some sense to this tea party brigand nonsense.

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Like a lot of people, I was both dismayed and amused by the news that a Tea Party-approved candidate for the House used to spend his weekends in a Nazi uniform re-enacting the exploits of a Waffen SS unit in World War II. The amusement came from seeing a bunch of middle-aged, suburban beer bellied slobs playing dress up like they could have survived ten minutes on the Eastern Front. The dismay came from the fact that they were not re-enacting a regular Wehrmacht unit, but one from the Waffen SS, the military arm of the institution responsible for carrying out the Holocaust. Not only that, the material on their website claims that members of the original Wiking unit were just doing their patriotic duty:

“We salute these idealists; no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was, the front-line soldiers of the Waffen-SS (in particular the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free.”

As anyone who actually studies these things can tell you, the German military’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a war of racial conquest, extermination, and enslavement. Anyone who tries to downplay that fact, or to celebrate the perpetrators behind it, is either horribly naïve, deluded, or a closet fascist.

There are a lot of ways to analyze Iott’s participation in the Wiking re-enactors. On the surface, it must be said, is the ultimate irony that Tea Partiers have been foaming at the mouth over the supposed parallels between Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama. To me, it’s increasingly easier to read those slanders as a desperate attempt to cover up the hard Right’s fascist tendencies.

That being said, I think we can actually go much deeper. Beyond the hypocrisy and the authoritarian fever dreams lurking in the Teabagger id, Iott’s hobby reveals the Tea Party’s ignorant and false understanding of history. Ultimately, the Tea Party views history as a vindication of their ideas, but they understand history as a kind of playground emancipated from any rules of historical fact and interpretation.

Tea Party events are infamous for the participants dressed in powdered wigs and tricorn hats. Their mouthpiece, Glenn Beck, likes to pose in costume himself, and constantly uses a distorted view of history to brand Progressives “fascists.” As I have pointed out in the past, he took Thomas Paine, an avowed enemy of organized religion and a proto-socialist, and turned him into a Bible-thumping free marketer. Why did he get away with this? Because his followers do not know or care about the real historical record, just as Iott seems to be unaware of the realities of the Eastern Front. (I will actually give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s not a Nazi, he’s just stupid, confused, and insensitive.)

They use and abuse history in this fashion because they need its authority to give their blinkered worldview some legitimacy. Their ideas have failed miserably in the present, so why not create a false, idealized distant past where they worked? I think that professional historians like myself need to do a lot more to set the record straight, since Teabagger history not only distorts the truth, its funhouse of costumes and invented facts threatens to confuse the past so much that Teabagger fabrications will be accepted for reality. After awhile it does remind one of a certain political group that blamed their nation’s military defeat on a “stab in the back” from their political enemies and used the resulting anger to grab power for themselves. Gosh, I wonder who they were again…

Correlation or Causation? Barack Obama and the Souring of American Race Relations

Hopes that race relations in America would improve with the election of the nation’s first black president have been dashed - with figures showing that the situation has actually worsened in the past two years.

A new poll found that just 36 per cent of voters now believed that relations between black and white was getting better.

This is compared with 62 per cent a year ago and 55 per cent in April.

According to the Rasmussen survey, black respondents were less optimistic - with just 13 per cent believing that understanding between the races was heading in the right direction, compared to 39 per cent of whites.

Confidence that America had broken through a major race barrier with Mr Obama’s election two years ago appears to have sunk along with the popularity of his administration.

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With roles both formal (Chief Executive and Commander in Chief) as well as informal (national cheerleader and guardian of the national prosperity), the presidency of the United States is the ultimate bully pulpit and magnet for media attention.

For Barack Obama, these responsibilities, and the incumbent, imagined, erstwhile power of the presidency seem to be magnified. As the first black president he is viewed by many as a messianic figure--a man who is one part Superman, with the power of Star Trek's Q, and infused with the magical appeal of Kennedy-Camelot redux. Obama, especially Candidate Obama, was imagined by some to be able to lay hands, heal the sick, and part the seas of American malaise and decline. Inversely, for many of his ideological foes Barack Obama is the harbinger of doom, all things evil, and a Manchurian half-rican anti-Christ "Progressive" "Marxist" "Socialist" long-legged Mack Daddy who lays awake at night plotting the destruction of their beloved United States of America.

After the fuzzy glow of Election Night 2008 had morphed into the real business of practical politics--the honeymoon now over--we witnessed a predictable backlash. The loyal opposition had decided that President Obama was not moving fast enough and had betrayed the vocal Left. Conservatives, both ideological purists as well as those of the New Right, neo-John Birch, Tea Party crowd, had decreed that they would stand in the schoolhouse door and stop President Obama's policy agenda at any cost...even if it meant burning down the village in order to liberate it.

Obama is truly a "bound man" because the symbolic weight of his racial identity adds a burden, one both positive and negative. For the former, the symbolism of Obama as President is aspirational wherein African Americans and others expect more from Barack precisely because he stands on the shoulders of the Black Freedom Struggle. For the latter, the very fact of his blackness (and that as a black man he had the unmitigated gall to run for the presidency and to win) is a lightening rod for all manner of white racial resentment, and is used as evidence for an insincere neo-liberal colorblind politics that imagines racism to be now dead, slain by the election of America's first non-white President.

Given this mix of impulses in the American body politic, the meme that race relations are now made worst in the Age of Obama is a predictable one. There is always a backlash when a society experiences a system shock. To point: the election of Barack Obama most certainly shook the metaphorical bushes and encouraged the racially resentful, nativist, and bigoted vipers to come out of hiding. But this push-back against America's first black president, to the degree that ideology is intermixed with racial hostility, also leaves some basic questions unasked. For example:

Is the election of Barack Obama merely correlated with a souring of race relations in this country? (Question: what exactly does this vague measurement of "race relations" actually mean? Does it mask and hide as much as it reveals?) In much the way that my getting up in the morning has nothing to do with the sun rising, is the mere fact of President Obama simply coincidental to a decline in the American public's hope about improved relationships across the colorline?

Alternatively, are the policy choices of President Obama (to act or not) on certain issues actually making race relations worse?

As a third option, did the election of Barack Obama along with changing demographics in a time of economic uncertainty stimulate a white racial backlash, an out-sized response that would inevitably overflow into the mass public?

