Buju Bye Bye (Reprise)

Tonight’s Grammy Awards may result in an award to Buju Banton in the Best Reggae Album category, and the dismay over his homicidally anti-gay lyrics (noted two posts below) has been dismissed by the Recording Academy, which gives out the awards, as irrelevant to the act of ‘honoring musical achievement regardless of politics’.

Oh yes, that familiar message: Tut, tut, now people, please don’t be dull and mix politics with capital-A Art.

But what if we were to do a thought experiment and change the let’s-shoot-and-then-set-fire-to-homosexuals lyrics by substituting another class of people to be on the receiving end?

Like Jews, for example. Or blacks. How far would a singer get who pumped up his dancehall listeners with calls to shoot Jews or burn dark-skinned people? I suspect the reaction might be characterized in a lot of ways but never as mere ‘politics’.

Nor would many people rush to such a performer’s defense in name of artistic freedom, which merely demonstrates that hateful incitement to violence against gay men remains acceptable in polite society while anti-Semitism and racism are not.

[P.S.] One of Buju’s esteemed ‘longtime collaborators’ listed on the Irish and Chin website (which also carries furious attacks on Banton’s critics under ‘Dear Sodomite or Sodomite sympathizer’) is Wyclef Jean, the Haitian musician who is raking in mountains of money to his modestly-named Wyclef Jean Foundation. Problem is, according to The Smoking Gun, the WJF ‘has a lackluster history of accounting for its finances and . . . has paid the performer and his business partner at least $410,000 for rent [and] production services’.

Great bunch of guys. Let’s dance (non-politically)!

Tony Blair's millions

While we have been distracted with the state of our sorry union, the Brits have been entertaining themselves with their Chilcot Inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war and Britain’s part in it.

That would be the war that has caused, so far, an estimated 1 million dead, produced 3 million refugees and created 5 million orphans, according to one account based on government statistics.

But who’s counting?

Tony Blair made his cameo appearance Thursday, sneaking in a side door to avoid people eager to shout ‘War criminal!’ at him.

There have been some interesting revelations in the official inquiry, such as how dissidents were browbeaten into silence or acquiescence, including Lord Goldsmith, the British equivalent of our attorney-general, who for a while told Blair that invading Iraq to depose Saddam would be illegal for the obvious reason that Iraq did not pose a threat to Britain. But Goldsmith was bullied by the war party and buckled like most of his colleagues.

The commission also learned that:

-British intelligence knew Iraq had disassembled its chemical weapons, and

-Blair and Bush had a secret deal (‘signed in blood’, in the words of one) to remove Saddam a year before the invasion and then looked for ways to justify it.

None of which is surprising, and in fact the testimony from senior diplomats and officials had the smell of scapegoating by many of those involved, which is what you’d expect after a debacle on this scale—finger-pointing at the other guy. Britain’s former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, claimed Blair’s bear-hug with Bush left officials scrabbling to find a ‘smoking gun’ to justify going to war, which Meyer himself promptly did.

Blair deftly parried all the revelations and kept out of the feeble panel members’ grasp throughout his six-hour appearance, an indication of how difficult it is for the political establishment to indict the architect of a failed policy with which it is deeply complicit.

Meanwhile, Blair, untroubled by regret for the destruction he has caused, used the platform to talk up another great idea—going to war with Iran next.

But despite his narrow escape, Blair is being steadily unmasked, revealed drip by drip as a conniving liar determined to do George Bush’s bidding despite massive domestic opposition, even while Britain got little in return.

It’s doubly tragic for Britons that the chauvinistic and brutal episode based on fear-mongering and lies was conducted under a Labour government, leaving decent-minded people nowhere to turn for an alternative. As one commentator put it, ‘We’re all conservatives now’.

"Buju Bye Bye!"

Buju Banton is a singer who’s achievements include a dancehall hit called ‘Boom Bye Bye’, which has lyrics like:

‘Boom bye bye
Inna batty boy head. . .

‘Guy come near we
Then his skin must peel
Burn him up bad like an old tire wheel’

In case you’re fuzzy on your Jamaican patois, Banton is saying that homosexuals should be shot in the head and set on fire.

I wonder what dances go with that.

But now Banton’s been arrested in Florida for trying to do a big cocaine deal. I can’t remember when I was more pleased over a piece of police work. Maybe a couple of decades in prison will give him a new perspective on the horrors of anal intercourse.

Needed: An Offense and a Defense

I don’t see any sign that Be Reasonable/Play Nice approach deployed by the president last night is going to turn the tide for more than a couple of news cycles. Obama’s ratings bump (among people who tuned in to hear him) was a relief and showed that people haven’t completely lost their minds to Fox and CNN. But the relentlessness of the war party shouldn’t be dampened by this modest setback, and they’re certainly not distracted by any silly old facts.

Masschusetts stimulated Obama’s faith in banking reform, and we heard another stern-daddy lecture on it in the State of the Union. If the legislation doesn’t ‘meet the test of real reform’, the president intoned, ‘I will send it back until we get it right’. [repeat] ‘We’ve got to get it right’.

Yes, that should happen, my cousin Jessica should lay off the vodka gimlets, and the lion should lie down with the lamb. But saying it twice doesn’t make it twice as likely to happen. Now that the Supreme Court has authorized the banks to use their unlimited cash [including ours] to buy up the last dozen remnant independent-minded fools wandering around Congress, how exactly is that worthy sentiment going to translate into anything?

For me, what’s missing in the Obama worldview is any sense that there are real differences of interest and intention among the opposing camps. He’s incapable of a Rooseveltian or Kennedyesque confrontation with the selfish, ruthless ruling elite that both of them knew so well because they were born into it.

