American Sphinxes

(I could not defeat a formatting idiosyncrasy of WordPress, no matter how many times I tried to reformat this.  Please pardon the unintentionally messed up. crowded, jumbled look of this post, even if I can’t.  It makes me sick.)
A fellow won a prestigious award a few years ago, if memory serves, for adding a NY Times best-selling hagiography, American Sphinx, to bookshelves bulging with mostly laudatory accounts of the life of the Author of Liberty, Thomas Jefferson.  
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I recall reading American Sphinx with a bent brow, not getting what I was looking for, except for another account of the mild, quiet, supremely controlled Founding Father coming back from his daily horseback rides with his horse whipped bloody, foam on the animal’s lips and terror in her eyes.  It was left to a slave groom to calm the traumatized animal.   This was, apparently, a regular occurrence on the plantation of our supreme advocate of Reason, Liberty and Freedom.  Even biographers who extolled Jefferson as a renaissance man and philosopher centuries ahead of his time sometimes mention the unaccountable fury he regularly vented on his horses.
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But it is other American sphinxes I am thinking of now.
 
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Though I wonder less about them these days, and am less bothered by their mysterious individual and collective silences, I confess a certain puzzlement.   If someone takes the time to send me something they’re working on I’m not likely to let it fall into silence. 
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That’s just me, I suppose, thinking it only takes a minute to find something interesting to comment on by way of encouragement, or if not, it takes even less time to tap “yup!” or “droll” or “groovy, dood.”  
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“That is just you,” goes a familiar refrain, “not everyone sits at their computer all day, thoughtfully writing and carefully reading emails.  Most people are too busy to even click on links people send them, let alone read them.”   She looks at her Blackberry and taps a few keys, laughs, hits “send”.
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“Publish something in the New York Times, then see how many of your buddies ignore your emailed op ed,” says my dead father, not unreasonably.

The Debate Continues — And I see why they’re pissed at Marable

The storm is still raging following the late Manning Marable’s recent Malcolm X biography.  Books are now in print taking aim at it, taking it to pieces, from the looks of it (see below).   I was in the library today, found Marable’s book on the shelf and checked the end notes.  They are indeed surprisingly sparse and almost random, as the critic who called the research amateurishly done by a team of grad students claimed they were.

I checked out two controversial assertions by Marable and went to the end notes.   There was a conspicuous lack of sources for Marable’s statement that “Based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon” (66).  The circumstantial evidence was that Malcolm Little’s prison records indicate that he was once employed as a male secretary for the homosexual Lennon.  This one could probably go either way.

The same probably cannot be said for the thread about the 18 year-old mistress Marable says Malcolm carried on an affair with during the last few months of his life.  This woman, in Marable’s account, may have stolen into Malcolm’s 12th floor single room in the Hilton the last night of his life, making her responsible for the ominous wake up call he received in that room early the next morning.  This same woman, interviewed by the NYPD after the murder, had been sitting in the front row at the Audubon as Malcolm was shot.  She had been seated next to a member of the Newark Mosque (the mosque where all the known assassins allegedly came from)  a man she went on to live with for 40 years.  It was this same Sharon 6X Poole, according to Marable, who called to volunteer false information to the cops a few days later that helped implicate, and later convict, two Harlem NOI men who were not involved in the shooting (or even present at the Audubon on the day of the murder).

If Marable’s account is credible, this woman had a direct hand in setting Malcolm up for death and then misleading the police about the identities of his killers in order to protect them.  One looks in vain for a footnote establishing the source of Marable’s belief.  Marable writes of the alleged affair:

Of these [earlier possible affairs or liaisons] no certainty can be had, but after his return from Africa, Malcolm appears to have begun an illicit sexual affair with an eighteen-year-old OAAU secretary named Sharon 6X Poole.  Little is known about her or about their relationship except that it appears to have continued up to Malcolm’s death.  (394)  

No source is given in the notes.

That she “may have joined him” in his room at the Hilton on Feb. 20, 1965, Marable attributes to a 6/18/03 oral history with Malcolm’s second in command James 67X Warden.  A page or two earlier Marable describe’s James 67X’s frustration with not being kept up to date about Malcolm’s whereabouts the last few days of Malcolm’s life, including that last night.

Much as I initially applauded and was moved by Marable’s account of Malcolm’s life, the speculative nature of these kinds of weaselishly worded passages, making, at best, careless, assertions against the veracity (my acquaintance “Rudy” did the  homosexual routine with the perverted rich white guy, not me)  and character (Elijah Muhammad is a hypocrite to commit adultery with young secretaries, I am above that temptation) of a man many of us admire greatly, I may have to join the group who is after the ghost of Manning Marable to push him up against the wall and demand “what?”

cut and pasted:

By Any Means Necessary Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented

By Any Means Necessary editors-Herb Boyd, Ron Daniels, Maulana Karenga and Haki Madhubuti-are in unison when stating:

Our purpose here with this collection is to continue, and to expand, the debate arising from Manning Marable’s biography.

