Timothy Dolan, the latest New York archbishop has been installed and immediately as the whole city cheers – he makes it clear, it’s business as usual but he’ll try to conduct church business perhaps in a different tone.

Maybe I’ve been to too many executive leadership conferences but archbishop Dolan has the personal style of a CEO, doesn’t he?

Troubling.  

At least he had the good sense to let the Prayer of the Faithful include an Igbo speaking Nigerian woman who climbed up to the altar in a gele and must’ve taken aback a good number of those Catholics of European descent who just don’t understand what their priests have been up to for the last 100 or so years. Would’ve liked to have seen the look on that creep Giuliani’s face at that moment. Sure he was surprised someone let her in.

At any rate, I sobbed into my hands when tenor Ronan Tynan sang Ave Maria. I was born and raised a Catholic –  though I no longer am. And this hymn still brings me to tears.  Some things never change.

Or do they?

Can Dolan and eerie groups like the National Organization for Marriage be successful in stopping gay couples in New York from marrying? And if so, what is it that they’re trying to stop from happening exactly?

I don’t see how two gay people who are in love, who want to settle down together and possibly even raise children are a threat to society. I thought our societal aversion to gay culture was that it was not rooted in family. Well, more and more it’s trying be. Isn’t this what everyone wants?

If the Catholic church is truly concerned about making sure that marriage is being kept sacred, I can think of communities teeming with heterosexuals having children out of wedlock as if there’s no such thing, who are completely in need of some help.

Wouldn’t it make greater sense for the church to positively promote marriage worldwide rather than trying to stop it?

If the belief that homosexuality is a sin is what the archbishop is so steadfastly trying to enforce,  perhaps he should begin with his own priesthood.

There are many Catholics current and former who are increasingly incapable of suspending disbelief that this vast culture of celibate men and women that comprise the church are really truly that and not a sexually frustrated religious body.

I applaud Governor Paterson. He’s right. This is the civil rights issue of our time. To say that, does not – as some African-Americans fear – mean that the black Civil Rights struggle is being minimized or somehow gentrified.

If gay people were aliens who suddenly landed in spaceships from outer space, this paranoia would make sense.  But all of us work and live peacefully, if not enjoyably alongside gay people every damned day and have done so since forever.

According to statistics, there are lots of us who harbor some fundamental resentment anyway and are ‘against’ our gay neighbors, family members and colleagues having the same rights we do.

Excuse the space ship talk, but I find that strange and a bit scary.

In Najla’s kitchen the other day, Najla, while preparing dinner for me and a couple of friends who hadn’t arrived yet, reminded me that it’s foolish for me to not consider marrying Wael, a journalist friend of hers from back home who wants U.S. citizenship so bad he’ll pay me enough to make the whole venture worth my time.

I don’t believe that marriage should be a business – least of all an illegal one.  It’s something very serious, very emotional and I’ve told her this every time she’s brought it up. She always gets quiet immediately afterwards as if I’m being holier than thou and need to get real – but the other day, she said something that offended me:

“You’re lucky. You were born here.”

I know that Najla is very proud of her cultural and national origins. In a few minutes, her apartment would flood with friends of hers from her country and their kids who will use the language of their homeland with each other, who even having lived in the US after a number of years, mostly socially interact with each other, their notion of being an American based on it seems having access to jobs and services that don’t exist back home.

So I know that Najla wasn’t undermining her origins when she referred to me as the lucky one.

But she was undermining mine. Because she was saying that being an American is just a matter of paperwork that I could sign off on to share the wealth or not.

I’ve never felt so arbitrary.

But it’s not just Najla, it’s so many of my friends, Hicham, a cool Moroccan contractor I know who ‘just wants to make enough money so he can get the hell out of here’ or my French friend Fatima who hasn’t been around for more than a year but who likes to take both fists and gesture as if she’s squeezing water from a sponge to portray the US quality of life.

OK, in an economic crisis like the sort we’re in, the numbers are very important. But just focusing on numbers alone does not address the dilemma of being an American today.

