blacksnextdoor

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.

As someone who has spent most of the last five years either ‘telecommuting’ from a PC in my bedroom, trapped in an office cubicle or staring out the windows of trains, planes and commuter buses, I am on a mission to become physically stimulated again. I spent two hours in the gym yesterday and an hour today and can’t believe how aroused I feel.  

“Now what?” I guess you’re wondering.

Ummm.  Snack on pistachios? Post something new in my blog?

What an odd thing to see Plaxico Burress paraded around in handcuffs like the most violent serial murderer when all he did was shoot himself in the leg!

Little boys and teens playing baseball and football for recreation I understand — but grown men playing games for a living I don’t — so I’m hardly Ms. ESPN.

Worse yet, those passing moments when a basketball game is on the TV in the room and I’m watching muscular black men scattering across a court in shorts and jersey combos like the kind that grace the racks in the toddler section of Kids R Us while a coach, usually a white guy in a suit sternly supervises – I’m not cheering, I’m horrified.

(And when the coach is black, it’s no more encouraging to me than a black cop or black soldier executing some misguided U.S. military effort).

Slavery is this constant reference point for just about every discussion about black people even when it’s not, so I try as a policy to avoid bringing it up  – but this said — the sports industry really does seem to be derived from the plantation business more than any I’ve seen.

Black athletes are physical property.  When they veer off those carefully scripted messages they deliver like hostages, they’re punished so severely. Take Plaxico Burress:  Head bowed in shackles for not having filed some form for a gun that as a celebrity he has good reason to own and not having harmed anyone with it but himself.

Tar, feathers anyone?

Don’t know how many of you follow http://www.thedailyvoice.com an online pub that seems to compete with the more well known The Root, http://www.theroot.com.  I rarely do, but Friday read ‘The First Black President and the Racial Mountain’ by Pamela Reed, a piece in which she defends Barack from those who insist he’s not authentically black. The piece is well written and some truth is imparted absolutely but more interesting is the message thread that evolves in response. 

None other than Sudanese poet Kola Boof who got a surge of attention in the media when she revealed she had been Obama Bin Laden’s black mistress — battles it out with Pamela Reed and the other readers with such ferocity, it is far more edgy and visceral than any basketball or football game.

Not only does Kola tear Pamela Reed a new one, but she also shreds each reader that posts a comment, to bits. The funny thing about Kola Boof is that she has identified a hole in the black whole that she fiercely deepens rather than tries like the softies of black academia, to mend.  Better yet, there’s no guy in a suit that can suspend her.  She is completely off the chain. Unlike me.  In search of greater freedom. Will report back next week. Or maybe not…