My All Over the Place Rant… Beware, there be Dragons here

It’s 0330 dark of the morning and I’m listening to Disaster-Piece’s IT FOLLOWS film score on CD (not something I would particularly recommend if you are in the house by yourself at this time of night), and I’m thinking…we are all adrift in the fields of the Lord.

That’s what I’m thinking.

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00VVXI6OM&asins=B00VVXI6OM&linkId=1b8d103b7ed03e858c8fa2f81d7154b1&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00T797A7G&asins=B00T797A7G&linkId=09100956e6c681e5a52471da886eb618&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

And I’m thinking of Carlos Castaneda and a Yaqui Indian called Don Juan and truths and fictions, and how the one becomes the other and the other the one.

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0671600419&asins=0671600419&linkId=c3085c20cd7051e3f72e832fa38581df&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

I’m thinking of the quality of person that would have actually voted for Resident Trump and be not ashamed.

I think the clinical term would be somewhere between fool and sociopath.

I’m thinking of seas relatively unspoiled by man, and islands far from this benighted shore.

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B006ZR4PKS&asins=B006ZR4PKS&linkId=dac6676eef857101143bb863de30f2ba&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

I think…

I think there are other worlds…

but this one is not quite done with me.

I think of duty and honor and truth and justice and loyalty, words co-opted by the venal to keep a nation of young men killing and dying and being mutilated and maimed for the 1%ers’ Dubai pleasure nations.

I’m listening to track 9 of IT FOLLOWS, the stereo panning in my Avanti Headphones, is working for me. Left, right… left, right. My brain relaxes, and formulates something beyond questions and answers.

It is a truly brilliant album, to accompany one of the standout horror films so far this 21st century.

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00VAVNN5W&asins=B00VAVNN5W&linkId=8bb07cc0ab9f7f6f08db6c0c2ab28260&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

I’m thinking I can’t get down with media lynchings, especially by a notoriously untrustworthy and historically lynching obsessed nation as America. So the more they tell me to demonize anyone, whether a Cosby or Simpson or insert famous Black male target of the day, the more I have to question it. In a world full of evils to fight, it’s funny to me how the press never tackles the evil that really controls and infects their viewers lives.

Like the evil of Pharmaceutical companies that are getting rich selling you not ready for human use drugs that have more dangerous side-effects than the conditions they are created to combat. “Oh you have acne, oh use our product, but oh, it might sterilize or kill you. Heehee… but we told you up front so we’re not liable.”

No you pieces of offal, that’s not how it works, if someone buys a hamburger from me and it is laced with arsenic, that may make them very sick or kill them, that’s called attempted murder. Even if the burger was a good tasting burger, did its advertised job, side effects of food poisoning and possible death are not acceptable or allowable risks to eating a hamburger.

So that burger is not ready for human sale or consumption and is recalled, pulled from the market.

The pharmaceutical companies instead market you these not ready for human usage products, and lawyer up against their products being filled with arsenic.

The actions that would get an individual arrested for attempted murder, these companies are using to get rich on the sick and desperate . Now that is something the press should for 3 decades be raging against. Not a suspect celebrity murder case, and not an even more vacuous charge of sexual assault.

So when the press avoid the crimes of their rich corporate sponsors and overlords instead to pile on with, ‘what Black celebrity can we pull down today’, well that’s a train I’m not going to board, and that is a Dachau I’m not going to populate.

There are lots of racist cops walking around free that have committed worse crimes than either Simpson or Cosby have been accused of. There are lots of you judging them, Cosby, Simpson,… that should be wary of casting that first stone.

Simpson I don’t care about, except that the fact of a white owned media embroiled in demonizing him over 2 decades after his acquittal shows clearly the new face of lynch mobs. We have young men and women coming back from parts of the world we didn’t even know we were still fighting in… damaged, and having damaged, for reasons that stink of lies, and true evil, and rather than the press demonize the real monsters that fill our nightly news with blood, they want to waste energy on cases that in the scheme of things while significant to the families of the victim and the families of the accused, to the larger body of society, are not of import.

