Dear Michael,
What strand of your balled-up yarn about Race have my eyes not already (Feb. 21 Wespeak) strained to unravel?
Ferguson? That would be Benghazi revisited: ebony Nero fiddled while ebony Ferguson burned. Why? Ask Valerie Jarrett, White House Cardinal Richelieu, with whom Dem Governor Nixon was tete-a-tete the night he ordered the National Guardsmen NOT to come to Ferguson’s rescue. Meanwhile, its mayor’s desperate calls to Nixon’s office were put on hold. A smoking gun? It reeked. What nosy newsy organ you grind for couldn’t smell it? That bunch of quick-draw artists never was quicker to act in response to the triggering challenge: “Go for your clothespin!”
An order of a somewhat different nature WAS heeded, that of Michael Brown’s father: “Burn the bitch down!” And so “the bitch” – good neighbor Brown’s own community of black-owned businesses, homes, and vehicles – was gangbanged while the Guard was ordered to stand down, lest it upset the rotten apples’ cart.
Ferguson is a colorful demonstration of community organizing a la Saul Alinsky, whose mentor was a fellow toddlin’ townie, the scar-faced Cicero Caesar. While the distiller’s clientele would imbibe his bathtub gin, King Saul would imbibe the brass-knuckled worthy’s vintage “organization” and pass it on to another South Sider, a simple Caesar, who sipped his snifter. (Whether he seized his knees and sneezed is a serious question I’ve danced around but found no answer.) Local boy makes good: that sipper is now the Community Organizer and Race-Divider-in-Chief.
He’s also the Intra-Race-Divider-in-Chief…. “WHOA! Monolithic Pictures makes Monolithic Pictures; black vs. black isn’t in the script. Another lapse like that and you’re on the boxcar back to Logjam Creek.” “Lucretia Falls.” “Lucretia Falls?” “The Bard gets around.” “Not around here she doesn’t.” “No problem. I’ll take both her and my log across the tracks to Diversity Pictures.” “Oh, will you now? We’re shutting Diversity down.” “Monolithic owns Diversity?” “And Inclusive.” “Well, I guess I’m up the creek.” “Not yet you’re not; you’re still in, OUR TOWN – get it?” “Got it, you’re a caution. Diversity wasn’t selling?” “It was, but outlived its raison d’etre.” “That being?” “Getting our foot in the door. Once in and in control, we went Inclusive.” “And those opposed to inclusion…” “…have nowhere else to go.” “You’re ALL-inclusive.” “We’re Monolithic. “And what becomes of the Holy Word Diversity?” “It becomes the pox-word Exclusivity. So you can take your log entitled…” “IS FERGUSON BURNING?” “Take your burning log and toss it into the fire. One less…” “Film noir.” “Film noir? This is where I came in.” “Came in?” “I TOLD you, we don’t film black on black; it isn’t DONE.” “I grant you, it isn’t white chalk on the blackboard…” “Make it white racist cops on Ferguson blacks, and we can talk turkey.” “Turkey?! You really want to talk turkey?! Well, it’s YOUR studio.” “Rewrite your log along my lines and Monolithic will give you a starlet secretary to take dictation and work with you through the night.” “Upon my soul, there really IS a heaven on earth!” “And yours for the taking. Now that you’ve got a new angle, you need a new title.” “I give you a classic: FAUST.” “A classic as old as the howls.” “Brevity being the soul of wit, FAUST says a lot in five letters.” “I give you MERDE. It says a lot in five letters too.” “You call yourself Inclusive? Unhallowed be thy name.” “And thine. The name is yours.”
So much for my idle musing. I coulda/shoulda been using the moment to shovel a tender-load of coal and get rolling on my Great American Scream Play (GASP!). When not on my back about it, my muse is on my lap in a lather, rapping: “Seize the momentum!” Gotta run, my boxcar just hove into earshot, so here’s my synopsis – a few words regarding your “WANTED” posters’ most recent escapees, the cops. To catch ’em you’ll have to hippety-hop.
The local cops threaten to cancel the Fundamental Transformer’s best-laid plans to shut the community down and reopen under new management: ventures along the lines of Michael Brown & Company (“Have goon, will travel”). Brown is the martyred worthy whose first name you bartered for “Mike” – no doubt to make “the gentle giant” (as gentle as the Aegean’s one-eyed host of sailor Ulysses) appear more “community-friendly-like.”
Thus sprach our Michael, hack of all trades academic. By reviewing books that no one else would touch, you’ve made yourself the go-to guy on Liberal Education, deconstructionism (i.e., nihilism), the philosophy of history (not Hegel’s but his up-ender’s, followed by brunch: a Western omelet at Comrade Stalin’s – ummmm, good!), and Freud. Instead of risking a scarring crawl through barbed wire into his mental no-man’s-land, you chose to remain at home in “M” (“That’s Me!”) – and pick at the warts on his nose.
Back to the calculated play of the fiddler. If keeping the lid on a stew pot like Ferguson is local law enforcement’s first order of business, HIS first order of business would be to skewer and then remove it (the one firm stitch in the social fabric threatened by the grist for crime statistics) from the scene of the crime.
King James to the rescue: “And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel…. putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him…into the wilderness. And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities….”
Chiming in, you dub the cops “racists.” I’m appalled. If you were a salient writer adept at riding the swells while guiding the wheel, instead of a canting cantor adrift in the wail boat, you could have cast the typical – make that stereotypical – copper badger as a saw-toothed beast, an ogre who answers to “Claude” and beats his wife with a red hot poker. (Thank you, Tootie’s evoker, Sally Benson.)
Nor are the cops your only bull’s-eyed goats…. “Zeke, I ain’t never come acrost a bull’s eyed goat.” “The schoolyard bully breeds ’em up on his animal farm.” “Pshaw!” “I reckon it waren’t him.” As I was about to say, the all-male frats are the goats you’ve most recently loaded up and sent packing. Vis-à-vis the Deke House, you’re giving an Oscar-winning reprise of CASABLANCA’s Major Strasser addressing Captain Reynault: “You’re ordered to close this place immediately.” “But I have no reason.” “Find one.” And win or lose in the court of law, your Captain Reynault will be paid right well, and what the hell? it’s only the dumb alumnis’ money.
King James continues: “And he that let go the goat for the scapegoat shall wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh in water…” Michael, don’t forget to scrub behind your ears.
What, you’re back on the poop?! You’d better get down below: loose canon Charles Barkley is on a roll:
“Cops are absolutely awesome…This notion that cops are out there killing black men is ridiculous….to be burning people’s property, burning police cars, looting people’s stores, that is 100% ridiculous….We as black people, we have a lot of crooks. We can’t just wait until something like (the Brown shooting) happens. We have to look at ourselves in the mirror. There is a reason that they racially profile us in the way they do.”
Michael, SAY something.
“I can’t say enough about the students, and this is why: they’re AWEsome! And my students in Film Studies are REALLY awesome!”
The mind reels.