From the Archives: "Welcome Back From Intellectual Wasteland"

Here's a letter to the editor I submitted to Savannah Morning News back in December.

An ode to “progressives.”

Last night I welcomed Keith Olbermann and the progressive blogosphere into my home for the first time in nearly two years. After perusing the netroots affected with a stirring mix of heartbreak and vindication, I tuned into Mr. Olbermann's program until the very end, where he concluded with a signature “Special Comment.”

In the intervening period, these people—my erstwhile comrades—had become unbearable for one small tic of theirs: what I perceived to be their fanatical fealty to and unrelenting defenses of Barack Obama.

It's an attitude that elicits potent feelings of shock and betrayal coming, as it happens to, from a young black man, in a majority-black town. From the very beginning, the current writer never bought the conceit of Mr. Obama's symbolic rise as inherently conducive to radical, real, or even modest progress for black people. And so I backed Hillary Rodham Clinton. Though she and the former president were, quite notably, the original triangulators, I felt that through her long, often infamous and incredibly fascinating travails in the harsh milieu of primetime American politics, she had developed a stronger sense of herself and would amount to an imminently less predictable puppet than Mr. Obama has been. (And to be sure, in the final stages of the campaign—back against the wall—she intimated truly progressive instincts.) 

Last night many of my old friends on the progressive left staggered back home—exhausted, dejected, feeling a bit foolish—from intellectual wasteland. With a little help from the menacing Joe Lieberman, they’d finally realized what I’d maintained all along: that the health care “reform”—if any at all—to be signed by Mr. Obama would be an absolute monstrosity. Because of the nation’s dire fiscal straits, as well as the understandable future concerns of cost-cutting and the resultant rationing by the government, I had always been reluctant about my optimal choice of Medicare-for-All, as well as the so-called public option, whatever that is. But the bill we have now—the bill that we were going to get all along—is a disgrace. The main problem is the individual mandate. (Allow us, for a second, to excuse the arguable unconstitutionality of the individual mandate, which Mrs. Clinton misguidedly insisted upon in the campaign.) The inclusion of a government plan to compete with private insurance at least gave citizens a choice. Any proposed legislation with the odious mandate that doesn’t include government competition is to be regarded as a bailout of the insurance industry. Obama and his benefactors are throwing the American people into a deregulated market (the cost-control features of the bill are chimera) to be flayed alive by the private insurers.

It would be akin to—if I'm permitted to borrow an example seen someplace I can’t recall—the government mandating that as a condition of lawful residence in the United States, we all buy cars and auto insurance without the availability of public transportation.

This illustrates why Mr. Obama is so dangerous. Republicans would never dare propose such policy. They are often inconsistent, but in the main, their partiality to business interests is predicated on an ideological aversion to government constraints in the service of the mystical “free market.” The sort of government-mandated cartel the Obama-Lieberman health care bill amounts to hasn’t even that justification. It’s an awful brand of corporatism.

My friends on the left that are beginning to come around are still wrong on the exact details of how we arrived here. Mr. Olbermann, last evening, passionately pleaded for the president to show leadership. Others mimic the critique, chalking up the problem to Mr. Obama’s weakness. Not so. Mr. Obama is not a victim of the congressionally-domineered process nor is he a mere opportunist waiting to sign whatever emerges from the Congress to please his insatiable ego. The truth is far more alarming. His White House gave barely a word to single-payer from the beginning, weighed in against the public option last summer and directed the acquiescence to Mr. Lieberman here recently.  Our elitist corporatist president is getting exactly what he wanted from the very outset.

Welcome home, gang. 

Pretty cool, I thought. Apparently they did not. It wasn't published. :(

I think all of this held up pretty well, if I'm permitted to say so. The one glaring exception is my supposing that Republicans would never posit something like an individual mandate--indefensible, constitutionally-questionable, and liberty-trampling as it is. How can I explain such a ridiculous supposition? Nevermind a charitable explanation; let's chalk it up to ignorance and my momentary failure to remember how thoroughly corrupt, and corporatist, both parties mostly are. Leave aside past Republican constitutional perfidy on issues like the war on terror police state ("Terrorist Surveillance Program," et al). This line of reasoning was wrong even in the relevant area of health care reform. The individual mandate is, of course, a reactionary Republican invention. And to be sure, the mandate was the linchpin of MassCare--ObamaCare implemented on the state level in Massachusetts, for all intents and purposes--which was signed by a still adamant Mitt Romney. (Furthermore, the fact that Romney is still considered a '12 frontrunner reveals a breathtaking level of hypocrisy, excuse-making, and doomed cynical calculating on the part of many a Republican--not Tea Party--voter.)