As far as Cosby, Cosby I was raised on, and in a world that would have you be less, he was one of the ones breaking barriers and opening doors so that a whole generation of young Black men and women could be more. There are very few people drawing breath on this planet that can claim to have done the good that Bill Cosby has done, and if you can not equal a man’s good, you are unfit to judge his evil.

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B0012EBV88&asins=B0012EBV88&linkId=9d86f23800eafe4fc0c0fab399f112a4&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00IU6HQ4O&asins=B00IU6HQ4O&linkId=2db2a8a3a2bbfa7ba278c21eddd12aab&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00ZGRMTLA&asins=B00ZGRMTLA&linkId=1ab329f97b2ed47a47fdafffbc6be50f&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B007RMQ56M&asins=B007RMQ56M&linkId=0af6da5bd1cdee7362fd6d4958e77369&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=herotime-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B01GWC8WTU&asins=B01GWC8WTU&linkId=1cc582a5f56afce9364838b3f3df927f&show_border=false&link_opens_in_new_window=false&price_color=333333&title_color=0066c0&bg_color=ffffff

If he committed a crime, that is to be determined in a court of law.

But a man’s falling down does not erase his standing up, including the many times he stood up for a castigated people. So to take arms against him now is beyond ungrateful, it is cowardice of the highest order.

To let yourself be so crudely used, in this war of Black and White.

Now transitioning to another rant…

Why is local autonomy in nearly every walk of life being replaced by autonomy of these very few companies and oligarchies and families.

Once a blockbuster movie meant not only the studios did well but the regional independent local theater did well. These days theaters are mostly studio owned, so we have this incestuous chain of the studios getting paid in every part of the process, and local economies are obliterated by it. Reduced to only the most minuscule piece of the proverbial pie.

AVENGERS makes a billion Dollars, I don’t really care.

I care that it is or isn’t a good movie, but do I care if a Billion dollar studio make more millions and billions? Not in the least.

As it stands now these studios such as Disney and Fox and Warner Brothers (pieces of larger snakes) should have been broken up years ago and their anti-competitive and local economy suppressing monopolies ended decades ago.

The best thing that could happen to America is a nation where all the Disney Properties, most of which are over 50 years old went into the public domain where they belong so everyone can legally make money off of them and be enriched by them.

An America without the endless shadow of Disney and its lie of family values would suit me fine.

The album is over, the clock has moved on, and my rant…

My all over the place rant… ended.

For now.

“Come back and throw stones later, Mother will be more receptive”

—LION IN WINTER

Netflix/Marvel Studios 2017 IRON FIST Episode #1 Review!

---

---

---

---

---

The last of the long awaited DEFENDERS heroes, IRON FiST breaks on the Netflix shores this Weekend, and my opinion? Well After Loving the first season of DAREDEVIL with some minor hiccups in the later episodes, Really enjoying JESSICA JONES, being Lukewarm on the 2^nd season of DAREDEVIL, and LOVING Hodari Coker’s LUKE CAGE: POWERMAN, I find the first episode of IRON FIST… underwhelming.

 

The trailers were the first hiccup as I found them tedious rather than exciting, and tedium is not what you expect from what should be a Martial Arts rich show. The action looked unimpressive, and the casting, especially of the protagonist gave me cause for concern. He looked unimpressive rather than what he should be… a living weapon.

But trailers can steer you wrong, and hoping to be proven wrong I watch the first episode of IRON FIST. What hits you is the opening sequence, one thing all the Marvel/Netflix collaborations have gotten right is an absolutely great opening/credit sequence. The IRON FIST opening sequence by comparison looks like an unfinished product, a bad joke. An unfocused concept that they simply ran out of time and ended up just throwing something together.

 

 

Getting beyond the disappointment of the Credit Sequence, I like the opening shot of the barefoot hero in New York, a shout out to the Master of Kung Fu Comic’s of the 70s.

