Tuesday, September 23, 2014

A Message From Beyond

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree
A Message From Beyond
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To Rita with love:
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We hear you, baby, so don’t ever let ‘em turn your head. You’ve got to expect the ugliness, the struggle, and the adversity. We all went through it. Some people think jazz is anything with a saxophone in it. They don’t understand. They don’t realize that Jazz is much more than that. Jazz is a way of life - it’s an attitude, a demeanor, and an outlook toward reality. That’s why things are so rough on you, because you’re one of us, one of the chosen ones; one who’s been chosen to relate our view of reality to a clueless world. We understand that can be a very heavy burden to bear, but we’re all watchin’, and we’re all very proud of the way you’re carrying that torch - our torch . . . with such grace, beauty, and majesty. You’ve brought 52nd Street back to life - and with your every note, you bring us back to life. Yeah, we’re watchin’, baby girl, and lovin’ it - and we’re lovin’ you.
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So just close your eyes and sing your song, baby. "Close your eyes, and rest your head on my shoulder and sing . . . Just sing your song, baby girl, and don’t worry about a thing. Just close you eyes and pay your dues. We gotcha."
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That was Sarah. You’ve got her eyes moist - and that’s not an easy thing to pull off with Sassy.
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-The Chosen Ones
 
If you’re a jazz lover and want to look upon the contemporary face of jazz royalty, take a moment to go check out Ms. Rita Edmond on Youtube. She's the jazz world's best kept secret.  She's currently working on her third CD, but even on her first CD, she made it abundantly clear to this writer that she hit the ground fully seasoned as one of the greatest jazz singers alive today. I know, that's a mighty lofty claim to heap onto the shoulders of a relatively new artist, but I'm not given to hyperbole, so I fully intend to back up my assertion with the contents and attachments to this piece.
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Ms. Edmond moves between sultry sophistication, hard driving swing, and childlike innocence without any effort at all. There are many great singers out there , but from the very first bar of anything Rita does, she clearly distinguishes herself as one of those rare individuals who was born to do exactly what she’s doing, and nothing else. She swings with the effortless grace of a Sliver Shadow cruisin' down Pacific Coast Highway, and her ballads are lush with sultry passion, personal depth, and individuality.
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You can't "learn" to sing like Rita Edmond. You either have it, or you don't, and there's only one or two lucky few in a generation who do - but Rita, like Ella and Sarah, is one of those lucky few. But don’t just take my word for it, go check her out for yourself and I’m sure you’ll agree with me that she’s a once in a generation talent, and clearly the heir apparent to some of the greatest divas that jazz has ever known.
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Along with this piece I'm attaching three links to make my point - ‘Here’s to Life,’ ‘Embraceable You' (Live at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) , and ‘It Might As Well Be Spring’ - and each tune shows a different side of her tremendous, and still growing, musical personality.
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‘Here’s to Life’ is a beautiful ballad that’s been done by some of the greatest singers who’s ever lived, yet Ms. Edmond’s version is as good or better than any version of this tune that’s ever been recorded. The soaring passion that she brings to this tune makes it almost impossible for anyone who’s ever had to struggle through life’s adversities and then managed to survive to continue to fight the good fight, to listen to with a dry eye.
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'Embraceable You,' (featuring Harold Land, Jr. on piano) demonstrates the ease in which she can establish the mood of a song and captivate an audience. It also show an artist who is so comfortable in serenading an audience that it seems like she was born on stage. And after the piano solo, notice the effortless spontaneity in which she throws in a lick that's so exquisite that it sounds like it should have been written into the tune. You won't be able to miss it, because the audience places an exclamation point of approval immediately afterward, as she casually, and routinely, moves on to the next phrase, as though it's all in a night's work. 
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Finally, she does ‘It Might As Well Be Spring,’ a tried and true jazz standard. Not everyone can do this tune well, because it’s such a jazz staple that it’s hard for a singer to put their personal stamp on it, and whenever they try, they either over sing or under sing the tune.  But Rita swings through it effortlessly and makes it her own. King Pleasure himself would smile at her rendition.
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I also wanted to add Ms. Edmond's rendition of ‘This Can’t Be Love’ as an attachment, but unfortunately, it's not available on Youtube. Nevertheless, it deserves a mention. On that tune Ms. Edmond displays yet another part of her musical vocabulary - her growing chops as a scatter and her ability to swing with the best of them. In this case, she scats in unison with yet another powerhouse, tenor sax player Ricky Woodard, and they’re pushed forward by the hard driving rhythms of Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath of the illustrious Heath Brothers on drums - and when it comes to the aristocracy of jazz, they don’t come any more blue-blooded than Tootie. So here, Rita is being tested by fire, and she literally danced through the flames with blissful abandon.
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So in spite of Ms. Edmond’s unassuming manner, whenever she picks up a mic, her tremendous confidence, individualism and flawless delivery seems to say, “There’s a new diva in town” - and I say, it’s about time! 
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Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.
at

