by Ishmael Reed
Boogie Man, The Lee Atwater Story is not only informative but entertaining. One wonders whether the tactics invented and developed by his dirty-tricks successors, including the sinister bunch packaging McCain, will succeed this time. (These guys make Atwater’s campaign seem benign. In one ad they presented Barack Obama as a sexual threat to white children.)
My only criticism of the film is the lack of discussion about Roger Ailes’s role in the nefarious Willie Horton ad and the relationship that Lee Atwater had with the late Ron Brown, Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce. Ailes appears in one of the movie’s stills in the company of Atwater. Ailes, president of Fox News, once told a Time reporter (August 22, 1988): “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”
The final scenes are ghastly as well as pitiful. Atwater is shown suffering from the final stages of brain cancer. He sits slumped in a wheelchair with a head the size of a prized pumpkin as his former allies ignore him. We’re informed that as death approached, Atwater was consulting religious leaders. These include Buddhists. Maybe Atwater was reincarnated as the Fox News Network.[8]
The Promised Land?
Morning in Obamerica9
(I wrote a light satire for CounterPunch of my vision of what a post-race America would look like.)
The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.
Isaiah, 65:25
T
he great American satirist George Schuyler’s prescient and comic work, Black No More, is about a scientist named Dr. Crookmore who comes up with a formula that turns blacks to whites (I wonder how Schuyler would treat the current profitable back-to-Africa DNA hokum). As a result of a country that is totally white, the civil rights organizations go out of business, and even the last hold out, the character, based upon the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, in the end, tries some of Dr. Crookmore’s solutions. Would something like this happen were Barack Obama to become president? A country where there exist no social divisions and the issue of race has become defused.
The leader of the NAACP says that the work of the organization will continue even with an Obama victory. Why? Wouldn’t it be better that the NAACP shut its doors, as cable’s leading conservative intellectual, Tucker Carlson, has suggested? Auction off its assets and join the post-race fever? In his The New Black Aesthetic (1989), author Trey Ellis announced the arrival of a generation of African Americans who would place the issue of race in the background unlike we “curmudgeons” and “cranks,” who came of age in the 1960s and who are still carrying on like those Japanese soldiers who weren’t aware that World War II was over. “The New Black Intellectuals” was even praised by Robert Boynton in an essay that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (March, 1995:53-69.)
To many, Martin Luther King’s dream has been realized. He said:
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
Obviously me and my over-sixty pals are still lingering in those crooked places and refusing to process the sunlight that is available to everybody else. People like us are going to have to adjust to this post-race America, which resembles a painting by Edward Hicks. A place where blacks have reached the Promised Land?
What does this Promised Land look like? This Obamerica? Shortly after Obama is sworn in, the police, instead of subjecting blacks and Hispanics to capricious traffic stops, will only stop them to offer free tickets to the Policemen’s Ball. Throughout the country, they will address blacks and Hispanics as sir and ma’m. The overcrowding prison problem will end because all of the blacks and Hispanics who’ve been sent there as a result of prosecutorial and police misconduct—probably half—will be set free. And all of those police who have murdered unarmed blacks only to be acquitted by all-white juries will be retried. Blacks will have the freedom to shop in department stores without being watched.
In the media, all of the black, Hispanic, and Native-American and Asian-American journalists, who, according to the Maynard Institute’s media watcher, Richard Prince, are being “shown the door,” will be rehired. The progressive media will spend as much time on the torture of black suspects in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles as they do torture at Gitmo. Blacks will be liberated from the crime, entertainment and sports pages exclusively and appear in other sections. They will appear in the more cerebral sections as scientists, engineers and astronomers. Jonathan Klein and other cable producers will stop managing black opinion so that it doesn’t alienate its white audience and voices other than those of black correspondents from Rev. Moon’s church will be awarded air time. Global-warming denier Michelle Bernard will be replaced by Jill Nelson.
Jesse Jackson will be appointed lead editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, and Al Sharpton will assume duties at The National Review. Rush Limbaugh will inaugurate a series called “Great African-American Inventors.” Spike Lee will be invited to run Columbia Pictures and Amy Goodman will take over at NBC. The Newspaper Society of America will apologize for the lynchings and civil disturbances caused by an inflammatory media over the last one hundred or so years. A choked-up Rupert Murdoch will read the statement on behalf of his colleagues.
In an emotional press conference, John McWhorter, Ward Connerly and Shelby Steele will admit that they have been tools of the Eugenics Movement and donate all of the millions they have received from far- right organizations to scholarships for black and Hispanic students. Blacks will have as much access to a good education as those members of Al Qaeda and Saddam’s government who studied in the United States. This will end the policy of you educate them, we fight them.
Gertrude Himmlefarb and Lynne Cheney will insist that the works by Hispanic, black and Native Americans be added to the cannon. Cornel West will co-host a show with Dr. Phil. The New York Review of Books will end its white-only policy and begin to resemble America. Philip Roth will admit that all of his novels are autobiographical. Several prominent Abstract Expressionists will confess that they can’t draw.
