The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Really?

I was going through the various websites from which I get my news this morning and saw an interesting footnote, apparently Neil Diamond and Alice Cooper will be inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame. Whist I mentally envisioned some ultra mellow uptempo performances of "Feed My Frankenstein" and "Hey Stupid" and metal versions of "Sweet Caroline" and "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" I asked myself the big question. Do I care? Sadly the answer was a resounding "meh."
I grew up in the period BEFORE completely formatted radio. It was not uncommon to hear several different types of music on one station. You could literally go from Issac Hayes "Shaft" to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." Suffice it to say "I Love Rock and Roll" is more than just the title of a Joan Jett and the Blackhearts song, it's a way of life. If you look at the history of Rock and Roll in the early 50s, it was hated for it's primal almost sexual beats and lyrics which if not blatantly sexual were ripe with double entendre. In it's infancy it's audience was young and black and gradually became white teens and at that point it's harshest critics labeled it "devil music", "Jungle music" and just plain "nigger music" which had to be kept away from white teens at all costs.
In some parts of the south there were protests and in and in some cases riots against rock and roll as some communist plot whose ultimate goal was the corruption of American culture by getting white youth to mix with Negroes. Simply listening to rock and roll was a form of rebellion the likes of which upset a middle America who wanted all kids to grow up to be like Perry Como, Dorris Day and Pat Boone.
Big Joe Turner, Little Richard and Chuck Berry were the last people middle class white America wished for their children to emulate. With each successive generation the voices of dissent against Rock and Roll seemed to change but they always seemed to say the same things. Those who hated Elvis Presley's gyrating hips in 1954 sounded eerily similar to those who loathed Jimmi Hendrix's Afro in the 60's and Robert Plant's flowing locks in the 70s.

Rock and Roll has long been the music of non conformity and rebellion, what sense then does it make for the anthems of non conformity and rebellion (and their authors) to be enshrined in a "hall of fame"? On the contrary, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems to be the ANTITHESIS of EVERYTHING Rock and Roll has ever represented.
When Jerry Lee Lewis was learning to play piano and eventually setting them on fire I'm relatively sure the thought of someday being a bronze bust sitting next to a similar statuette of J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson. When Bo Diddly learned his first chord he was not thinking of being accepted as "popular" music and when James Marshall Hendrix first took the stage fusing blues guitar back into rock and roll his thought was NOT to transform the way a generation would listen to music.

Neil Diamond and Alice Cooper said neither of them were sitting back awaiting the call from Cleveland to inform them of their induction into something they've achieved long ago. Both men earned the respect and accolades that made them both legends and to that end being given a bust in some hall somewhere next to a television playing a loop of their music seems a pointless honor. The REAL Rock and Roll Hall of fame exist where ever lovers of music congregate. It exist in music stores all over the planet where people buy the music that great artist produced as recently as last week and as long ago as several decades. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exists online whenever someone downloads a song or a video of an artist whom they've never heard of and is mesmerized by it.
But most of all the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exist where ever someone is holding a pair of drumsticks, a horn, bass or guitar and is desperately attempting to learn the chords of a song they simply can't get out of their heads. Rock and Roll like ALL great music can not be confined. Just as Beethoven and Mozart didn't need a "Hall of Fame" neither do Hendrix and Slash.

Have you ever smoked crack?

I haven't, but I've seen it done more than once. The first time was in 1992. I was in a strange transitional place in my life and for some reason hanging out with a big hooker named Rita. Believe it or not, our relationship wasn't a sexual one. Each of us found the other attractive, but we never acted on it. For my part I wouldn't risk becoming emotionally attached to someone who I knew would be sleeping with other people for money moments after saying how much she cared about me. In so far as she was concerned, she had a preference for short Latinos with thick moustaches.

We were drinking buddies. I met her in a sleazy bar on Main Street back when the now bustling part of downtown Houston was still pretty skanky. We had a few drinks and seemed to enjoy one an other's company. She was a big, six foot, brunette from Arkansas, with big blue eyes, heavy over sized breasts, and a trailer park twang that was as comical as it was rustic and charming in a backwoods kind of way. After we talked for an hour we discovered that our birthdays were exactly eight days and one year apart and we both drank vodka. At the time we hung out I was working a dead end job, which involved lifting heavy objects and she was hustling the streets. By hustling I meant she was begging, picking pockets, breaking into cars and turning the occasional trick. She would do virtually anything to keep a roof over her head. She'd left Arkansas when she was 17 and had spent the previous five years drinking hard, snorting coke and doing smack and her face showed it. At 23 she looked 35. When I met her she drank mostly. She only did drugs when either she had the money or when someone else provided them. She lived in a miserable downtown hotel that seemed to be a haven for prostitutes.

The owners were reprehensible recent immigrants with thick accents of unknown Eastern European origin. They knew most of their mostly female residents were working girls and turned tricks in their rooms so as not to be left out they charged the girls a $10.00 visitors fee for each "visitor" who came in so as to get their "cut" of the action. One day Rita and I had a cheap bottle of vodka and went up to her room to get drunk beyond belief. She drank to escape the problems she'd created for herself, and I drank to escape the minuscule demons of my own making which paled in comparison to what she saw each day on the cruel streets. As we sat drinking warm vodka from cheap thin plastic glasses there was a frantic knock on her door. When she got up to answer it a skinny redhead with a black eye entered.

"Girl. You aint gonna believe this shit." She said as she entered without fanfare.

"What's wrong?" Rita asked

"That bitch Chloe." The redhead said "That skank is saying I'm going on $10.00 dates."

"You're shittin' me?" Rita said in disbelief. The nameless redhead was a sight. She was wiry to the point of being what many would consider anorexic. Her skin was pale and blotchy and she wore too much foundation. Her hair was a peculiar shade of brownish red and her eyes were a placid blue. The problem however was the fact that when she entered while she looked in the general direction of Rita and me she seemed to be looking straight through us. She had what soldiers and Marines call a thousand yard stare. Her eyes were filled with fear. It looked almost as if she were staring down the barrel of a gun. "I ran into her outside" she continued "and kicked her fuckin' ass."

Funny thing about those who sell sex for a living. We call what they do 'picking up Johns' or 'turning tricks.' The simply call it going on dates. I guess in their mind it sanitizes that which they do and makes it a bit more mentally palatable to them. What could be more harmless or NORMAL than going on a date? While being a whore amongst whores isn't a bad thing, being a CHEAP whore was considered to be unacceptable. One girl claiming another was doing 'dates' for anything but the going rate was an affront worthy of getting cut.

"She do that to your eye?" Rita asked

"Fuck yeah." The redhead countered. "But don't worry, I got her." She said. "I got that bitch good." She sat down on a beaten wooden chair as Rita returned to the couch where I sat with a generic bottle of god awful vodka. The redhead poked around in her purse. "I mean seriously." She continued "Who the fuck does that bitch think I am?" From the worn black handbag that looked as if it had been fished from a dumpster she fished out an odd looking bent piece of glass tubing.

"I don't blame you." Rita said as she obliviously snatched the bottle from me and filled the scratchy, thin, plastic cup to it's rim. "She needs ta mind her own fuckin' business." The redhead reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of tissue and carefully unfolded it. In it was a tiny clump of something that looked like baking soda. She gently placed it into the piece of glass tubing then began to fish around in the dirty, faded jeans that hung from her boney frame and pulled out a beaten, purple, plastic lighter.

"What's fucked up" The redhead continued as she desperately flicked the old lighter until it finally produced a flame. "Is that I fuckin' trusted her! I mean she even crashed with my ass a couple of days when she couldn't make her rent. Fuckin' bitch!" Once she had a flame she greedily placed the other end of the tube into her mouth and puffed it as tiny billows of white smoke came from her face.

I tried not to stare, but don't think it really mattered. She was in another world. She closed her eyes and the fear that had been on her face seconds earlier seemed to become a distant memory. She was in an odd state of euphoria. The fight she'd been in minutes earlier had become irrelevant, for the moment her problems had all disappeared. The rock she was smoking had been a small one or else she might have shared it with Rita.

Rita and I let the conversation end as the redhead seemed content to silence herself. Rita and I resumed drinking amid the chemical smell produced by her friend's quickly inhaled crack rock. Neither Rita nor I could sit in judgement. Rita over the time that I knew her slowly ruined her life with the same drug. She wound up doing a lengthy prison term for possession of it and some of the crimes she committed in order to get it. I was drinking at the time and couldn't pretend that my own vice was a harmless one.