The full story from the Daily Mail can be read here.

Black Revenge Fantasies, White Manhood, and Historical Memory: Boardwalk Empire's Episode, "Anastasia" Reviewed

HBO's Boardwalk Empire is a lush television series. Do not be mistaken: Lushness does not necessarily mean a completeness of superficial physical beauty or the trap of ephemeral and pretty things. Lushness can also be depth. It can be intelligence. Lushness can be breadth and reward. As noted philosopher Slavoy Zizek said of the seminal dystopian film Children of Men, some artifacts of popular culture reward "deep viewing." For those who study film, popular culture, or the semiotics of mass culture, this means viewing a film with obligatory seriousness, intensity, and broadness of field.

For scholars of film, this understanding is a wink to the concept understood as "Mis En Scene." Translated: Boardwalk Empire frames a shot in such a way as to encourage a careful attention to clothing, the positioning of the characters relative to one another, and of the scene at large. The most damning observation that one can make of a television series such as Boardwalk Empire, a period piece set in the 1920's, is that it is a wax museum come to life. On its worst of days, and in the hands of a lesser steward, Boardwalk Empire could be the pitiable performance of a once great Motown band singing at a county fair when all the magic is gone, and the agents involved are in full denial about how far low they have fallen. Boardwalk Empire is none of these things--it is a window into the past, carefully constructed, and indelibly committed to the best that dramatic television can offer.

Boardwalk Empire is set is the great age of Prohibition-era America, when flappers danced upon the stage, temperance societies of now empowered (white) women reigned for a moment as they spread the wings of their now found political agency, and gangsters (with their liquor) were king. This is also the moment when white ethnics--those Italians, Irish, Greeks, and others--fought to burn away their ethnicity in the crucible of a soon to be found full whiteness in the post-World War One moment, as they become erstwhile Horatio Algers, when like James Cagney, they came to understand that "the world is mine."

The setting that is the literal boardwalk in Boardwalk Empire is also a complement to how race was made in early 20th century America. The sites, sounds, and spectacle of this space, the World's Fairs and mass culture were locations for race making through popular culture. Moreover, the iron cage of white manhood, its imagined fraternal order, and the creation of "normal" bodies were all made real through the accessible spectacles featured on the boardwalk of places like Atlantic City, P.T. Barnum's enterprises, the "freak show," Ripley's stages, and the great midways of cities such as Chicago.

Boardwalk Empire contains all of these elements. It has acknowledged the racist spectacle of The Hottentot Venus. The marquis of the theaters featured in Boardwalk Empire's deep scenes all signal to this history. Cigarette store Indians are omnipresent. Black popular culture is the ether of The Roaring Twenties, all the while black folks are dismissed as schwartzes who don't polish the crystal ware correctly. As whiteness exists only in juxtaposition to blackness and the Other, black folk are peripheral to Boardwalk Empire while being central to the American mythos. This is especially clear in Sunday's episode, "Anastasia." Because popular culture, especially television shows such as Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire, traffic in the malleability of historical memory, the white gaze doesn't see "us," but "we" are forever there.

The greatest moment of Boardwalk Empire's "Anastasia" episode signals to the power of blackness in American memory, and of this country's popular culture at large. To this point, Nucky, Steve Bushemi's (main) character, the top dog of Atlantic City, is playing chess not checkers. If politics is "what have you done for me lately?" and "who get's what, when, and why?" Nucky must reach out to Chalky, Omar of The Wire fame and the boss of the African American political machine in Atlantic City. Ultimately in "Anastasia," realpolitik trumps white supremacy and provincial notions of the supremacy of white bodies over those black and brown.

There is also a fantasy element to collective memory which Boardwalk Empire is so keenly aware. Some viewers may indulge dreams of flappers, finely tailored suits, and bootleg liquor. For those with a blue's sensibility, our freedom dreams may be a bit different: How many of "us" have ever gotten to sit across from their sworn foes? To make them render onto Caesar? To act out justice upon their bodies?

In "Anastasia," Chalky indulges this dark dream--an Inglorious Bastards moment--of providential justice. He sits across from the Grand Cyclops of the KKK in Atlantic City. Chalky, in the longest monologue on the show to date relays a tale of class, race, and "uppity" negroes who dared to step out of line. For this, Chalky's father swung like strange fruit. And as Chalky opens up the leather clutch that contains his father's tools to torture the Grand Cyclops, we understand that pain will be a form of cathartic vengeance.

Here, suffering rendered onto the enemies of black folk, the Knight Riders, Klansmen, Klanswomen, and others is also a fantasy of sorts. How many black Americans can really recount a family story--one that is "true"--of relatives hung on the lynching tree, of uppity negro Catcher Freeman runaways, and where we, all of us, had grandmas who had Colt revolvers hiding under the hemline of their dresses ready for any white man (or anyone for that matter) who crossed them?

And we certainly cannot forget the stories about former chattel who ran away and came back as Union soldiers--much to the chagrin of their former masters; of slaves who posted bounties for their "owners" during Reconstruction; slaves that evicted masters on the plantation as they built a nation under their feet, or of the ultimate "go to hell letter" written by Jourdan Anderson to his white "employer." These are collective memories that may or not be literally true. Nevertheless, this does not take away the power of these communal truths because collective memory is none diminished by appeals to empirical truth.

In relief, Boardwalk Empire is a story of class, aspiration, and the Horatio Alger myth. Boardwalk Empire is also a tale of revenge and fantasy on the part of "us" against "them." Per our tradition, some questions about the Easter Eggs and Mis En Scenes of Boardwalk Empire:

1. What have you noticed in the background? What is your favorite shot of the series so far?

2. Of fashion choices and body sculpting. Am I the only person who has noticed something amiss with Lucy's beautiful breasts, or the choice of "female grooming" to this point so far?

3. Harlem. I need to see Harlem in its heyday. As an Easter egg, Boardwalk Empire could feature some former Harlem Hellfighters as badmen and now gangsters. Alternatively, some former white officers in those famed units would make for suitably complicated characters that are nonetheless racist, but somehow "progressive" for their contemporary moment in Jim Crow America.

4. On that note, Steve Bushemi's character dismisses the obviously "racist" cop during their meeting. Am I being cynical, or does the white racial frame always find a way to protect itself through a narrative where white racism is an outlier and most white folk are always good people--despite the politics of the epoch?