All of the blacks and Hispanics who have been driven out of New York, Oakland, and San Francisco, as a result of the policies of ethnic cleansing, advocated by Jerry Brown, Giuliani and San Francisco’s Newsom, will be invited to return. The banks that aimed toxic mortgage loans to blacks and Hispanics, who would have qualified for conventional loans had they been white, will halt the foreclosure process and renegotiate these loans. CEOs on Wall Street will forego bonuses and golden parachutes. Sales conferences will be held at Day’s Inn. For Rent signs will go up on K Street. The American Enterprise will close its doors.
The right will stop using worn out phrases like “political correctness,” and “victimization” and hire Sean “Puffy” Combs to provide them with some hip language.
An Obama administration will launch the Obama doctrine, which will advocate friendly aggression and soft diplomacy in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and other global spots where American forces are killing people. These trouble spots will be inundated with artists, writers, dancers and musicians, engineers, doctors and people who speak their languages.
American students will be required to learn an Asian and African language as well as a Western one. President Obama will call for an end to warfare by air so that these forces will at least look their victims in the eye before murdering them. No more drones. Missiles. Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will address him as Mr. President, both in private and in public. The White House, haunted by the ghosts of the Indian fighters and slave owners and KKK sympathizers like Woodrow Wilson, who once ruled from there, will be demolished and the first family will reside in a St. Louis condo as the country seeks a fresh start. Cindy McCain will sell her wardrobe and donate the proceeds to rebuilding New
Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Any one outfit that she wears on a given day would help to rebuild a block. John McCain will acknowledge the black members of his family whom he has snubbed up to now. Obama critic Governor Schwarzenegger will be among the new president’s well-wishers. He will offer to improve President Obama’s physique by sending him some steroids from his private stash. And, by the way, doesn’t an effort to put some meat on somebody’s bones begin at home?
A big step toward a green America would be to return the land that was stolen from Native Americans. (The Southwest will be returned to Mexico).
A Tale of Two Callahans The Irish Black Thing10
(Dr. Nancy Mercado complains about the media confusing Mexican Americans with Puerto Ricans. Pakistani-American characters in Wajahat Ali’s play, The Domestic Crusaders, complain about being confused with Afghani Americans. Many of us have a tendency to treat “whites” as one undifferentiated mass. I do it all the time. As a short cut it serves a purpose, though if one were to examine history, one would find that those whom we consider white are one or two generations away from being something else. When the Armenians entered California’s Central Valley, they were classified as Asians. Because of my education by Bob Callahan, and Danny Cassidy and others, I was able to notice that with the exception of Lawrence O’ Donnell, those Irish Americans who appear on shows like NBC’s Morning Joe, Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, represent the Irish right and that an Irish American of the left was as rare as a leftist African American or Hispanic American. I was one of those who spoke at Bob Callahan’s memorial.)
W
hen the media probe the homicides resulting from gang wars taking place in my Oakland neighborhood, they call upon the two or three African Americans listed on their Rolodexes to comment. Most of them live in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Similarly, those on cable, who are commenting about how the “white working class,” or “Reagan Democrats” are going to vote in Pennsylvania are as distant from “the white working class” as those Harvard experts are distant from the lives of those who live in neighborhoods like mine.
From the way they behave as experts on the “blue collar workers,” however, you’d think that they brown-bagged peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to work instead of dining in some of the most exclusive restaurants in New York and Washington, often with the people whom they cover. That they motor to work in used Chevys instead of being chauffeur-driven in network limousine services.
Columnist Maureen Dowd identified the ethnics who are referred to in euphemistic phrases. She said that they were members of her tribe, the Irish (The New York Times, March 19, 2008), who are opposing Barack Obama’s steady march toward the Democratic nomination, ignoring the fact that hundreds of thousands of Irish Americans have probably already voted for the senator. As the late Dan Cassidy, author of CounterPunch Books’ How The Irish Invented Slang emailed me:
The [Rev]. Wright pseudo-flap sure isn’t keeping mainstream Dem. Micks from endorsing Obama in slews, i.e. Bob Casey other day, Pat Leahy, Teddy Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, Patrick K., etc. I was with a slew of writers from Bill Kennedy to Dan Barry at NYT, TJ English, Peter Quinn, Terry Golway, etc., & all are for Obama.
Although there are many progressive Irish Americans like Cassidy, the media profile of Irish America lies somewhere between shrill talk-show hosts, who yell and interrupt their guests, or snarling resentful Archie Bunker types, or Bernard McGuirk, whose comment about the Rutgers basketball team led to Don Imus’s firing, or a pugnacious Pat Buchanan, who believes that it was Grant who surrendered at Appomattox.
In the movies it’s “Dirty Harry Callahan” who violates the constitutional rights of suspects. There seems to be no place for a Pat Goggins of the San Francisco United Irish Cultural Center, or authors Bob Callahan and Dan Cassidy, who have worked for decades to heal whatever divisions exist between African Americans and Irish Americans.