It was the first time I'd ever seen anyone freebase cocaine, and I wish I could say it was the last. Unfortunately for me over the years that followed I witnessed entirely too many members of my generation destroying their brains and lives with that poison. Some would ultimately wind up dying as a result of it. Mine was not the first generation to lose a good portion of it's better minds to drugs. I guess it's part of an odd cycle of stupidity. With age comes a certain degree of wisdom, but in retrospect I can't help but wonder where Rita, her red headed friend and various other members of my generation are now and where they would be had they better used their common sense.

Oh My GOD! There are BULLIES IN SCHOOL!

Recently in a handful of unrelated incidents American teens have committed suicide out of sheer embarrassment because either someone started a hurtful (and unlikely rumor about them) or either attacked them or outed them for being homosexual. In typical knee-jerk fashion, lawmakers are in a tizzy and are scrambling to enact ANY sort of anti-bully legislation to protect our children. While it shouldn't matter those bullied who would up taking their own lives were white kids from suburbia. Do I have issues with white kids from Suburbia of course not. Do I think someone should do something about bullies in America's schools? Of course. Should we pass strict "anti bullying" laws?
Before I answer that question let me pose one. Is bullying a new and recent phenomena or have bullies been around since the dawn of mankind? Everyone who went to school falls into one of three categories they either were bullied, were bullies or know someone who fell into one of the aforementioned categories. When I was in elementary I was unfortunate enough to have sat in front of someone who would today be called bi-polar. Back then we just called them crazy. A student who I'll call Phil used to go into violent rages and hit the person closest to him and as we sat alphabetically and I sat directly in front of him he would periodically punch me in the back of the head. Once he got up in the middle of a class, knocked me off my desk and pummelled me. We were both sent to the Principal's office where we were ordered to say "I'm sorry & shake hands" and go back to class. I looked at the principal with disbelief and told her I wasn't going to apologize for being attacked for no reason. Regardless she told me I'd get paddled (as they weren't stingy with the paddle back then) if I didn't. I reached out to shake his hand and he stood up and punched me full on in the face...IN our principals office.
I was given an ice pack for my eye and for some reason they gave both me AND my bully Popsicles and sent us back to class. Phil would occasionally wait for me after school with two other idiots and they would jump me for sport. When I reported it I was told my teacher (whom I sincerely hope is dead and roasting in hell by now) that "No one likes a tattle tale." By the time I made it to high school bullies hadn't changed I was being picked on in the 10th grade by some idiot. When I defended myself against him he attacked me with five of his friends and gave me a concussion by hitting me in the back of the head with a 55 gallon metal trash can. I told an assistant principal and was told "We'll do what we can." The next time I saw my bully he didn't have his five friends in tow. He was walking down a hall with his girlfriend. I ran at him at full speed and turned his face into my own personal punching bag.
As it was the late 80s and every jerk and his dog had a HUGE Run DMC looking gold chain, I wrapped my hands in his and used it as a crude weapon to repeatedly ram his head into a locker as hard as I could to the point of denting it. Before I knew it, Mr. Henry my assistant principal (who stood a good five foot four) had tackled me at the knees and was dragging me to the office by my left heel with one hand. I was suspended as was my bully for the previous confrontation and I was never bullied again. Funny thing. Four years ago I was in a convenience store and ran into the bully from my second story. The fight came up and we had a good laugh about it.
My point? There have always been and will always be bullies how we react to it defines us in a way. Was my way the best way? Most certainly it wasn't, and I don't' advocate being a vigilante. The bullied in the 90s responded to their bullies by bringing guns to school and apparently the bullied in this generation respond by killing themselves. In the 90s principals responded by getting more counselors to talk to kids when they felt "stressed". The downside to this was anytime a kid didn't want to be in a class he/she would simply say "Uh...I got a problem and need to talk to my counselor" which lead to rampant abuse.
The solution to bullies isn't passing laws to hold some bully accountable if the bullied kills him/herself. The solution is simpler than that. Teachers, principals and parents should simply DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS and come down on bullies like a ton of bricks. What about Phil the bully from my first story? I ran into him in the old neighborhood at a gas station. He was incoherent and rambling talking about how people were out to get him. I mentioned a former classmate of ours and Phil made some sort of veiled threat against him. I let him leave first and while he was outside someone approached him and he drew a 9 millimeter pistol on them prompting them to flee. Passing "feel good" anti-bully laws won't solve this age old problem, the framework has long been in place to handle it, but rather than disciplining those who bully we coddle them and ignore the kids BEING bullied until something goes horrifically wrong and until we start telling kids at an early age that bullying is wrong the problem will persist.

ME FIRST!

The other day I was talking to a co-worker when a student came up and interrupted us.

"Mr. Nemo I need your signature on XYZ." My co-worker and I simply stood there looking at the student as if there were a foot coming out of her forehead. She signed the document and we continued our conversation. The other day after church I was standing around talking to an usher. In the midst of our chat a boy who couldn't have been more than 12 came up and interrupted "You want to buy so me cookies." I looked at him oddly and politely said no. "It's for a good cause" the kid interrupted. I again said no thank you. "Please." the young person pleaded again. I stood there and said:

"Young man HERE are the mistakes you made. #1 you didn't say excuse me. This gentleman and I were talking and you just interrupted us as if what we were discussing was of no importance. #2 You didn't introduce yourself. My name is Joe Blow or something would have gotten our attention. #3. You didn't tell us what you were selling this stuff FOR! #4. You're not telling me what kind of cookies. It's like you don't know what you're selling. You're rude and you act like we should buy from you simply because you're telling us to." The young man's expression didn't change as he looked me straight in the eye as if I hadn't uttered a word and he asked me:

"So you want to buy some cookies or not?" When did common courtesy and civility become the exception and not the RULE in these United States? My generation was occasionally smacked upside the head by our parents. Was it right? Of course not, but unfortunately it made my generation the WORST parents the world has ever seen. When I played pop Warner football you either won or lost. If you won you got a trophy if you lost you got a lecture on it not being about winning but rather about sportsmanship which you later discarded because you wanted to win.
Now unfortunately everyone on every team gets a HUGE trophy simply for playing. Children who swear at parents and teachers are no longer paddled, they get "time outs" where they get to think about what they've done OR they sit and talk about their feelings. When I was coming up if you cursed out a teacher you were expelled. If you cursed out one of your parents you said "time out" as they attacked you with a worn leather belt or some kind of hickory switch.
My generation has given their children every computer, video game, phone and electronic device that the mass media tells them they should have and the end result is a group of fat, lazy complacent young people with no imagination whatsoever who only go outside on their way to pick up fast food or more games.

As we don't require them to work for anything, we ask schools to relax standards so that their grades are artificially bolstered. Reading anything other than garbled text messages is considered "nerdy" or a waste of time. When they receive a bad grade we blame their teachers as our children can't possibly be at fault. The end result of this coddling is an entire generation which can't write in cursive, thinks that cell phones have always existed, feels that there wasn't a time when we were never on the moon or flying shuttle missions and can't name either the allies or axis powers of the second world war.

We can't blindly blame "society" because as many of our parents have passed on or retired WE have become the society which we rebelled against in the midst of the late 80s and 90s. Our lack of foresight will soon come to disturbing fruition when the children who can barely read, become adults who can't hold jobs because they insist on treating bosses and co workers as if they owe them something. The collapse of social security is inevitable and the generation of slackers and idiots whom we're counting on to pay for it all will be too busy trying to figure out how to get bigger televisions to care or to even fathom that their kids and grand kids will be far dumber than they are.

Pedophile! Pedophile!....man of God?

