Author Archive
Evidence of Things Unseen
There is nothing that would justify in my mind the shooting of an unarmed man down on his knees with his hands in the air by a police officer, soldier or anyone else particularly those who we have authorized to use deadly force on our behalf. Nothing. I just wanted to get that off the table first.
I really want to talk about the great divide of opinion over the incident. Many support the police officer and cite “reports” of Michael Brown’s robbery of a convenience store a few minutes earlier, Brown’s use of marijuana, and Brown’s physical struggle with the policeman in the officer’s police car as the incidents which set events in motion. A few days ago, there was even a false report of physical injury like a broken eye socket that was inflicted on the police officer presumably by Brown. These reports come from official and unofficial sources that range from the Ferguson police department to shadowy unnamed friends of the police officer. Some use these “reports” as justification for the officer’s action in shooting Brown citing the threat that a six foot four “hopped-up-on-drugs thug” (to quote one person on Facebook which is always an impeccable source) who even when unarmed might cause an officer to to fire out of fear or anger. Those who hold this view usually have positive or sympathetic views of the police officer and negative stereotypical views of the victim.
In contrast the people in the Ferguson black community have positive or sympathetic views of the victim and negative stereotypical views of the police officer. They concentrate not on anything that may have precipitated the officer’s actions but on the act of shooting Michael Brown. They rely on the reports of eyewitnesses who say Brown was surrendering when he was shot and not threatening the police officer in any way. To be fair the testimony of eyewitnesses has been shown in court to be questionable as folks bend their memories to fit what they think is happening, forget some details while recalling others real or imaginary, and to not always be truthful. Similarly, the “reports’ of those in authority have been known to be selective, self serving and even doctored. Those reports from shadowy unauthorized sources who claimed to know the police officer are not worth the air time they are given. They are the result of an overactive media who rushes to fill its air time and will jump to any conclusion, use any source and even fabricate things to do so. My point is that whatever side you are on in these two differing views of the event the evidence is at best not unimpeachable or complete and at worst flimsy.
This has not stopped people on either side from strongly holding their views of this incident. It is a spectacular example of what psychologists call confirmation bias. Both sides are making assumptions and holding preconceptions perhaps based on past experience or perhaps not; based on stereotypes and perceived truths or not. Confirmation bias is the tendency to believe evidence that supports our preconceptions and discount evidence to the contrary. This phenomenon has been commented on for almost 500 years.  In 1620 Francis Bacon wrote:
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects: in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
Great thinkers and non-thinkers alike have to recognize and perhaps guard against confirmation bias lest the truth become another casualty. In a larger sense the truth of this incident is less important than the reality of the situation. Â The purpose of the games of dueling evidence, character assassination or build up, is not to establish the truth but to confirm our biases. As long as police see themselves as the front line in a war against crime and the protectors of the white community rather than the black one, they will think of the people they police as animals to be contained rather than fellow human beings. As we have seen in every war soldiers have to dehumanize the people they kill by thinking of them as “gooks”, “rag heads” or in this case “n*ggers” in order to do the job they think they have to do. Much of the black community thinks of them as an army of occupation rather than the nice officer who is there to protect them because that is how they have been treated too often. If we are to move forward out of this cycle, we need at least to recognize how we endlessly repeat our flawed thinking, talking, and behaving about these issues. Most of all we have to change the reality of the situation to change the thinking and behavior. Â In the heat of battle this may seem like a luxury. Indeed, putting the police on notice that the continued killing of unarmed black men will no longer be tolerated may be the highest priority right now. Let this small voice in the wilderness call for us not merely to use this tragedy to confirm our assumptions, prejudices, preconceptions and stereotypes. Let Michael Brown’s sacrifice not be in vain.
The America that poor people and people of color live in is already an America few middle and upper class whites refuse to recognize. It is an America where police and others in authority are not on your side; an America where there is no right to assemble and protest; an America where you can be hassled by the police just for walking down the street; an America that is sustained by the human sacrifice of a black life every now and then; an America where there is no justice. It is an America that will continue until whites understand that it is coming for them too or until it is too late.