When a memorial was held for Bob Callahan in Berkeley, a few weeks ago, there were African Americans in attendance including Al Young, the poet laureate of California, and Joyce Carol Thomas, winner of a National Book Award. Callahan not only counted friends in the African-American community but Native-American and Hispanic communities as well. He’s the one who put me in touch with the late Andy Hope, poet of the Tlingit tribe, a relationship that led to my partner, Carla Blank, and I being made honorary Klan members on September 26, 1998, during an all day potlatch held in Sitka, Alaska.
When I told a professor at an eastern college that my mother and grandmother claimed Irish ancestry, he laughed. Since the Irish were indentured servants working on the same plantations as African Americans, why should it be a surprise that hundreds of thousands of African Americans are members of the Celtic Diaspora as well as the African Diaspora? Gerry Adams, of Sinn Fein, cited this plantation experience when lecturing to students at the University of California at Berkeley.
He said that it was the plantation owners who created whiteness as a standard. They wanted to separate the two groups. Some of those Irish men who left Ireland during the potato famine married African-American women, and as Noel Ignatiev points out in his book, How The Irish Became White, Irish-American women married African-American men. He writes:
In New York, the majority of cases of “mixed” matings involved Irish women. The same was true in Boston. A list of employees of the Narragansett and National Brick Company in 1850 includes a number described as of Irish nationality who are also listed as “mulattoes.”
In the 1860s, Muhammad Ali’s great great grandfather, Abe Grady, came from Ireland. If Alex Haley had done a Roots about tracing his father’s ancestry it would have taken him twelve generations into Ireland. Isn’t it odd that so-called Reagan Democrats—Maureen Dowd’s Irish—would be opposed to Obama. His mother was Irish, a descendant of Falmouth Kearney, who arrived in New York in 1850, a fact never mentioned when the cable guys are exhibiting their expertise about bowling and beer guzzling.
As the late John Mahar of the Delancey Street Foundation said when introducing me at a dinner held by the Celtic Foundation, if one drop of black blood makes you black—a commercial definition created by those for whom human beings were assets like cattle—why doesn’t one drop of Irish blood make you Irish?
The cotton planter’s one-drop rule shows little change in racial definitions since the medieval notion that the child of a black and white relationship would be polka dot.
American scientists may be able to analyze the chemical composition of one of Saturn’s moons, but when it comes to race, the national discussion is back in the Stone Age. Some of our leading public intellectuals sound like Fred Flintstones when discussing the issue. Callahan knew his way around this and other topics, because he did his homework. In the material distributed during his memorial service held at Anna’s Jazz Island in Berkeley, Robert Owen Callahan was described as “Gifted with a silver tongue, rapid-fire synaptic flashes and a huge store of talk, he was unabashed in his enthusiasms, embracing the best of both the schlock and the sublime of American culture and with a characteristic Callahan zeal.”
He had a gargantuan intellectual appetite. (He could eat, too!) He was a genius. He had a mind that roamed over a number of fields of interests, from ecology, archeology, anthropology, botany, the Native-American oral tradition to comics.
He edited The New Smithsonian Book Of Comic Book Stories. He wrote the narrative for the famous graphic novel, The Dark Hotel, illustrated by the great cartoonist, Spain Rodriguez. It was a cult classic. He was also a publisher.
I introduced Callahan to Zora Neale Hurston. He was responsible for republishing some of her books, including her masterpiece, Tell My Horse. At the time of his death, he was working with Joyce Carol Thomas on a graphic novel based upon Zora Neale Hurston’s work. We both took tenuous steps into each other’s world. When Callahan invited me to a dinner held by the Irish Cultural Center, I called him several times during the day to seek his assurance that I wouldn’t be h
armed. I was treated very well, and my presence was even announced from the stage. On the night of the Holmes-Cooney fight, Callahan, his son David and I went to the Oakland auditorium to watch it on the big screen. While David, who was a youngster at the time, mingled with the crowd, Callahan, seeing that he and David were the only whites in attendance, looked around and said, “I hope that Cooney loses.”
While the Irish and blacks have clashed in street riots, there have also been instances where the blacks and Irish joined in rebellion. On the evening of March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks, an African American was in the front lines of a group of thirty to sixty Americans who clashed with the British, resulting in the Boston Massacre. Behind Attucks were those described by John Adams, who represented the British soldiers in court, as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.”
The result of this confrontation was the Boston Massacre. In 1741 a group consisting of Irish and blacks engaged in a “plot to burn New York and murder its inhabitants.” The leader, a slave named Caesar, Peggy Kerry and a Catholic priest named John Ury were executed.
John F. Kennedy, in the minds of some, did more to advance the Civil Rights movement than any president in history, publicly as well as privately. When I visited the black employees at Lockheed Martin in February, I was informed that Kennedy threatened to withhold federal funds unless Lockheed integrated its lunchrooms. Maybe that’s why, according to Abraham Bolden, author of The Echo from Dealey Plaza, some white Secret Service men called Kennedy “a nigger lover,” and vowed never to take a bullet for the president. Both Callahan and I were Kennedy admirers; Callahan was co-author of Who Shot JFK?