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Barack and The Kenyan Weed Affair

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree
Barack and The Kenyan Weed Affair
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There’s so much ugliness going on in the world, and so many heavy issues going on in my personal life, I needed a break. So after seeing a photo of Rick Perry in a meeting with President Obama where Perry seems to be pouting like a child, it was so hilarious that I decided to build a purely fictional scenario around it to take my mind off things. So again, this story is completely fictional, it has no basis in either fact or reality, and is intended as a spoof of some of the idiotic scenarios that people like Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News organization try to pass off to the American people as truth. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t beat me to it.



Kevin,

Just between you and I, we get special reports in the hood about what’s going on in the White House, and according to those reports, the President just has one weakness - that damn Kenyan weed. It’s a throwback to when he was a kid. His relatives used to manage to get it in here to him when he was in college. And from what I understand, just before that meeting with Rick Perry, he got his hands on some, and I hear that shit is monstrous! Look at how everybody in the photo is grinnin.’ And from the look on Rick's face, he seems to be the only one who didn't get a hit - and the combination of that good Kenyan bush, and the look on Perry’s face, seems to have given the President a severe case of the "goofies." Personally, I think the President purposely bogarded. He just couldn’t bring himself to waste none of that good bush on Perry’s ignorant ass - and I don’t blame him.
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Now this may be an urban legend, but they tell me that Kenyan weed is twice as potent as any other weed in the world, because it’s grown in the wilderness and it has lion piss on it, and that seems to be substantiated by the President’s demeanor - the brother is crackin’ up! Similarly, the expression on Rick Perry’s face seems to suggest that he knows he missed out on something fabulous, because I’m sure the contact alone had Perry giddy and squirming in his seat just for one hit, but obviously, the President wasn’t having it.
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You see, Texas is right there on the Mexican border, so Perry knows some premo weed when he smells it. That Mexican weed been pissed on too, by coyotes - and coyote piss ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at either. And bein’ a Texan, Rick Perry knows his piss. But the most potent pissin’ coyote in the wilderness don’t hold a candle to lion piss, and Rick Perry knows that, that’s why he couldn’t wait to wrap his lips around that good, Kenyan weed. From what I understand, just the contact from that Kenyan shit will make the hairs fall out your nose, because a lion has some powerful piss. You can damn near start a Corvette with a gallon of lion piss. So that Kenyan weed is powerful! Check out the President - that shit got him crackin’ up!!! And another thing, when was the last time you saw a Kenyan that wasn’t smilin’?
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Now, I’m not going to tell you how I obtained these pictures, because they’re Top Secret, but I will tell you this - they are right out of the Secret Service files. So if you think I’m lyin’ about how bad this Kenyan shit is, check this out. This is a picture the President took right after the meeting:
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And if you think that’s something, check him out here - he completely took it to the next level. I couldn’t get my hands on the one where they said that shit had him thinkin’ he was Spider Man, but they tell me he was tryin’ to climb up the side of the White House wall, and then kept looking at his hands, tryin’ to figure out why his web wasn’t workin.’
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And a whole 5 hours later he went to a late afternoon lunch with Al Sharpton. Here he is gettin’ his grub on. That lion piss had him attackin’ that grub like a starvin’ werewolf. He scared the hell out of Al! Al said, "I was just hopin’ he got full, because I made up my mind that if he started lookin’ up at me I was gone haul ass. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it - the brother was grubbin’ like a man who’d been stranded at sea for two weeks.
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So, like I said, that shit is bad. So bad, in fact, that the Secret Service added a special detail to make absolutely SURE the President couldn’t get his hands on nothing else that any lion, or anything else, might have pissed on. You know how you White folks are. You go overboard on everything. So once they made the connection between the weed and the lion piss, they forgot all about the weed - they're used to people gettin' wasted in the White House; George Washington even had a plant or two at Mt. Vernon - they started focusing on the piss. Now they’ve gone on a mission to make sure that the President doesn’t consume anything that might have been pissed on.
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That's right - they done made piss a national security issue. They even had a Hazmet detail wearing those white jumpsuits sniffin’ the collard greens in the White House galley. I guess they figure if lion piss can make the President trip-out like he did, God forbid what might happen if some crack-smokin', socialist hood rat piss on the presidential collard greens!   So now they’re growing ALL White House vegetables in a $22 million, specially constructed, hydroponic garden with round the clock guards, just because the President got ahold of some good weed. No wonder the poor people are starvin’ to death!  
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In addition, they put out a special memo to everybody on the White House staff that said, in no uncertain terms, that anybody who sneaks anymore of that shit into the White House is gonna be dragged down to the basement, and the Pentagon is gonna send in a special team of Navy Seals just to kick their Black ass. Then they’re gonna send ‘em to Guantanamo Bay and let ‘em chill a few months with Adul the Booty Bomber. But after giving it some consideration they thought better of it, and redacted the "Black ass" part. But it was clear who they suspected of gettin’ the President high. Things never change. It’s always us. How do they know some White, weed-smokin’ attache from the State Department didn’t bring that shit in? 
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But when all is said in done, I’d just like to know one thing. What pissed on that shit that Bush and Cheney was smokin - it must have been something we thought was extinct, or maybe it was the Koch brothers.
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So those are the facts - at least, according to the hood rat grapevine. But I’ve got to run, my man - I promised to take my woman to the zoo.  By the way, you wouldn't happen to have a bucket around here somewhere, would you?   
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Eric L. Wattree
Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
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Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA) .
Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.
at