But maybe that's not the only thing that didn't hold up. I think I may have been too hopeful about the intellectual awakening of "progressives" like Keith Olbermann (Dylan Ratigan, Rachel Maddow, and other people who voiced grave misgivings about the Obama-Baucus-Lieberman "reform"). In fact, these people are utterly hopeless. What they all said in December was swept aside in a matter of weeks, and reached a fever pitch as we inched closer to the bill's possible passage. By the end of the ordeal they were angrily remonstrating against people like gullible doofus Bart Stupak of Michigan for having the gumption to possibly derail the same measure they criticized (and threatened to protest, in the case of Olbermann) a short while before. Lame. Wankers. All of them.

A Very Imus Tradition

More weird stuff about me: My favorite radio program is the infamous Imus in the Morning. I've been intently watching Imus in some form or another for, like, six years now. I watched him on msnbc in the very recent bad old days and now I religiously listen to the show's daily podcast rewind and occasionally catch the show in the morning live on Fox Business. He's awesome. ("The Great One" Mark Levin checks in at a close #2.)

Anyway, for the past several months Imus has been doing this thing where he asks Lou (program engineer) to get each guest's five favorite songs, which is innocuous enough except Imus predictably seizes the opportunity to upbraid nearly everyone for either suspicious selections--"Did you have your staff put 'em on, damn it?!"--or dopey ones. 

So in that vein, I'd like to present my five favorite songs for the week; a list I'm sure Don Imus will never have the privilege of pwning:


1) "Call Me." Go West. 

2) "Dirty Diana." Michael Jackson.

3) "Go Your Own Way." Fleetwood Mac.

4) "Love's Holiday." Earth, Wind & Fire.

5) "Run tha Streetz." 2Pac.

Solid Blow

It's been an especially hectic set of days since Tax Day, this past Thursday; a circumstance that left me unable to promptly take up and muse about events surrounding the recent Tea Party rallies. 

I'd like to begin by explaining what allows me to call myself bohemian tea partier. (Besides one's inalienable right to call himself whatever he damn pleases, of course.) Logically, the term itself seems counterintuitive, if not outright contradictory. So let me spell it out: I'm a bohemian; specifically, in my case, an ethnic, contrarian weird, socially progressive, ganja-partaking liberal arts student of the (sometimes regrettably called) MTV Generation. But I'm also a self-declared proud member of the Tea Party movement teabagger. That is to say, I am resolutely against bailing out the financiers, and profligate government borrowing for stimulus packages (that aren't). In an era of immense ideological intolerance, my opposition to the prevailing liberal catechisms of a compulsory cartel health care system, the faith-based monstrosity of anthropogenic climate change, its resultant monster of cap-and-tax, and my general disdain for Barack Obama, have placed me at a point of common cause with conservatives and libertarians who comprise the preponderance of the Tea Party movement. 

I feel, as Sarah Palin does, that this movement is a "beautiful" development. On a basic level it represents genuine, popular, populist uprising in an era of politics as Madison Ave-orchestrated hype and stale conventional wisdom. As a liberal still, I disagree with the deeply libertarian philosophical underpinnings of the movement, but mostly disregard the difference because we've arrived at kindred conclusions on the compelling issues of the day.

Having moved beyond that important prefatory stuff, I'd like to call your attention to an op-ed in Friday's New York Times. Charles M. Blow--that cool-lookin' dude up there--writes about the Tea Party he infiltrated in Dallas:

I had specifically come to this rally because it was supposed to be especially diverse. And, on the stage at least, it was. The speakers included a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism, a Hispanic immigrant who said that she had never received a single government entitlement and a Vietnamese immigrant who said that the Tea Party leader was God. It felt like a bizarre spoof of a 1980s Benetton ad.

Blow does ultimately make a good point. This passage was cited to give you an example, however, of the sort of obnoxious elitist shit you have to wade through in order to get there. He continues:

 The juxtaposition was striking: an abundance of diversity on the stage and a dearth of it in the crowd, with the exception of a few minorities like the young black man who carried a sign that read “Quit calling me a racist.” 