 

Quirky but in reality do you know how impossibly disgusting it would be to walk around the streets of New York or any major city in your bare feet?! There are things I fear to step on, even with shoes on. But again it’s a harmless if ludicrous call back to the comics of yesteryear.

 

What immediately impresses me is how much better Finn Jones is as Danny Rand, than the trailers hinted at. He has a likable and commanding presence, that is at the heart of the character, and he is choreographed to move with an effortless balletic grace that speaks volumes of his character and journey.

 

 

Indeed, Jones as Danny Rand is pretty much, contrary to my thoughts on the trailer, rather than being the weakest thing about the show, in this episode he is the strongest thing. He is very affable, which above all is the saving grace of his character, and in many ways distances him from the other more brooding members of the Defenders.

With the exception of Luke Cage, who beneath his bullet proof skin has, like Danny Rand, the heart of an optimist and a poet. Unlike the bone breaking Daredevil or the oft alcoholic and fatalist Jessica Jones, Power Man and Iron Fist don’t want to hurt their fellow man, they want to help them, make them better; Even, if possible, their villains. It’s why those two work so well as a duo in the comics. Particularly the wonderful David Walker and Sanford Green POWERMAN AND IRONFIST comics that started in 2016.

 

Finn Jones gets the character of Danny Rand, The Iron Fist. Underneath the affable nature of Jones portrayal, there is something you see in his first closeup (when he is trying to get in to be seen) a core of steel, something unyielding that completely sells him in a way the trailer did not.

So the Danny Rand portion of the first episode works well, it is a lot of setup, and I don’t mind setup, if it is done well, and written well, and brought across well, I thought the first two epiosdes of LUKE CAGE, which some considered talky, I felt were two of the finest written hours of television of 2016.

ASIDE ON  LUKE CAGE SERIES AND COLOR CODED TELEVISION

(I’m about to get deep into media bias, particularly as it relates to ethnicity, so feel free to skip the following aside, the ending of it is marked, and continue on with the Iron Fist review)

 

Coker’s LUKE CAGE said wonderful truths that you usually don’t get with ethnic characters, because mostly ethnic characters on television are nothing more than Black faces spouting and reaffirming White messages . Messages which whether BUFFY or SUPERGIRL Season 2 or DOCTOR WHO or NEXT GENERATION all tend to be some variation on the wish fulfillment of its writers or worse the unconscious coded messages that they unknowing have accepted as truths, namely White female initially falls for Ethnic Character than comes to her senses and dumps him for a White character.

If that plotline plays out in one show, that’s fine, that’s life, stuff happens. However, if that plot-line plays out in every single show where a white female is romantically tied to a man of color, then that is no longer sharp, inventive writing, or originality, it is programming, played over and over again until we stop seeing it, but keep believing it.

In Hodari Coker’s LUKE CAGE you got writing that was shorn of that very racist programming that makes up 90% of the shows we see on TV, and the output of even our best writers. By no measure do I think Joss Whedon is racist, however he reuses the above pattern of racial politics when it comes to the romantic lives of the men of color he scripts from FIREFLY to BUFFY to AGENTS OF SHIELD to AGENT CARTER. At some point any romantic light he casts the men of color he scripts, any momentum to a healthy heterosexual relationship, particularly with a female of another ethnicity has to be derailed. Their identification as a sexual alpha, derailed. Mac on AGENTS OF SHIELD becomes comedy relief, rather than what he should be on that show… the Mac.

And like I said you would be hard pressed to not see this very strange repetition of sexual marginalization and symbolic castration (fit to be comedy relief or the non-threatening buddy or father figure but not the romantic interest) occur over and over to men of color in just about every dramatic show you can name, particularly the action oriented ones. Whether BUFFY, AGENT CARTER, AGENTS OF SHIELD, NEXT GENERATION, ER, ROSEWOOD, SUPERGIRL, FIREFLY.  Such bias extends even to our news and ‘reality programming’, the fact that over 20 years later the media is still lynching OJ Simpson (A famous Black man accused of murdering a white woman) while in the intervening years there has been no shortage of murdered spouses. However this particular case accomplishes familiar goals of America, the tearing down of idols, the vilification of the other, and a platform to use an individual act, to try to send a message to a whole mass of people. It’s a lynching, writ large, 20th and 21st century style.