5. The Romanovs. What a great meta-narrative for this episode as Boardwalk Empire is a show centered on the pretenses of class mobility, uplift, social betters, and striving towards the good life.

6. As we saw with the slashing of Jimmy's prostitute lover, do the little folks always have to suffer for their associations with the marginally more powerful?

7. Why the emphasis on premature babies? Is this some signal to technology, progress, and America? Or is it a wink to a fascination with abnormal bodies during the early part of the 20th century?

8. We have Chalky as the bad black man and one of the machine bosses of Atlantic City. Are we going to see The Queen, the real queen, who was marginalized by the Hollywood myth-making machine in Lawrence Fishburne's movie Hoodlum?

Saturday Afternoon Thinking Project: Is Islam a Religion of Peace? Chris Hitchens Versus Tariq Ramadan

“If you want diversity, you need a secular state with a godless constitution. Secularism is the only guarantee of religious freedom.”

Returning to the evening’s assignment, Hitchens said Islam requires the belief that the prophet Muhammad was “a perfect human being” and that the Koran is “a perfect book.” “These are categories that do not exist,” Hitchens said. “Yet any challenge to them is heresy. The demands that you believe these imperatives do not lead to peaceful outcomes.”

It is good to see Christopher Hitchens in the ring throwing punches and scoring points.

This debate is a good one that is akin to the classic rivalry between Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat and Ric Flair. Both Ramadan and Hitchens are at the top of their respective games. The latter a secular humanist, the former a religiously informed scholar. Styles make fights: Tariq Ramadan is at a profound disadvantage in this exchange as intellectuals who proceed from a faith perspective have already ceded too much territory in the terrain of rationality, empiricism, and truth to win any debate against Christopher Hitchens (or any other exemplary informed atheist or agnostic). Nevertheless, Tariq gives as good as he gets.

So, is Islam a religion of peace?

I have little taste for such questions as they are imprecise. Moreover, the trope that Islam is a religion of peace seems akin to a set of tired talking points that the well-intentioned and naive can recite without having to ask hard questions about the deeds committed in the name of Islam--and how said deeds are supported by selective citations of a text. But, I also don't think that Judaism or Christianity are religions of peace either. For in practice, individuals, States, charismatic personalities, and mindless followers of faith have committed any number of murderous deeds over the centuries in the name of their personal "God" (or "gods"). Here religion and "faith" seemed to embolden human wickedness and not temper it.

In these matters I follow a shorthand rule: in a secular society the religiously minded should learn to play nicely with others. Despite what some on the Right would suggest, religion and the claims thereof do not a priori and prima facie demand respect by virtue of their mere existence.

For example, in Europe there is a real struggle between the forces of the secular and politicized Islam. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the obvious when free speech is imperiled by threats of violence and murder; the obligation of the radicalized faithful to create a global caliphate, and where Sharia law is creeping forward. Likewise, in the United States the influence of Christian Nationalists, Christian Zionists, and Christian Dominionists is a dangerous encroachment on the public good in what is ostensibly a constitutional republic where church and state are separate.

Ultimately, I would respectfully suggest that the mysterious and the unprovable should remain private matters, as by virtue of the very necessity of faith to remove certain priors from debate what remains are matters unresolvable in the public square or through reasoned debate.

The full text of the Ramadan versus Hitchens debate can be found here.

Radical Feminism or Female Misandry? Duke University Undergraduate Student Karen Owen's "Fuck List" Goes Viral

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Question: Is Karen Owen a radical feminist or a woman who hates men?

My parents gave me a pretty good birds and bees talk before I went to college. It was direct and went something like this: "You are going to have opportunities to hook up with lots of women. Be careful and before you have sex with them ask yourself if you really want to be either stuck with them forever if you knock them up, or alternatively have to deal with someone who will put your business in the street."

Over the years I have crystallized this down to my "crazy eyes" litmus test, i.e. does she have those eyes that indicate something is amiss (an imperfect rule because crazy eyes often do not appear until post-coitus) and if it becomes known that I took said lady to space mountain will I be ashamed to be publicly linked with her?

In the era of Facebook and social networking this age old rubric seems to have been thrown aside by a generation of millennials who are constantly connected, who bathe in the glow of the false intimacy provided by sexting, texting, i'ming, twittering, friending, and the like--yet are often incapable of effectively communicating in person. They want the closeness. But many do not have the maturity or life skills to deal with the consequences of their generations' shattering of the divide between public and private.

At Duke University an enterprising young undergraduate has provided an object lesson in this phenomenon. Karen Owen has compiled a Powerpoint presentation titled, "An Education Beyond the Classroom: Excelling in the Realm of Horizontal Academics." In short, this is Karen Owen's "fuck list" (I am too lazy and simply use a napkin and pen for this obligatory task). Inevitably, our intrepid undergraduate researcher then sent this document for the ages to her friends.

Gasp. Shock. Surprise. Karen's sex list was circulated online and has now gone viral. Helicopter parents of the featured Lotharios are calling the Dean of Students at Duke (Can you imagine that phone call? "Hello, I am Mr. SuperMcCool beerpong playing lacrosse dude's mom. Karen Owen hooked up with him, and wrote a report where she discussed the size of his penis and how he is a lazy lover. It is upsetting him. Please tell her to stop sharing this personal information or I will sue the school!"). And predictably, in our era of ritualized and empty apologizes for outcomes that ought to be predictable, Ms. Owen has responded to her critics with the following script: "I regret it with all my heart. I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that."

The report itself is an entertaining sociological document that provides more insight into the life of college age students than the obligatory My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student--the current favorite of many a university's Center for Teaching and Learning. Yes, it is true that Karen Owen's methodology is sloppy. Her style of presentation also suggests something is amiss in higher education (and our culture at large) when Powerpoint is somehow imagined to equal either intellectual rigor or clarity of thought.

A helpful note to Miss Owen (and all other undergraduates, colleagues at conferences, and folks in general who rely on this technological crutch): Powerpoint should be used only as an aid to communication and not as a distraction from your primary message. Long lines of unbroken text and endless bullet points obfuscate your message. Use Powerpoint to highlight key concepts and to create powerful visuals that could not be communicated in another fashion. Please avoid animations and flashy transitions between slides as they annoy the audience.