In fact, it’s this notion of America being a mega grab bag that all we have to do is refill to restore, that causes this cynicism.

Increasingly, whole communities full of memories are being erased.

The southernmost area of Harlem becomes ‘Soha.’ Instant neighborhoods like this are invented in every major city eliminating real neighborhoods rich with urban history.   

Surging numbers of people enter the U.S. every day with the popular conclusion being that if this constant social churning feeds the economy, it’s healthy.  I’m not convinced of that. I’ve seen blocks transition from one ethnic group to another.  It’s seldom this natural wave that pundits who live in static, affluent communities, say it is.  Afterwards, you wonder where people and stores are that are gone, filled with nostalgia and loss.

There are those who say Obama bent over too far during the G20 – see that obsequious bow to King Abdullah for an embarrassing example – but I feel like he’s trying, really trying to get the point across that America’s not just an economic and military empire, not just a dropper of bombs or a revolving door for the world’s work force, but a country with a heart and soul.

Everyone agrees his eight day tour of the world was a success in this regard, but now let’s see if this case can be made right here, at home — or have I become too much of an irrelevant spectator to refer to this country with such familiarity?

So, Barack and Michelle are sweeping through Europe like the black John Steed and Emma Peel. Can’t you see Michelle next in a spandex cat suit with those dangerously arched eyebrows, brandishing a swishy sword?

Watching the rage filled crowds with cries of ‘eat the rich’ on the streets of the UK, I was — as always worried at how routinely life goes on stateside even as we lose our homes, jobs, savings.  If American democracy has a pulse, guess it’s reflected in those poll numbers always flatlining our TVs.

Good thing we have a leader that can passionately emote. Barack’s press conference at the ExCel Center following the G20 summit was unbelievable.

I almost didn’t pay it any mind because I had a million things to do, but Barack drew me in. Made me listen. 

I am slightly ashamed to admit this but it’s official: I adore our President the way some women adore certain Hollywood actors and sports stars.

I love Barack and Thursday just took my enfatuation with him to new heights because it felt so much like an intimate chat between the two of us that had nothing to do with my eyes or lips or any of that nonsense former significant others have narrowed me down to to distract me from the missing bigger picture. 

He discussed the plans he was making with heads of state around the world to protect my financial stability from any future funny stuff.  He spoke in behalf of me as a woman with her own distinctive interests that he was appointed and ready to defend – oh with such deep throated sincerity by the way — but whose range of opportunities he was expanding on globally in as much as the rest of the world was ready to meet us halfway.

The opposite of inspiring, that morning I had ridden the subway in a car with just a few people doing a reverse commute away from Manhattan, two of them a younger but not quite young black man and woman. The woman was pregnant, just showing, her hand unsurely on her rounded belly the whole ride.  

The man had this ultra diesel sitting posture, legs and elbows spread wide, meticulous corn rows spilling down his shoulders that some woman, perhaps the one sitting beside him had toiled over for who knows how long.

Everything about him spoke of this sense of entitlement that trumped the worried looking woman next to him as well as their unborn child. At one point when the woman who apparently was not his wife mentioned that she didn’t want her child to have a different last name than she did, he slung his big, strong arm around her small, frail shoulder and gave her a lecture on ‘not caring what other people think’ the whole time he asserted ownership over her emotionally and physically, masterfully disowning her socially and economically.

You didn’t need a crystal ball to know that this woman’s future as a mom was going to heavily rely on state help, state enforced child support payments and maybe even a phone call or two to 911.

When the two of them stepped off the train, an elderly woman next to me rolled her eyes in the air at what we had both witnessed, not because we had never seen such a thing before but because we had both seen so much of it, see so much of it every day.

I understand that Mr. Wonderful may have not grown up in a home with a father who was kind to his own mother or had had no father around at all, but what I don’t understand is a masculinity so trifling it’s at odds with its own legacy which is what that woman and child under the right conditions offered him.