Sunday, September 07, 2014

An Ugly Truth: Why Some Black People Are Still Waiting For Santa Claus

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree
 
An Ugly Truth:
Why Some Black People Are Still Waiting
For Santa Claus
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Whenever I hear the Name Belafonte the first word that comes to mind is "Class." That’s the only word appropriate for the way Harry Belafonte represented Black manhood in the fifties and early sixties. During a time when the few other Black celebrities with the crossover appeal of Belafonte were trying their best to make the White world forget that they were Black, Harry Belafonte flaunted his Blackness with dignity and pride. This soft-spoken, intelligent, and self-assured Black man with the undulating body drove White women crazy for just a taste of forbidden fruit, while at the very same time giving the White establishment a glimpse of things to come.
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During that period America still viewed Black men in the Steppin’ Fetchit tradition, so for the most part, the only Black men that we saw or heard in the media were people like Lightin’ and Amos n Andy. So brothers like Harry Belafonte were sorely needed to upgrade our image, but ironically, Belafonte was so self-assured, and moved about the White world so effortlessly that there were a few in the Black community who called him an Uncle Tom. Such people will always be around. No matter how impressive a person is, you can always depend on a handful of haters pointing out that one of his shoestrings is shorter than the other. 
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But, of course, calling Belafonte an Uncle Tom was ridiculous. Harry Belafonte was on the cutting edge when it came to defining the modern American Black man. Again, Belafonte was one of America’s first looks at what the modern Black man - at his best - was to become. While on the other hand, those who called him an Uncle Tom represented a throwback to the slave mentality of the Black man at his worse, with a mentality that dictates that any Black man who doesn’t walk around looking at his feet, or who is comfortable in casually dealing with White folks eyeball-to-eyeball, can’t be trusted.
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I’ve come to call that mentality the Smiley/West syndrome. You can always spot these people with just a glance. While they don’t act overtly subservient to White folks, and they’re even militant at times, their interactions with the White world always have a needy, self-conscious tinge to them, as though they’re seeking admiration, or recognition from the White world for being "brave" enough to speak up, and smart enough to speak to them in their own terms. Thus, while on the surface, they seem to be speaking on behalf of Black people, the message beneath the surface seems to be a desperate plea for acknowledgment, for the "Great White Father" to give them recognition for being "special."  Their actions and behavior seems to say, "See, I ain’t like those other niggas!"
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Notice the Body Language. 
There's No Doubt Who's the Dominant
Personality Here.