And by contrasts it has been envogue for the last 20 years to pair White Males successfully with women of color, pair being perhaps too equal a term, more like have the woman of color fling herself at the White Male, whether that’s FLASH, JAMES BOND, WALKING DEAD, TAKEN, EMERALD CITY, and again a couple of times it is just original storytelling, but for this pattern to be a constant over the last 20 years, then that is something else, that is programming.

 

So I’m always drawn to the shows that eschew these programming ploys, these repeated coded messages. So that is why I hold shows like LUKE CAGE in such high regard. A show where a man of color, a Black man, can be a hero and get the girl, full stop. It’s a rare concept in a mass media that is so racist it is not aware of how rare they have by design, made that concept.

Name me ten Dramatic shows (not comedies) on TV right now where a lead character of color, is in a successful healthy relationship with a female, particularly of another ethnic group. You’d be hard pressed to name 2. But you can name dozens upon dozens of shows that are cast and written the other way. Even though statistics tell us there are far more Black Male/White female relationships than White Male/Black Female relationships.

So why would the fiction of mass media be so contrary and completely out of sync with the realities of the populations watching those fictions? Because invariably the writers, who mostly are white males, propagate their limited definitions of diversity while also crafting their wish fulfillment, which usually breaks down to our White Hero is ‘so enlightened’ because he deigns to have a Black girlfriend, and the Black Girlfriend who has to throw herself at him.

Like I said, once or twice, it is original, however all the time, the same way, it is programming and it is insulting.

 

END OF ASIDE

Hodari Coker’s LUKE CAGE : POWER MAN brilliantly gave us something more than the programming we have been used to, showed us Netflix as a channel where more original and more truly DIVERSE stories could be told.

It left big foot prints for the next show, IRON FIST, to follow in.

And without expecting IRON FIST to be ground breaking, or anti- stereotype and ANTI programming, I did expect it to be good.

Unfortunately the first episode of IRON FIST suffers because its lack of action is not compensated for by rich and compelling characters, or evocative acting. Case in point… Ward and his father.

There is nothing more derailing to a narrative, than a weak antagonist, and unfortunately in Ward and his Father you have two very boring and uninteresting and cookie cutter antagonists. Ward came off as just a petulant child, a whiner, and whiners do not make for great TV.

The scene with Ward and his Dad discussing Danny Rand, rather than riveting is the definition of tedious. I had to look at the clock, to see how much time was left before I could watch something else.

That is never what you want to be doing when watching a show, looking at your clock.

So,  between the pacing issues, and the casting issues, and the uninteresting bad guys, I’m solidly unexcited to move on to the next episode. And that’s not an issue I have had with the previous shows.

I hope to work my way through the series and all the way to the end, and I hope I can report it gets great, but for the first episode all I can give it is a …

Grade: C-

 

Currently Listening to : Nate Parker’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION (2016) The Inspired by Album

This is a really odd post, it starts as a nice, fluffy love letter to an album I’m completely loving, and at the end goes completely off the rails and becomes a tirade.

I would say, read the warm, fluffy part, and leave the tirade alone. Especially if you know nothing about the Nate Parker controversy, or better yet care nothing for it.

I’ll give you ample warning when to stop reading.

Not sure where it came from, but it came.

My ire, and disgust with the media.

But it came.

And I thought it was honest, not necessarily right, but it was honest and deserved its say. So I left it.

You have been warned.

I think what Nate Parker is doing with BIRTH OF A NATION, a hundred years after DW Griffith’s love song to racism by the same title, is nothing short of inspired. The audacity of it, the brilliance, the balls of it, Something Percival Everett does wonderfully in literature, overturning assumptions, and re-appropriating those parts of our shared consciousness, our story, that we have relegated too long… to the worst angels of our nature.

