Tag: America

“Illegal Immigration is Immoral”

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Victor Davis Hanson lays out a compelling and logical argument why illegal immigration is immoral in the National Review.

Kunstler on the Tuscon Killings.

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James Howard Kunstler writes provocative critiques about the decline of America, interpreted through the aesthetic ugliness of our strip malls, billboards, and vacuous suburban environment.   He speculates about why young men, facing meaningless work and oppressive debt, might go mad in a nihilistic nation that has destroyed its own character and integrity:

“The rewards of entering the realm beyond college are paltry-to-miserable. Solitary cab rides to the mall. A burrito and a Big Gulp. Later, back home, an hour in the virtual company of the Kardashian sisters via the E-Network on your parents’ cable TV. Where are the initiations into manhood? (Try the channelized dry-wash, courtesy of the Barrio Blue Moon boyz.) I’m convinced that the reason video games and movies aimed at young males in America are devoted almost solely to fantasies about super-heroes and supernatural power (especially the power to kill) is because adolescent boys feel so impotent, so powerless, so unlike real men. The adults in this culture do not furnish any meaningful alternative scripts. That’s the market’s job, I guess.”

Racialism and Obama.

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Racialism and Obama

Suddenly, the cat is out of the bag and people are looking at those who oppose Obama and asking if the dislike of the President is formed out of racial animosity.

To an observer and historian of American history, the question should really be asked: What issues in our nation are not tinged by racial prejudice?

Very few.

Welfare reform, tax breaks for the wealthy, home schooling, public transportation, spending for domestic social needs, legislative redistricting, education, jobs, sprawl, the growth of the Sun Belt, immigration reform, the depopulation and decay in the Rust Belt, Christian values, states rights, affirmative action, prisons, law enforcement, guns. Almost everything has some underlying racial preference or prejudice influencing people’s beliefs and behaviors.

Obama is half white, but in this nation, that means he is all black. He married a black woman, and they joined a majority black church and lived and worked among working class black Chicagoans. Obama never lived post-racially but joined the very race based world of South Side Chicagoland.

Despite his immersion in South Side politics, Obama has tried and nearly succeeded in making white people forget that the history of America is as much about the exclusion of darker skin as it about the inclusion of everyone else. For the last two years, the liberal “elite”, if there is such a class, has pronounced, from its well-to-do white habitat, that we are a “post-racial” nation. We are not, and never will be that country.

Who among us, if given a choice, would rather have a black complexion? Who would choose to live in a mostly black neighborhood if they could live anywhere? We are lying if we say that we want to make our life harder. Anyone with common sense would like things to be easier: economically, socially, and racially.

If some sleeping liberals now detect that hostility to Obama stems from some hidden bigotry, they might realize that hatred of the man and his policies all share a common thread, however insignificant: race and color will always inform our policies.

Race and class are sitting in the debate room on issues as small as the renaming of a part of Van Nuys as Sherman Oaks; and as large, invisible spectators in the national tragedy of why we have spent 2 trillion dollars in Iraq rather than rebuilding Detroit, Newark, and Camden, NJ.

END

Colorful people for a Better World, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King (Ben Heine)

(Note : If you wish a print of this image, follow the following link and click on “Buy This Print” : benheine.deviantart.com/art/Obama-Luther-King-81753252 thanks)
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Without a Shtik.

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These are bad days, for people like me, who are without a shtik.

For those of you who don’t know the definition, a “shtik” is a Yiddish word, defined as:

“A characteristic attribute, talent, or trait that is helpful in securing recognition or attention.”

You see these shtik people all the time, especially in the media. Like Donald Trump who can make any ugly building “the most beautiful property in the world”.  Or those expert writers and best selling authors like David Brooks or Tom Friedman who appear on the news armed with years of dispensing the same hokum, so often, that they appear to possess real knowledge about world events.

Closer to home, in Hollywood, you meet a mediocre, gum chewing woman of no discernable articulation or breeding who will tell you, with a straight poker face, that she “produces and creates reality TV”. She can’t write, act, or direct, but she has her “shtik” down pat, and she peddles it to a gullible public who eventually believes she really does know what she’s doing.