In the title of this post I have paraphrased the name of a famous Harlan Ellison science fiction short story, but it is really the evening news that has driven me to this entry. The following stories were on the news: Israel’s ground campaign into Gaza in which civilians are being killed; the Ukrainian airliner that was shot down as the peripheral damage in a war that was not theirs; the Sunni Muslim faction that is taking on the Shiite Muslim army in Iraq and the innocent New York City man who was choked by the police and died while emergency medics did nothing to help him. This does not mention several other ongoing stories: the continued civil war in Syria, the immigrant children from Central America who are being met with protests and a failed policy on immigration, the growing inequality in the United States and the world, the suddenly surging murder death rate in Chicago and many other ongoing stories. All of these amongst the media stories on frivolous things that are supposed to make us feel better and a political system in which no one, no party and no individual seems to have an understanding of what causes those things or how to cure them. They do have a self-serving obsession with pandering to their uninformed constituencies and the cowardice to avoid doing anything while the world falls apart around them.
Let me be clear although some of these are disputes between Jews and Muslims, Sunni’s vs. Shiites etc. they are not religious disputes. They are not about religious doctrines nor are others about ethnic hatreds and race. Yes, sides may be chosen up according to these criteria, but the disputes themselves are not about religion doctrines, nor ethnic differences nor even really about race. They are about human rights, money and political power that are distributed differently. One may distribute those rights on the basis of religion, ethnicity or race, but if the rights were distributed justly the disputes would not be so violent nor probably even occur. There are ideologies or beliefs based upon religion, ethnicity and race that are used to prop up whatever unequal distribution of rights, money and political power are in play in a given region. Unless the inequities are reduced to a level acceptable to all the principals in these disputes there will ultimately be no justice, no peace.
The other thing that angers me is a political debate that does not acknowledge the United States’ participation in these inequities. For example there would be no influx of immigrant children from Central America if the United States had not for so long propped up dictators and powerful money grabbing political office holders who have created and sustained the poverty that grips the area. The armed support that we have given and continue to give to Israel, Syria’s Assad, the Iraqi Shiites, the Afghanis will never occur to the foreign policy hawks like John McCain to be causes of the unrest not its cure. The unfettering of corporate power that we have seen the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidencies of both Republicans and Democrats alike, all support; the increase in state surveillance that the Patriot Act unleashed; and the growing concern about ourselves and not others, has increased the obsession with “getting mine†and the fear that granting to others somehow lessens us. The protestors in California who blocked a bus full of immigrant children, who were not even going to settle in their communities, are a shame and a disgrace. Even if all of the Central American immigrant children were incorporated into the United States it would not decrease the protestors’ share of the American pie one iota. The protestors have just been convinced by politicians and conservative talk radio (commentators like Rush who are most interested in ratings) that their very existence is at stake.
Nowhere are any of these issues discussed in the mainstream media. The media that the conservatives decry as “liberal’ are so right wing that one must go to the niche radical media like al-Jahzeera for example to get any take on this at all. I recently encountered the preface to Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables which reads:
So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century– the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light– are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;–in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.
And I will have to continue to scream.
I don’t think I’ve told this story about meeting Maya Angelou before.  In the course of  heading my college’s Africana Studies department I’ve had the good fortune to meet many celebrities black and white who came to the college to speak.  As a young professor I had the privilege of meeting her.  The talk was to be given in the theater on campus.  She had a small dressing room in the basement of the theater and I was escorting her up some stairs backstage before her speech.  As we climbed the industrial type stairs she held tight to my arm explaining that her vision in the dark wasn’t as good as it used to be.