Anyway, see Beyonce’s new film Obsession with a white female homewrecker as the fave scapegoat for the stressed out sexual politik of black men and women — or grab the one you’re with to waltz in the romantic  glow of this long overdue first couple of ours, Barack, who also grew up fatherless yet models a manliness that’s as graceful as it is strong, and Michelle, a jazzy dynamo confidently exemplifying the virtues of being a black wife and mom for all the whole world to behold!

I was over the sink, washing dishes the other day when of all things, I wondered how Mariem was doing.

Mariem was a fiery Latina Republican who I worked alongside for TWO, I repeat TWO years which included the last very fierce campaign for President in which her ugly world view was this inescapable background noise in the office I tried in vain to block out day to day.

She’d quote Karl Rove and Sean Hannity after reading the latest headlines on her computer screen, turning a professional space into her own personal right wing podium, in these sudden hostile outbursts, egging on the politically like minded around her to join in the most miserly, bigoted, cynical little tete a tetes that would make smoke fume from my ears.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I complained about her during a meeting with a couple of higher ups. Instead of them showing the slightest bit of interest, they recited clichés about team spirit that left me wondering  (like I always do before I quit a job), if my financial stability was as important as my mental health.  

One night, upon leaving the office, Mariem appeared in front of me on the street and began to rant and rave about how much she distrusted upper management, hated our company. When she was done venting, she offered me her hand and clasped mine as if we were comrades in some worker’s revolution.

From that moment on, every day at noon, she’d ask me if I felt like having lunch together. She’d ask with a grimace as if she expected me to ignore her or say ‘no,’ which for a while I did. One day, I decided to join her and the next thing I knew, it became a regular routine.

Was it a cheap thrill? Were we re-inventing or betraying ourselves? How was it possible that I was able to sit with such an evil witch at small tables for two every day and enjoy my salad?

One answer may be that Mariem’s cell phone chats with her sister had the same intensity and tone as those with mine. Sometimes, in fact, when she’d end a super hyper sisterly chat with Lorena, it would seem as if the same breathless confidence would continue between us and vice versa.

We were both inspired and moved by this similarity without ever really acknowledging it, our lunches often becoming this super personal time in the course of the very impersonal business day where I could expect Mariem to insist that ‘I eat some steak or a burger for my anemia’ or coerce me into sharing a red velvet cupcake with her lest she eat a whole one by herself and risk getting fat.

How the hell in my journey into myself, did I find this…this…reactionary McCain Palin supporter? Was there any benefit in this strange exercise?

During this time, I remember an African American friend of mine in marketing at one of the famously liberal New York publishing companies, telling me that she had white co-workers who wore Obama buttons on the lapels of their jackets but never uttered so much as a ‘hello’ or ‘good-bye’ on any given day at the office.

Anyway, I no longer work in the same office as Mariem.  My last days, I was unable to take a minute more of the morbid, venomous, racist critiques of the Obama administration that would sporadically rise up from her desk and spread throughout the room like some toxin poisoning everyone within reach and I recall not so much as uttering a word to her in parting.

Were the contradictions of our friendship error messages we ignored or was there something natural at the core of it  that our clashing political interests obscured?

Still, as much as I fondly recall dashing through the streets of Manhattan shoulder to shoulder with Mariem, laughing, if I ever see that witch again, I’ll keep things simple and exclude her from my view.

Despite everyone obsessing over Barack’s appearance on Leno, I think Michelle ‘shovel ready’, planting veggies around the White House was the far more provocative political moment of the last few days.  

If the country has come to characterize Ms. Obama as someone accessible and unpretentious, perhaps watching her toil over a patch of land around the White House was pushing things.

Yes, black folks should garden but there was something about watching her, our black first lady, digging and planting in what did not look like a yard as much as a field,  that was difficult — even as I applaud her efforts to lead America into a Green era.

Equally as interesting was her appearance at a DC public school where she attributed her success as a student in the black Chicago of her childhood to ‘talking like a white girl.’