 
Such people are frauds. They’re trying to play both ends against the middle. On the one hand, they’re trying to gain the admiration of Black people for having the courage to speak up on their behalf, while on the other, they’re winking at the White man and desperately seeking his approval. That’s why such people were so hostile toward people like Harry Belafonte in the past, and those same sort of people are hostile toward Barack Obama today.
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People like Belafonte and Obama have attainted the stature and genuine respect of the White establishment that the frauds so desperately seek, so their response to people like Belafonte and Obama is like that of a child who resents his brother or sister because their daddy seems to like their sibling more.
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There’s clear evidence of this syndrome in the career of Cornel West. For a man who claims to love "his people" so desperately, it’s very curious that he’s never invested one smidgen of his oft-lauded skills as an educator into an effort to educate Black kids. Cornel West has never taught at a predominantly Black school in his entire career. He’s chosen to educate the kids of the White elite at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale instead.  And with respect to that, a good rule of thumb when attempting to assess the character of any individual - be they preacher, politician, or potentate - is to ignore what they say, and watch what they do.
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Any Black man who advocates "conserving"
 traditional American values is,
by definition, an idiot.
There are far too many Black people around who still suffer from this slave mentality. They’ve been convinced over the years that their own people are inferior, so unlike the people of most cultures, whose prime motivation is to come together and help move their people forward, the prime motivation of far too many Black people is to prove that they’re somehow superior to their own people. Then, when they come across other Black people who demonstrate the excellence, and even brilliance, that thrives throughout the Black community, instead of embracing these people, they feel challenged, and become hostile.
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As a direct result of that attitude by some, the very Black people with the knowledge, foresight, and character to help us move forward, are often severely scrutinized and brutally attacked, and that’s exactly what’s taking place with respect to President Obama. Instead of just letting the President do his job like any other president, people like Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are constantly demanding that he PROVE that he cares about Black people. It’s ridiculous - the man’s wife and children are Black, and he’s Black!
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But it’s more than just ridiculous; it hurts the Black community, and it hurts the nation. It makes the President’s job twice as hard, because in order for the President to be effective, he has to have the solid support of the people. So this constant insinuation by his Black critics that he’s somehow "not Black enough," not only dilutes his Black support, but their constant demands that he do something SPECIAL for the Black community to prove his Blackness, serves as grist for the mill of his political opponents. His opponents use such demands to both further dilute the Black community by claiming that he should be doing more for Black people, and then flipping the coin and telling the President’s White supporters that all he cares about is delivering special treatment for Black people. Thus, everything he does is scrutinize and evaluated in that light. As a result, everything he does that happens to benefit any group, is turned around and used against him as evidence that he doesn’t care about another.   
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BOYCE WATKINS
It also hurts the Black community because it prevents President Obama from using his bully pulpit to even suggest things that the Black community could do to improve its plight, and that’s something that’s needed very badly. A prime example of that was when, then, Senator Obama, was running for President, he gave a Father’s Day speech suggesting that Black fathers step up to the plate and take responsibility for their children. The next day all hell broke loose. Dr. Boyce Watkins in - who it now turns out is an undercover Black conservative in drag - wrote an article in "Your Black World" wanting to know why Obama singled out only Black deadbeat dads. It seemed to me, that should have been obvious - because he's Black, and he wants to see Black people thrive.  But, of course, Watkins was simply fishing for an issue.