Through the collective vision of these four scholars, wordmakers and educators, readers now have a comprehensive view of the Marable text as well as new scholarship and insight on Malcolm X – the man, “Real, Not Reinvented”.  By Any Means Necessary Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented and Malcolm X: A Lie of Reinvention are two of the more prominent books being released by Black publishers to push back against Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

Be Careful What You Wish For

So, continuing to read the book on starting a nonprofit that I should have read a year ago, I learn about UBI, Unrelated Business Income.   If a tax exempt organization has UBI, it has to pay tax on it.

I have been imagining, with the famous difficulty of obtaining money for anything that doesn’t promise a good, dollar-for-dollar return, with the fierce competition for limited nonprofit grants in a world of professional grant writers, that I will routinely package and try to sell the materials children create.  Assuming, of course, that I can find children to make these materials.  I am imagining, perhaps with the wishful, unrealistic expectation that has long been my hallmark, that children may well create materials other kids will love, materials that can be the core of a new literacy curriculum.  And, as I envision it, selling these curriculum materials could bring in a substantial part of the operating budget.  Cutting out some of the begging to philanthropic gatekeepers and middlemen.

There are three main IRS criteria used to determine if a nonprofit’s fundraising income is UBI and therefore taxable.  If the answer to any one is YES, consult your tax adviser, file Form 990-T and pay the taxes due.  And I would seem to be two for two:

1) would the activity generally be considered a trade or business?

2) Is the activity a regular, repeated occurrence, as opposed to a one-time special situation?

To each one I’d answer “Yes!  Hopefully!”  Wrong answer, probably.

On the other hand, why worry?   If the income is small, the tax would be negligible anyway.   If the income is large, cheerfully pay the tax, you’re making a living, you’re paying your people, the organization is a success, against all odds.

It’s them odds I’m against that are nipping at me now.  And their teeth are not dull, nor their jaws weak, I can tell you for sure.  And it doesn’t make the biting any easier to endure  when I think of unregulated for-profit corporations and their sharp teeth, powerful jaws and global reach.  If you’re smart, you don’t pay much in tax.  If you’re not smart that way, it’s a sucker’s game designed for you to lose.  

Better luck next life.

mission statement

a crudely drawn pen cuts itself out of the heavy paper, raises itself up, dips into a crudely drawn bottle of ink and, without a hand to guide it, magically inscribes, in the best calligraphy it can muster:

Mission Statement

to find

inspire

and support

young students

at risk of giving up

on reading

learning

and becoming part of the solution

humidity

He stepped up to address the packed, sweaty auditorium, face glistening in the merciless humidity.

“My steamed colleagues,” he said into the mic.

“Kill him!” rumbled a voice from the back, and two hundred men in neck ties, their heads ready to pop in the heat, began to nod and mumble as the speaker showed his teeth and began shifting from foot to foot.

You’ve got to be very careful what you say when the heat and humidity are unbearable.

not for profit

Reading a book I should have taken out of the library two years ago I learn the obvious:  a dedicated team of unpaid idealists is needed to share the heavy uphill burdens of starting a business based not on making money but on doing good.   “Be realistic about your capacity,” urges the author of this guide-for-idiots style book, “it is easy to find yourself burned out by taking on too much responsibility.”

“Delegate, delegate, delegate!” exhorts one chapter heading.  I opened my pocket-sized idea book and drew a bird-headed man in a contemplative pose, looking into a mirror and parroting “Delegate, delegate, delegate!”  Hell yeah.

The author writes that 75% of all nonprofits fail, in large part, because they are started by well-meaning people with no business experience.

The answer, of course, is to delegate more of the concrete tasks to myself and quit whining about how exhausted I feel all the time.  Will be starting wehearyou.netblahg, rah-rahing myself and keeping potential supporters apprised of my mad uphill dash.

As a friend and great supporter often writes “Go team go!”

Stinking Garbage Truck

I take my bike rides at night during the hottest time of the year.  The hilly streets around here are quiet, lights flash on the front and back of my bike, I wear white, and a helmet.   I can get a good aerobic, mind-clearing ride while listening to Bill Moyers, the timer in my pocket counting down an arbitrary 37 minutes.

One thing I’ve noticed this summer is a stinking garbage truck that races down the Avenue between 1 and 2 a.m., the same time I’m usually pumping up and down the hills.  Since the streets are empty, the truck rumbles along at top speed, trailing a wake of wet stink that hangs in the humid air for two blocks behind it.

I keep an eye out for the stinking truck, and smile when I manage to turn up another street to avoid breathing in its humid reek.   Last night, though, they were doing road repairs on both ends of Seaman Avenue.   The broad avenue was blocked off by trucks running their engines to keep the overtime crews inside cool.   I found alternate uphills on a much shortened route and was coming up Indian Road, a fairly steep incline, when the stinking garbage truck roared around the blind turn and came at me on the narrow street.   That I was riding a bicycle uphill and they were speeding the wrong way on a one-way street did not come into the equation for anyone but me.