The conclusive thought behind the piece is basically summed up like this:

 I found the imagery surreal and a bit sad: the minorities trying desperately to prove that they were “one of the good ones”; the organizers trying desperately to resolve any racial guilt among the crowd. The message was clear: How could we be intolerant if these multicolored faces feel the same way we do?  

To be sure, Blow is an average liberal elitist whose pen drips with an acute contempt for the subject of his little investigation. But as far as I'm concerned, he strikes an insightful chord when spotlighting Tea Party tokenism. It exists. Just as tokenism has always existed in the modern right-wing quarters; cognizant, for whatever reasons, of potently-levied charges of racial exclusion.  

My experience at the Savannah Riverfront Tea Party was akin: I believe I was one of only four or five black patriots present. And I noticed the two black speakers were particularly bombastic; hitting the theme of Proud Black Conservative as stridently as possible. 

Blow and I come together on the curious disproportion of black speakers and attendees but where he goes wrong is the automatically cynical verdict he thunders down because of it. He basically takes the presence of tokenism in the Tea Party movement as evidence of sinister manipulation on the part of the movement's (decidedly white, he dutifully reminds us) leaders. Not so. In my mind the frequent, and slightly condescending, attempts to promote the relatively few black faces in the movement is born of sympathetic defensive posturing. There's nothing inherently troubling about the paucity of black (or brown, yellow, or florescent beige) people in the Tea Party movement, and therefore, no need to overcompensate. 

If Blow's screed is indicative of establishment liberal thought, we must note a possible shift.  While they once remonstrated against the movement simply for its lack of black people, they now castigate the movement's leaders for deliberately--and boastfully even!--displaying its few eager black faces. Ironic how the new sin could well be a realistic description of affirmative action, tokenism's younger, 'roided-up brother. 

Condescending, well-intentioned symbolism for me, but certainly not for thee... you racist!

Agnostic sympathy for the Queen

I stated in the introduction that this little corner of mine was a political one. I'd like to qualify that a bit: bohemian tea partier is a primarily a political blog. But there's room for lots more; namely, the endlessly fascinating milieu of pop culture. 

The subject of this particular pop culture rap session is Queen Oprah of Harpo, Inc. My past attitude towards the woman can be summed up as a sort of pious agnosticism. I couldn't have possibly cared any less about her one way or the other. What Oprah represented--in addition to the incredible potential of individual blacks, which is undeniable progress--was the sublime therapeutic approach to, well, almost everything. Including politics. 

Pious agnosticism morphed into outright hostility around late-2007 when Oprah deigned to enter the acrid arena of electoral politics for the purpose of throwing her weight behind then-Sen. Barack Obama. An undecided Democratic primary voter at the time, I recall being fairly disenchanted with the three most popular choices presented to us: Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and sociopath John Edwards. 

The choice should have been clear, right? Here I am, politically engaged young black watching a charismatic--and black!--cosmopolite making a serious but uncertain run for the presidency. Furthermore, this elegant black insurgent would soon be joined by arguably the most famous and successful black woman ever to grace Creation. "What's not to like?" is a natural inquiry to be answered with another; as in, "Where to begin?" Succinctly put, Barack Obama stood as the most prominent encroachment of the Oprah phenomenon upon my unlikely little hobbyhorse of American politics. And I didn't like it. Ms. Winfrey had remained largely inoffensive training her media influence, as it were, into high-profile cross-examinations of Hollywood degenerates. But the eventual transfer of her obnoxious brand of sublime therapy to the serious business of Politics with a capital P was actually what precipitated my stedfast opposition to the Obama candidacy. It forever led me to conclude that the movement around this compelling personality amounted to nothing more than mass irrationalism. 

One assumes those who felt as I did are tempted with a giddy dose of schadenfreude upon the ridikulously delicious revelations put forth by Kitty Kelley. Kelley, commonly repudiated as a "poison-pen" sensationalist, has penned a new work: Oprah Winfrey: A Biography. 

As is normally the case in all things Oprah, I initially didn't give much thought to the ruckus left in the trail of Ms. Kelley's latest treatise. But leave it to the muckraking headline writers of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post to pull me in: 

Lesbian flings, prostitution & abuse lies: Oprah's 'hidden' life.