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What makes this problem so tenacious, and so easily seized upon by Black demagogues, is that Black people have been on the receiving end of such groundlessly slanderous criticism over the centuries that we’ve become overly sensitive to ALL criticism - even when it’s constructive and warranted. We’ve got to get past that and learn to follow truth. We’ve got to train our minds to always give truth priority over ideology, and learn to follow truth wherever it leads and regardless to whose ox it gores. If we can simply teach ourselves to do just that one thing, it would put us "Miles Ahead" (pun intended) of every other group in America.
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Recklessly irresponsible parents should be
liable for the crimes their kids
commit - Period.
Truth is much like physical pain. While it can be severely uncomfortable, it can also alert us to serious problems that need to be addressed. So again, we should always follow truth wherever it leads, and then, if we don’t like where it leads us, instead of trying to deny truth, we should take the necessary action to modify what it reveals.
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If we can do that, we’ll see many of the problems in the Black community begin to melt away, because truth will tell us that we’re both the primary source of many of our problems, and should be the primary source of their solutions. Truth would tell us that more money passes through the Black community than through many countries, so if we would learn to work together and patronize our own businesses, we could become a nation within a nation. Truth would also tell us that we need to begin to teach our children the value of knowledge from the day they’re born, and we should also teach them about the stupidity of killing one another over a "territory" where they don’t own even one blade of grass.
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Truth would also tell us that our churches should be doing a lot more in the community than just preaching and collecting money every Sunday. It’s not enough to just recite the words of Jesus. Jesus’s words were designed to teach us how to actually live, not just TALK about how to live. 
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One of the things that Jesus said was, "If you claim to be the children of Abraham, you’d be doing the works of Abraham." Are our churches doing the works of Abraham? I don’t think so. If they were, there wouldn’t be a hungry child in America. So again, truth would tell us that our Churches, and the preachers who preside over our churches, spend far too much time TELLING us about Jesus, and far too little time LIVING like Jesus.
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Take the issue of poverty, for example. One of the biggest expenses for many working mothers is childcare. Why aren’t our churches helping to relieve that burden by keeping the churches open during the week and using some of their tithes to provide affordable childcare for working mothers? They could also hire unemployed mothers to staff the operation, and use retired teachers within their congregation to help educate the children. I think that’s what Jesus would have done. 
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So until we open our eyes to the truth, we cannot correct one of the most serious legacies of slavery - the belief by many that Black people have a moral obligation to remain ignorant. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated we think we’ve become, we are still the product of a racist environment, and as such, many of us are just as racist toward other Black people as any racist, sheet-wearing, barefoot, Hillbilly - and in many cases, even more so.  I refer to such people as "bligots" (Black-on-Black bigots) - and let there be no doubt about it, there are many of them out there. 
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So in order to neutralize that inbred legacy of slavery, it is incumbent upon us to expand our minds and seek to become independent thinkers. Each and every one of us should begin to educate ourselves, and thereafter, never give anyone else's ability to think priority over our own. Yes, we should continue to absorb knowledge from the knowledgeable, but we should evaluate that knowledge, and then ALWAYS connect the dots for ourselves.
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And remember, even though knowledge is the most valuable commodity on Earth, it's free, so no one can deprive you of it. There is just as much knowledge on Google or at the corner library as there is at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities combined. So if you don't avail yourself of it, you're CHOOSING to remain ignorant. That's the one thing that we can't blame on the White man.
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And finally, the human mind was designed to hate ignorance, so true pride can only be had through the acquisition of knowledge. Thus, until such time that we obtain the true pride that comes with knowledge, we are doomed to continue to hate ourselves, which will make it impossible for us to ever come together to fight for the independence, equality, and justice necessary to sustain a viable culture. So the long and the short of it is, until we learn to respect the power of knowledge, we will remain enslaved - period.