After her talk she was escorted back down to her dressing room. It was a beehive of activity with students, well wishers crowding the tiny room. Â I intended just to stay a few minutes to hand Ms. Angelou the honorarium for her visit. Â While I was there a tentative knock on the door. I opened it and it was a small elderly white gentlemen with a bouquet for Ms. Angelou. Â I passed the bouquet along to students who passed it to Ms. Angelou. She began reading the card with the flowers. Â In the meantime the man had turned to go. Â Ms. Angelou exclaimed, “Oh that is Mr. (I won’t give his name) please ask him in.” Â I stopped the man from leaving and escorted him over to Ms. Angelou. She explained that he was from a small town in central Maine and they had been corresponding for years. I don’t think they had ever met face to face. They made an odd couple: the majestically dark and tall Ms. Angelou and the tiny white man who looked to be in his seventies. They began to talk as if there wasn’t any chaos around them. It struck me as one of the best examples of the family of human kind I had ever seen. Â Their relationship was based on the commonality of their humanity even though they were from vastly different experiences. I cannot remember her speech that night but her actions that night will never leave me. As the tributes to her talents, her writing, and her quotes pour in, it is her simple humanity that I recall. Â Rest in peace Ms. Angelou.
The deal that Amazon Prime made with HBO to show its old shows allowed me to watch the first episode of “The Wire.”  The Wire is a profane, cynical, profound, humanistic show that has even become the subject of entire college courses. It entertains, informs and unsettles all the stereotypes about black folks, white folks, the drug trade, the school system, local politics and even the media.  It is the best that television can be, that is, it makes you think, laugh and cry sometimes all at the same time. I picked up on it some time in its first season so I actually had never seen the first episode. The full quote from which the title of the episode and this post derives is: “Don’t give a fuck when it’s not your turn to give a fuck.” It is about an anti-hero hero who is a policeman who sits in on a trial of a case that isn’t even his. The cousin of a drug dealer has murdered someone and is eventually acquitted when a witness recants her testimony having been bribed or intimidated by the drug dealer. The judge who knows the policeman from the good old days calls him into his chambers and asks him what he knows about the case.  The policeman tells him it is about a drug dealer who is running the drug trade in black neighborhoods.  This drug dealer has rigged three murder cases that led to acquittals through witness intimidation.  After he leaves the judge calls the deputy chief of the police force and asks him what he knows about this drug dealer.  The deputy chief knows nothing but  the police scramble to find out about him although they had been ignoring him before presumably because he confines himself to black neighborhoods. The rest of the series is thereby set in motion to catch this drug dealer. It is all the result of somebody giving a fuck when it wasn’t his turn or responsibility to give a fuck.
The Wire is really about the collapse of all the institutions we have set in place and none of which operate as they should because of the human frailties of people who inhabit them. Shocked that the administrators of VA hospitals care more about covering their asses than providing services to veterans; then you haven’t seen the Wire. Amazed that the Republicans can govern this badly and still be favored to win the Senate in the fall; then you haven’t seen the Wire. Stunned that someone could post videos on YouTube, write a 140 page manifesto, see therapists, be investigated by police and still get guns to shoot people near University of Santa Barbara; well then you haven’t seen the Wire. Let me cite just one story from this episode. A black youth has been killed and the policeman is just sitting at the scene talking to another youngster who knew him. The youngster is surprised that someone would shoot that boy.  He tells the policeman that every Friday his friends and he get together for a game of craps. Every Friday the dead boy had played with him but eventually grabbed the money in the pot and ran away with it. The policeman asks if they knew he was going to steal the pot each week, why did they let him play?  The boy turns to him and says, “This is America.” Why did all the institutions fail to stop that killer from his rampage, “This is America.” The freedom to do what you want is protected so much even if someone eventually  (and continually) uses his freedom to kill innocent people, the right still is protected even when it makes no common sense.
Why does all this madness continue? Â I would say it is because no one gives a fuck when it isn’t their turn to give a fuck. Christians might rephrase that but they mean the same thing. Â When God asks Cain where his brother is he answers somewhat sarcastically “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Â The answer is yes.
