We Are NOT One

You know, I’m not usually one for pissing on other people’s parades, but when they seem hellbent on pissing on mine, all bets are off.  The arrogance of the assumption that every single “true blue,” and especially, “real” black, American is, or should be, quivering in anticipation of the formal installation of Barack Obama as Spokesmodel-In-Chief, just because he’s black, and it’s “time” for America to live up to it’s “promise,” so let’s dance and sing and call each other “brother,” is gallingly offensive.

So many people eagerly admit that the appeal of Obama is simply that he’s black and he’s not George Bush.  That’s the “hope” and “change” thing in a nutshell.   The obvious fact that millions of black men are not George Bush, and most of them shouldn’t be president either, is lost.  “America elects a black man” validates the “wishes do come true” hopey part of the equation, and the fact that you can’t get much further away from the image of a reckless cowboy than a bright, clean, articulate “brotha” represents the “change.”  Some even suggest that to challenge that logic is not only racist, but a just total un-American bummer.  The hopium-laced KoolAid snorters, whose frame of reference is shaped by Play Station, American Idol and Lil Wayne, seem not to understand that there is an underlying agenda shaping their perceptions.

Frankly, I have nothing against the embrace of pop culture, growing up as I did in the Beatles/Motown era of James Bond and Matt Helm, Laugh-In, Shindig and Hulabaloo, not to mention American Bandstand, Lucy, Twister and Playboy After Dark.  But I have always known that that popular culture played against the backdrop of the Cold War, Viet Nam, black power, Civil Rights and ERA.  Though my memories of my youth are seamless, I’m very well aware that the reality was not.

“Checks and balances,” “separation of church and state,” “diversity,” and “freedom of the press” are fundamental principles of a country whose states are united, but whose people, their philosophies and experiences, are not.  Nor, were they ever really expected to be.  Equality is not a synonym for unity.  Nor is “separate but equal” a practical possibility.  Freedom ensures that disparate entities have equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness, it does not guarantee equal experiences for all.  In fact, the notion of a nation of automatons marching in lockstep to their arbitrarily designated common fate is the stuff of nightmares.  There is nothing patriotic about pledging allegiance to a mass marketed, faith-based, UniParty in control of the government and the media, in fact, shouldn’t that be the very definition of “anti-American?”

At today’s “We Are One” concert kicking off the already kicked off obscenely expensive inaugural “season,” a crowd of indeterminate size listened to celebrities praise the holy name of the “messianic” pitchman whose applied adjectives, other than “black,” are most often merely part of the pitch, not accurately descriptive.  The size of the crowd was reported to be “vast” and of anticipated “estimates of 500,00” by the Obamedia, reluctant to diminish the “momentousness” of the moment by actually reporting more precise numbers. After initially reporting “tens of thousands” of attendees on page 1,  The Washington Post, near the bottom of  page 3 of their 4 page story gets a bit more specific:

With predictions that as many as 500,000 people could come to see the concert, dozens of buses had been dispatched to the vast parking lots around RFK Stadium east of the Capitol, ready to ferry people who drove to the stadium the rest of the way to the concert zone. But as of 11:20, the buses were idling and empty. They far outnumbered the parked cars in the lots.

Each “news” story also took pains to remind it’s readers that even “larger” crowds of “millions” were anticipated for the big event.  But while “reporting” on all the hoopla attendant to the shameless promotion of illusion as misdirection, the Obamedia pays no mind to the truth that though “scores of thousands,” or even “millions” of Americans may be eager to stand in the cold holding hands and singing the Obama-approved version of “One Nation Under A Groove,” or watch on TV, millions more couldn’t be so bothered, millions of whom don’t even like their interpretation of the song, no matter how many big-name celebrities they could see for free.  Nor is the fact that a significant number of the crowd in attendance was made up of people trying to provide goods and services to the other half portion for profit seen to be particularly newsworthy.

No matter how many millions of Americans “approve” of the job they think he’s going to do, or how many times memories of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King are deceptively evoked, the truth is, hype about “hope” and “history” is just another Astroturfing tool of  promotion of the rather frightening agenda the UniParty Spokesmodel-In-Chief is paid to pitch.