The video is simple, direct, and moving. In the style of a “public service announcement,” the video reminds us of the horrible history initiated by Columbus’ arrival in what came to be called the Americas.

Now, I can’t quibble with the sentiment and the outrage. Stories of voyage and discovery persist, starting in childhood books and the remaining part of our imagination in adulthood. When met with a wholly indisputable set of historical facts, adults are often still resistant and unwilling, for one reason or another, to face reckoning with the past and our origins as a country and named continent.

It is this idea of reckoning that came to mind when I saw the kind-of-PSA. The message of the video is both clear and undecided. What is clear is the reminder of historical atrocity: the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were decimated within decades, nearly to the point of complete vanishing (Dominica is the only country with a population of indigenous peoples, which has occasioned its own sorts of issues regarding marriage, travel, and the like). What is unclear and still undecided, however, is the question of what to do with this thing called “Columbus Day.” My guess about the kind-of-PSA, and this might be obvious in the video, is that the sentiment is “let’s get rid of this thing.”

That’s where I hesitate. For sure, the uncritical, strangely nostalgic (if we Americans really even think twice about the holiday at all) embrace of the holiday has got to go. No doubt. But I’m not so sure that the name and the day should be forgotten. Quite the contrary, the severity of the atrocities done, then put in motion by Christopher Columbus ought to intensify our memory of arrival, conquest, genocide, and everything thereafter. We need something more than a reminder of the atrocity. We need something more like a recognition – that first stage of an authentic reckoning – and a moment of memory. How to do that? That’s difficult work and demands careful attention to many things. For what it’s worth, I’ve wondered about a moment of silence, made official, and so a part of the public face of Columbus Day. Or maybe some form of reparations to those who remain. Reparations are no small part of making memory concrete and actionable. Much to think about, many things to imagine.

However we make Columbus Day a day of memory, I still say it isn’t a day that should go away. That’s telling a lie about who we are. The day can’t, just like all of us here, on the continent and not indigenous (indigenous folks, a different story), we can’t go away. What we’re left with is a painful memory. What to do with that painful memory is an even tougher question than raising awareness about atrocities. But it is probably the most important and urgent question we should be asking.

Let me make two basic observations about this “controversy” over Obama’s award. And let me too say that I think it is a fabulous choice. Unexpected. For sure. Though, let’s be honest, not many of us pay attention to the process…and how many can name, without internet access, the past ten recipients? Ahem.

First, I think the critique that he isn’t really worthy of the prize (left critics like to note that wars are still going on in Afghanistan and Iraq) because he hasn’t made peace engages in a certain kind of historical amnesia. And U.S.-centrism. It is actually a lot of amnesia, because it forgets the long history of violence that foregrounds his appearance on the world stage. The Middle Passage, slavery, colonialism, segregation, and the persistence of anti-black racism at every level of American life (and life in the West generally) are certainly violences worthy of consideration, and Obama’s candidacy and election is surely a blow against that violence. No, one doesn’t have to go to the “post-racial fantasy” extreme. One simply needs to note that the unthinkable happened. Yet, I’ve not seen much attention to any such foregrounding violence in the commentary. It’s as if Obama became president, then even the critics of “post-racial America” forgot that he was black and what that means and how much violence forms the context of his election.

Second, I think a certain (and to my mind deplorable) American pragmatism comes into play here. The criticism that Obama has not brokered peace or ended two wars not of his making is all over the left and right. I wish those wars were over. I also have no idea how to do such a thing responsibly. But that’s not my point. My point is this: the narrowness of historical thinking that determines “accomplishments” in terms of policy action is troubling. Such thinking makes meaning instrumental. Wholly pragmatic. Larger historical meaning matters not, and instead we should only care about how a policy was formed and put into play (successful or not…because former winners have seen good hearted plans fall apart, in terrifying ways). This makes everything bluntly ideological (did he do what I want?) and makes human life much too discrete and isolated (only this moment matters!).