I can’t wait to see the movie when it breaks on wide release. It sounds completely on my page. However I haven’t seen the movie so the jury’s out, but I have listened to the soundtrack, and… I LOVE IT!!!!

LOVE IT!!!

To listen to this one album was reason enough to sign up for Spotify.

And speaking of Spotify, how did I get involved with it?

Well I’m not at all a social media type. But I like things that enrich us and after a month of using Spotify I have to say… I’m feeling enriched.

This is going to sound hyperbolic. And maybe it is. I’m too close, I can’t say. I can only say I’m listening to THE BIRTH OF A NATION as I write this and I’m feeling… thankful.

I think as we get older, and side-tracked by adult concerns, one thing that falls by the wayside, is our time to enjoy and follow and discover music. And I think that moving away from that discovery of new sounds, new voices, new visions, new wonders to buoy our souls, is when we begin to die,

I know, extreme.

But bear with me.

What if the world began with a song, and will end with one.

What if all we are is notes, in some unfathomable composition.

That would mean that what we feed on more than food is music. And it would mean what we starve for lack of, more than food, is music.

The lack of it, the relinquishing of it, perhaps just a little death.

A little death we let wedge its tip into our hearts.

And widen, till everything we are… escapes.

So I’m finding SPOTIFY, with its easy ability to allow me to find and listen to this music I would otherwise not find or find time for…I’m finding it, in my emotional state of listening to THE BIRTH OF A NATION, I’m finding it… of great value.

That said MP3 is great for sampling music, and SPOTIFY is great for introducing me to music, but great music deserves to be listened to on the highest quality CD you can find. I’ve spent a month on SPOTIFY and I have bought easily a couple hundred dollars in CDs.

I’d like to buy BIRTH OF A NATION but unfortunately it is not yet available on CD. But when it is, it’s going on constant rotation in my portable cd player.

It is that good.

 

 

“When they say make America great again, they mean make us all slaves again.”— WAR Nas

“No matter if you’re red, white, black, if you want freedom, then we’re all like Nat!”— WAR Nas

 

OKAY STOP READING HERE!!!! Beyond this place, like the old maps once said… “There be Dragons!” I’m bat guano ranting in the next section, and it goes strange quickly, so if strange is not your friend, stop reading NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Oh and if you have a problem with Nate Parker, and are part of this new spate of using the media to lynch Black Men before trial, be it Bill Cosby or Nate Parker, or really going back 20 years to OJ Simpson, eff you and the horse you rode in on.

“Oh, but they are guilty, they did this, they did that.”

Then let a court prove it. Not the news, not talk shows, not soap boxes.

I don’t stand with lynch mobs, whether you wear a white hood and a shotgun, or a TV camera and a microphone.

Because for a lynch mob it’s never about innocence or guilt, it’s about creating an atmosphere of fear and horror and distrust, so they can sell a message, usually to keep a certain demographic in line.

Me, I’m not the message buying type. In a Nation where less than a hundred years ago, thousands of Black men (many of them war heroes) were lynched by ‘god fearing’ ‘people’ I’ll side with Black ‘villains’ before I side with a biased lynch mob media, everyday of the week, and twice on Sunday.

If they are guilty try them in the courts. Do not effing try them on your TV program, or radio show, or ‘news’ show, or at the water cooler, or on your lynching scaffold.

Until you’ve done the good of a Bill Cosby, or a Nate Parker, or even an OJ Simpson; don’t presume to judge their evil. That’s for a court room… your soul is not sinless enough for the task.

I say again…

Your soul… Christian, or Muslim, or Jew, or Hindu… is not sinless enough for the task.

I think any Presidential candidate you can name has done more evil than all three of those men combined. The pursuit of power is a bloody road, and the achieving of it even more so.

You kill one person (allegedly) they call you what, OJ? 🙂 You kill thousands of people, they call you Reagan or Bush.

Save your hate for mass murderers, but for other flawed men, and for yourself, pray to be better.

That is the justice of honest men, who are wise enough to know, there… but for the grace of God… go I.

 

Woah… that came out of nowhere.