I’m sure if Ms. Obama had been able to elaborate in less of a controlled setting, a really interesting discussion about black versus white English would have spun out because the Obamas – like most black people and even some whites who use black English to varying degrees, switch back and forth between both.

I believe Ms. Obama’s message to the young black audience she was addressing was that there are certain skills you have to acquire to make the transition from the margins into the mainstream though to some it may have seemed that she was advocating imitating white people as a program for self-improvement which I’m fairly certain she was not.

The whole subject of how black folks talk in America is weighed down by very neurotic identity issues. If I wanted to be morbid, I could recount stories of being ridiculed back in my own school days for the same reason as Michelle Obama, but the fact of the matter is you adapt.

 At 48, I now speak all kinds of ways.

I switch codes so much, I don’t even know what the real way is that I speak anymore – though when I’m in the company of certain African-American women there’s an expectation that I use a very specific black female voice – you know that cynical song that the black female character in every commercial and TV show has to sing with her hand on her hip and one eyebrow raised –  that I’m afraid for so many reasons just doesn’t work for me.

In fact, recently, during a first time business meeting with another black woman, when she instantly referred to me as ‘girl’ and then ‘chile,’  instead of her breaking the ice with me, what she did was make me doubt that I should be taking her seriously.

I’m  middle-aged, gray haired, in no way a child or a girl and find it unfortunate that so much of what passes so proudly  for black English, including that infamous word thrown around in every other rap song, is just an exercise in self-deprecation.

A few summers ago, I got in a cab in Harlem with a Guinean driver named Alpha, an intense guy who could switch from English to French to Spanish to even Russian not because he had some great passion for learning the world’s languages but because he had had to become versatile to survive.

Similarly, Black people in America are going to need to embrace a much more complex sense of self.

That said, may a patch of organic collards sprout somewhere in the Obama garden. Because this new paradigm could be as easily served by just seeing the greens in Green.

I don’t know about you, but when I find myself suddenly staring at the ceiling in the wee of hours of the morning, I reach for the remote and watch Oprah. I have no idea when exactly she’s on EST time, but there she was beside Tyra Banks Friday morning sometime before dawn using Chris Brown and Rihanna’s troubling relationship as a case study of sorts.

Wow, I never cease to revere how she’s taken a tacky forum like the talk show and transformed it into something between a temple and a town hall that not just Americans but people all over the world – she’s huge in Saudi Arabia – depend on for moral direction and advice on how to live whole, fulfilling lives.

As for Tyra, post modeling, she has bloomed into even more of a femme fatale — as unbelievable as it is that she could have become more of a tigress than she already was but I think there are all these dimensions to her that modeling didn’t let her explore that she’s leveraging.  

I mean she’s basically cleaned up the down and dirty Rickie Lake time slot and audience in a way I didn’t imagine possible, is actually guiding a demographic  of younger women that Oprah doesn’t reach, into a more stylish, informed femininity that does however — positive aspects  aside — seem to be embedded in too many accessories!

Anyway, I know not a single song by Chris Brown, have very little familiarity with what he does. I have observed him once or twice on a TV in my teenage nephew’s bedroom that always seems to be tuned to BET and my impression of him right off the cuff was that it’s unnatural for a young man that age to smile so sweetly, so it comes as no great surprise to me that he has a hellish flipside.

As for Rihanna, I know her music a little better, though I would like to mention as a disclaimer that I feel like an ancient Greek discussing a fight between Zeus and Hera somewhere up on Mount Olympus when I attempt to wrap my head around a celebrity couple’s argument in a Lamborghini en route to the Grammys .

Oprah and Tyra did their best to take Rihanna’s bite marks and bruises and turn them into a ‘teaching moment’ for the young girls nationwide who have seen this whole awful drama unfold and may have needed help processing it, especially in light of the fact that Chris Brown and Rihanna are apparently still dating.