Or someone tries to pretend they have their shtik down but it falls apart when they describe themselves as an actor, voice over actor, real estate investor, and owner of a North Hollywood photo studio. The shtik becomes convoluted, muddled, therefore unbelievable.

There are sensitive people who play the guitar, who paint, who take great photos, who can dance well, who write poetry, who know the history of England since 1066, but they are of no use because they offer no shtik to the world. They frequently are jobless, struggle to make a living, and cannot define their life’s purpose in a Facebook profile.

But the honored ones, the ones who garner the most respect in America, do not care to be honest, for they have already discovered the best thing in life is to lie to yourself and be a wholehearted believer in your own bullshit. Perhaps this brings to mind the blank unlined faces of Pastor Rick Warren and his Botoxed wife? A long time back, these eternally youthful creatures hit upon a shtik of positivism and salvation through materialism and, lo and behold, it works. Even the President-Elect believes them.

The next time someone tells you that they have invented a great weight loss device, or that they are the “King of Encino Real Estate” or they call themselves “Mr. Baklava”, remember not to laugh.

They have a shtik and they are better than you.

Frantic Time at the Mall.

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I went over to Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks just to kill time.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend and the retail stores are in an absolute panic about falling sales.

The mall hired professional dancers to put on a show. A crowd watched a man and woman swing around like Astaire and Rogers.  Anything to get the masses back into the stores.

Every single window of every single store had a markdown, or sale sign. “50% OFF!”. There was not a single retailer who wasn’t trying their damnest to move merchandise.

Walking around Bloomingdales’ Mens department was sad. Here were racks and racks of $150, $295, $330 denim jeans with 60% off signs. The jeans were cheap and ugly. The prices were obscene and even the sale prices were a rip-off.  How long have these stores been scamming the public with t-shirts and jeans that will set one back $500?  Are these retailers living in the same world where people cannot afford to make their mortgage, college tuition or medical insurance payments?

Lunatic fragrance and Kabuki masked cosmetic salespeople rushed up to us in an attempt to sell us their utterly useless overpriced snake oil.  Bloomingdales has a block long wall of fragrance that never goes on sale. I wonder how they are going to sell it all.

And only the Apple Store seemed to be packed. It didn’t have a SINGLE THING discounted. They only sell great products for full price.

Maybe all the department stores with their crappy denim should study Apple and ask themselves if perhaps quality does matter after all.

The Color Has Changed, the Situation Remains the Same.

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In the aftermath of the glow over President Elect Obama’s win, the great national back pat and international acclaim for our nation, continues. WE ELECTED A DARK SKINNED MAN! Tears were pouring out, because our racist country could now point to that one example who surmounted the odds and would now take the oath of office in January 2009.

But as Shelby Steele points out in the Los Angeles Times, Obama has been masterful at putting forth an idealism that implies that a vote against him would be an act of cynicism. “His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America — and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.”

Steele argues that some white Americans would like to vote for a black person because it absolves them of the sin of racism. He writes that Obama’s racial identity, not his political views, form the strength of his new compact with the American people. “In fact, this was his only true political originality. On the level of public policy, he was quite unremarkable. His economics were the redistributive axioms of old-fashioned Keynesianism; his social thought was recycled Great Society. But all this policy boilerplate was freshened up — given an air of “change” — by the dreamy post-racial and post-ideological kitsch he dressed it in, “ Steele says.

But the larger issue, goes to the heart of how America sees itself in the world. We are convinced that our power is unlimited. That if we only put our minds and money to work, we can end terrorism, control global warming, make the Israelis and Palestinians love each other, and insure health care for everyone. True conservatives are wary of such great ambitions, but we have just come out of eight years of neo-conservatism with its doctrine of pre-emptive war and American exceptionalism.

When Obama takes office, the expectations will again be completely ridiculous. The world expects America to be different. Obama’s supporters think he will withdraw our troops from Iraq and begin to enact national health insurance.  But by February 1, 2009 I expect the honeymoon will be over.

I voted for Obama. I like Obama. In fact, he made me cry several times during his election campaign.  I’m glad he won.

But I am nauseated, tired and sick of hearing about how his melanin, and Kenyan father, somehow ushers in a new era of change.

Skin color as change is no change at all. It’s the same old racism.