Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (21 page)

Mamet also wrote “Most contemporary debate on race is nothing but sanctimony—efforts at exploitation and efforts at restitution seeking, equally, to enlarge and prolong dissent and rancor.”

Mamet doesn't know anything about most contemporary debates on race, because the hundreds of black intellectuals, scholars, writers, poets, etc. who know something about the topic are kept off stage by a media that has a thing about cerebral blacks and offers only those who serve the interests of the media owners like Ms. Bernard, Larry Elder, Joe Watkins, Amy Holmes, Bob Christie and John McWhorter, a puppet for The Manhattan Institute, which supports eugenics “research.” Such is the power of the Institute, which gets money from places like Chase Manhattan Bank, that on Sunday, September 20, the Associated Press gave McWhorter the lead in an article about President Carter's accusation that some of the vitriol aimed at President Obama is based upon race, another way that the far right manipulates public discussions affecting blacks through puppets like McWhorter and Bernard.

Does Mamet read
Panopticon Review
, or
Black Renaissance Noire
, or
The Black Agenda
or
The Final Call
or even
Ebony
and
Essence
,
TheRoot
,
Black Scholar
or
The Amsterdam News
? Has he ever heard of bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Adolph Reed, Jr., Gerald Early, Darryl Pinckney, Cecil Brown, Sonia Sanchez, J.J. Phillips, Bob Steptoe, Katherine Takara, Jill Nelson, Elizabeth Nunez, Thulani Davis, Quincy Troupe, Eugene Redmond, Adrienne Kennedy, Herb Boyd, Ed Bullins, Jerry Ward, Houston Baker, Jr., Ethelbert Miller, Askia Toure, Askia Muhammad, Keith Gilyard, Bernard Bell, Greg Tate, Justin Desmangles, Tricia Rose, Clyde Taylor, Kalamu ya Salaam, Joyce Joyce, Eugene Redmond, Reginald Martin, Al Young, etc.?

And as an example of how ignorance reaches the highest segments of American intellectual life in a racist society, Mamet has fallen for the media hoax that affirmative action is a black program, when, for Rabbi Michael Lerner, quoted in
Time
and the late Seymour Lipset, quoted in a book called,
The Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America
by Jonathan Kaufman, it benefits Jewish women the most. Kaufman writes: “…he predicted that the great beneficiaries of affirmative action would be Jewish women. In fact, Lipset turned out to be right.” (Pg.224) My view is that the purpose of Mamet's Op-Ed was an attempt to do a pre-emptive strike on black critics who will probably find his play
Race
as racist as the piece of dreck to which he lent his name,
Edmund
, which, as it turned out, closed soon after it opened.

Langston Hughes complained that most of the plays written about black life during the 1930s were written by whites.

Nothing has changed. Richard Price has made so much money creating blackface dialogue that he is moving to Harlem. Jimmy Carter doesn't have to undergo an identity makeover like Price in order to know about blacks, nor does he have to make “brief forays into the ghetto,” which is how Price says that he gathered his material, like someone on a safari. Carter is a Southerner.

After Jimmy Carter made an accurate assessment of the racist response to the election of a black president, all-day cable shows featuring mostly all-white panels weighed in on the former president's remarks. Predictably, many dismissed him as a doddering fool. Except for Roland Martin, most of the black faces had to tone down their comments. Only Larry Elder, of the black right was allowed to get livid over Carter's remarks. Later, they jumped on Nancy Pelosi for telling it like it is. She said that the current atmosphere of political pornography drummed up by people like Glenn Beck's boss Rupert Murdoch and his Beelzebub, Willie Horton mastermind Roger Ailes, reminded her of the hateful atmosphere that led to the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, a liberal who was on his way to becoming governor of California. The others were too timid to call a viral white supremacy that has infected thousands of birthers, deathers, tea baggers and armed miscellaneous crazies, as a result of Barack Obama's election, for what it is. A public mental health crisis. The fact that many educated whites in the media deny Carter's claim might be seen as part of the crisis. Talking about inmates running the asylum. George Wills, appearing on
This Week
, said that those who saw racism in the nutty 9/12 demonstrations were guilty of “liberal McCarthyism.” Will once said, following the line promoted by McWhorter's Manhattan Institute, that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. (As usual, Irish Americans were represented on this panel by a right-winger. This time, Peggy Noonan, a woman with, as a bluesman might say, ice water for blood. She doesn't seem to mind that forty-five thousand people will die each year from lack of health care, according to a Harvard study. She's against big government. Without big government, millions of Irish Americans would never have entered the middle class.)