I was raised in the Roman Catholic church, and while in my youth I viewed it as simply parental obligation as I've grown older I've found solace in the church. Over the past decade or so, it's come to light that there have been some Catholic priest who've abused their position and sexually abused young children in the church. This is both reprehensible and inexcusable. What angers people far more than the fact that these things occurred is the fact that a good number of these things were covered up.
Has this been going on in the church for some time? Obviously it has as people who've survived this come forward all the time and tell their stories. Should we ignore these stories? If so it would be at our peril. Should we act as if these occurrences are the exclusive domain of the Roman Catholic church? We'd be stupid if we did. Every so often I turn on my television and hear of some small town preacher or a local one for that matter accused of taking sexual liberties with the youth of his church, but more often than not as they are not Catholic it rarely warrants the big press and follow up stories that it would get if the clergyman were a Catholic priest.
In the song "Ode to Billy Joe" a young man leaps off a bridge to his death because he's tortured by having been molested by a church elder. Literature and popular culture are smattered with stories of the young and naive being taken advantage of by some in positions of authority in the religious bodies to which they belonged. Is it justified? Of course it isn't.
In the midst of the Catholic sex scandal I grew weary of non Catholic holier than thou types saying disparaging things about ALL priest because of the actions of a few. In the time that I've spent in the Catholic church as a child and as an adult I've never been privy to ANY behavior from my priest which I'd consider inappropriate. I wager that most clergy regardless of their faith are honest men who have dedicated their lives to the practice of their faith.
Recently the head of a mega-church was accused of bribing young men (with church funds) into sexual relationships with him. Do I believe there is any truth to the allegations? Honestly I've not seen enough evidence one way or another to either assume he's guilty or innocent of the charges. If it is true I'm upset that a clergyman would do something so reprehensible while preaching God's word, but what truly bothers me is that the same people who would incinerate every Catholic priest on earth simply because of a few sick men are coming to the defense of the accused minister. I even heard Reverend Al Sharpton asking if we as a people should even scrutinize the "private lives" of our clergy. I found this a tad odious. Men of the cloth are supposedly carrying the mantle of God. When one is a standard bearer for his God he IS held to a considerably higher standard than some politician or public figure. There are those who would say that the Late Reverend Martin Luther King engaged in activities that were quite unbecoming a minister. I don't know if those allegations are true or not, but as Reverend King was attempting to get a good portion of America to give basic human dignity to another portion of it and he was NOT attempting to get donations to give to mistresses on some church payroll, comparing MLK to some of todays wanton clergy is like comparing apples and water mellons.

I won't openly attack someone else's faith, or what I perceive to be "cult of personality" ministries, but I have to say I have a hard time reconciling those who would lambast my faith (from which the MAJORITY of Christian religions are derived with the exception of Coptic, Greek & Eastern Orthodox) while acting as if somehow theirs exist in a vacuum. We live in a country that is supposed to be devoid of religious litmus tests, yet I guess that only applies if one belongs to the "right" religion.

EVERYBODY...but me.

If oft been told that as an American I live in "The Greatest country in the World". Despite not having the world's highest literacy rate, (That would be Japan) not living the longest (that would be where the Japanese barely edge out the Swedes). Perhaps it's the ratios of doctors per hundred thousand people? Well if it were we'd lose out to China big time. What makes the U.S. so great? Well, THEORETICALLY you can be born dirt poor in the U.S and become a wealthy man or woman through hard work. Most DON'T live out that Horatio Alger story, but in theory it's possible (given you kiss up to the right people or make the right "connections.")
Let's face it greatness is like "sexy" you simply are because you CHOOSE to be. America became a superstar in the 1940s and 50s simply because we weren't in either Europe OR Asia. World War Two saw massive bombing in Europe and Asia saw the infrastructure of countries utterly collapse. The U.S lost no factories so we helped friend and foe alike rebuild their economy while building our military. Translation we got rich and strong helping everyone else out.
Now the rest of the world is on equal footing with us and economically while we're still the big kid on the block we've competition from some of the kids we used to bully like Germany, Japan, China and India. We barely manufacture ANYTHING but we excel in ONE area...blaming EVERYONE for everything.
The great thing ABOUT being an American is simply that NOTHING which ever goes wrong is EVER your fault. Face it through out our illustrious history we've ALWAYS had convenient scapegoats for EVERYTHING! In the early days of this country it was the Native Americans, then the slaves, then the immigrants, then various religious groups, people of color, communist. We as Americans while we can no longer derive a sense of pride from having more missiles and thermonuclear devices than what WAS the Soviet Union can at least say we blame others for our problems MUCH better than anyone else in the entire world.
Blaming other countries for your woes may be xenophobic...but damn it, it's the American way. But why stop at that. The blame game works in practical everyday situations.

In real life if your kid's an idiot, why blame YOURSELF for not paying enough attention to his education or making him/her read when he/she was coming up? Do you pause and think that maybe you shouldn't have given him the electronics store that IS his room and should have encouraged him to pay closer attention in school? NO You blame his overworked underpaid teachers and every musician and television personality whom he or she listens to.
Don't blame yourself for never changing the oil in your car, blame whomever BUILT what your driving when your engine falls apart. Low wages are not the fault of either a society which tolerates them OR the cheap a-holes who pay them they are the fault of people who sneak into this country because the a-holes in THEIR countries pay even LESS!
If you're over weight it's not because you've never eaten any form of vegetation, it's the fault of fast food conglomerates for being on every corner. Never mind the fact that no one has ever been forced into a burger joint at gun point and force fed a metric ton of french fries or a quintuple decker bacon cheese burger. They ran commercials (which you also weren't forced to watch or respond to) which made you want to become a morbidly obese diabetic.
If you can't get a good job, blame someone from a foreign country or of another ethnic group because an imaginary or insignificant government quota gave THEM a job rather than you. So what if that person was considerably more educated and qualified than you. Everyone is to blame...but US!
In the greatest nation in the world NONE of your problems can POSSIBLY be YOUR FAULT! The key to success in ANY large organization is having a scapegoat and the TRULY great (like we Americans) are infallible.

Stupid...just plain stupid.

I've never had much faith in mankind. I'll be the first to admit that the human condition saddens me to some degree. It's one of those things in which there SHOULD be some degree of hope but sadly again and again it serves to disappoint. Ben Franklin once said "The only things we can be sure of are death and taxes." Well, I contend that our good friend and canabis smoking founding father forgot human stupidity. Let's face it, courts are FILLED with people who did something STUPID who are suing someone else rather than simply admit they were at fault and incredibly stupid. While I'll admit I can be a bit of a misanthrope I have my softer moments when I simply can no longer watch people doing stupid crap without at least TRYING to warn them. So here goes, a list of just plain stupid things one should avoid.

1. Smoking or playing with your cell phone at gas stations: Okay there are signs two feet high with bold red letters and little pictugraphs telling you that if you're smoking near gasoline fumes OR carrying a small electronic device which CAN create a spark you MIGHT burst into flames. IF you ignore this and turn into the human torch...don't look for an invisible girl, elastic guy or a dude made of brick, stop drop and roll and be prepared to be the dumbest multicelled organism in the burn center.

2. Picking a fight with ANYONE with the word KILL emblazoned on any part of his/her body OR on any article of clothing they're wearing: This is ESPECIALLY stupid if he or she towers over you and outweighs you by 100 pounds. There is a good chance he or she...might not be right in the head.

3. Busting yourself on Twitter/Facebook. You call in sick and catch the Astros and Dodgers playing a double header. You have a $7.00 hotdog and $10.00 nachos and take lots of pictures. You then post on FACEBOOK how you got out of work by pretending to hack up a lung then post PHOTOS of yourself AT the GAME getting a noogie for former President George Herbert Walker Bush. You return to work the following day and find yourself unemployed. Were you fired for lying to the boss? No FOR BEING STUPID!

4. Dissin either your job OR your boss/boss' family on FB/Twitter. Your boss' wife looks like some kind of walrus and if he had less hair and lost 100 pounds would vaguely resemble some sort of orangutan. And the spawn and byproduct of these two heinous looking people doing the humpty dance looks like a cross between pound puppies and swamp rats. These things are ALL true, but by posting them you're saying "Cram it with wallnuts ugly" (Yes I stole that from the Simpsons) and please fire me...cuz I'm a MOE-RAHN!

5. Attempting to get drugs OUT of a foreign country: Your trip to Holland,Turkey, Thailand or Usukistan was GREAT! You met lots of Fantastic people and smoked something the name of which you couldn't pronounce. MAN! YOU GOTTA BRING SOME OF THIS HOME! No you don't you imbecile that's called smuggling and the penalties for it range from country to country. Most of the time it results in a lengthy prison sentence and in some places like Singapore it's an automatic DEATH (as in rubbin' your ass out) sentence. Even if drugs ARE legal, chances are leaving the country in question with ced narcotic is ALWAYS considered SMUGGLING and is as stupid as it is illegal.


6. ANY sexual activity which involves a member of the animal kingdom: Okay rather its gerbil play, making a SHEEP squeal like a pig or letting a dog lick peanut butter off your junk. Okay, spend a split second to ponder the BRILLIANCE of giving something with claws, pointy teeth and a strong jaw access to your genitals. Unless it's a 40ish divorcee named Sylvia...abort!

7. Imitating ANYTHING you've ever seen on Max-X or JackAss: Johnny Knoxville and Stevo should be coated in gasoline soaked rags and fired from a cannon into an active volcano and if you're compelled to set youself ablaze and jump into a pool because you saw THEM do it then you should wrap a flanksteak around your testicles and go play with a tiger.

