Posts will be spotty over the next couple days, as I'm leaving for a very quick trip to see a longtime friend embark upon a lifelong dream. If I reveal anymore, I literally might have to kill you.
Or he might kill me. I don't really know.
Anyway, I missed my flight this morning so I've had a chance to catch up on all my magazine reading and I pretty much thumbed through all the major daily newspapers. Have I ever told you all how much I love the airport?
That said, I see it's time to board my flight. There will be more later. Much more.
As a native son of the South, a heretic who has argued endlessly against the lie of Confederate nobility and someone who lives only minutes from one of the largest Confederate flags in the world, budding Civil War historian Ta-Nehisi Coates did my heart some good this morning:
I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause.
The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color. But I suspect that some manner of change is coming, that we are reaching point when witlessly honoring the founder of the greatest perpetrator of domestic terrorism in American history, when flying that sorry order's battle flag, becomes embarrassing. Sooner or later, I think the South will understand that the ideology of "noble victimhood" is a luxury it too can ill-afford. Some will hold out, I am sure. But sooner or later, I think most of the South will be black like me.
As someone who also worries endlessly about the future of the country, particularly in our poor and perenially underperforming Southern states, I believe this sort of crushing honesty needs to acknowledged.
Denial has been too detrimental.
I really have more to say about this but I need to think it over some more this afternoon. My thoughts about this are all over the place. I'll be revisiting this post.
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Kick your, dopest rhyme, I'll break it up like 3rd Bass/I'm from the crew that sets it off by sprayin beer in your face:
Believe it or not, this was actually a legit Memory Lane moment. "Daaam" was the first song I ever listened to in my first car, a fire-engine red 1987 Honda Civic CRX.
Good times, people. Good times.
And for what it's worth, Tash was a criminally underrated MC.
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Everyday, we - as Americans - should give endless thanks and praise that John McCain was sent back to the Senate and denied a chance to continue an eight-year U.S. commitment to cowboy foreign diplomacy.
For two years now, John McCain has been entirely consistent on Iran: every last statement he’s made—at least, those that I’ve seen—has been (a) fabulously uninformed and (b) dangerously bellicose. He’s still at it, apparently. There is no question that President Obama’s more prudent path is the correct one right now. There is also no question that the neoconservatives are trying to gin up this situation into an excuse for not engaging with the Iranian government in the near future—and also as a rationale for their dearest, looniest dream, war with Iran. ...
... The point is, neoconservatives like McCain and Wehner just can’t seem to quit their dangerous habit of making broad, extreme statements based on ideology rather than detailed knowledge of the situation in Iran and elsewhere. This was always the main problem with McCain’s candidacy—he would have been a trigger-happy President, just as Wehner’s old boss, George W. Bush, was. We are well out of that.
Speaking of dangerous and extreme ...
I shudder at the thought.
Again, I'm no foreign policy expert and I have only a functional understanding of what's unfolding over in Iran at the moment. But given what I know about our choices on Nov. 4, I much prefer having a steady, thoughtful, nuanced leader in the White House than McManiac.
Even better, we were spared the prospect of Vice President Sarah Palin.
Dinosaurs on Noah’sArk ? The peculiar spectacle of Terry Schiavo? Book bans targeted at gay authors?
Charles Pierce grew weary of this nonsense long ago, well before Sarah Palin was claiming foreign policy experience from Juneau and Glenn Beck descended into full-blown delirium. In his irreverent and smart essay for Esquire in October 2005, Pierce offered that“the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good.”
Obviously, not much has changed. If anything, the problem was exacerbated by the revival of the Democratic Party in 2006 and the subsequent decline of the Republicans. I'll let you be the judge of who's most responsible.
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