I just saw the 12 Years a Slave movie.  To get this out of the way first it is an excellent movie with top notch writing, acting, cinematography and directing. I have used the book in my classes at times and of all the slave narratives I have assigned it is the one that has elicited the most response.  There is something about the tale of once having been free and then becoming unjustly enslaved that amplifies the injustice, cruelty and inhumanity of slavery. Steve McQueen has done an excellent job of translating the essence of the book to the screen. The real question is whether we still need such reminders of the horrors of slavery in contemporary society? Do we still need a movie like this when most whites can say “I don’t own any slaves?”
To remove the suspense my short answer is “yes.” The slavery of African Americans was based on the idea of the subhuman bestiality of an entire race. Â We can argue whether it was the white race or the black race, but the assumption that the other is not a human being worthy of the protections, practices, and civility accorded other human beings is the core of the slave system. Unfortunately that belief has outlived United States’ slavery which for the record was practiced for 300 years. This belief in black folks’ not-fully-human status has underlay the 100 years of “Jim Crow” and the continuing era of second class citizenship that has followed slavery. We can see it today in the bleating of Fox News and Tea party conservatives who try to rationalize it in non-racial terms. They say or pursue policies based on the idea that black folks are inherently violent, lazy, or less intelligent and need to be treated differently than white folks. Â This is of course the same rationale that the slave-owners used even though they were disproven on a daily basis. It is this foundation belief that the movie attacks with incidents of Solomon demonstrating his intelligence even though he suffers for it, black workers who pick several times more cotton than white workers, and slaves who let their slaveholders live even when they could have murdered them in their sleep. Just as in slavery contemporary capitalist America could not function if African Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and women were truly the people the mythology used to keep white males in power says they are. If Trayvon Martin were indeed the model of the inherently violent black teenager that the defense says he was, he would have shot George Zimmerman on sight. If blacks lacked any work ethic as Newt Gingrich stated then why are almost 90% in the work force or looking for a job. If immigrants are just looking for free social benefits why have they had a long history of doing the worst jobs, raising themselves up and advancing in our society?
The presence of these ideas submerged, subconscious or fully acknowledged in our political debates is proof that we still need to be reminded where these ideas come from, how they have entered our collective conscious.  While I as other reviewers am given pause by yet another movie about black victimization, whipping or rape porn, and white folks doing black folks wrong, I do endorse this one.  It shocks and disgusts by showing that white neuroses, psychoses and relationship problems were played out on black bodies. The movie certainly subtly shows the toll slavery has on whites but that is not the major point.  Too many Hollywood movies assume a white male gaze leads to profitability and therefore concern themselves primarily with white protagonists. This one doesn’t. I saw it with a predominantly white and full audience. I hope others see it and recognize it as demonstrating where that path of the assumed inferiority of others can lead. More to the point I hope they see and recognize those ideas in contemporary political debates so they don’t fall for this ideology even when it is hidden in color blind language.
A recent CBS poll shows that 72% of the American public opposes the Republican shutdown of the government unless the Affordable Care Act is repealed or delayed. Even half of those who call themselves Republican do. Â Among those who identify themselves as Tea Party some 57% approve while even among them some 43% disapprove. None of that is a surprise to me. Â What is a surprise is that only 44% blame the Republican party for the shutdown while 35% blame the president and 17% say both parties are to blame. That is, a majority of the American public hold the president partly or entirely to blame for the shutdown. Â This is astonishing.