But hey, that’s what you can expect in a nation that is honestly considering Trump for the highest office in the land. Derision. :).

God keep you all from rage, and keep you all from harm, and most of all god keep you from the folly of thinking you are bloody better than the poor slobs the media chooses to lynch today.

Amen.

If you like this crazy post, or just like the blog, support by checking out and purchasing the following cool and recommended items!

Sylvania SDVD7029 7″ Portable DVD Player-Swivel Screen (Certified Refurbished)
Kids these days, in this age of MP3s and Itunes and Spotify have no idea what CDs are, or how good they can sound. For $40 you can give them the gift of not only a portable CD player, but a portable DVD player.

But it’s as the former, a portable CD player, that currently interests us. In addition to the portable player you want to get them a couple CDs to play on it, and I recommend the following two:

It Follows (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) I really enjoyed IT FOLLOWS and the soundtrack on CD is equally brilliant, and stands on its own as just engaging and creepy and addictive listening experience.At once an influenced work, yet highly original in its own right, and sure to be influential. Disasterpeace hits a homerun with this score. Nice use of stereo imaging. Highly Recommended.

Sinister (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) – I’m not a wimp, and am a huge fan of a variety of scores, especially the dark, strange ones, but I have to say this Christopher Young score is on a level all its own. I find it truly disturbing, and yes… scary. A huge achievement, and essential listening!

Azend Group Corp BDP-M1061 Maxmade Portable 10-Inch Blu-Ray DISC/DVD Player (Black)

Sony S1500RF Multi System Region Free Blu-Ray Disc DVD Player

Random Thoughts: O.J. Simpson 1994-2008

Random Thoughts.

OJ Simpson.

Here’s the thing. We either live in a land of laws or we don’t. By the law, and through the malfeasance of the law (racist cop, planted evidence etc), OJ Simpson over a decade ago was found not guilty of the murder of his wife.

Now you can have your opinions on that, but at the end of the day the case was not proved. There was messy, muddled doubt.

And yet in the nearly 15 years (can you believe it’s been that long?) since, not a day has gone by where OJ has not been subjected to a continuous media trial. Oj, his children, his friends.

I think of those kids a lot, and what these years must have been for them. Imagine for a second that OJ is not guilty, can you imagine what we owe them?

What the world owes them?

And imagine for a second he is, and we still owe them just as much, because the media has taken a private tragedy, and made it into a public crown of thorns for these kids to wear. A crown of thorns disproportionate to the crime.

In that same time we have had and continue to have serial killings, bombings, mass murders, heinous acts beyond the number, and yet the media chooses to offer disproportionate coverage and caustic commentary on this case.

Why?

Anyone’s murder is a tragedy, but people of color get killed every single day and it usually doesn’t even make the newspaper much less the television. And it definitely isn’t a topic of conversation for 15 years.

Yet here we have a famous Black personality, and a dead white Woman. If his wife, who was murdered was Black, given all the mysterious circumstances, would we still be talking about this case 15 years later?

I don’t think so.

Would we have been talking about it then? The around the clock coverage? No. We wouldn’t have. It would have been a media flash in the pan at best.

Instead of what it became, and what it is…

A very public lynching.

A media led lynching, that I really feel had less to do with a dead White woman, then making an example out of a successful live Black man.

I’m saying the mindsets that led to the unspeakable demise of 14 year old Emmett Till, going on 54 years ago, for whistling at a white woman are still very much alive in the actions of people who dispense the law, people who cover the law, and people who preside over the law. And such mindsets color the impartial dispensing of justice.

(A brief aside: To show you how much these mindsets are still with us, the grave of Emmett Till was recently defiled. Here, this year in 2008, not in 1955; as if not enough was done to him in life, even in death there are twisted things, old hates of the fathers, that still inhabit empty sons)

So here is the thing.

I will never side with the public lynching of a person of color. Not OJ, not Wesley Snipes, not Marion Jones, not Michael Vick. Because the common thread I’m seeing… is that the rabid media coverage of the “fall” of famous people of color, is disproportionate to their supposed crimes.