The problem I had with the whole discussion was the way young men were discussed or —  weren’t. They never got past being ‘they’ and ‘them,’ and hovered over the whole discourse in a way that could only be felt as problematic.  At one point when a girl in the audience brought up the possibility that Rihanna may have gotten physical with Chris Brown first and that Rihanna’s reconciliation with him may have been evidence of her complicity in the violent nature of their relationship, the point that a boyfriend can only restrain a violent girlfriend was made without addressing the issue of violent girlfriends.

Something’s missing.

For starters, there’s no male version of Tyra to help young men work through this discussion.

As for the the absence of nurturing role models for young black men on the home front and in our neighborhoods, that’s best illustrated by Tied To Greatness, an idea of Alex Ellis, a black designer, amongst other things, who visits schools in cities like Philadelphia and Chicago to teach young black men how to groom themselves for success.

To date, Mr. Ellis has given out around 2500 ties to young black men who have never undergone such a basic male rite of passage as being taught how to knot a tie.

Hello!

Aren’t our sons one of our community’s greatest resources? 

This morning, I woke to a bird singing outside my window. The song was about love and rebirth. It had nothing to do with share prices or consumer spending. I was so relieved.

The bird’s subversive solo inspired me to eat breakfast under the veranda outside my kitchen. I ate a bowl of mangu topped with grilled onions and fresh lemon juice, cracking into a lemon seed as I chewed, welcoming the bitter taste in my mouth as it joined with the seductive sense of a Sunday on the cusp of Spring.

Unfortunately, my reverie was broken at the gym while on the treadmill soon after. Watching This Week With George Stephanpoulous on the monitor in front of me, instead of turning the damned thing off, I read the captions below George Will’s weasley face with a grimace.

Mr. Will mocking Obama’s ‘Stock Broker in Chief,’ routine last week when the President admittedly with some sheepishness recommended Americans start buying up stocks since there are some great deals out there if you have a long term perspective.

I’m really done with the tension between Barack and Wall Street. Done. Absolutely done, in fact with the tyranny of numbers over my day to day life.

This is the last great domain of racism. The Stock market as an echocardiogram of the American heart that does not respond to Obama, that is broken by ‘minorities who couldn’t afford to own homes but bought them anyway,’ that proves that blacks don’t stimulate intense economic desire, only paralyze it.

(Oh, such deep, deep despair I feel at the possibility that the worrisome market activity of Americans with black skin may not arouse the most rapturous investment outcomes. Sniff. Sniff).

Sarcasm aside, I didn’t feel Obama’s recent foray into being national financial advisor. If I want to get the latest casino gaming tips, there’s no shortage of it elsewhere.

What I appreciated most about our President’s rise onto the political stage was the humanity he brought to Washington. The Republicans would have us believe there is no VALUE to being alive that is not monetary.

Their ‘Patriotism is consumption,’ ‘greed is good,’ ‘nothing matters but the numbers’ message has brought the fear of a permanent winter where the sun doesn’t come out anymore, the warmth doesn’t return, flowers and fruit no longer blossom because they’re besides the point.

The point is the most narrow definition of profit.

So please, please, monsieur le President, don’t pander to these trading floor gangstas.

Your legacy will be defined by how well you’re able to execute the inspiring promise of your campaign which was never to be able to pick winning stocks for my portfolio but to inspire a dialogue between the races that is as enlightening as intimate and yes, inspire collaboration where before we had only bombs, improve human and ecological health care, motivate Americans young and old to be part of community projects that nurture our neighborhoods  and our urgent need to be more than spectators in sports stadiums.

Obama, perhaps not Elizabeth Alexander – but more poetry please – and support for the poetic, aesthetic, non-commoditized.

If fresh clay and paint, the sound of violins, flutes, and cellos would return to the hallways of our local schools, President Obama, an homage to you would resound more prodigiously than the most arrogant closing bell. Anyway…you get my drift…

In faith & solidarity

Jen Jefferson/Blacksnextdoor

The week in review. Let’s see. Well, it seemed to include lots of honking horns. Squealing brakes.  Me dangerously strolling through it all like a ghost.