No doubt part of this is the result of how the news has framed the shutdown. The mainstream media are portraying the current shutdown as a failure of the two sides to reach a compromise agreement.  Fox News and the right wing press are decrying Obama’s refusal to even meet with the Republicans to negotiate. Let us be clear here.  This is an attempt by a Republican minority to blackmail the president into repealing or delaying a law that has been passed by Congress, signed by the President and declared constitutional by the Supreme Court.  All three branches of the government have therefore had their say on this.  Yet a minority of Republican politicians have convinced the Republicans in the House to side with them on extorting the government into doing what they want or they will cut off their funding.  This is not a negotiation this is blackmail pure and simple.  President Obama has already said time and time again that we will not negotiate with terrorists blackmailers like this. And, for good reason.  Just as negotiating with terrorist about American hostages would endanger every American abroad, negotiating with these Congressional terrorists would put all in jeopardy. If he even sat down with them it would embolden them to do it again and hold the country hostage to some other demand that we repeal or enact some other law.  As with other terrorists this governmental crisis will not be solved until the House Republicans withdraw their demands or a Seal Team goes in.
Part of the blame put upon the president is of course the racial animosity portrayed as political opposition that has always occurred with this president. Some of it is legitimate ideological difference with the president and the Democrats. Most of it however is about the failure of the media to portray the real situation. Â The media are bending over backwards to show themselves as objective by presenting what is happening as a dispute and the failure to reach a compromise. I don’t know if they are afraid of losing sponsors, afraid that the Republicans might retaliate by refusing them access, afraid of losing conservative viewers or afraid of offending the big money that funds the Tea Party. Whatever the reason they are doing the American public a disservice, forsaking their own history of truth-telling, timidly surrendering their constitutional right to freely present and betraying their duty to keep the public informed. When one has to go to a source like America al-Jazeera to get a correct reading of the situation, you know that there is something wrong with the American media.
Dictionary.com defines delusional as: “1. having false or unrealistic beliefs or opinions; 2. Psychiatry. maintaining fixed false beliefs even when confronted with facts, usually as a result of mental illness” Now I am no psychiatrist but Tea Partiers, Republicans and lately Ted Cruz have recently demonstrated delusional thinking in either sense 1 or 2. I know they are politicians and they are trying to win votes among an electorate many of whom share their delusional thoughts, but their arguments are no less delusional for being  a part of a performance. I was reminded of this while reading this article on the newsone.com site about Rep. Kevin Cramer R-ND. The article says “who last week made headlines after invoking a Biblical quote to slam the impoverished. Cramer was responding to constituent (and probable Satanist) who opposed his calls to drastically cut food stamps for the young, elderly, and poor. … Cramer’s overall point is that the poor don’t want to work, and thus, need to be kicked off of aid for their own good. The idea that the poor don’t want to work is a long perpetuated falsehood from Cramer’s ilk. To wit, in an op-ed posted on his site, Cramer echoed the “We cut your aid to help you!†sentiment by asserting, “Our reforms to food stamps also address the larger benefits of work and its value to the human spirit.â€
What makes this demonstrably wrong? As Paul Krugman argued in the New York Times in answer to a similar statement by Sen. Paul Ryan “last year, average food stamp benefits were $4.45 a day. Also, about those “able-bodied peopleâ€: almost two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, the elderly or the disabled, and most of the rest are adults with children.” The caricature of a poor person in these beliefs does not describe any poor person who I have ever met. On what evidence do they base their picture of the poor? What makes this delusional? Ryan, Cramer and the others should, could, or do know these facts but “maintain fixed false beliefs even when confronted with facts.” Cramer even used the New Testament to support his beliefs though ignoring that Jesus feeding the poor part.
I was having a conversation about such delusional realities the other day and the other person asked the “emperor has no clothes” question. Â What is wrong with living in a delusional reality? Â If one accepts that there is no usable objective reality all we have left are competing relative realities. If some of those competing realities are delusional, so what? He said the question is not how much your delusion corresponds to reality but how well you are able to live in your delusion. It would be narcissistic to judge somebody’s delusion by how much it differs from my subjective reality. On what basis should you judge someone else’s delusional reality?
One method would be to judge whether one of its consequences is to harm other people. Take the D.C. Navy Yard shooter. Â His delusional reality led him to take the lives of innocent people as in most mass shootings. If terrorists hold a delusional belief that leads to a suicide bombing or an attack on the World Trade Center, I think that’s enough to condemn the delusion. It is clear that the decision to cut food stamps (the SNAP program) is one that will ultimately harm people and so I condemn it.