Nevertheless, there is much to be applauded here. Of note, while Ms. Owen's reach does not equal her grasp, the intervention of using such criteria as creativity, aggressiveness, talent, and the size on her lovers' penises as metrics is a nice wink to scientific rigor.

Substantively, Ms. Owen's anthropological record is one of drunken sex, athlete chasing and quasi-groupie behavior, the role of black men's genitals in the libidinous imaginations of poorly endowed white frat boy athletes, passion filled nights, the ability of hip hop legend DMX to inspire a morning rutting session, and the soothing soulful notes of Trey Songz as the preamble for a hooking-up session with a near-stranger (apparently he is the millennials' version of Barry White).

There are so many questions to be asked. Is this ironic karma in action, that the infamous and entitled Duke lacrosse team would have the tables turned on them? How does race and gender play into this? If a man had compiled a Powerpoint list of his female lovers and circulated it, would there be an outcry? What does this incident tell us about the campus climate and undergraduate culture at elite universities in the age of Facebook and the Great Recession?

Libertarianism's Dystopian Dreaming: Fire Department Lets Family's House Burn Down Over a $75 Membership Fee

In a thousand years I never would have imagined that I would write the following:

On September 30, 2010, a family watched their house burn down because they did not pay a seventy-five dollar "membership" fee to the fire department. They pleaded for help as the fire department stood by, while their home, animal family members, and dreams were turned into ashes. A neighbor offered to pay the "fee" and was ignored. The Right and their pied piper Glenn Beck (along with others drunken on the noxious stew that is Ayn Rand infused libertarianism and Tea Party ribaldry) find mocking joy in the Cranicks' loss. Welcome to America in the year 2010.

Americans (whether intentionally or otherwise) frame their understandings of politics around the notion of "freedom dreams." For some, this is a dream of mass mobilization and a return to the "glorious" 1960s. For others, it is a belief in the virtues of "small government" and "freedom to" as opposed to the necessities of "freedom from." In the imagery of the modern myth that is Ronald Reagan's "a shining city on the hill" and his "morning in America," the freedom dream was one of a renewed country that inexorably triumphs over an "evil empire" and where wealth came to all through trickle down economics and the fictional bounties of The Laffer Curve. The election of Barack Obama under the banner of "change" and "hope" was another type of freedom dream--one where young people along with folks across all boundaries of race and class could come together to heal the economic, social, and political wounds caused by the Bush administration.

Sadly, these freedom dreams seem to have reached an impasse. As America grapples with the Great Recession, a pair of permanent and seemingly endless wars, the contraction of the middle class, and how to best manage its fall from grace as the preeminent power in the world, we are witness to the rise of alternative framework. Enter: libertarianism's dystopian dreaming.

Here, local and state governments offer mandated furloughs to employees. Basic services such as police, fire, and 911 have been drastically curtailed. Public municipalities are on the verge of bankruptcy. The gap between rich and poor is widening while wages remain stagnant and the middle class contracts. One in six Americans receive public assistance. Tent cities have sprung forth for the indigent and semi-homeless, while others wait days at a time for medical care from traveling health clinics. Citizens are tired and exhausted. And ultimately as the inevitable result of the Right's dogma beginning from at least the 1970s and early 1980s that government is the problem and not the solution (where the Great Society is imagined as an abject failure) the public has come to expect little from the State and its elected leaders.

As brilliantly highlighted by Sheldon Wolin in his book Democracy Incorporated, there is a sense on the part of the American people that democracy is a sham, an artifice run by two major parties distinguished only by the degree to which they are beholden to a corporate kleptocracy. In America's managed democracy presidential elections can be stolen with little outcry. Profit is the motive for all things--even the most basic of services such as fire protection, education, and health care that ought to be granted to citizens by virtue of their membership in the polity.

This is a creeping rot. For example, on one day it is the most basic of "public goods"--the non-excludable items that every Introduction to Macroeconomics student learns about the first day of class--that are taken away because of an inability to pay. Tomorrow, it may be police protection. The following day, the exclusion could extend to something as basic as national defense--a service to be outsourced to the highest bidder.

We saw a hint of the selfish egotism and empathy-less madness that is inherent in the libertarian, anti-statism that cheered on the burning down of the Cranick family's home in the moments following Hurricane Katrina. While some rightfully focused on the narrative of race and poverty in that American tragedy where the white racial frame deemed black Americans scavenging for food to be "looters," and white folks in the same perilous straits as "looking for food," there was another narrative at play. For some on the Right, the fall of New Orleans was not a parable about the logistical failures of the federal and state governments. Instead, Hurricane Katrina's enduring lesson was that the poor (read: the underclass and blacks at large) need to get an education, end the cycle of poverty, and then purchase cars so they can get out of town if another hurricane were to strike the city: A cruel calculus that ignores any questions of the common good, or of the obligations, merits, and value of citizenship.

Ultimately, the dismantlement of the State, and a breaking of the expectation that the government has obligations to all citizens (and we to our democracy) serves only the rich, the privileged, and the powerful. They can wallow in the sophomoric musings of Ayn Rand and libertarian philosophies best suited to the drunken meditations of college age trustifarians because those with resources simplistically imagine that they are islands onto themselves with little to any need for the government. The Rand Pauls of the world can muse poetically about a repeal of the Civil Rights Act because to them it is an odd historical factoid, not a law that governs their treatment as full citizens. Beck and company can harp on about the evils of unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and "progressives" because they are rich off of their unique brand of faux-populism and its appeal to the tea party, astroturf lemmings. More generally, the New Right and its supplicants can harp on about nullification and "second amendment" remedies precisely because the repeal of the federal government's power serves their politics of "us" as opposed to "them."

As a function of our freedom dreams, we often spend a great deal of time talking about American exceptionalism. What is a core tenet in American society, held in different and varying ways by folks on both the Left and the Right, that America is a unique place, almost singular in destiny, origins, and claims to the greatness of its democracy. But one must also ask the hard questions: How "exceptional" is a country where citizens are deprived of basic services? Where folks like the Cranicks can be made to stand and watch while their home burns to the ground over a membership fee? Is America exceptional because of its infant mortality rate? The educational achievements of its students? The longevity of its citizens? Her status as a debtor nation? The amount she spends on the military?