These people are so good, it's almost criminal. They even bulleted crucial little nuggets Ms. Kelley supposedly unearthed: 

 * Winfrey concocted stories about sexual abuse she suffered as a child -- and grossly exaggerated the poverty she was brought up in. 

* She went to great lengths to conceal her "lesbian affairs" -- including hefty payoffs -- and publicly attached herself to Graham to appear more normal to her audience of housewives.

* She lavished romantic gifts -- including a diamond toe ring -- on ABC talking head Diane Sawyer.

* Winfrey sold her body to earn extra money and has even described herself as a teen "prostitute."

* She doesn't know the true identity of her biological father.

* Her relationship with her own mother is so cold that Winfrey won't even let the older woman have her phone number.

If true, the hypocrisy is so staggeringly obvious that it needn't be fully delineated here. I certainly haven't talked to anyone about this but I think it's fair to assume many will look on this as Oprah's comeuppance. And while the backlash may not enough to entirely dethrone the billionaire heroine, it certainly should temper the tendency to handle Oprah with a hagiographic care, as has been the case. Since forever. 

As an irreverent sort of fellow, I tend to believe these sorts of things about public figures. When you're operating on the level of an Oprah Winfrey, it almost demands a kind of awful neurosis. And in terms of politics, it operates without regard to any discernible ideological boundaries. 

And still I want to sympathize with the lady. Apparently she was a crafty, ambitious, poor black girl who parlayed a gift for gab into incredible fortune and fame. While she may have perpetrated a complete and utter fraud, it is, in the main, a victimless one with one glaring exception. If these allegations are to be believed, then, for me, it magnifies the disgraceful display of her substance-free and faux-transcendent endorsement of Barack Obama back in 2007. I can countenance fraudulent personal narrative-weaving in the realm of entertainment, but once it intrudes the most important, all-encompassing element of society--politics--it becomes another thing altogether because of the dangerous potential. 

I am wont to leave entertainment figures to their devices, so as long as they remember their place. Shut up and sing, is a popular and apposite refrain these days. In the case of Oprah: Shut up and go back to exploring the neurotic depths of all those masochistic enough to avail themselves. 

Comin' From Where I'm From

The Internets,

Well, I suppose an introduction's in order, although I'm not precisely sure how to pull this off.

I guess I could start by sharing how I decided on what is certain to be an arduous endeavor. I mean, it certainly warrants justification, doesn't it? It takes a great deal of courage (or a rather revealing measure of grandiosity, but whatevs) for an initially young and obscure writer to put their work--and really, themselves--out there for public consumption. As if the quotidian pressures of self-critique aren't enough, there's the added requirement of shameless, constant self-promotion. (Not to mention the certain recriminations of your humble writer about all of this, in ten years or so.) But nevermind all of that; we've already started the blogger account. The die has been cast.

This is a political corner, first and foremost. I'm only 20, but I've been a political junkie really for many years now. In that vein, the start of a blog doesn't come as much of a surprise. I have experience writing letters to the editor to the local paper; proselytizing in essays while desperately trying to stay within the assigned topic; and sparsely posting on a few blogs throughout the years. As a tenth grader, I even held a sign near a polling station in support of John Kerry's marvelous and inspirational quest for the presidency.

The current political situation is, alas, so lamentable that's it gotten to be a little more involved than all the aforementioned stuff. This republic of ours is at a crossroads, and I can't help but to be on the scene, furiously scribbling down my every sardonic thought. This is History, baby, happening right outside my window, and I'll be damn if I let it pass me by for watching Zsa Zsa Gabor on Dancing with the Stars or whatever the hell passes for decent entertainment (with hideously high ratings) these days.

Before divulging a little more about myself, I should note that there is a level of manipulative, ass-covering calculation in how I plan to conduct this blog. First off, my name is "Jack Landsman," but not really. Also: I hail from a little historic town called Savannah on the old plantation of Georgia; and I attend "Gotham College" here in Savannah, and sit behind Commissioner Jim Gordon's eldest son in British Literature. (Tee hee.)

The most expedient and colorful way to describe my ideological persuasion--without getting too much into it; there's plenty of time for that--is to say I'm a populist, contrarian liberal.

Although I'm not entirely sure which career path I will eventually embark on, I think it's fair to predict it will heavily involve the discipline of writing. And this seems like a pretty solid start. Cheers.

Yr. Obt. Svt,

Jack