Free Ride

I do not have much for you this morning, other than a sense of being disgruntled, as I usually am, after parring viral communities down to size. I feel a certain weariness with blinding myself to the fact that I allow myself to be exploited, wobbling down the damn stepladder as opposed to holding my own. Ta-Nehisi, whose tag I now have to repair, was frank enough to tell readers the truth during the crescendo over Cosby: we don't make a great deal of money even under the brand name. This includes The New Republic prior to Chris Hughes, and okay, I struggled with an unsuitable community once again, get over it-- but LinkedIn hasn't been a five star venue either, exactly-- although I am taking another look. These platforms are indicating new ways hapless flat foots gain exposure, and I grasp the LinkedIn voice preference just enough, that with care, I can fake its light arcania sentiments, on some relevant issue I don't mind giving away.

I am tired and in pain and comfortably starving so as not to aggravate aged patriarch with mummified third wife; and it could be worse. I've written strong pitches, weak pitches, fucked pitches with typographical errors and still, I pitch, and Yabberz users did, now and again, give me a new market. If I had stayed, I would have threatened to kill the entire body of California liberals, as a class unique unto themselves. 

There is something superficially inimical about those domicile to the golden state, not that I feel particularly generous to modal libertarians either. We need to learn how to bond in mutual support now and again, and if I roll out of public housing, I need someone to catch me, not just suck me dry as a consumer.  Exposing Melissa's limits was exactly that. I can write about the public housing system as a corrupt and quiet holocaust forever, but who, exactly, would intervene? Catholicism even agrees with Presby's lies treating the broken with dignity. It is for our own good, or it isn't that you don't care, but you're sinking in an underwater mortgage too. I hear you, but section 811 and 202 are Satan's sadistic pleasures brought to life, the corrosion of defeat caught between our teeth without a decent polish and floss. It needs to end, even for nonagenarian bones. Regardless of who we fucking speak to, what we fucking say, a public housing tenant is so much chattel, a classification, automatically relegated, and I will show up in New Wales soon to find Toomey's campaign, and I intend to raise the damn dead when I do, if I have to, to break HUDs power.

Name Recognition Genealogy

"No, he can't be on all the time," --Malaak Rock, in response to Oprah's query about comedy in the home.

When Malaak appeared on Oprah with her husband, the undercurrent of tension between Rock and wife was discernible. Malaak's reservations could be read in her face, her husband as passive as if he needed to be reigned in for premature ejaculation while she was calculating fortune and Chris's net worth as a bankable asset, and Rock's currency is obviously under threat of  hyperinflation.

In generational terms, why Rock has been successful as a comedian is a legitimate query. Bill Cosby may not be Mr. Clean, to recaption Joan's protest about the conspiracy of silence surrounding the allegations toppling the old man, but he did not devalue education, self-reliance. For those of a certain generational cast, permission to mourn is understandable. Rock, with Schneider behind him as a producer, disparaged higher education. What substance there was in Everybody Hates Chris was overwhelmed by clashing cymbals and Rock's high voice, always in an exasperated panic mode.

Not to say Rock is incapable of eliciting laughter from those who coast on C's, but who has a vested interest in keeping him in the public eye? His agent? His union? John Lewis? People like Coates? Why does Access Hollywood disseminate such innocuous articles about the B list?

Malaak was the matriarchal force in this spousal union, and when applied correctly, there is no harm in being chirpy. Many women relate to Winfrey's struggle with chips, but the emphasis here is on the level of correction. Why marry a frog who needs pyrotechnics to coax the caboose? Foiled against Freeman in Betty, a fugue state on overdrive, the bullied boy was passable. All Americans understand the juxtaposition of violence as one kind of economic capital against the subversive following of soap opera plots, but that was nearly 15 years ago.

I would not mind making friends with a woman like Joan Tarshis, in part because despite our experiences being exclusive to ourselves, my sympathy for her struggle to deal with her violation is intuitive. Multiply her rape allegations by 15, maybe 20, and then weigh venom in that context. 

Joan Tarshis

When I hear of horrific things like like Tarshis being sodomized after downing a redeye, I feel compelled to reach out to the victim through shared experience, though I myself was never forcibly sodomized. Stuart Lone, my fabled heroin addicted stepfather, merely groped me, tortured my dead brother in front of my eyes. It was mother's man before him, another stone addict named Beaky, ugly as sin, who tried to rape me, and I let my ex Frank penetrate me anally, perhaps out of self-hatred, and I did not like the pressure on my bowel. Had problems days afterward. Well, I found the old woman, coping with her torment, much as I am letting it all hang out, coping with mine and losing, understanding Robinson's cautious commiseration  and Ta-Nehisi Coates' struggle with his conscience.

As an Italian woman with quadriplegia assaulted by a black relative of a public housing tenant and molested by a biracial inner city woman, I do not really have a say in this internecine argument about black identity spilling over into white cross over acclaim. Cosby did not have the greatest impact on me due to the popularity of Cliff Huxtable, rather, I had to endure countless instructional films of Bill Cosby doing exaggerated versions of Ralph Ellison's lone black man defiantly penetrating through the brick walls of white preconceptions, and it influenced my subconscious about the righteousness of being a straight arrow. Now I have to live with the imagery of his alleged forced penetrations, with these women alone with him like naked sheep, shorn of their woolly coats, in our sexually permissive society.

I tweeted to Joan. You can read it. I cannot enter into how she lives with it, being forcibly fucked by such a talented man who had such an influence on our psyches. It isn't about whether or not we believe her, or want to defend an icon who may have to end his public career on such a note, it is more about what kind of society we want, where trauma is apparently the new normal, and nothing is innocent any longer. Coates' observation that we generate our moral values from people like Cosby may seem a deft perception, but in reality, personality cults cut across human cultures. It isn't simply an American meme. Napoleon is still a herald in France. Margaret Thatcher was part of a Reagan era triad, of some sort, and so on. Nomenclatures evoke their own language, and Ellison would probably be turning in his grave. I was naive enough to tape his picture and obituary on my door in the inner city the year he passed away in 1991, a man whose genius strove more than most to call identity politics the tragedy for which they were. Right now I can't forgive anyone. Black journalists, corporate media, women like me and Joan who eat it and don't fight back until it is far too late, certainly not a comedian who made me believe my moral center was a justified possibility.