The burning of the Cranick's home is a sign of a deeper malaise. In total, their loss was an object lesson in the Right's libertarianism infused dystopian dreaming, where empathy and sympathy are trodden over by selfishness and a pure profit-loss calculation.

Nevertheless, I remain a dreamer. Thus, I must ask the following: Is all truly lost? What can we do as Americans on the Left, in the middle, and on the responsible Right to regain our freedom dreams? Are these dreams now and permanently in the dustbin of history, never to be reclaimed? Or is there some undiscovered country that awaits us all?

Pedagogical Failure? Epic Face Palm Moments of Teaching Race in the Age of Obama

I am a pragmatist. I believe that education can have a transformative effect for some students. I do not believe that I am some collegiate version of Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver or Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds. My only expectation is that my students meet me (at least) halfway and take ownership for their own learning--and at some bare minimum grapple with the ideas presented in class in an intellectually honest and rigorous manner. Nevertheless (and despite our best intentions), we may encounter a face palm a moment of pedagogical failure where the law of unintended consequences reigns supreme.

"Do you remember when?" is usually the most banal form of conversation in existence. Nevertheless, for my purposes today a trip down memory lane proves most instructive. One of my favorite professors (we will call him Dr. Kurt) in college relayed a story to me when I was contemplating graduate school. This wise soul of Sociology told me about one of his best students, a young man who was curious, excited by the material, and eager to absorb all that my then mentor had to offer. Dr. Kurt had found a holy grail: What is seemingly a dream come true--a padawan to our Yoda; a Mr. Miyagi to our Daniel. Said student absorbed everything taught in his classes on race, class, and gender. And he was especially fascinated by the politics of housing segregation and the built environment.

Dr. Kurt was both pleased and gratified. Years later, Dr. Kurt would meet his protege at a class reunion. Excited to share how his life had been indelibly marked by Dr. Kurt's classes, said student explained that sociology was the basis of his career success. My mentor was overjoyed. "How?" he asked. Our young friend explained that "I work in real estate. All that stuff on redlining and blockbusting was so useful for me. I apply those techniques and I'm now a millionaire because of how well I use them. Thanks!"

Dr. Kurt laughed as he told the story, the laughter a complement and mask both to, and for, his intellectually infused gallows humor. As a newbie I didn't understand the nuances of the tale. Finally, I think I am starting to "get" Dr. Kurt's wizened wisdom. For in these last few weeks I have witnessed the following episodes...what could be great fodder for a never to be written set of memoirs:

Race in the Age of Obama Pedagogical Failure Moment Number One: In one of my classes, we are discussing the spatial dimensions of neighborhoods, segregation, and how race is a cognitive map, a floating signifier that organizes our world, and that white supremacy is still a real, trans-historical, social force. In what I thought was an accessible way to demonstrate the power of this point, I showed my class the infamous This American Life episode on the restaurant Weiner Circle, where white racism is on full display when the mask of civility is dropped in the whee hours of the night at this legendary Chicago eatery. The next class session one of my students was visibly excited as she exclaimed, "Professor, I went to Weiner Circle over the weekend with my friends! The food looked so good in the video I just had to try it. It was awesome!" Epic. Face. Palm. Moment.

Race in the Age of Obama Pedagogical Failure Moment Number Two: I spend a great deal of time on racial formation theory. Accordingly, I go for the jugular and don't flinch. Whiteness is the center of the conversation. The relationship of Whiteness to power is the frame. How white ethnics earned their bonafides as fully White citizens by hating, distancing themselves from, and participating in often violent rituals against black Americans is the ugly history that we will confront together.

Some students are enraptured. Others are sitting nervously with the "did he just go there?" look on their faces (I hold my breath waiting for my evaluations each year by the way). With great passion, a young quasi-White student raised his hand. Upset he offered, "my relatives have done everything we have read about. I am so frustrated. Why haven't we, Hispanics, earned our whiteness and white privilege! This is so unfair." Rendered. Speechless. Despite. Intervention. Moment.

Race in the Age of Obama Pedagogical Failure Moment Number Three: There is often a disconnect between what students read and how they believe it does (or does not) apply to them. If it is positive and reinforces their priors about how wonderful, grand, great and post-racial said students believe themselves to be, this information seems to be retained. When this information challenges said priors, or calls their own behavior into question, the data is discarded. Often, despite the best efforts of some to dismiss challenging information, students often prove the very logic of the theories of which they are so suspicious.

Several of my assigned readings focus on the scripts that white folks in the age of colorblindness use to deflect charges of racism specifically, and of the overwhelming power of race to over-determine life chances, more generally. As a daily task, I ask my students to critically evaluate their readings for a given day. Not surprisingly--and perhaps most depressingly--many of them deploy the same tactics highlighted in the readings for the class. "I am not a racist, but..." "I have black/brown/Hispanic/gay/minority friends and..." "My relatives came to America a hundred years ago and we never owned slaves so..." And my favorite, "Okay, all this stuff may be true but it doesn't apply to me or my friends and I don't really believe it and..." No. Comment. Not. Ever.

In the interest of transparency, my worries are not that the disconnect between teachers' intent and students' reception is anything new. These are common laments across time, culture, and generations. But, how do we go about teaching race, and the realities of colorblind racism in the Age of Obama? When for the post-Civil Rights generation to even talk about race is itself "racist?" How do we overcome this gap in language, understanding, and application?

More generally, is this is a classic story of a gallon's worth of information being poured into a pint size glass size of intellect and preparation? Or are these moments an example of a collective failure on the part of teachers, universities, and colleges? Moreover, are the expectations we hold for our "millennial" students too high?

Pray tell my fellow teachers, students, and other allies, how do you respond to these moments of utter pedagogical disconnect? Tips, suggestions, or strategies?

Of Secrets, Playboy Bunnies, the Military Industrial Complex, and Taboo Love: Mad Men's Episode, "Hands and Knees" Reviewed

Black folks have been obligatory bits of window dressing in the last two episodes of Mad Men. Question: Which is more problematic, African-Americans center frame as giant negroes (last week) or as Playboy Bunnies (this week)?

The theme of Sunday's episode was secrets--secrets revealed; secrets confessed; and secrets at risk. As one more example of the sharp writing and Easter eggs aplenty in Mad Men, the closing musical cue of "Hands and Knees" was the Beatle's song "Do You Want to Know a Secret."