Despite the ugly racist mood of the crowd that came to Washington on September 12, 2009, some of them displaying signs that depicted Obama as a communist, a witch doctor with a bone in his nose, designed by Fox news expert Dr. David McKalip, or as someone who belongs in a zoo, as a monkey or as someone who should be killed, David Brooks said that the demonstration had nothing to do with race, yet they're always criticizing Iranians for ignoring facts. Here's a man who gets quoted as though he is Solomon. He wasn't the only one. A steady stream of white politicians, pundits and their African-American tokens like Zambia-born Amy Holmes denied that race had anything to do with the ugly display against President Obama during the Fox and insurance industry sponsored 9/12 march on Washington. Neo-con David Brooks doesn't understand why many blacks won't assimilate, a process that has worked for him. His mentor is the late Irving Kristol who rose to power by scapegoating blacks for all of the country's social ills and associating them with welfare, the Great Society programs, and affirmative action when the largest group to receive the advantages of these programs have been whites.

Kristol became a consultant for the Bradley Foundation, one of those think tanks that finances quack studies about black inferiority. He even got all cozy with backwoods Christian fundamentalists, even though they believe that the Jews must convert before Jesus comes down from out of the sky. His friend Norman Podhoretz also used this formula to make it. Criticizing black family values. A hypocrite. According to Theodore Solotaroff, Podhoretz's colleague at
Commentary
, Podhoretz was a real party animal: “He was no longer the spokesman of our sober, mature look, whose wistful suggestion for acting up was a midnight plunge in the Plaza Hotel fountain. No, that Norman was history. In the past year or two he had teamed up with Norman Mailer, the lead rebel, iconoclast and sensualist of the New York scene. The result was a hard-drinking, sexually liberated Norman who didn't seem to spend many evenings at home.” Solotaroff says that Podhoretz's wife Midge Decter, a woman who has spent years making a career of criticizing unmarried black mothers, made a pass at him. Like Michelle Bernard chastising black males instead of some of the corporate malefactors who sponsor her shows, the neo-con operation founded by Podhoretz and others served the purpose of redirecting attention from the criminal behavior of corporations, the money behind the neo-cons, to the bad habits of the so-called black underclass. The corporate-owned media use the same strategy.

The news media spent a week running footage showing a black student beating up a white student on a school bus, but three recent cases where white thugs murdered Hispanics and got off were virtually ignored. During the same period the police, and the media, which always take their side, accused some black and Hispanic youth of a gang rape. Later it was discovered that the rape victim had lied and that the police had jumped the gun, which is typical of how the police treat black and brown suspects. In the same week a white man suspected of killing an Asian- American woman at Yale was permitted to go home and after he was arrested the media showed pictures of him behaving like an altar boy and brought on friends of his who vouched for his character.

Howard Kurtz, a so called media critic, and an Imus Alumni, who has had it in for Obama ever since he announced his candidacy, spent Sunday, September 20 on Serena and Kanye for laughs, but hasn't commented about the media silence regarding the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer “which agreed to pay 2.3 billion dollars to settle civil and criminal allegations that it had illegally marketed its painkiller Bextra, which has been withdrawn.” It was the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind ever. So restrictive is the latitude accorded David Gregory by his corporate bosses that when Senator Joseph Lieberman appeared on
Meet The Press
, November 22, he failed to point out that Lieberman, who was on the show to oppose the health bill, receives millions from the insurance industry.