For a second method I am not willing to give up on distance from reality. I can’t help thinking that eventually there will be a cost for denying a reality, even a subjective reality, that conflicts with one’s delusional reality. If you are a politician who believes that the electorate wants your delusion when it really doesn’t, you will be voted out of office. They may indeed hold subjective, delusional or at least different realities, but if it is not the one you are preaching then you will lose. If you try to cross a chasm on a delusional bridge you are going to fall. It has not been shown that enough of the electorate does not support this view to not elect politicians who do. Â To a large extent those in the electorate who share this view, ignore this view, or do not vote, have been the enablers of it.
If we do not remove from Congress this and similar delusional views as well as those who hold them, we will continue to have Congressional gridlock, silly things like Cruz’s faux filibuster of a bill he favors (please don’t get me started on this) and attacks on the poor, women’s right to choose, gay civil rights and the middle class. Delusional realities especially when held by members of Congress can lead to tragedy as much as delusional realities held by people with guns.
Recently we have seen the fiftieth anniversary of two seminal events in the history of the civil rights movement: the 1963 March on Washington and the Birmingham church bombing. Each event has something to tell us about race and oppression, but are we learning the right lessons? Â At the March on Washington anniversary celebration the weekend before the actual anniversary we had another gathering of fewer people but we had speakers to remind the crowd of how we may have made some progress but we still have far to go. On the Wednesday of the actual anniversary we again had speeches from leaders including President Obama though they couldn’t hold a candle to the originals. I have often felt that there has been too much emphasis on the speakers rather than the audience. Although Martin Luther King’s oratory on that day soared I always felt that he would disagree with the constant reminder that that speech became what is remembered about that day. It smacks of what he called “the drum major instinct” where leaders become enamored of the notoriety and fame of their place at the head of the band. I have always felt that historians and teachers have placed too much of their lessons on the few who were on the stage rather than the many who were in the audience. Â After all it is the band that makes the music and without them the drum major is just a man flapping his arms. The real heroes of that day, indeed of the entire civil rights movement, were the ordinary people who did extraordinary things like travel by car, bus or foot to Washington D.C. that day. They are the ones who, often at the risk of injury or death, marched, sat-in, protested, or tried to vote. Â They are the ones who worked to end the indignities, fear and violence that was a part of segregation.
The other anniversary to note is the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing that killed four little girls and injured others. It was an action whose savagery, location, and innocent victims shocked America and made clear the violence that enforced and underlay segregation. A major part of King’s nonviolent action was to make that violence manifest itself by bringing it down upon himself and his fellow civil rights workers. The hope was that their clearly undeserved suffering would stir the consciences of Americans. The leaders of Birmingham were  happy to oblige. The adolescent industry of television was able to broadcast it to the entire country and the world.  Newspapers around the world blared headlines so loud that civil rights became a Cold War foreign policy issue for the U.S. government. The bombing of the church and the deaths of these children made the country and world understand that what southerners wanted to present as a peculiar social practice was actually enforced by murder, hatred and viciousness.
I have often told students that oppression can’t be maintained by violence alone. Â There is a psychological component to it in which the people being oppressed have to be so intimidated by violence that they accept their oppression as an unfortunate but unchangeable reality. Â They may even accept the logic or rationale upon which their oppression is based. Franz Fanon has explored this psychological aspect of oppression through out his work especially in Wretched of the Earth. He concludes that the oppressed, in his case the colonized, can, must, and will throw off their psychological acceptance of their oppression. Â For Fanon this can only be done through violence against the oppressor. Â His model and experience of this was the Algerian battle against the French forever immortalized in the magnificent film The Battle of Algiers. Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to do this nonviolently and it is in this context that we need to view the March on Washington. The march was an attempt to bring all the people who were working on the front-lines of the battle against racism together. Â It was an occasion to demonstrate the widespread support that the movement had, an occasion to show the foot soldiers that they were not alone, an occasion to provide inspiration to continue and an occasion to demonstrate that the movement was an interracial one. It was acknowledgement, encouragement and respite for those who had successfully overcome the psychological bonds of racism.