8. Answer "Oh definitely" when any woman ask if another woman is prettier than she is or if she looks "fat.": It's just a good way to die.

9. Texting while driving past a police station: Run into a cop car you'll have a story you'll be able to tell your GRANDCHILDREN!

10. Tell your significant other about your affair: Yeah. You cheated on your wife only YOU and the homeless chick you picked up while volunteering at the soup kitchen and brought to that Sleazy Motel know about it...but the guilt won't let sleep so tell her to ease your conscience. Now you can sleeep...WITH ONE EYE OPEN FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! Yeah you made yourself feel better by making another person feel worse and that is just plain stupid. What's worse is that there will be repercussions. No who are we kidding, women are known for letting things go and not making a big deal of things right? They never bring up stuff you did in 1974 which they told you they'd forgiven.

Okay stupidity is part of human nature and always will be. Ultimately we can't stop it but we can collectively appreciate it's entertainment value.

She's fat...

I spent Saturday as I've spent many, on ice. One of the guys I skate with is an 18 year old, gangly sack of hormones who shall remain nameless. He and I stopped on the ice when I happened to notice a tall, muscular black man and his girlfriend walking past. The girlfriend was a short, pale blonde with a tiny waist, thick, muscular, well defined thighs and a rear end that looked as if she were smuggling volleyballs in the tight black shorts which barely contained her. My young friend skated up and asked what I was looking at, at which point I told him to gaze upon the small blonde. His response? "Damn. That's just TOO MUCH ass. Man, why do black guys always go after fat white chicks?"

I came to the defense of the girl I didn't know. "Okay. The girl's got a serious booty to waist deficiency...but I wouldn't call her fat. The girl just has a booty."

"Sorry man. I just don't see how any one finds that attractive." As I watched the thick, muscular, young woman swish away I respectfully disagreed with my young friend. When did we as a culture decide that the ultimate female form was a skeletal system? There is nothing wrong with being thin, but only a handful of people are genetically predisposed to be disturbingly slender and for some reason they are the yard stick that all women must base their self esteem upon. Women of color generally don't have the same issues with weight as white women do, but I'm thinking that might be in part to people like my friend.

Josef Göbels once said that "A lie repeated with a great enough degree of frequency eventually becomes accepted as truth." Sadly I think he might be right. Black and Latina women have no issue with not weighing 90 pounds because Black and Latino men like women with curves. Case in point? Wanna be celebrity Kim Kardashian has a larger than average rear end and prefers to date black men. Why? Because many white guys more than likely would try to get her to drop a few pounds.

The fashion industry constantly bombards women with size ones and size zeros then pretends to be completely innocent when they learn of eating disorders or women who suffer body image issues. Perfectly healthy women are currently sweating in gyms and starving themselves to attain an elusive body image which genetics has predetermined they shall never possess and why? Because some man convinced her she should.

Perspective on Islam...

I remember when I first Met Maria Khan at the Daily Cougar. She was a tall, curvaceous woman whose skin was a magnificent dusky hue. Her hair was a shimmering black and her eyes were big and beautiful and the color of pitch. One rarely meets someone whom they could describe as "arresting" but Maria fit that bill. She and I occassionaly hung out and caught a movie from time to time. I found her intellectually engaging and her personality refreshing. We weren't "Dating" or anything like that, but I simply enjoyed being seen with someone who was so beautiful in every sense of the word.
I used to jokingly say that if I HAD thought for a moment that Ms. Khan had considered me her "type" I would have happily converted to Islam. In all seriousness however, she and I had a few conversations on her faith and I can say that my view of the Islamic faith was initially formed by the occassional talks we had.
Over the course of my life I've known several Muslims and was fortunate enough to have studied Kung Fu under one who informed me that the very word "Muslim" means one who submits to the will of God and that "Islam" essentially means submission TO God. In 1979 there was a revoloution in Iran and several employees of the U.S. embassy in Terhan were held hostage. At the time I didn't know that the kidnappers were Muslims or even what a Muslim WAS. All I knew was that Americans had been held against their will by hostile people who hated America. Ronald Reagan (conservative icon) was elected president in 1980 and had issues with Iran and various groups in the middle east, but for all Regan's tough talk I must give him his due, he never villified Islam or Muslims in general the way many Neo-cons do today, and to that end most Americans of my generation had no opinion of Islam growing up.

I would like to say I've read the Koran I own from cover to cover, but I can't. Honestly I can say the same of the Bible which I own. Many who consider themselves "Christians" not only know nothing of Islam, but do not CHOOSE to know anything of it. Their attitude is simply that if it isn't Christianity it's not worthy of their attention, yet by some strange paradox condemn those of the Islamic faith who refuse to convert to Christianity or refuse to be bombarded with Christianity.
Recently someone proposed opening an Islamic Cultural Center two blocks away from the site where the World Trade Center once stood. The building in question wasn't to be a mosque. To be frank there already IS a mosque two blocks from where the World Trade Towers stood and it's been there since the late 50s and predated the world trade towers, but the outcry from some would have us believe that not only were they planning a mosque but some center for training terrorist agents.

Not since the Crusades and the Inquisition has there been such a wave of ill will towards Islam. Why is this? Some would argue that groups like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Hamaas and Al Quaida show by their actions that Islam is a culture of violence. What if someone were to use the same logic to imply that the actions of the Ku Klux Klan (who considered themselves a Christian values organization) and abortion clinic bombers implied that Christianity is a faith dedicated to killing one's enemies? We have to come to terms with the fact that since the dawn of time there have been men and women willing to kill over their respective faiths. Men who blow up abortion clinics no more represent Christianity than those who strap bombs to themselves represent Islam.
America is at war with a group of radical Islamic terrorist, but we must NEVER act as if we are at war with Islam itself. Muslims like Christians are on six continents and that most get through their lives without once firing a shot in anger. We can not say that all Muslims are either "peaceful" or "warlike" any more than we can say the same of Christians. Neither religion is a monolith yet recognizing that would require us to THINK.

Farewell KTRU...

When I was a student at the University of Houston majoring in Radio and Television I attempted to apply for a job at KUHF the radio station at the University. The Federal Communications Commission established educational frequencies so that colleges could use them as teaching tools for students who wished to enter broadcasting. Upon entering KUHF I was informed that they simply didn't hire students.
I and several at the school Newpaper the Daily Cougar riled up a few people who mounted a protest which then head of the School of Communication Dr. Robert Musburger crushed. KUHF decided to pacify those of us who disagreed with the theory that a college radio station should NOT be a home to college students but rather to fat, middle aged radio hasbeens who had never been by creating a student intern position.
Why the ire? The two other educational frequencies in the city of Houston i.e. KTSU at Texas Southern University and KTRU at Rice University have some student programming. KTRU in fact is ENTIRELY student run. Shortly after graduating from the university of Houston I ventured over to KTRU where I did a late night show for two years. I was taught to use broadcast equiptment and sound boards and didn't have to pay them a dime and at the same time I was on the radio (albiet to a small audience) in the fourth largest city in America. It paid NOTHING but at any point had they asked me to pay THEM for the priviledge of being on air I would have gladly done so.
Earlier today I read a piece in which I learned that the University of Houston had just purchased KTRU much to the chagrin. Needless to say I was livid. KTRU does what many THINK KUHF is supposed to do, it TEACHES people who know NOTHING about radio how to utilize broadcast equiptment. It doesn't attempt to be some PR machine for a school which doesn't give 2/10th of a damn about students who can't dribble a basketball or run a 4.4 40 yard dash. It serves a purpose. Rice University is a very exclusive school, but it's radio station was open to all unlike it's cross town counterpart.
I was never truly a fan of most of the music I played on KTRU (although they did give me an appreciation for Japanese pop music) but it afforded me an opportunity to work behind a microphone for two years which my alma-mater (which will never recieve a dime from me) didn't think I or any student in it's own Radio and Television program was deserving.
To my alma-mater as they take over the station which I considered myself honored to be a part of, I say this. Ignore the rich history which you'll erase, hire more washed up jackasses who've spent their entire careers on the outskirts of radio rather than giving a new generation a reason to enter and love radio. My contempt for you as an educational institution was only surpassed by my contempt for you as a broadcasting entity and now I can safely say you utterly disgust me on every possible level.

Things I'd like to see...

Let's face it quite a few things utterly suck. The world is far from a perfect place and we all know it. Mind you certain things were they to occur would make this miserable famine plagued, war infested mud-ball juuuuuuust a little more tolerable. I'm certain I can't speak for everyone (as my attempt at a Global coúp dé tát and world domination FAILED MISERABLY) but here are a few things (in no particular order) that I think would make life just a tinge sweeter.