So many questions I grappled with. So, so many especially around myself as I relate or don’t to other black women.

For starters, there are only about four other black women that ever ride my daily express bus. Each morning, In that dim modular space between point A and point B as I ignore the other passengers on purpose and vice versa, I have always noticed a certain tension between us. It’s as if we’re breaking a taboo by not all sitting together in one designated area of the bus.

It finally happened and the other night I found myself in Manhattan in the bus queue with one of these other black women. I’m shivering and pogoing up and down as I tend to do when I’m cold and I notice her eyes flash with amusement when she says: are you cold?

I state the obvious when I tell her that I’m freezing. She seems taken aback. I’m left feeling like a game show contestant that just gave the wrong answer. Then another one of the black women who I see from time to time on the bus appears and the two of them jump into a dialogue with lots of happy ‘girl,’ ‘chile,’ and eye rolling even though it seems a bit tongue in cheek.

Once on the bus, the two sit side by side and continue talking and I wonder what it was about me being demonstrably cold that may have been so odd.

Then there’s a young woman about twenty years younger who I find myself beside on a sofa at a casual after work gathering.

During my first attempt at small talk with her, I couldn’t help but notice that her deep brown face was almost completely lost inside tendrils of silky Barbie hair. In fact she was completely trapped inside a web of artificial hair and thick make up and even spoke in a tiny Barbie voice that couldn’t possibly have been real.

I’ve noticed that the great rapper, Lil Kim, has become a Barbie doll of late too. Anyway, I inquired into what she did, and after she had responded, it was not at all clear to me what it was she actually did which is often the case these days in this complex business environment but I had a strong feeling by the way she was speaking that she was trying to make a certain impact and what she actually said didn’t matter. It was all in the delivery.

I dare to peek through the thickness of her disguise at one moment and it’s like looking into an unlit room where you sense someone hiding. I tried to break the ice once more, but her Barbie tones grew more shrill like a radio when it’s broken or seagull emitting signals of distress and I moved onto another area of the room.

Then, there’s my favorite aunt. I stopped by to visit her and raid her photo albums the other day. She has the oldest family albums in the family and I love to go through them and talk to her about different relatives, share stories that the photos evoke, but this trip I wanted her to let me leave with photos and make copies of them for myself which I didn’t think she’d agree to – she’s always kept these albums in impeccable condition and very well guarded.

But when I finally got the nerve to stop browsing and ask her, she not only encouraged me to start making copies of whatever I liked, she also mentioned she was thinking of leaving her photo albums for me ‘to manage’ when she passed because she thought they meant the most to me more than anyone else and I couldn’t believe she felt that way or express how honored I was.

Anyway, another high point last week was an email exchange with the daughter I would’ve had if I hadn’t had a son, Carmen. Carmen is currently in Senegal teaching – she has interesting observations on being a black feminist woman in a patriarchal society like Senegal that I would like to hear more of — not only is she an ambitious communicator – she speaks four or five languages – she’s travelled as much as she’s been able and is just wonderful in every way and very easily shares her thoughts with me whenever I need to pick a younger, more agile brain.

I wanted to know if she thought that black college students should study abroad as part of their whole career and personal development scheme or if it was just a luxury for the wealthiest white students and she of coursed confirmed my belief that black people be active players in globalization and that it’s a great thing to encourage our kids to achieve fluency in a second language, travel.

Very grateful to be part of a nurturing network of other black women. May it grow, though the politics and dynamics of black femininity still often leave me out in the cold…

Bisous….

Wow, life so very chock full of drama personal and otherwise, stayed in bed until close to noon Saturday I was so wiped out and even then, ventured outside my blankie with extreme reluctance.

Choppy rewind: Eric Holder in a speech honoring Black History Month accuses the U.S. of being a ‘nation of cowards’ for not discussing race enough.  

Honestly, I find our Attorney General quite good looking – love his laughing eyes, that dark ‘stache and the way he wears a tie and jacket.  But that remark was a boisterous power chord without music to follow.