Just as the victims of racism had to overcome their belief in its inevitability and sometimes their belief in their own inferiority, the perpetrators of racism and the silent majority who allowed it to occur, had to overcome their sense of its correctness, inevitability and necessity. Racism’s underlying logic was that there was an inferiority among all blacks and a superiority among all whites that made segregation or second class treatment of African Americans the thing to do. Segregation was only common sense since God had made blacks inferior and entrusted their care to superior whites. The Birmingham bombing shattered the self righteousness of their belief in segregation. Even if they still believed in the inferiority of blacks could they accept what the maintenance of the racist system required or led to? Were you really superior if you had to bomb churches and kill children to prove it? In blindly following the logic of their system could they live with what they had become? The bombing produced cracks in the support of the segregation system, cracks that would eventually bring about its downfall.
Amid all the hoopla it is therefore necessary to examine these events for their real meaning and not the one popular culture, superficial history, politics and the media give to them. I believe their weakening of the psychological aspects of oppression were key.
One day you wake up and realize that you are living in that science fiction world you dreamed of as a kid. Â Yeah I know we don’t have the Jetsons’ flying cars and robot maids or Star Trek’s transporters or phasers. We do have “roombas”, tablets, smartphones and that thing they call the internet. The internet for example, is the greatest accumulator and disperser of information that humans have ever created. Â In fact it is so good at its job that we humans have made it difficult to use. Â Among the videos of pets and stupid human tricks, there is so much misinformation, lies, damned lies, and statistics that it is hard to find the dependable, factual information that we crave. In some of the science fiction stories I began reading as a kid one could check a device usually wearable or small to get reliable information about any topic. Smartphones and tablets offer that possibility today, but real information is usually drowned out by the constant blare of the useless, irrelevant and misinformed stuff that is out there on the web. In addition there is no sanity test one has to pass before posting something on the web and the crazies are out in full force. Anyone with an ax to grind can find someplace on the web to grind it. The mainstream media has been captured by the corporate world and has adapted to use social media to spread the narratives it wants to spread whenever it is not telling us about celebrities. In this way the “free ” press can put the important things on page twelve (if they cover them at all) while beguiling us with nonsense, providing a distortion of reality and indoctrinating us on page one. Having trained the public in what it wants them to crave the mainstream press can then fall back on the “we are just giving the public what it wants” argument to justify itself.
I have therefore in my hubris started my own web site that posts what I think is important. It cherry picks the mainstream media notably the New York Times op ed section, some of the leftish blogs like democracy now.com , African American mainstream blogs like Ebony and the Root.com, and things that my Facebook friends alert me to. I also occasionally link to Digital Professor to provide commentary. Indeed I have an open invitation to anyone who wants to write commentary to send it to me for Afamonline.com as it is called. I try to post things that are not receiving enough attention in the mainstream, offer new interesting insights on the news, history that is relevant to today, and music that is noteworthy. Â In the future I also hope to add articles about art and more things written specifically for the site. I try to write little intros or outros that explain why an entry is important and I always link to the whole article to complement my abridged version.
I always tell you where an entry is from, use accredited academics or respected journalists, and offer information that I believe to be true. Â I also understand the weaknesses of these sources. Â I have learned long ago that academic studies can be skewed to prove whatever it is you want to prove, that there is no knowable objective reality, and even respected or accredited people can be wrong. Â However I try to use the best information we have and things that make sense or are at least insightful. Â I also realize I can be wrong (as rare an occurrence as that may be.) I am quite willing to be corrected or persuaded otherwise.
So check out my version of the world at http://www.afamonline.com