1. Ryan Seacrest being beaten beyond recognition. Sorry this little prick, annoys the piss out of me. Every time this leprechan says "Seacrest out" I really want to knock him the VUGG OUT! The fact that he's the executive producer of that God awful "Keeping up with the Kardashian's" show just pisses me off more.

2. Ryan Seacrest being kicked in the nads by a bunch of guys trying out to be place-kickers in the NFL AND 5th degree black belts working on their accuracy. The reason being? Keeping up with the Kardashians, Courtney and Khloe, and that Denise Richards' "Real Life" thing.

3. "The Situation" being thrown into the ring with one of those UFC guys. Maybe a shot in that fake tanned mug of his might make him stop speaking in the 3rd person.

4. Gigantomastia appreciation day! Look that one up.

5. Allowing NFL quarterbacks to take a hit. Half the professional QBs wouldn't have lasted a season in the 80's and 90s when you could follow a QB home and shoot him in the face with a bazooka. Hell I saw Dan Fouts get stabbed back in 1982...he still finished the game and didn't bitch about it.

6. Give your worst enemy a haircut day!

7. Angelina Jolie and Selma Hayak kissing with reckless abandon. I don't care what your gender or sexual orientation...that's so hot you'll scorch your retina looking at it.

8. Busta Rhymes being elected to something and performing "Woo Hah" rather than giving an acceptance speech. Come on...as long as he isn't YOUR Congressman...ya gotta admit that would be funny.

9. Celebrities and professional athletes going to JAIL when they F' up. Face it, if community service hours were frequent flyer miles Robert Downey Junior would never have to buy another airline ticket for the remainder of his life. Stop gushing over these celebs and just send the muff-huggas to jail!

10. A time machine and a crate of condoms. There are entirely too many mindnumblingly STUPID people on the planet. Give me a time machine, a crate of condoms, the names of both their parents and how to find them...9 months before the imbecile in question was born...bada boom bada bing...PROBLEM solved.

11. Passage of a law that would ban anyone with a SEX TAPE from attaining instant celebrity status. If you're already famous and gettin' freaky with your neighbors goat go nuts it doesn't apply to you, but if you're either some rich skank or some struggling 'actor/actress' who no one's ever heard of screw you pal. Think about it, we now know who Paris Hilton is NOT because he great grand father started a huge hotel chain...but because she slept with Shannon Dougherty's ex husband and videoed the whole thing.

Kim Kardashian is a pretty white girl with a big @ss who likes to FCUK black guys and because she got her freak on with Brandy's no talent kid brother Ray-J She has a TV show. Okay adult film star Kayla Kleevage has been doing the same damn thing for the last 10 years when will douchebag Ryan Seacrest produce "Keeping up with Kayla Kleevage?" I'd watch KKK. :-)

12. Diehard Soccer fans accepting the fact that U.S. doesn't love the worlds most popular sport. Sorry guys here in the US of A here is the professional sports batting order.

#1. Baseball

#2. Football

#3. Basketball

#4. Nascar

#5. Hockey

#6. Women's Tennis

#7. Men's Tennis

#8. Golf

#9. Bowling

#10. Professional women's full contact hopscotch

# 11. Fishing with dynamite

You guys are on the list...but only in the same way that I'm "on the list" of guys who have a shot at Lindsay Lohan by virtue of the fact that I have a Y Chromosome and a pulse.

#8. Golf.

13. If deer had thumbs. If Deer had thumbs...and access to rifles...hunting would be a REAL sport! Come on if the deer is shooting BACK...it's ON like NECKBONES BABY! IF you survive...not only are you tha man...but you get to eat the chump who was shooting at you.

14. Teleportation and Invisibility...but only if I could do them. Screw you guys.

15. Centerfold Bimbos with single digit IQs Not acting as if they were better than everyone else. I have no issue with people posing naked if they're so inclined. If you're a beautiful girl who wants to pose for pics KNOWING that thousands of guys will get their jollies looking at you naked go nuts. If you're a good looking guy who wants to pose for pics knowing that thousands of GUYS will be getting their jollies looking at you...go nuts. But don't act like you found the cure for Aids, before going to your day job in the jet propulsion lab at NASA right before posing for the pics in question.

16. A horror flick (not from the 'Scary Movie' series) other than "Night of the Living Dead" where a black guy is still alive at the end. Come on most of the negroes I know would either break the hell out or pull out a Smith and Wesson if some beat off with a hockey mask shows up inching up on us with an axe.

17. The bikini clad, baby oil covered Sofía Vergara hour! Give my favorite Columbian her own talk show but make her wear a bikini, sit behind a clear plexiglass desk and generously coat her in baby oil, I assure you that I and every other drunken frat boy in America would watch.

18. My worst enemy (he knows who he is) having someone throw an angry wolverine on him while he's sitting on the toilet. Dude...the only thing that stops me from beating you till your own mama doesn't recognize you are the obscenely LIBERAL laws that govern this country. Seriously...you're a bitch man.

19. More buffalo wings. Face it they rule.

20. Women NOT bringing up shiznit guys did back in 1972 (which they SAY they forgave ) but expecting guys to never bring up any mistakes THEY EVER made. Welcome...to fantasy island!

21. Oprah falling in love with the game of football, dedicating several shows to it and women learning to shut the hell up during the game. Yeah I said it.

22. Women accepting that heterosexual men don't want to go shopping with them and to us all women's shoes look alike. Sorry ladies, we care about your shoes as much as you care about:

a. The infield fly rule

b. Barry Sander's career Rushing stats

c. A new socket set

d. barbeque marinades

e. Megan Fox's measurements

f. The chassi of a 1957 Chevy Bellaire

g. A 1967 GTO

h. Beer.

i. urinals

j. the "Dude...you know what would be cool ?" game where we dare each other to do really stupid crap...simply because we're guys.

23. More French chicks. Even homely women with thick French accents...have no trouble getting a date.

24. Old white guys at hip hop concerts.

25. A "SHUT THE FCUK up!" card. Every U.S. citizen should get a card which enables them to say "Man SHUT THE FCUK UP!" to the authority figure of their choice. Be it their boss, significant other, or that HUGE psycho down the block whose dog keeps taking a dump on your yard. Use the phrase in question, pull out the card and let them punch it and inform you that you only have 2 left. :-)

26. Idiots who cause car accidents because they're either on the phone or texting while driving having to serve as crash test dummies for a month. GET OFF DA DAMN PHONE STUPID!

27. The ONE asswhipping a year law. You should be allowed to RANDOMLY distribute ONE deep downhome, chicken fried, countryboy, what you say about my mama, what the hell you mean less fillin' I said taste great ASSWHIPPING to A-hole of your choice. If you don't use the alloted ass-whipping... it carries over!

28. Brenda Song in a leather mini skirt. Yay me!

29. A one chick flick per year rule. Guys cannot be forced to attend more than one chick flick per year. Sorry ladies...it's the law.

30. A Porsche 928 S Turbo. I love that car.

31. The official disbanding of the Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Lakers.

32. The cast of Jackass being stuffed into a rocket and fired into the sun. You idiots suck. Grow the hell up.

33. Babybackbabybackbabyback....babyback ribs....barbeque sauce...

34. Free calamari, saki and okonomiyaki on your birthday if you're over 40 and were born in late December. :-)

35. Britney Spears being banned from producing another album or ever performing again unless it's with Frank Stallone. Please go away lady.

36. Someone...ANYONE telling me what the FCUK is so great about Lady Gaga.

37. More Matthew McConnohey jokes on Family Guy. Seth McFarlane is a genius.

38. The World acknowledging that techno sucks. Seriously...it sucks. Who doesn't get that?

39. Martian ...Successor... Nadesco. Thinkaboutit!

40. Middle-aged white guys having to dress like James Brown every year on his birthday. Come on...you guys know ya want to.

You're a slave? Take off your shirt and let me get a bullwhip.

(The following blog will contain no profanity)

The other day while watching something political on TV I saw some would-be politico named RICK BARBER in Alabama running an ad in the congressional race in which he's running where he compared paying taxes to being a SLAVE. He attacked the federal government (which seems to be the style these days) and said that working for months so that "A stranger gets a meal or medical procedure or someone gets a bailout" is "Slavery". What's more he had an actor portraying Abraham Lincoln say it to make it seem poignant. He then went on to say that "we've shed too much blood in the past to prevent men from being slaves."