People were discussing Michael Vick at the same time a renegade President was blowing the hell out of half the hemisphere, shoveling people into concentration camps, and ripping up the bill of rights, ripping up your right to be.

But you know what , the media wanted no part of that. They wanted no part of true, and staggering crimes. So they create a blood sport, a feeding frenzy around Michael Vick. Who really was not important enough, given what was happening in the world and the nation, to be taking up my news time.

He was a diversion, from real issues, and I resent that. He was something to keep the rabble busy, while real issues that affect people’s lives go unreported and unchallenged.

The courts have become the new Roman Coliseums and people of color are once more the Christians being fed to the lions, for the sake of keeping a dumb mob occupied.

So with yesterday’s sentencing of OJ, after almost 15 years of riding a man’s every turn, yet another Roman mob is appeased.

So I am not saying there should not be a fitting response for crime, but I am saying determining guilt and innocence and appropriate punishment becomes difficult when both sides bring differing levels of respect to the table.

I do not believe in all white Juries (increasingly the fashion), and white judges, being able to offer anything close to justice… to people of color. Just like I do not believe in the Israelis being able to, with parity or humanity, occupy Palestine.

I believe an occupying force is always a destructive thing, and justice and law can only be cultivated from within a group, and can not be imposed from without.

Not long. And Not well.

What begins to happen is under pressure, you create resistance. And the more pressure you apply, the more resistance you create.

People in this nation are increasingly under pressure. Pressure by an unjust system. And the ramifications of pressure finally released… is not good.

And too often a still very Jim Crow system, masquerading as integration when what it really is, is oversight, exacerbates the problem. Deepens it. Because at least in the days of Jim Crow, people of color had their own news outlets, their own farms, their own markets.

Now we rely on a system of talking heads, that no one trusts… to dispense justice.

I don’t think there is any Justice in yesterday’s sentencing of OJ Simpson. Malice? yes. Vindictiveness? yes. The particulars of the case for which they want to give him prison time, are quite patently absurd. What he was really convicted for and sentenced for… was a Murder he was found Not Guilty of, over a decade ago.

Did OJ kill his wife?

I do not know. A court of law said no. And unfortunately there was too much tampering of the evidence by the LAPD to argue with that verdict.

So I don’t know if he killed his wife. But I don’t know if a lot of people committed crimes. I don’t know the crimes of my neighbors or the crimes of those of you reading this. And my world keeps turning.

But by the rules of the game, the game of law, he should not be taking up my TV time anymore.

But like I said, it’s been a vendetta to get him, for going on 15 years.

I can not speak on OJ’s crimes, I can not see them. And I can not see yours. But I grew up on OJ Simpson’s good. There was no more loved personality, than this Football player turned actor. I’ve never liked the American past time of turning on our idols, relishing their fall.

I don’t know how to turn on someone I like, not easy. Not while there is doubt. And I do not know, know will I ever learn, how to relish a person’s fall.

I wrote the following back in 1994, in response to someone’s attack on an even-handed article about the just arrested OJ Simpson. It was published in the paper, and I think it is still valid:

“—— is disgusted because in a hero-less time we seek to remember our heroes. And whatever else OJ was or is, in his public life he was a hero. And if ——– has never committed the evils of OJ Simpson, neither has she ever come close to equaling the good. And in the final analysis she is unequal to the task of judging him.

—— must understand that none of us are saints and most are sinners, and the best we can do in this life is hope the good we do outweighs the evil. I don’t know if OJ Simpson is guilty or innocent…. If guilty I weep for the man OJ Simpson has become, but will always remember this accused wife beater, this accused murderer, as a bolt of lightning rushing down the field breaking tackles, breaking records. I will always remember him as a man who for one moment in time gave us all something to cheer about.”

So I personally would like to see the sentence appealed as the punishment OJ Simpson is getting, is disproportionate to the stated crime. He is being sentenced for a crime for which he has already been found, Not guilty.

And that is not… justice.