“Motherfucking stink merchants,” I muttered as I managed to leap a mercifully low curb and continue up the sidewalk next to the narrow one way street.  Then I turned right, breathing hard, and headed into two blocks of the truck’s foul backwash.

Propaganda — short tour

soapbox, please.

Personally, I thought this recent Texaco-sponsored Romney ad was a bit over the line.  Whether President Obama was born here or not, whatever his religion, or his extreme European Socialist views, what possible good can this sort of offensive negative ad do for our great nation?

(Full disclosure: the Texaco-sponsored bit of propaganda above was part of the war effort against Imperial Japan during World War Two and not an ad for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.  I am not linked with the Romney campaign, nor with any related or unrelated super-PAC or other charitable group supporting Mr. Romney, nor was the crude example of propagandistic rebranding strictly called for.  But, see paragraph below beginning “The Allies, Hitler pointed out…”)

But let us backtrack a bit and try to be a little more analytic.  What makes something propaganda?  A shameless and manipulative appeal to our emotions, brought to us via mass media.  What makes something good propaganda?  A well-paid ad agency, or government, or both, employing the most skilled people it can recruit.

1622, Pope of the Catholic Church, under attack by the so-called Reformation, creates an office to propagate the faith, sow it, let it flower.   Three hundred years later Hitler dictates the first volume of Mein Kampf, pauses to wipe the foam off his mouth and delivers a short, cogent lecture extolling the effectiveness of Allied propaganda in the recent World War.  That lecture concluded he resumes foaming at the mouth for the remainder of volume one and, presumably, in the secret, unpublished volume two.

Note: the editor of Mein Kampf was killed in “The Night of Long Knives”.

The psychopathic future dictator made several astute points in his discourse on propaganda.  One is that a lie, wielded without mercy or weakness, is almost always more useful in inspiring obedience and violent action than any sort of truth.  The Allies did not hesitate to lie about alleged atrocities committed by the Hun.  Hitler applauded this, it creates hatred of the enemy and also fear, which combined, engenders a determination to exterminate the enemy.   In contrast, the German authorities made a snobbish appeal to the superiority of their culture and troops, sneering at the contemptible unsophistication of the enemy.  

The Allies, Hitler pointed out, didn’t hesitate to make  up inflammatory captions to hideous photos– a gruesome pile of bodies waiting to be taken to morgue had not died of typhus (truth) but had been tortured to death, in a specific place and on a given date, by the Hun.  Not only that, they ran the incendiary picture in every paper for days running, with articles scrupulously documenting the invented crimes against humanity.

You starting  to get the picture?

Why did the USA get into the World War in the first place?  That is a question nobody to this day can give a very good answer to.  There’s no question American bankers had loaned many millions to the French and English war efforts, stood to lose a shitload of money if Germany won, but that alone can’t explain it.  There was a scramble for colonial possessions and a frenzy of competitive nationalism, but that wouldn’t be enough to have American farm boys, city boys and young collegians lining up to enlist.

It was the genius of George Creel and his Committee for Public Information that got them on their feet, cheering, patriotic and bursting to “make the world safe for democracy” to fight the “War to End War” and cover themselves with glory.  You can look it up.   Woodrow Wilson enlisted Creel and the Creel Committee, ingenious, tireless, unhindered by scruples of any kind, whipped up a great patriotic frenzy for war.   Lines of guys singing “Over There!” went over there to run to glory out of muddy trenches into barbed wire and machine gun fire, through mustard gas and aerial bombardment.

It begs the question of why America entered the World War. But it explains how.

Anyway, Google “propaganda”.  Look at the Wikipedia article.  I guarantee that the images you will imagine as you read will be based strictly on your political outlook, shaped by the famous confirmation bias.  Some will read the descriptions of the various techniques and see images of Cheney, Bush, Condoleeza Rice and so on.  Others will immediately see Obama, lying eloquently through wolfish teeth.

The one thing we can be sure of, effective propaganda costs a lot of money.  You have to saturate everybody, constantly, for it to work.

The Supreme Court told us recently that money is speech, the same way it once told us in the Civil Rights Cases* that biogtry against blacks had nothing to do with their status as former slaves, that nobody should get constitutionally huffy about it, and that the Fourteenth Amendment had nothing to say about it.  Go tell the Supreme Court they’re wrong.

“So, call me ‘pisher’,” the Supreme Court will shrug, “we’ll talk about this again in 90 years or so.”

As for me, I’m speechless.

*  see italic section near bottom of  post below for a full-bodied quote from that fascinating decision, it begins When a man has emerged from slavery

https://gratuitousblahg.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/my-fellow-americans-ignore-me-25-2/