 
RELATED MATERIAL
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Eric L. Wattree
Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.comCitizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.
at

Saturday, September 06, 2014

Revenge of the Nerds: Are Americans Being Brainwashed Into Mass Servitude?

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree
Revenge of the Nerds:
Are Americans Being Brainwashed Into Mass Servitude?
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THE GOP HAS A VESTED INTEREST IN KEEPING
AMERICANS MISERABLE, ANGRY, AND UNEMPLOYED
I gave up watching television about a year ago. One day I got tired of simply complaining about how silly and inane television shows were and decided to do something about it. So I called Direct TV and told them to shove it, and I haven’t regretted that decision for even one second since. 
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But last week I had occasion to spend a night in a motel, and for lack of anything else to do, I decided to turn on the television and let it lull me to sleep. That decision not only confirmed why I stopped watching it in the first place, but much more. After not watching it for a year, its aggressive propagandizing was not only much more apparent to me, but its blatant and heavy-handed approach to controlling the public’s collective mind was all but oppressive.
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The problem - and danger of television - is that it lulls the mind into a hypnotic state and then presents ideas and concepts as though it goes without saying that they’re valid. That causes the public to accept the most ridiculous and dysfunctional propositions as valid without the scrutiny of critical evaluation.
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One of the most destructive propositions that television promotes in this manner is the concept that brawn is superior to brains. How many times have you watched movies or television shows that portray the dumb and clueless jock as superior to the "nerdy" intellectual? These shows will show a jock who can’t chew gum and tie his shoes at the same time as a handsome, sharp dressing, and confident lady’s man, while portraying the most intelligent student in the school as disheveled, awkward, and a turn-off to women. In short, they routinely profile intelligence and the pursuit of knowledge as a dysfunctional condition to be avoided at all costs.
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That is the exact opposite of the message that we should be sending our young people. So it’s no wonder that America is rapidly sliding downhill. The fact is, just because an individual is intelligent, that doesn’t mean that he or she is either awkward, nerdy, or, socially dysfunctional. One simply has to look at many of the elegant denizens of Wall Street or Madison Avenue to recognize the fallacy of that portrayal - in fact, many of the struttin’, jock-strap-wearing "lady’s men" from high school are now the chauffeurs, flunkies, and "gofers" of these so-called nerds.
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But perhaps that’s why many of the rich and accomplished have so little sympathy for middle-class America - they remember how they were treated in high school and college while they were trying to lay down their foundation for success. Many were looked down upon and treated as outcasts, so now, it’s payback time - and we’ve made that payback extremely easy to accomplish.
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When many of us should have been hard at work laying down our own foundation to become competent individuals, we were so busy trying to be popular, and living vicariously through the exploits of our favorite celebrities and sports heroes, that we never learned to think. Instead of learning HOW to think, we were taught WHAT to think. As a result, we’ve become so thoroughly programmed in group-think that we’re now mired in a cesspool of intellectual dysfunction. That accounts for why we routinely hear, and never question, comments like, "President Obama is a socialist - he’s engaged in a socialist plot to provide my family with healthcare." Many Americans have been so brainwashed with respect to the "isms" that they fail to recognize the stupidity of such a statement.
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A sizable number of Americans have also casually accepted the ridiculous concept that by making the simply rich, filthy rich, it will help to create jobs - and that’s in spite of the fact that the American middle class has been plummeting downhill for the past 35 years under the fallacy of that economic concept. Far too many Americans lack the simple intellectual competence to recognize that regardless to how much money we give to the rich, they will never use that money to create jobs unless they have someone to purchase the products in which those jobs produce - and the American middle class no longer possess those funds, because we’ve already given the rich our money . . . for free. So the one-percenters have absolutely no incentive to create jobs - they don’t have to. They can just sit back and play the stock market with the money they’re already getting from the American taxpayer. So why should they take on the additional headache of actually having to produce a product? 
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The scheme to convince the American people that jobs are created by the rich was conceived during the Reagan administration by USC economist, Art Laffer. His name is quite appropriate, because the rich have been falling out laughing all the way to the bank every since. Even many Republicans were absolutely shocked when the American people fell for such a transparent scam. George Bush Sr. called it "voodoo economics," because the scam was, literally, predicated on the assumption that the American people were so gullible, undereducated, and dumb, that they could reintroduce Santa Claus back into our lives - and the amazing part was, it worked.