It is probably of some note – and I think a ton of note, actually – that Obama’s candidacy and election meant so much across Africa. Have we forgotten his visit to Africa and how he was welcomed like a long lost son? Maybe we have. Or maybe we haven’t forgotten and instead just believe that, well, those Africans aren’t all that important when it comes to big, global stuff like Nobel prizes. However, if we are thinking outside this moment in history and the suffocating narrowness of pragmatism, then the meaning of Obama’s address to history has to be important across the world. Especially in those parts of the world most harmed by anti-black racism.

No matter the policy question or the issue of successful summits, Obama the person and historical actor expresses a world-historical address to four centuries of unspeakable violence. We should take note of this in every possible way. Perhaps this requires many to think outside the very American habits of amnesia and pragmatism, but all for the better. For, in the end, the long-shadow of history informs our thinking, speaking, and acting more than we ever know. Obama’s address to that terrifying and decimating shadow is worthy of many things. One of those, to my mind, is a Nobel to call his own. And our own.

You see, I was struck immediately by the jokey response amongst American lefties – of which I am a far-wing member – after al-Zaidi threw he shoes at then-President Bush. So many people emailed around laughing remarks, started a Facebook.com “Fan Page” on “the shoe throwing guy,” and so on. It was as if his shoe throwing provided the catharsis many of us yearned for. By getting his, perhaps we could get ours, however vicariously. That’s a basic human thing. It makes literature and film work. It makes storytelling important. We respond to others when they act out – with outrage or sympathy or catharsis or whatever – and our own longings and needs get a slightly detoured outlet or satisfaction. He threw his shoe and scared and humiliated a president so many of us despised. Isn’t that funny?

I got so many “invitations” to al-Zaidi’s “Fan Page” on Facebook.

But I never said yes. Not because I think Facebook.com is anything other than a hobby and distraction, not because I think I’m above rooting for political actors in fairly ironic cyberspaces, but because it seemed grotesque to identify and outlet our own anxieties in al-Zaidi’s case. When I read about the shoe-throwing incident, I felt great fear for the man’s life. You can’t do that kind of thing without severe consequences, even under normal circumstances. Just try it at Obama’s next press conference. The “shoe-thrower” (he rarely got named as a person, but rather as a symbol alone) acted in a terrifying context. In the moral anarchy of the U.S. war in Iraq, who would expect anything short of torture? I feared he would die under “suspicious” circumstances. He didn’t and now he’s free. Now he can, I hope, tell his story.

The other, albeit secondary story that needs to be told is the story of how so many Americans took self-righteous pleasure in what would become another man’s extreme suffering. Building our catharsis on another man’s risk of body and life. In that way, how so many Americans repeated the very use of brown, foreign bodies in order to feel better about their world – the very thing of which G.W. Bush and his administration have been (rightly) accused after invading Afghanistan and Iraq after 11 September 2001. That repetition of use, which to my knowledge occasioned no apologies or expressions of regret, does not show that lefties are as bad as righties. Or maybe it does. I guess I’d just like to say this: the repetition of the use of brown, foreign bodies shows just how deeply seated the colonial gaze is in the Western, privileged world. And how vigilant and self-critical we have to be in order to avoid it.

I’ll be plain about this: it reminds me of the case of Saartjie Baartman, who was exhibited around Europe so that Europeans could gaze with curiosity and astonishment at her “strange” body. It was a traveling spectacle, gruesome. Reading Baartman’s story, we today surely recoil in horror. It is just so terrible. Why, though, does Baartman’s story strike us as terrible? Many reasons, but perhaps the most obvious reason is that those looking at her thought they had the right to gaze at her body. Who were they, really, to think they had such rights? And what does that assumption of a right say about them as people? An ethical question, that is, and it cuts to the core of who and what we are as people.

And isn’t that just what’s happening with the increasingly lurid accounts of Semenya’s body? Mass-media – in images, video, and word – creates traveling spectacles and thus creates spectators in so many new ways and contexts. We consume the spectacle casually on our computers and television. Fascination with Semenya’s genitals is all the story today, and surely will be for the next coming days. The assumption is that we have rights to this gaze, to look inside (prompting notions of biopower, no doubt) and outside her body (recalling Baartman’s case). Why this comfortable assumption? Simply because we are, maybe, sports fans (though so few are actual track and field fans…not unimportant here!). Or because we can.