Mad Men has revolved around this theme since its first episode. Don Draper's secret is the life that is a lie, one adopted from a dead G.I. in Korea. Peggy's secret is her love child by Pete. Sal's secret is his life as a closeted gay man. Joan and Roger's secret is their love affair. More generally, the secrets of Mad Men are a polite wink to the lie that is advertising (for isn't the word "secret" just a polite cousin to deception?). By extension, Mad Men is at its heart a show about desires, wants, and greed--of the characters and of the mass public--as they are manipulated into being pliant consumers and self-perpetuating happiness machines.

But what to do when the wheels threaten to fall of off the machine? When the secrets we hold will be revealed to all? Or the Ponzi scheme, the house of cards the American economy is built upon (as The Great Recession has made clear) all threaten to fall down? Apparently, the characters of Mad Men delayed the inevitable in this episode, but at what cost to their souls and lives?

Per tradition, here are some questions and observations:

1. Got to love the clothes. The torpedo bra on Toni, the maternity teddy on Trudy. Question: Am I a deviant because I saw Trudy's playful garb, rotund belly, and come-hither look, and immediately said in my best Robocop/Smash TV voice that "I'd buy that for a dollar!"

2. One of the story arcs of Mad Men is the rise of the military-industrial complex and the national security (and now national intelligence) state. These companies employ hundreds, if not thousands of lobbyists, public relations personnel, and other consultants to sell the American people on the necessity of spending trillions of dollars on guns and not butter. As offered by "Hands and Knees," the Northrop Grummans, Lockheed Martins, and General Electrics of the world propagandize going to the moon, but never discuss the dead hand or MIRVs.

With good reason: The Consumer's Republic is now almost inseparable from the military-industrial complex because both are addicted to the technological marvels produced by this union, and to talk about destruction instead of pleasure would not fatten the bottom line. For example, the Internet, the personal computer, cell phones, and many advanced medical technologies are a product of the tax payers' subsidy of the military and its iron mongers. Question: are we talking to ourselves? Does Joe Q. Public even care about this problematic relationship and how it subverts democracy?Was anyone even listening to Eisenhower's prescient warning?

3. We know that Don Draper is going to bed Megan (can you blame him?). He is self-destructive and runs from the real intimacy offered by Faye. The latter is a keeper of secrets by trade, want, and character. Once Don takes his prize, will Faye reveal his secret in a moment of scorned love?

4. Random thought: Is Don a coward? Does he secretly want his secret out? (got to love that Oscar Wilde word play) Will this reveal and its resulting chaos complete Don Draper's story, one where he is a semi-tragic, anti-hero?

5. Apparently, Hugh Hefner was a civil rights visionary, the Rosa Parks of poontang. As the documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel suggests, Hugh was a firm believer in the equality of the races and was sympathetic to the fight of Black Americans for full citizenship. Famously, Playboy magazine featured cutting-edge interviews with Malcolm X, Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali. Less well known is Hefner's official policy of racial non-discrimination at his Playboy Clubs.

This is one more bit of smart writing on an already brilliant show that rewards close viewing. To point: is Mad Men's introduction of Toni a triumph over racism, because women (apparently, despite the color of their skin) are consistently treated as objects by the men around them? Or is Toni's character (a quasi-sex worker) rendered even more problematic because of how race and gender are configured on her body? What would womanists have to say about this one?

6. Charlie Murphy! No, not really. But Lane's father hitting him upside the head with a cane was worthy of Chappelle's infamous sketch. What reading did you take away from Lane, crumbled, on the ground, his father Robert hovering over him like a lord of the manor? Was Robert more upset that his son's lover is a black woman, his "chocolate bunny," or that Lane will not get a divorce and comport himself with more respect?

7. At the end of the episode Don was left a broken man. The cool operator, the iceman, cracked and was brought down so low by a panic attack that he curled into a ball, fetus-like, to be comforted by his lover. Does Don become all the more compelling because the lower he falls, the higher he seems to inevitably rise?

An Island of Safety from the Great Bed Bug Plague of 2010

If any of your homes are infested with bed bugs you can seek respite and safety in my apartment (only after I spray you down with DDT).

My building manager has ordered that an exterminator must certify each apartment bed bug free. Goodness, I do not envy the young brother assigned this task as God only knows the yuckiness he could potentially find (unclean sheets; sex toys; old condoms; food wrappers; stained underwear; etc. etc. etc.) in a stranger's bed.

[Insert Drum Roll] Just moments ago I passed what felt like the equivalent of a short arm inspection. My place of rest, sleep, and where I take the ladies to space mountain is now certified bed bug free. Now, I can finally exhale.

More seriously, my gut tells me that this bed bug panic is an exaggeration, a hoax, one that fills the coffers of the scurrilous, dishonest, and money grubbing insect-pest control military industrial complex. Sure there are some nasties about, but like dust mites, hpv, and other cooties, many folk probably have them and live in blissful ignorance.

A question: What do you think the bed bug plague is really a signal to? Are the bed bugs symbolic of a general insecurity that most are feeling in the Great Recession? Are the bed bugs signaling to a fear of terrorism, a metaphorical "they" which can attack at any time--a foe unseen and unstoppable? Hell, are the bed bugs somehow correlated with the New Right's nativism and xenophobia for all things not WASP, milquetoast and "authentically American?"

Racism Chasing in the Age of Obama: Avalon Restaurant Criticized For 'Black On Black Crime' Hot Wing Flavor

We live in blessed times. Racism is such a thing of the past that folks have to put on their racism chasing shoes in order to find it. As Brother Martin said, let freedom ring and justice rain down on us from the mountain top. We have truly reached the promised land when stories about buffalo wings are considered newsworthy, and when white and black can finally unite in common brotherhood as they sell chicken wings covered in "black on black crime" sauce.

You all know that I am a fiend for some good fried chicken. Now, I don't eat it in public or with mixed company lest some racial stereotype be fulfilled. But in private? I can't resist. From my most fondest of memories in which my dad brought home ill-gotten garbage bags full of Popeye's fried chicken, to my eating chicken fingers (this was off the kid's menu...I could not be denied) at a friend's wedding party reception at the great MK restaurant here in Chicago a few weeks ago, the bird is in my blood. Thus, my dedication to bringing you fried chicken related nonsense whenever I stumble upon it--black folks protesting over Popeye's; Latarian Milton attacking grandma over a disputed chicken wing; and of course the crazed chicken McNugget lady.