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That was an eye-opener for the corporate community and their political cronies. The mere fact that they could get America to embrace a concept as ridiculously self-defeating as "trickle-down economics" clearly demonstrated to them that they could get the American people to embrace ANYTHING, as long as they could convince us that it would hurt a targeted group that they could conditioned us to hate, the concept was repeated often enough, and it was wrapped in the appropriate patriotic vestments. That’s why every time you turn on your television set you’re served up the virtual equivalent of "The Night Before Christmas" - even though Christmas Day has been eluding us for the past 35 years now.      
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The reality is, jobs are created by a vibrant and healthy middle class who has the money to purchase goods and services. Thus, it doesn’t matter how much money we give Gucci, he will never hire anyone to produce handbags if he’s forced to try to sell them in a homeless shelter - and for good reason - because no one would have the money to purchase the product that he’s produced - and essentially, that’s what we’ve allowed America to become, a homeless shelter.
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So when we turn our money over to the rich, they’re not going to use it to create jobs and re-circulate that wealth; they’re going to let that money draw interest, and dust, in offshore accounts. We’ll never see that money again. That’s why the top 5% of the nation controls 83% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80% of Americans only control 7% of the wealth, and the gap is widening with every day that passes. So consider what happens when the 7% of the wealth that’s controlled by the middle class becomes only 3%, or even 1%. At that point, for all intent and purposes, we’ll be slaves. The only difference is, we’ll have to provide our own housing and maintenance, and therein lies the corporate whip.
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So if there’s a moral to this story, it’s that the American poor and middle class need to wake up, begin to educate ourselves, and stop allowing corporate interests and their political cronies to keep us fighting among ourselves. It’s way past time for us to recognize that we’re no longer engaged in a race or ethnic war; we’re now in the middle of a class war, and we’re losing badly.
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Now, that isn’t to say that racism and bigotry is a thing of the past; on the contrary, it’s still being used to great effect. But there’s a major difference in its character. Today, bigotry is no longer the war itself. Racism and other forms of bigotry have now become a TOOL of war. It’s being used to keep the poor and middle class divided, because as long as they can keep the masses at one another’s throats, the people will never come together to defend their mutual interests.
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Another important distinction of a class war is the fact that we can no longer assume that because a person is of the same race or ethnic group, that they’re on same side. That fact should have been made abundantly clear to White America during, and subsequent to, the 2008 Wall Street calamity. It wasn’t just Black people who lost their homes and jobs, and they’re not just sending the jobs of women and gays overseas, the corporatists are targeting ALL of poor and middle class America. Be you Black, White, Asian, or Eskimo, if you’re not independently wealthy - and comfortably so - you’re the new "nigger" on the block. 
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That point was driven home in graphic detail during the recent school board election in Los Angeles, when two Black politicians (Alex Johnson, and his mentor and boss, Mark Ridley-Thomas) mounted a highly financed campaign (funded by charter school interests) that brutally slandered Dr. George McKenna, a nationally recognized and respected educator who was portrayed by Denzel Washington in the movie, "The George McKenna Story." Even though Johnson and Ridley-Thomas are Black, just like Dr. McKenna, they weren’t concerned about the interests of the Black and minority community, their alliance was with the corporatist agenda. 
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And again, the same is true of White corporatists. They don’t care any more about poor and middle class White people than they do Black people, women, or gays. This is true of corporate feudalists of every stripe. All these people care about is subjugating the poor and middle class to big business - period.
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So the next time you turn on your television set, or allow yourself to be swept away by any component of the mass media, keep in mind who’s tailoring the message being propagated. Because chances are, that message was specifically designed - or at the very least, promoted - to cloud your mind (and the minds of your children) with nonsense that undermines your way of life - all "isms" notwithstanding.
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Eric L. Wattree
Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.comCitizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)
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Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.
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