Obama, by contrast, looks like a smart guy who’s convinced that the system is basically benign because it permitted him to come from nowhere and get where he is, and on his own merits, too. But within that alluring Weltanschauung is a dangerous trap.

The same system that made Obama president was staggering into a serious morass of its own making after the vast disaster of the Bush years and, I would argue, three largely uninterrupted decades of Reaganism. What better vehicle for a tactical retreat than someone who looks and sounds completely different—but perhaps really isn’t?

Obama’s bio reveals a guy who doesn’t show his cards but in the end is rather drawn to the conservative side of the fence. He stands for something more than Bill Clinton ever did, and he shouldn’t be counted out for flubbing Year One. But the forces out there trying to jam our society into a dangerously fanatical and narrow-minded mold are not to be underestimated either. That’s something we down on the ground can see and sense much better than the remote figures at the top.

WRONG

Why doesn’t Obama just publicly suck Joe Wilson’s dick and get it over with?

Obama’s imminent announcement of a freeze on non-defense, non-security spending emboldens the crazy teabagger narrative that we’re in trouble because the government takes care of people’s health and well-being, not because George Bush put us in hock so he could give away trillions to rich people. It’s exactly the narrative the Republicans want to push, and now they have the president of the opposition signing onto it—for which they will pillory him mercilessly as a Johnny-come-lately.

The last time our president-of-record addressed a joint session of Congress, South Carolina solon Joe Wilson of the unrepetent Confederacy famously broke protocol and called him a liar from the grandstands. If the current leaders in our increasingly polarized nation really believed their own rhetoric about respecting our country and its democratic systems, this would have been a watershed event.

Obama and his governing party could have saddled the Republican/teabagger crowd with the obvious fact that they’re bullies. We could still today be hearing about the difference between using violence and brute force to get one’s way and the Founding Fathers’ careful and ultimately successful strategy for making a revolution and not killing each other afterward.

We could have been hearing an alternative point of view since then, an indictment of the me-me-me party for its fanatical determination to permit nothing to occur that might remotely aid the populace and block the continued absorption of all national wealth by the plutocracy.

Instead, Obama shows every sign of determination to give away the store, the one we mobilized after eight nightmarish years of W-ism to deliver to him. We look to him for a distinct vision of the state, our current problems, the role of government, and what do we get? Recycled ideas from the people we threw out who are treated with deference while we’re chastized for making unreasonable demands.

Wilson should have been the poster boy for everything that’s wrong with the nasty, brutish opposition, and instead his shark attack was passed over as childish bad manners. So now there’s blood in the water—why not redouble the attack tonight?

Bank shares plummet—Yippee!

If ever there were a sign that things are going our way at last—the ‘our’ in this case referring to us regular folks—it’s the news that the Royal Bank of Scotland is now worth 7 percent less than yesterday and Bank of America 6 percent.

Of course, it’s just one day, and who knows how serious Obama is about getting real reform of Wall Street out of our lapdog Congress or whether he’ll be able to do it having wasted so much of his political capital trying to please both. But the symbolic shift from Geithner to Volcker was swift and delightful.

Volcker is the former Fed chief who kept saying the collapse of 2008 should lead to structural reform in the rapacious and overstuffed (shall we add ‘criminal’?) financial sector while Geithner’s solution was indistinguishable from those of banker lobbyists. So finally we have someone in charge who thinks the destruction of millions of jobs and the loss of millions of family domiciles should have some consequences for those responsible so that it can’t happen again.

It took losing Ted Kennedy’s seat for Obama to figure out THAT? I’m glad he got hip, but I still don’t know what planet he really lives on.

The Debacle

‘Let’s stop the giveaways and get jobs going’. –Massachusetts voter Marlene Connolly, a lifelong Democrat quoted in the New York Times after voting for a Republican to replace the late Teddy Kennedy

The tragedy of the loss of Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat to the teabaggers is not the loss itself but the irony of allowing the populist revolt against corporate abuse to be snatched away by the party of big business.

A mere year after Barack Obama inspired us with his promise to do things differently and his manifest personal differentness, his instincts have turned out to be technocratic and naïve. The soaring post-racial rhetoric about all of us being in this together, etc., etc., which sounded nice enough on the campaign, suggested a refusal to contemplate the huge vested interests arrayed against any attempt at reorganizing society for the people’s benefit. Now we see the results.

The legacy of Reaganism—stacking the decks in favor of the rich while convincing the poor that you’re on their side—lives on, and the White House has played into the hands of its practitioners by relying on guys like Emanuel, Geithner and Sommers who look seedy, shady and ready to cut secret deals with the powerful. And then do.

But behind the dubious doings of these operators, behind the giveaway to AIG, the faux outrage over banker greed, the continuity of Bush-ite war policies in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, is the profound lack of vision emanating from the boss.

We worked and voted for someone who would dare to start from different premises, and had these actions failed, we would lament it. But it is far more exasperating to lose while giving in.

This is Clintonism redux, to move inexorably toward some vague center and strip yourself and your party from standing for anything identifiable except yourself. To cling to no real core principles and to horse-trade everything in the hope of emerging with a deal even while the opposition attacks like wolverines. To look cerebral, a bit supercilious, amused at the viciousness of it all, and in the end, lame.

Our society is descending into a nasty pit, and the reactionary forces do not believe in cooperation, compromise or cohabitation. They are a war movement and enjoy crushing the enemy and shouting down the weak. They will kick the chessboard over before admitting they have lost a match, and they could give two shits about democracy itself.

These people are dangerous, and to pretend that they’re not just won’t do. If the Obama administration and the top guy himself aren’t willing to accept the polarization that has been thrust upon them, they will continue to preside over defeat and pave the way for who knows what horrible next chapter.