It ain't the reefer madness. No, fried chicken related madness is the real and most accurate barometer for our national mood. Somehow the yard bird speaks with deft clarity and precision to the collective political unconscious and the colorblind politics of the Age of Obama. Ultimately, the yard bird is Plato's chorus, for we have indeed walked through the looking glass when fried chicken chasing has replaced racism chasing as our national pastime.

Tocqueville and Myrdal would be so very proud.

The story follows.

****

Avalon Restaurant Criticized For 'Black On Black Crime' Hot Wing Flavor

At Big Shot Bob's House of Wings in Avalon, apparently it's everything. Channel 11 News featured the restaurant in the Pittsburgh “Best Wing” contest, but it’s a name of one of the flavors that caught the attention of many WPXI viewers and Facebook followers."If I had any idea this would happen, it wouldn't have gotten on our menu," said Big Shot Bob's owner Matt Cercone. "We've been getting threatening phone calls here, and there are people saying we're going to go out of business."Big Shot Bob's is more popularly known for its 100 different flavors of wings, but it was the "black on black crime" wing flavor that generated the negative publicity.

Channel 11 first learned about the controversy through our WPXI-TV Facebook page. A viewer wrote, "How about this for a story. There's a place called Big Shot Bob's house of wings and they have a featured wing called black on black crime."

Cercone said after he started receiving complaints about the wings name, he changed it. Cercone said he meant no harm and that the wing's inventor, a loyal customer who happens to be African-American, came up with the name."Offense was never part of anything," said Cercone.Big Shot Bob's changed the name of the wings to "Big Fine Woman 2000." Cercone said they allowed the woman who first brought the controversy to light to name them.

Throw Whitey in Front of the Train? The Differing Moral Universes of Liberals and Conservatives

Turned out the racial identities did indeed, ah, color peoples’ judgments, but it colored them differently depending on their political bent. Pizarro, who describes himself as a person who “would probably be graded a liberal on tests,” roughly expected that liberals would be more consistent. Yet liberals proved just as prejudiced here as conservatives were, but in reverse: While self-described conservatives more readily accepted the sacrifice of Tyrone than they did killing Chip, the liberals were easier about seeing Chip sacrificed than Tyrone.

Are your moral codes flexible or absolute? Would you kill one person in order to save the life of another? If so, how would you make the calculation?

Apparently, if psychologist David Pizarro's findings are to be believed, liberals and conservatives would sacrifice different individuals if faced with this classic moral dilemma. David, using a version of the classic "trolley problem" asked college students if they would be willing to sacrifice one person by throwing him on to the tracks in front of a trolley if it would save a group of 100 people. Not content with a basic test, Dr. Pizarro mixed it up a bit--what if one of those to be sacrificed was black, the other white? Adding a further twist, what if the groups to be saved were of (presumably) different racial backgrounds than he who was to be sacrificed?

Enter: The Kill Whitey Study. Its findings? Self-identified liberals are much more likely to sacrifice a white man (named Chip Ellsworth III) to save the Harlem Jazz Orchestra. Conservatives are much more likely to sacrifice a black man (named Tyrone Payton) to save the New York Philharmonic. Apparently, both groups used post hoc reasoning to appear more consistent with how they frame their moral choices.

This raises a number of fascinating possibilities. Are conservatives more consistent than ostensibly pragmatic liberals?Are both motivated by their own unique sense of right and wrong? Do liberals embrace diversity as a principal, or is there some white/liberal guilt at work in their decision to save Tyrone and not Chip? Conversely, are conservatives just primed to throw black people in front of the proverbial train whenever they get the chance?

The trolley dilemma is a classic, made more so by Pizarro's application of it. How would you make your decision? Is jazz more valuable than classical music? Has Tyrone suffered enough in this life because of race prejudice and white privilege, so now it is time for Chip to pay Tyrone's long overdue freedom dues? Do you know someone named Tyrone and can't stand him, thus you would sacrifice his namesake on principle? Is your husband/best friend/school chum named Chip and you can't bring yourself to liquidate him?

A methodological question: Would the results change if black and brown folks were oversampled? What if one played with gender? Let's say Tyrone was replaced by Shaniqua Jackson and Chip by Becky Jones? Who would get thrown in front of the trolley then, and by whom?

"Kill Whitey. Its the Right Thing to Do" can be found on Wired magazine here.

Of White Feminism, Civil Rights, and Giant Negroes: Mad Men's Episode, "The Beautiful Girls" Reviewed

Mad Men has earned just praise as one of the best shows on television. As has been suggested elsewhere, there are few shows on television that speak as richly and sharply to the Age of Obama. The premise of Mad Men--a show about the creation of the true lie that is advertising and the happiness machine--is actually a window into the illusory power of memory. Ultimately, Mad Men is a meditation on the lie of whiteness, suburbia, American prosperity and consumerism. In exposing this true lie as such, Mad Men deftly engages questions of power and identity in ways that often go unnoticed by the casual viewer (and frankly by many professional reviewers who to my astonishment have not commented on the centrality of race to the show's melodrama).

This is the genius of the show. On the surface Mad Men is "just" about men of a certain age and their corporate machinations as they try to cultivate desire in the consumer's republic. More than offering a mere Easter egg of detail that some shows offer (of which my beloved Boondocks is a prime example), there is real meat to Mad Men.

The recurring vein in Mad Men's current season is change. The first two seasons offered an idealized world where white men were king, America was rightly ordered following the Korean War, and "those people," the minorities, women, gays, and young people knew their place. The political salience of this fiction is not to be underestimated.

It is the basis for the Leave it to Beaver, Norman Rockwellesque fiction that animates contemporary American conservatism from (at least) Reagan onward. It is a return to the world of Mad Men seasons one and two--"the good old days"--that animates Pat Buchanan and the Right's culture war ethos of the late 1980s into the present. And grappling at this illusion of "a natural order of things" is what Palin and The New Right presently pander to in their histrionic, crackhead-like, political meth-infused, herrenvolk yearnings for a return to "real America."