My first response was Richard Prior's favorite twelve letter profanity then I stopped to think about just how ignorant either Mr. Barber is or how ignorant you have to be to follow him. If I remember the American Civil war correctly then men from Alabama weren't fighting FOR the Union they fought against it and FOR the wealthy agrarians who didn't start the war FOR the sake of slavery, but did choose to preserve it.

If Mr. Barber would like to compare himself to a slave then I would like to extend the following challenge to him.

Mr. Barber I encourage you to move to one of the more rural parts of your state of Alabama or maybe Mississippi or maybe even my birthplace of Louisiana. Move your entire family into a squalid one room house with a leaky roof and a dirt floor. Allow me to randomly pick a new name for you and teach you the rudiments of a foreign language which shall be spoken by myself and those supervising you in this 'experiment'. Should you or any member of your family be caught referring to one another by your given names and NOT the ones we gave you or using the English language we'll tie you to a post, strip you to the waist and give you lashes with a bullwhip. Sound like fun Mr. Barber? It gets better.

You and your family shall work from sun up to sundown six days a week picking cotton, harvesting sugar cane, picking peas or whatever work I can find for you. You'll subsist on a diet of salt pork, grits, hominy or whatever is cheapest.

Should I find an opportunity to make a few extra dollars, I reserve the right to sell or rent out your children or your wife to ANOTHER plantation and you just might not see them again. While we're on the subject of your family, I won't be above taking sexual liberties with the female members of your family if I'm so inclined.

Does this upset you Mr. Barber? Should you voice your indignation I'll have one of my overseers strip you to the waist and give you lashes with the bullwhip I mentioned earlier as I stand on the balcony over looking your shack sipping a mint julep. Let's make this even more fun Mr. Barber, let's play this sadistic little 'game' for the rest of your life.

Do you find this disturbing Mr. Barber? You should, it was the experience of millions of American slaves including my ancestors. Mr. Barber when you compare paying taxes to being enslaved you may as well stand over the unmarked graves of my ancestors and freely urinate on them as you loudly laugh racial slurs. Comparing taxation to enslavement is like comparing apples to watermellons (no pun intended) and it insults not only people of color, but the men who fought in the bloodiest conflict on American soil. Mr. Barber, God HELP the congressional district in Alabama you're running for should they elect you. I'll wager there are ficus plants who are infinitely more qualified than yourself to hold this office.

IT'S EVERBODY'S FAULT...but mine

"Society's fault? No. Nobody put the crack into the pipe, nobody made you smoke away your life."

:Ice T "You Played Yourself"


This morning while listening to a morning show on an R&B station that goes out of it's way to define "blackness" (whatever that means today) I found myself bombarded by pro black messages, some positive some negative. Though I'm not a morning person by ANY stretch my BS filters are particularly well tuned first thing in the morning and the show in question seems to sound like "black black blickity black black...'How you feeling this morning Ted?'

'I'm BLACK Phil...I am black.' Anyway while listening to this interspersed with sparse offerings of hip hop, classic R&B and the nauseating begging for sex that has BECOME R&B I heard a social commentary on street gangs killing civilians in street violence in Chicago and how some were asking for the National Guard to be called in. I listened more intently and the velvety voiced female commentator she went on to say that the problem should have been stopped at it's roots. I couldn't help but agree. No one wakes up one morning and decides to join a gang, begin selling drugs and shooting at people. It happens over time.
She then went on to say that part of the problem stems from the fact that young black and Latino males need places to feel as if they belong and are respected and gravitate to gangs because the government has failed on some level to provide sufficient programs for them and that the chasm between rich and poor have driven them to it.
At that point I was glad I wasn't in the studio with this woman as her argument was the reason someone invented hip waders...chest deep BULLSHIT. Bad neighborhoods are nothing new and neither are gangs and thugs. I grew up in a big city and there were gangs and drugs but the bulk of us didn't belong to a gang? Why? I can't speak for my friends, but in MY case my father was a contractor and always had work to be done. He had me out on a job site whenever I didn't have an activity.
Activities? There was cub-scouts, Pee-wee football, baseball and just old fashioned getting a ball and playing with your friends. If you didn't have an activity the best reason NOT to join a gang was the thought of your mom and or dad cutting a switch from the nearest large tree or taking a worn leather belt and taking a layer of black off your "narrow black ass" as they so frequently put it. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for government programs that encourage programs to get young people to do constructive things in their spare time. When I was a kid they offered a myriad of programs at my local park and there were other programs which I took part in which cost next to nothing.
My parents were working class and never let me forget that for a second and I understand that there are people in my old neighborhood who are so poor they can barely afford food for their children. But honestly there are some things you can get your children to do which don't cost any money. How much does it cost to take your kid to the park and push him/her on a swing? How much does it cost to go for a walk with your son or daughter? How much of your weekly income is taken by simply offering your child praise and encouragement?
Government programs are great, but they are NOT the ultimate solution. Psychologist have shown in study after study that the type of person your child will become is shaped by the time he/she is 2 years old. That being said, if you don't curtail certain things your kid does while he's still a kid, you will soon have an adult on your hands who has no respect for you or anything else. The end result my generation (the lovable losers known as "Generation X" are raising a group of lazy, violent, disrespectful, thugs incapable of using simple logic who have an ungodly sense of entitlement. Who can we blame for it? No one but ourselves.
Mike Rutherford once said "Every generation blames the one before" and to that end Gen X blames our parents as they blamed theirs in the 60s and 70s, and our grandparents blamed their parents in the great depression. But let's stop for a moment and take stock as we look at the lazy, disrespectful, semi-literate, logic impaired, recreational drug using, oversexed, tattooed youth that we've spawned and stop passing the buck. This is entirely our fault and the time has come to come up with some solutions and preventative measures to insure that our grandchildren (some of whom might either be with us now or on the way shortly) don't fall into the same trap we obliviously led this current generation into as we pointed the fingers of blame.

The Scrapbook

One day when I was nine years old, I was hanging out with my buddy Demontrion at his house on a Saturday afternoon. In the far corner of his room near the window was a closet which he scarcely opened back then. Years later when we were in high school and he became the clothes horse/ladies man he's notorious for being now, it would simply be the closet that was too small to accommodate it's fair share of his trendy clothes which seemed to go in and out of style as quickly as he put them on.

The houses in South Park where we had grown up had been "G.I." housing. By G.I. housing, I mean that at the end of World War II when the veterans returned home to the heroes' welcomes they'd earned along with G.I. home loans, men with expanses of land built neighborhoods with similar floor plans and sold them to returning soldiers, sailors, pilots and Marines. If you were to drive through my old South Park neighborhood you would note that most of the streets are named after generals and battle fields. The streets have names like "Doolittle" , "Iwo Jima", "Tarawa" and "Ridgeway."

Demontrion's grandfather whom I'd never met served in the Navy in the second world war and made a career of it and Demontrion's uncle Johnny did the same. His dad on the other hand had joined the Marines. He never talked about his war experiences when we were coming up, but as we grew older and learned what happened over there, we realized that we'd been reading the war on his face our entire lives. He was a quiet man who didn't speak unless he had something to say. Honestly to this day when he talks I find myself listening as if I'm still a little kid. He's always been one of my heroes thought I doubt I've ever told him.

Demontrion's parents were divorced and he lived with his grandmother. The room he had, had been the one his father and uncle shared. When his father returned from Southeast Asia, he hung up the dress blue uniform that Marines seldom wear, (but always seem to be photographed in whenever they do) in a closet along with a sea-bag full of mementos, one of which being a scrap book never thinking for a moment that ten years later they would sever as curiosities to his son and his best friend on a restless afternoon. We found a worn scrapbook full of black and white photos. There were pictures of his dad, but we had difficulty recognizing him. Neither of us had ever seen him without a beard or at least a mustache.

The photos were mostly of his dad and the other Marines in the unit in which he'd spent two years. They were young men, I'm assuming between 19 and 23 who had the tired eyes of old men. There were pictures in the jungles, small villages, and bares that we all find synonymous with what we know of Vietnam, but there was one photo that stuck in my mind. My best friend's father at 19 was sitting on a big rock calmly looking into the distance and smoking a cigarette. The photo would hardly seem unusual were it not for the small khaki clad figure in the background who had been crucified. We couldn't see the man's face, but he wore khaki and a pith helmet that we would later learn had been the uniform of the North Vietnamese Army.

