REPOST: The Convention Made Me Do It

photo courtesy of Business Insider

Apparently, just about two years ago today, I published this post as my "end of hiatus" triumphant return to blogging.  Well, "yay" for that.  
But what's disturbing is that, looking about at the discussions going on today, the "dialogue" on race hasn't progressed.  As in: at all.
Yet we continue to feign surprise and haven't let up the speed in which we produce these precious, precious "teachable moments."

photo: Christian Science Monitor

***********************************************

The hiatus is officially ended.

The spell, somehow, broke around 10 pm last evening, during a ventriloquist failure at the Republican Convention, as a broken and weird-haired Clint Eastwood opened network coverage of the circus, basically introducing former Governor Mitt Romney with a routine that I'd bet a bazillion dollars wasn't... vetted.

So much of our troubles are due to this vetting obsession, so much of the loss of our fun.  What should have been the guiding light of my life is this seussian bit of wisdom:  “If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”

And then there is the iconic Seuss, meant for my gravestone:  “Being crazy isn't enough.” 

Back to vetting, the idea that we can know it all by what all we can dig up in the peaty dirt, the dirt old enough to get peaty rich, that old, old dirt.  Like an imaginary President Obama perched on what looked to me to be an insultingly uncomfortable folding chair, mouthing off at Clint with a big old "Go fuck yourself." 

Presumably, Obama was pretty lit, having had to be forcibly removed from Boehner's bar.

Yes, I suspected that the Republican Convention would end my blogging hiatus.

The balance, the scale, isn't just the symbol of justice, blind.  Balance and scale are needed to make it safely head-to-pillow each and every day -- provided head-to-pillow denotes, for you, day's end.  What people consistently fail to point out is the grin on Lady Justice's pocked and bruised face.  And she's not *blind*, people, she's blind-folded.  Big difference.  I think she peeks.  And I think she joneses for Seuss as much as I do.

She-Hulk #1

“I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights.” 
― Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle and Gertrude McFuzz

“The words in this book are all phooey. When you say them, your lips will make slips and back flips and your tongue may end up in Saint Looey!” 

― Dr. Seuss

In addition to vetting, I propose ciphering, or coded words, as enemies to my political fun, at least. I would like "Chicago" to reference a city in Illinois and not become the millionth Other Word to mean "a gathering of people of color," "black," or "African American."  What was so wrong with "urban"?

The day has come, O Jehovah, in which I quote with approbation the inimitable Michelle Malkin, from her half-assed researched and cent pour cent aware articlette, entitled "The Condensed Liberal Handbook Of Racial Code Words."  Oh, and it was published in the... Patriot Post.  Quick!  If you are a J. K. Rowling fan, eat chocolate!  If not, if you're the lazy sort:  "You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." 

As Malkin slipslides her way down, she writes this graffito in the slime accumulated on her ill-kept rodent burrow, and it *is* a good one:

--Kitchen cabinet. Radio talk-show host Mark Thompson jumped on Romney for using this phrase -- coined to describe Andrew Jackson's administration in the 1800s -- at the NAACP convention in July. Romney was referring to a close member of his staff during his tenure as Massachusetts governor. 

"To talk about being in the kitchen and not talk about an African-American actually being in your cabinet is really not a good metaphor to use with African-Americans," Thompson blasted. Is it racist to ask: Huh?

I'm so fully aware of racist speech and racist code words in political speech, in particular, that I've developed linguistic bulimia, polysemic purging.  As Lee Atwater, Malkin's godfather put it:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[9][10]

You all know that I am an expert in everything, being something of a specialist in 16th century French Literature, although, through circumstances completely out of my control, I ended up writing a thesis concentrated on the eighteenth -- which explains my real and actual fascination with the relationship between word and image, the whole ut pictura poesis thang.  If you're with me, then you'll understand that simply seeing a fleeting image of Jan Brewer is cathartic for someone with my predilections.  She simply makes me spew -- and go into a five-minute routine of poking people with a witchy index finger.

Thank goodness there are not too many occasions for using that old chestnut of a phrase, "blah people." 

from Crooks and Liars

"We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers." asserted Neil Newhouse.

Now, there you go!  It's not exactly MY take on the Good Seussian Life, but I can stomach such an open-armed hug to fun... I mean, it's not quite ipecac, and that's progress.  So thank you, Neil Newhouse!  I'm laughing and so far, lunch is staying down.

The lower you go, reading-wise, down, down, where the hard work, the hard digging is done, the more ano-friendly the texts.  There are no codes in use.  The First Lady is called a "fat black cow."  This same author pondered summore and came up with:  "id like to take obamas big fat black lips and make them kiss his own buttox." 

One of my favorite writers on the interwebs is a frequent tweeter of Our President and his First Family, excitedly anticipating their love of a spicy African soup, and frequently deciding that Michelle Obama must be pregnant.  She's a fan of those who are fans of her, and so I pray and frequently beg my friend, The President, to send her a letter full of praise of some of her original ideas -- you know, how sex is solely intended for those intending procreation, and acknowledging the incredible guilt of newborns, in general, and in specifics -- from unemployment to shady welfare suck-ups.

I HAD to come out of sabbatical.  The world was going to Hell and being led there by people blaming climate change on Hell itself.

Captain Haddock may, however, need to extend my FMLA job-protected and unpaid loafing, that invitation to sloth so obligingly enacted by that impeached bum Bill Clinton, who stole it from the blessed founding father of the free lands west of the Lone Alp, now known as the Tête de Hergé.