In Mad Men's third and (now) fourth seasons, those folks who existed in the shadows and on the periphery of Don Draper and his brethren's hermetically sealed bubble are moving front and center. The barbarians may not be at the gates, but the normative centrality of the white male heterosexual gaze is being disrupted. Whether from the Civil Rights Movement, a growing anti-war movement, or the increasing assertion by white middle class women of their own self-interested feminism, change is gonna come. The question remains, how will Don Draper and company respond?

Per tradition, here are some questions and observations:

1. Was "The Beautiful Girls" a pro-feminist or anti-feminist episode? Is the death of Miss Blankenship a signal to a changing of the guard? Alternatively, is her passing a portent of how work and the rat race will trap all of the women in one way or another, even those who were as ahead of their times as Miss Blankenship secretly was? Not to be forgotten--wasn't Burt Cooper's eulogy grand?

2. Could the signal to the various ways that women negotiate their own identities, work, and relationships be captured any more perfectly than the concluding shot where Faye, Joyce, Peggy, and Joan--all four of whom are very different women--enter their respective elevators?

3. Is Don Draper excited by the prospect of a serious, long-term relationship with Faye, a person who in theory remains semi-independent of him? Is Don capable of seeing the women in his life as anything other than secretaries? Is Faye overreacting in her rage toward Don?

4. Is Peggy a liberal racist? Does she honestly believe that black Americans fighting the tyranny of Jim Crow and formal white supremacy have anything in common with her struggle to become a copywriter? Contrary to the norms of center-Left political correctness, I have always suggested that oppressions can in fact be ranked. Here the oppression of middle class white women in the 1960s is quite low on the misery index. Once more, does sexism trump racism? Can Peggy avoid giving in to the power of white women's tears, and the narcissism of Whiteness?

5. You have to love the flippant wink to racism above the Mason-Dixon line in the meeting with Fillmore auto parts. You also got to love the Harry Belafonte/Dean Martin exchange.

6. A historical point. How long until Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has to reach out to the African American market? Will one of the self-interested, forward looking characters hire a black consultant? Alternatively, will Pete (as signaled to by his hapless conversation in Season three's episode "The Fog" with Hollis, the African American elevator operator, about black folks' television buying habits) work with an African American owned PR firm in order to fatten his bottom-line?

7. We are finally in the center of the frame. Was Joan and Roger's robbery a "giant negro moment?" Given the lack of non-whites on Mad Men, was this scene racist? Was it honest? Could it be both? What to make of the fact that an armed robbery is the spark for a curb-side rutting in the shadows of an alleyway? Depraved or erotic?

8. Talk about take your daughter to work day! Don Draper has to negotiate childcare duties without either the help of his wife, or the heretofore often forgotten Carla.

Question: how often do the white, second-wave feminists of the 1960s forget the role of class and race privilege in their struggle? That the suburban comfort that white women yearned to "escape" was in large part made possible by the working class black and brown women who took care of their kids and homes?

9. When will the 800 pound elephant in the room be dealt with: There is something amiss with Sally. She is oddly adult at times and is clearly the victim of more than parental dysfunction and divorce. The signals are all present: I would suggest that Sally was in fact molested by her grandfather. Thus, the root-spring of her sexual acting out earlier in this season.

There is likely one more dark secret afoot here--the smart money says that Betty Draper was also a victim of her father's advances. The clues are all present. Will Mad Men connect these dots?

Open Thread Sunday: On Christine O'Donnell, Values Voters, Anti-Americanism, and The Ruling Class

A little break from football (go Pats! by the way).

Christine O'Donnell, Tea Party darling, anti-masturbation advocate, former witch, and feminist fan of Lord of the Rings gave a stirring speech to the true believers at the "Values Voters" summit where she railed against anti-Americanism and "the ruling class." As you know, I am transparent in my feelings towards O'Donnell/Palin/Beck and their cabal of Know-nothings: The New Right and its faux populism are a cancer in the blood, bone, and marrow of the American body politic that must be excised.

Nevertheless, one must still try to understand the terms of engagement that govern their political rivals. It is prima facie that Beck, Palin, and O'Donnell are pulling a page out of Pat Buchanan's Culture War speech from the 1992 Republican Convention (who would have thought that Buchanan's screed would be the reactionary Right's Gettysburg Address?). For Conservatives of a certain stripe, the war--as it has been for decades--is between "us" and "them." Here the us are the "real Americans," "the heartland," "Christians," and "the silent majority." The them are "the gays," "the liberals," "the feminists," and "the minorities."

I am now unsettled. Because for decades I had gotten used to being a perpetual outsider, someone who by definition could never be part of the "ruling class elite." After listening to the mouth-breathing exhalations of the tea baggers and watching Christine O'Donnell's speech I find myself more than a little confused about my orbit in the political universe. Thus the following questions:

1. Who exactly is the "ruling class?" I thought they were the corporations, a narrow two party system, and the forces pulling the strings of neo-liberalism and globalization. I guess I am mistaken. Are you part of the ruling class small elite? How do you know? What does it feel like?

2. What the hell is anti-Americanism? Will I know it when I see it? Is it the same thing that Joe McCarthy was railing against in the 1950's or is it a new/old bogeyman? Is there a membership form or dues to join this exclusive club? Do the anti-Americans hang out with The Legion of Doom?

3. Who are these "values voters?" What exactly are their values? And where do these values come from? Don't all people, all villages, all communities have values? What makes the values voters' values so special?... (how can you not love that Oscar Wilde-like word play?)

Shameless Self-Promotion: Chauncey Devega's Interview with Ring of Fire Radio

Thought I would share this interview with you all, for now you too can bask in the staccato tone of my monotone voice. More seriously, I did radio for years and do truly miss it. Who knows, maybe we need to get our ducks in a row and finally debut the much delayed We Are Respectable Negroes show on Blog Talk Radio?

All in all I thought the interview went well and was lucky to have the chance to speak with Mike Papantonio on Ring of Fire about Glenn Beck and his followers. Funny, these Internets are always a surprise as one can take five minutes, say what needs to be said, link it to an accessible concept, and then get your time to shine (conversely, one can take hours to write a post, throw it into the wind, and said thoughts land with a dull thud).

It would seem that the ghetto nerds and respectable negroes are on the march. Next stop: Fox News...yeah right. But then again, I would love to go head to head with Beck et al. in their own house.