I found it neither funny, nor disturbing. Honestly, neither I nor my best friend had any idea what we were really looking at. The crucified NVA wasn't real to us, he was merely a glossy black and white image in a photo. We didn't understand the two men in the photo. One the victor, the other the vanquished. They were members of an odd fraternal order of mutual respect. The fraternity of men who've exchanged gunfire. Before they entered a cluster of jungle that became a battle field, they were two highly trained, well armed, teenage boys who had been armed to the teeth and sent out to obliterate one another. Their differences? One grew up a military brat in Houston, Texas his father a proud Navy man who had served in the Pacific, the other had probably been raised in Hanoi hearing about how bravely his father and possibly his mother had fought against the French in the last war.

The two boys met in a battle that probably lasted minutes but seemed like a week and in the end, one got to go home and the other was "sent" home.

I would join the Marines after high school, learn more ways of breaking and utterly destroying other human beings that I would ever care to know, but I would never be sent to test those martial skills against some other teenage "patriot" fighting for HIS country. Demontrion and I never peered into the scrapbook again. I can't speak for Demontrion, but I think on some level we probably felt it just didn't seem "right." It wouldn't dawn on me until years later that we probably didn't venture to open it again, because on some level we knew that not being members of the "fraternity" we weren't worthy.

Iesvs Christ! He's back!

Iesvs. Consider the fact that the letter "J" didn't exist in Latin and the letter "v" was used the same way that the letter "u" is. Hence the word "virtue" would have been written "virtve". That being said Lets go to today's topic Iesvs or as we spell it today "Jesus".
When ever you turn on your TV 24 hours a day there is someone telling you about Jesus. Jesus walked the earth 2000 years ago and was followed by a loyal group of guys (one of whom betrayed him) where upon he was crucified and became the basis of first a faith then a religion.
What's the difference? A faith is a belief, a religion is simply a set of actions that are repeated faithfully.
That being said whenever I turn on my TV someone or something is telling me that Jesus is my lord and savior. That's a pretty positive message. Do I believe it? Yes I do. Men and women are on my television telling me that Jesus not only loved me but died to redeem me in the eyes of the almighty father/creator of all. Do I believe this. I actually do. These men and women (a majority of whom seem to be from the American south) are telling me 24 hours a day that Jesus talks to them and wants them to spread his word and apparently (if these men and women are to be believed) enrich themselves in the process. They wear tailored Italian suits, wear $100,000 Rolex watches, ride around in limos and private jets, and surround themselves with body guards.
I find that an interesting paradox given that the disciples who actually traveled WITH Jesus while he walked the earth didn't have a horse, chariot or wagon between them. The apostle Peter who was left to spread the Gospel after Jesus ascension into heaven wasn't clad in the finest silk or traveling with body guards. If he had been maybe the Romans wouldn't have captured, imprisoned and eventually crucified him huh. Maybe televangelist do it that way because they're learning from Peter's mistake right?
Now from what I've read the book of Revelation tells us Jesus shall return in glory and usher in the apocalypse. I say...GREAT. But I have to ponder a few things. What will happen to the televangelist? Will Jesus simply take over all of their Christian broadcasting companies with a "thank you...you rewards shall be in heaven?" As they say they're doing it all "for the lord" will they relinquish their mansions, leer jets, expensive wardrobes, limos, Rolexs and other trappings that to the skeptic merely appear to be "bling" and "excess?" As they've said it's all about spreading God's word, I'm sure they will.
Will the son of God tell these men and women to walk from town to town in their geographic areas (Jesus and his disciples walked every where even though there were horses, wagons and chariots) and spread his word (without collection plates) to all who can hear them? I'm sure he would. Jesus said that following him was NOT an easy path and that his followers would be persecuted and their faith would be tested.
Would the men and women who've dedicated their lives to appearing on TV in mega-churches simply let Jesus have what they claim they built FOR him and "render onto God...that which is God's"? Of course they would. After all, they've been saying these many years that they were doing it all for Jesus Christ and his teachings.
Think of it, these men and women would be rewarded in the greatest way possible, they would be able to remember what Jesus said to a rich man about selling all he had and giving the money to the poor. They would earn the title of disciple and would live in the same poverty in which Jesus' ORIGINAL disciples did! And the best part is, all of these men and women would be both happy and honored to do so! We know this because each has told us as much. Unless of course they're liars and hypocrites who're only in it for the money, and we all know THAT isn't the case right?

The South Shall Rise Again?

While perusing the United Press International web site for some of my daily news I noticed something curious. Governor Robert McDonell of Virginia has decided to declare April Confederate history month. He claimed it was to "bolster tourism" and to "make many aware of the sacrifices of soldiers and leaders of the confederacy."
From 1861 to 1865 The United State of America was divided into two separate nations. One calling itself the United States of America, the other the Confederate states of America. Many Americans like to think that the war was effectively about slavery when in fact the war had been raging for an entire year before U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which in THERORY freed slaves in the Confederate States. Effectively the Emancipation Proclamation said to the south 'If we're victorious...we're freeing your slaves.'
The causes of the American civil war had nothing to do with Americans in the north caring about the freedom of Slaves, but rather had more to do with economics and politics which have been the root of every war. The south's agrarian economy relied on slave labor to cultivate and harvest, tobacco, sugar and cotton just as the north's economy counted on a steady stream of immigrants from Ireland, southern and eastern Europe who were willing to work for pennies a day. The issue was not free men versus slaves but rather the congressional representation that the Southern states received from 3/5th of each state's non voting slave population.
Southern Agrarians could easily capture a majority in congress by simply purchasing or breeding more slaves. Northern industrialist who opposed slavery did so because slavery offered their Southern agrarian competitors a political advantage and not because of of some romanticized love of freedom as many revisionist historians would have us believe. Abraham Lincoln himself once said during the famed Lincoln/Douglas Debates "If I can preserve the union by freeing all the slaves, I shall do that. I can preserve the union without freeing a single slave I shall to that."
Rich men on both sides of the Mason Dixon line convinced the poor men who would fight the war of some sense of duty. Northern Industrialist talked of "Freedom" Southern Agrarians talked of a large central government interfering with "popular sovereignty". But the end result was the bloodiest conflict to take place on American soil with 620,000 Americans dying in the end.
When the smoke cleared America mended it's fences as best it could but there were resentments that simply wouldn't die. Were you to talk to the descendant of a Union Soldier he/she would talk of how his/her ancestor fought to preserve the Union. Were you to talk to the descendant of a Confederate soldier you would hear of the courage of his/her ancestor in fighting a tyrannical government bent on imposing it's will upon an angry populace. Were you to talk to the descendant of a slave they would either consider the Union heroes and the Confederacy racist, or simply view it as yet another war between men who simply saw their ancestors as chattel.
Whatever one's point of view it has to be said rather someone is a hero or villain is determined largely by geography and ideology. Should Virginians celebrate the "glorious Confederacy?" It could be said that those who wish to should be allowed to but to be true to the spirit of the Confederacy those who choose not to...should not have it "forced upon them by a tyrannical government."

Open Letter to the Tea Party:

Ladies and Gentlemen:
America was founded by men (mostly wealthy merchants and planters.) who protested their taxes being raised to pay for a war which defended them from the French. Being a dissident as part of being an American and the right to dissent is written into our constitution. While it is frequently not fair that those who dissent are often labeled as "rabble rousers" and more often than not "un-american" we should realize that our republic would not exist if everyone who disagreed with George III had simply kept quiet.
The irony attached to your party would have to be that many of you openly questioned the patriotism of your fellow Americans who protested the war in Iraq or President George W. Bush. Many of your older members considered the entire civil rights movement a Communist plot and were quite adament in stating your opposition to it.
As a young Marine I would have died for your right to disagree with me and as a fellow citizen I would still agree that you've the right to disagree with me and I with you. Ladies and gents you've fought the good fight, but now is the time to lay down your arms and come to terms with the fact that this battle is over. The court challenges will be to no avail but those of us who opposed you expect a battery of them and shall endure them all the way you endured our endless challenges of the election of 2000.
When the dust clears and the anger, bitterness and disappointment subside as ours did in 2000 you'll realize that in the great tradition of American politics you were an integral player and are part of a dance that shall exist as long as our democracy endures.
Despite his surname Barack Hussein Obama is not a practicing Muslim. He is not intent on destroying our great nation and he is not the "anti-christ" which the book of Revelation spoke of. He is merely another American whose political ideology is juxtaposed to your own and earnestly if we all shared the same ideology our republic would have become stagnant and ceased to exist long ago.
All things considered. Those of you who protested health insurance providers being able to charge you ridiculous premiums, raise your premiums & deductables or cancel your policy on a whim without reprocussions that was your right as Americans. Just as it was your right to protest any attempt at policing a self regulating industry who essentailly could tell Americans to go off and die simply because they were too great a health risk to warrant coverage, it is my right to teach you a mantra I found myself reciting in 2000 and again in 2004.