All Americans seem to discuss is race. The commentary is non-stop and mostly grudge driven.  For instance, if one more black woman tries to bond with me by referring to white women as if they’re some radioactive force that must be controlled, I’ll jump screaming off the nearest cliff.

The problem seems to be that there are no clear guidelines for what healthy discussions about race are. I would say NO discussions about race are what I look for day to day. I prefer taking people one at a time and am always invigorated by those I meet who don’t follow the script.

On the subject of ‘the script,’ the Bullet Proof Weave story that emerged mid-week never mentioned race, yet seemed to have no function other than to question black female beauty.  Surely, in a trigger happy nation like ours where guns are in such abundance, people survive being shot at every day.

But for some reason, a black woman’s scalp was suddenly being shown over and over inviting viewers to step right up and take a peek at the monstrous mechanics of her hair. It’s a real downer when the news has the same circus bark as The Maury Povich or Jerry Springer show. Had little time to process how to respond to the leering anchor people on Eyewitness News in New York reporting this trash with the controversy over the New York Post cartoon raging, however.

I don’t see the point in accusing The New York Post of being racist. It’s a Murdoch creation like Fox News designed to be just that.  All the hurt feelings and shock that The Post could print such a thing struck me as dumb.

What I did relate to was singer, John Legend putting companies who advertise with the Post on the spot by asking them to not run ads in the paper as well as refusing interviews with Post reporters and encouraging other entertainers to do the same.

Perfect.  The Post has been a dying paper for a while and will regret publishing that cartoon because of threats to its revenue stream far more than black people sobbing and putting on temper tantrums about how hurt we are and vulnerable our feelings.

From Rush Limbaugh to The New York Post, the voices of the Republican party continue to broadcast fear of the future. That’s why the right wing fantasy of a chimp being murdered is so symbolic.

The planet has evolved without anyone’s consent. The future is a force of nature – and it’s coming no matter how much they try and shoot at it.

Meant to take a sabbatical from blogging. Too restless, feeling more and more trapped in the bleak news report that loops over and over without end: the economy this…economy that…the economy, the economy, economy…

Anyway, I’m back because before I began this Blacks Next Door public diary, I promised myself, to do it for one full year — so I will do my best – despite my wide mood swings to honor BND’s September 2010 expiration date.

“The economy’s still not doing well.” I overheard someone sigh in the elevator last week. You would have thought he was mourning a dying family member or dear friend such was the intensity of his melancholia.

Life by numbers is oppressive. It’s also stupid. Ever have a manager shove a spreadsheet into your face that’s supposed to be a snapshot of your value within your organization that doesn’t reflect any of the important intangibles like what the forces were that inspired you to perform well or may have led your daily performance to be not at all inspired?

Well, if the Republicans continue to have it their way, this is how America will be ruled: by spreadsheet.

Human potential will have no more meaning than what numbers justify. In fact, the future will be shut inside a coffin and handed back to you wrapped in a flag.

This is my final conclusion after a week of watching Republican politicos kick and scream and foam at the mouth over the President’s proposed Stimulus Package.

Allocating $50 million to The National Endowment on the Arts is a waste of money they ranted. How could citizens having music and art in their lives be stimulating except in some subversive way that only serves ‘liberal’ culture?

First of all, this is no longer the 80’s when the voice of the Right may have been more in tune with that of the mild mannered ‘man on the street’ than that of an artist like Andres Serrano.

After two terms of Clinton — who at least at the level of the streets I walk, was a conservative influence – and eight years of Bush, porn and gambling are bigger than ever.

And instead of the Piss Christ, we have Ann Coulter.

So the Obama team will have to use imagination as much as money to truly stimulate and inspire people to feel good, dream, innovate – not just consume but create.

Until then, as long as one of the most important cultural events in this country is basically a war game, yeah, sigh, The Super Bowl — with an ominous Bush regime icon like General David Petraus at the center to kick it off, America remains — as far as my watchful eyes can see — well, a Republican nation.