Kurdstantinople

and for the next I think about three days, the president will lie in -- the former president will lie in state.-- Charlayne Hunter-Gault

I do not mean to suggest, in my Ifill post, that prominent African Americans are responsible for the fact that I get it from all sides. Henry Louis Gates did not create North Philadelphia's destitution any more than I manufactured Glenn Beck, but there is an essential disconnect between Dr. Gates, his historical admonishments, his genetic challenges to the very identity he embraces, and the reality of life on the ground in urban corridors, whether those corridors are west coast, the LA-Compton track, or east coast, which extends from the DC metro grid and hits a speed bump roughly at Hartford's city line in CT (when she wishes spastic is an amateur demographics expert).

Bill Cosby shares my traditionalism in this regard, and I respect the comedian for his early first decade efforts to speak the truth to northeast urban black communities (and Cosby's middle aged bigot he created for K-12 sociology instruction is also a mimetic simulation of the angry retractive jackass into which my civic duty has contorted). But, and this is what I keep driving at-- Cosby's honesty lacks the spearheaded pretensions of Gates and his indignation with white privilege. The only effect my father's denigrating attitude about blacks had on blacks themselves was his exodus from the city and the tax revenue that went with it. At the end of the day, I detached myself from every minority paraprofessional: partly discomfort, partly contempt, but in a number of instances, also an instinctual need for self-preservation.

The time to shine technician did not hurt me; maybe she did not take my dates, knowingly throw out my wheelchair tools, or pay attention to my dress skirt on the bar I purchased to interview locally on my grid, but she is the last blue collar minority I will allow within five feet of my personal space, excepting police or EMS. Yes, I am a quadriplegic, but I'm done, however I have to square that reality.  

Gwen Ifill, Postpartum Rinses

I may email Dr. Gates, because this is how my mind works. Engage with enemies who were unfairly arrested after I have unfairly been scarred living in terror, in Philadelphia's Beirut war-zone mock up of an inner city, across the street from a state campus from my 23rd year. The entitlement which radiates from Henry Louis Gates is refined with restrained ebullience, but the difference between pride and conceit has its own continuum. The man projects pompous inflation, and if I have shut myself off from the history of the African diaspora, what would I expect of a response?

Not that there would be one--but I'd ask for an accounting. Filching may be a time honored tradition in custodial work, and I do not mean to take fiascoes with cleaning companies all that seriously, but I returned to Philly as a young woman to succeed, not to have to struggle an entire lifetime against nearly unremitting threat and relentless superhuman effort for my place at the table. 

Gwen Ifill and I had a moderated 30 second exchange on WaPo's website. Do not ask me about what. Like a diligent anchor, she wrote I could download the Newshour for my iPad as well! Is information and education necessarily tied to markets in this way necessarily the best we can do? Is this beneficial to the human mindset, regionally? Globally? I recall Ford's lawyering up on Gwen when she only mildly pressed the politician during his primary run about family corruption. Politico might have kept on it-- but my point is more about social burrowing and the value or lack thereof of exposure.

I have barely eaten all day, and wish I could laugh about it, but I rode this grim route in my twenties; I'd rather be dead than repeat the experience.

Braque Boxes

James once suggested to William Dean Howells that he should consider publishing a story on incest.  --Michael C Clark, shoulder ghost

I may not have had the diction on hand then that I have available today, but even before my father smashed my stereo to avoid smashing me, and there were several of those instances, signifying the luck of the draw that my immediate family wasn't subject to annihilation, I knew in my pre-collegiate days that Pete Townshend's solo smash was too effective as a corrosive force on my naivete. Elton and Bernie may have dangled homoerotic lyrics like a choice pork medallion, but they did it with an adolescent simplex. Townshend is darker in Empty Glass, a sick perverted bastard if ever there was one, and yet, in the musical traditions that fermented British rock, the album is a work of art, much like Birth of the Nation put the movie industry on the map due to its technical accomplishments, despite the ferocity of its repressions. Blomkamp speaks to this aesthetic complicity in District 9. He was speaking my language before my blogging unwittingly gave voice to my somewhat unrealized convictions, before I butted heads with secular liberalism, whether Zionist, academic, or LBGT.

The plot does have certain inexplicable elements. Christopher seems to be a lone intelligence amid a swarm of alien idiots who cognate slightly better than great apes, and Copley's Wikus survives a paranoid military of a paranoid government and its equally brutal gangland counterpart, but that given, it is a film that has caught up with what it is possible to achieve in science fiction when authors treat the genre with respect. In watching Blomkamp's mock analysts, we see reinforced how our own analysts stand as a bulwark, giving power the benefit of the doubt. When the Petraeus scandal broke, David Brooks gaffed, sitting in his Newshour chair, "I had lunch with him [the general] last week."

This signifies that Brooks gets access in the Beltway, but little else in what the public should know, could know, about the people we pay to run our governments; District 9 signifies this -- it is a film  integral to Africaan guilt (and those Dutch polyglots should feel guilty) but applicable to the rest of us. It is honest in its view that the legal collapse of apartheid does not magically fuse Europeans and Africans like Siamese twins, although Henry Louis Gates, whose chip on the shoulder practically vibrates, says we are all biologically African! How can caste subjugation be so pervasive? Gates makes Rand's ideological lunacy seem sympathetic.

Blomkamp should have won the best foreign film Oscar, but that would have been risky, an anti-establishment gateway.