Nor did he utter a word about Bank of America, another criminal operation and sponsor of Bill Cosby and Michelle Bernard's entertainment, “that covered up 3.6 billion dollars paid out in bonuses when it purchased Merrill Lynch.” Unbridled capitalism and their media hirelings make chumps of millions of whites by entertaining them with the antics of O.J., Serena, Kanye West and Chris Brown, (the sole U.S. domestic abuser), and Michael Vick so as to divert attention from their crimes. Big business ought to put O.J. and them on salary. MSNBC's criticism of Obama's mild health reforms makes sense when you realize that General Electric, which owns NBC, sells health insurance and Joe Scarborough, one of Obama's harshest critics, is just another salesman to them. During the same period that corporate criminality was unveiled, the media jumped on ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations of Reform Now, an organization that serves the poor and registers black and Hispanic voters to the consternation of the Republican Party and its media allies. ACORN warned of the foreclosure crisis.

I listened to some ignorant poor and middle class whites call
The Washington Journal
to complain about ACORN, a few of whose workers were entrapped by a conservative sting operation. The employees who fell for this sting should have been fired for falling for the idea that a conservative nerd was a pimp. In the case of the woman, I would also have been duped. She carried on like someone who had been turning tricks for years, bringing to her role the kind of zeal we've come to expect from wingnuts. (I guess that Ann Coulter wasn't available). The fact that ACORN lost over fifty million dollars as result of her performance makes her the most expensive play-acting whore in history.

These whites complain about big government but toady for big business that treats them like dirt. Poisons their food, overmedicates their children, hypnotizes them with the Bernay's principle so that they buy things that they don't need, and sends their jobs abroad. Instead of fighting those who view them as serfs, they travel all the way to Washington from places like South Carolina to call Barack Obama a monkey. (If South Carolina secedes again, which it's always threatening to do, would the country fight another war to persuade a state that still thinks of itself as Scotland to return to the fold? I don't think so.) The
Times
' ombudsman wrote a piece about how the liberal news media and his own newspaper were tardy in picking up on the ACORN scandal, which was uncovered by the vast right-wing media conspiracy, which was on ACORN like a bloodhound.
[14]

I'd like to see the ombudsman report on why the media both liberal and conservative almost hid another of Bank of America's scandals. In December 2008, a federal jury in Manhattan found Bank of America liable in a securities fraud trial that centered on the sales of asset-backed securities and involved some of the biggest names on Wall Street.

In a verdict delivered late Thursday after nearly six weeks of trial, the jury ordered Bank of America to pay more than 141 million dollars to a dozen institutional plaintiffs, including the American International Group, Allstate, Société Générale, Travelers, Bank Leumi, Bayerische Landesbank and the International Finance Corporation. The money includes interest that Bank of America, the nation's largest bank, is obligated by law to pay on the 101 million dollar award, which did not include punitive damages.

On September 29, 2009, the
San Francisco Chronicle
reported that Bank of America suspended its work with the ACORN group. Bank of America and ACORN had been working together on mortgage foreclosure issues. Bank of America severed ties with the group after GOP Reps. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, Darrell Issa of California and Lamar Smith of Texas sent a letter to fourteen banks requesting disclosure to the House Financial Services Committee of all financial arrangements with ACORN and its subsidiaries or affiliates.

“The Republicans are trying to intimidate banks that have stepped up to help stop the foreclosure crisis,” said ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis. “These same Republicans ignored ACORN's warnings about predatory lending and the foreclosure crisis, then gave Wall Street free rein and are now obstructing efforts to help families.” You can't make this stuff up, the stuff that Republicans make up. In this land of white supremacists make believe, where Ayn Rand, the crank addict, is a goddess and Sarah Palin is the Moose Queen, fifty percent of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the election for Obama!

Yet, while I was sitting in the airport watching a newswoman dressed like a hooker by the sinister men who pay her bills, I wasn't feeling as cranky as sometimes. As a matter of fact, I was optimistic for once. During the previous two weeks, I had just witnessed two young people, one of whom is my daughter, demonstrate that books and theater—the arts—are still effective means by which those who are excluded from the airwaves can respond to those who monopolize the airwaves and who wish to distract from the excesses and greed of their class by pitting group against group and race against race and parading people like Michael Vick, Chris Brown, Whitney Houston and O.J. before the cameras, your old Puritan ducking stools with lenses.