"MycandidatelosttheelectionI'mgoingtohavetogetoverit....mycandidatelosttheelectionI'mgoingtohave togetoverit." Say it until you're calm and the next 3 to 7 years may pass a bit more quickly.

Obama-care!? The Sky is Falling!

Teddy Roosevelt once invisioned a nation where all Americans would have access to affordable healthcare. It did not come to pass and the creation of the FDA didn't make him any friends in the meat packing industry.
Roosevelt's nephew Franklin was elected president during the great depression and suggested healthcare for all Americans, but it was lost in the shuffle of the various new deal programs he proposed, many of which were called "unconstituional" by his opponents.
Harry Truman proposed healthcare, but with the tail end of the second world war, the beginnings of the cold war and various other issues put it on the back burner. Joseph McCarthy was quick to brand anyone and anything he didn't like as communist so the idea of the government getting involved in any aspect of American life was as unpopular as those on McCarthy's blacklist.
John Kennedy talked about universal health care when he was a candidate but didn't introduce any legislation to back it up. After Kennedy's assasination, Lyndon Johnson proposed health care and was shot down but introduced medicare..
Richard Milhaus Nixon was the LONE Republican voice who spoke up for universal healthcare and was shot down by his own party. It was not until Bill Clinton that healthcare came back to the forefront where it was slowly beaten down by a strong Republican party.
After a century an American President has done what many thought impossible. Gathered enough men and women in congress who were willing to put their political careers on the line and pass a piece of legislation that would give greater access to healthcare to American men and women.

Rather or not one agrees with the new healthcare laws, we have to sit back for a minute and think about how monumental a piece of legislation this is. Is it "socialized medicine" No. It places caps on rate hikes that insurance companies can give the insured. It tells insurance companies that they can no longer cancel your policy because you simply made a claim. Insurance exist to pay your bills in the event that you get sick...the fact that they were free to cancel your policy when you chose to use them never made any sense. No Americans will be forced to give up the health coverage they already enjoy if they have it. The new healthcare law also gives tax credits to small businesses to insure their employees and enables peopel to keep thier children on their insurance until 26.

Any of these things sound like bad ideas thusfar? Not to me, but many in GOP see it as Socialized medicine. Far from it. This legislation will not create a slew of "government" hospitals. It will however prove beneicial to insurance companies as it will give them millions of new customers. The new healthcare bill is simply insurance industry legislation and the industry simply didn't wish to be regulated.
Martin Luther King once said that "Men with power do not wish to relinquish it easily." A Belgian Nobel Lauriat once said "There are invariably 10,000 men in the path of change." To that end change is inevidible. Should we therefore embrace change? No, change isn't always a good thing, but we should always be open to and experience it before we decide how much we do or don't care for it.
For the most part however many Americans will not notice any sweeping changes in healthcare unless they find themselves hospitalized. We as a republic shall neither implode nor collapse. The sky will not fall upon our heads and tanks emblazoned with the hammer an siclkle shall not roll with our streets escorting troops who will then hand each citizen a set of olive drab Mao Tse Tung style fatigues.
America is not perfect as much as we would hope for it to be, but we as a nation get closer to it every day. Will there be abuses in the system? There are abuses in the CURRENT system and in EVERY system, to suggest otherwise would be laughable. Will America be better off because of the legislation that President Obama signs into law today? The passage of time is the best measure.

Stay Black and Proud...except for you.

Don't ask me why, but for some reason I was convinced to attend a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. I'd avoided the NAACP because of a run in with an NAACP official several years ago at one of their conventions. He was a person of note and I attempted to shake his hand at which point he looked at me as if I were begging him for change. I noticed him posing for photos with various people at the event at which I met him and when I attempted to get a photo with him I was treated as if I'd just crawled from a septic tank. I left feeling insulted and the following day I saw the same man who had rebuffed me nearly in tears because members of MY generation weren't joining the NAACP in the numbers we once were during the 50's, 60's and 70's. I wanted to reach into my television pull the negro through it and beat him until his mother didn't recognize him for this hypocrisy.

Regardless, I was attending an NAACP meeting. The turn out was small and the bulk of the membership were men and women in their late 50s and early 60s. There were a handful of people my age, but not many. The new people were asked to give their names and say somethin about themselves and when my turn came I said who I was and said what I do during the day to pay the bills. I thought nothing of it, but when the meeting concluded I found myself being told that the NAACP's national convention would be in our city and that I of all people should come up with an idea for a business that I could shop around to some of the well connected persons who might show up.
Another older member told me that I would "find my nitch" at some point. Mind you my day job doesn't have a pension or benefits, but it's nice to know that members of my parents generation could easily overlook the fact that I:

a. Wasn't in jail
b. wasn't breaking the LAW to support myself.
c. HAD A JOB!

yet they were wondering why I and other members of my generation weren't rushing out in DROVES to join them. In the parking lot one of the older members whom initially thought was okay took issue with the fact that one of the chapter's officers was white. He went on some drawn out racist tirade about how black organizations don't need white members etc and peppered his sentiments with a plethora of racial slurs.
He then got on me when he learned that one of my closest friends is Asian by saying how my generation has so alienated itself that we have to look to "other races" because we can't befriend one another.

I know the people I met are not the ENTIRE NAACP, but at the same time I was thinking that this cross sampling reminded me why I hadn't joined the organization in the first place. I'm not saying they don't do any good. The organization was at the forefront of the civil rights movement and many of the rights I take for granted today were secured by NAACP lawyers like Thurgood Marshall, but today's NAACP needs to find leadership that looks at today's issues rather than celebrating it's glorious past and try to appeal to men and women whose generational outlook is more in keeping with the new millineum and the problems that we (Americans of every race) will have to solve.

Legacy of the Little Boy

A fair amount of time had elapsed from 8:15am August 6 1945 to a cold, late December afternoon in 2009 when a 40 year old, dredlocked, American former Marine got off a trolley in Hiroshima clad in an old field jacket. Armed with a digital camera, his mission was to capture a piece of history.
When one stands before the "peace dome" one can't help but think that mere yards away the bomb produced by the Manhattan project which was jokingly named "little boy" was dropped by the Enola Gay and detonated 600 meters above and changed not only the city of Hiroshima, but the entire world.
Co-pilot Captain Robert A. Lewis wrote in the Enola Gay's log after seeing the mushroom cloud "My God...what have we done."

The Peace Dome was one of the handful of buildings which survived when Hiroshima and the bulk of her inhabitants evaporated on that hot August morning. As a hard wind whipped your humble narrator's locks from the back of his head to his face he stood there attempting to take a photo of the building around which the present day city of Hiroshima seemed to have been rebuilt.

I stood there as my cold fingers fumbled with the buttons on my camera attempting to photograph a building which had been seen by the entire world in the 69 years since the bombing. Tears streamed down my face as I took photo after photo and thought of the men, women and children who never knew the bomb was coming and died instantly.
I thought about those who survived only to die shortly afterwards and those who survived and suffered from radiation related illnesses for the remainder of their lives.
As I ventured through the park and to the peace museum itself I saw a disclaimer from the Japanese government which said essentially that the purpose of the museum was not to place blame on the United States and how Japan's Emperial policies and it's attack on the United States meant that they could not claim to be innocent victims. The purpose of the musem was simply to show the world the consequences of war and how the losers always out number the winners.
I thought of the American, British & Australian soldiers, sailors and Marines who died at places like Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Battan and Wake Island. I thought of the Chinese butchered at Nanking, the Korean & Chinese "Comfort women" forced into prostitution to service the Japanese military and the countless Japanese civilians who died in American bombings.
Wars are started by old men, fought by young ones, but suffered by entire populations. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that a million American servicemen would have lost their lives in an attempt to invade Japan and no one is quite sure how many Japanese civilians and military would have been lost.

The bomb had been called a "nessasary evil" but as one stands in the shadow of the peace dome, one can't help but wonder HAVE we learned anything from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The bombs in the world's nuclear arsenals destroy 10,000 times more "efficiently" than little boy and fat man did. We are just as likely now to engage in armed conflict as we EVER were and truthfully there are many who can't see beyond nationalistic furor which blinds them from seeing the citizens of a country which his own has declared "the enemy" as human.

At the end of the day as I stared out the window of an okonomiyaki restaurant on the other side of a narrow street from the peace dome, all of this ran through my tired mind. How many "peace domes" will the world know 69 years hence?