We don’t have that right. In fact, there is something grotesque in this gaze, invading her body from the inside (chromosome testing, examination of internal structure, etc.) and on the outside (facial features, genitals, etc.). Yet, it goes on without much of a question at all. Reportage, reading, jokes, carefully crafted photographs, and even expressions of solidarity and sympathy. As if we have a right to look and name and make Semenya’s body our own. We don’t.

I include here the cruel jokes, the “outrage” (mostly from folks who don’t follow track and field, much less women’s events), and the shockingly voyeuristic reportage. But I’d also include (with less urgency, I’ll admit, but still…) the sympathetic backlash against all that, including all of those who will take her case on as a cause or an example. Mostly, my criticism is directed at those who find it funny or feign outrage and all of those energies of degradation. Still, it is an enormously invasive gesture and very much the same gaze that would adopt Semenya as an example or cause without her participation. What does Semenya want? How does she understand herself? Has anyone listened? What would it mean if she were to not speak, to not share this thing to which so many – critics and defenders alike – assume a right?

My response to this whole “event” is, in that way, really just a few critical questions. Why do we think we have these rights? And why do we affix our gaze to Semenya’s body with such curiosity and eagerness to speak for her? Or expect (even demand) that she speak in a way we find familiar and politically helpful? Or speak at all? Semenya’s case puts these questions to us in such blunt, even visceral terms precisely because the visibility of the global athlete is suddenly put in contact with the terribly anxious and unpleasant histories of race, nation, and sexuality. At this very moment, all questions return to us and ask us who we are when we demand such speaking with our gaze, in our interests, and in how we begin, often rather unconsciously, speaking-for-another.

Again, who are we to speak for Semenya? Or even to demand that Semenya speak, display, and describe?

The New York Times reported

I’ve read a lot of stories about Leibovitz’s financial troubles. Nearly without exception, they have been human, focusing on the tragedy of losing rights to one’s art, the sadness she felt after the loss of her long-term partner, and so on. All of which was supposed to add sympathetic texture to her financial problems. Somehow, she got into all of this trouble – to the tune of two dozen million dollars of debt! – because of depression and inattention. I suspect all of that is overly sympathetic, as well as probably pretty true.

But I’d ask you to consider this: what if Annie Leibovitz was black?

Well, we don’t have to imagine. There are plenty of cases of rich black people in the public eye, who get famous and rich and then go broke. We laugh at them. We sneer at them and talk about how stupid they were to blow millions and not plan well. They end up on VH-1. First, in Behind the Music. Second, on some degrading reality show.

MC Hammer lost all of his money. He’s broke. In debt. Same with Mike Tyson. Both are culture jokes because of it. They were stupid and blew all their money. Were cheated and deceived by those around them. Yet, not a word of sympathy, except in outlier cases of reporting.

Coverage of Annie Leibovitz’s financial problems portray her as depressed and forgetful and inattentive. Sympathetic, really. Or at least complex.

There’s all the example we need for how race works. White, famous, and going broke? Tragic and complex. Black, famous, and going broke? A culture joke.

Don’t get me wrong in this post. I’m not going to rant about marketing to children (a worthy rant) or the merchandising of everything, from birth onward (another worthy rant). Instead, I want to think about Thomas the Tank Engine as a troubling site of ideological reproduction. If the show is inside little people’s brains, then we ought to think about the world it gives them as image and maybe even reality.

By “ideological reproduction,” I here simply mean a place where certain forms of life – values, preferences, comportments toward self and other – are instilled in us out of habit and everydayness, rather than from an authoritarian source. That is, how forms of life happen in our common experiences, rather than surprising interventions of authority. The theorist of this is Louis Althusser, whose famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” showed, in such troublingly straightforward terms, how ideology is in the very air we breathe. My favorite example: the requirement to sit quietly in class while the teacher talks produces and reproduces the ideology of submission to authority.

What might Thomas the Tank Engine produce and reproduce? In other words, what’s the ideological “something” in the show?

Thomas the Tank Engine follows a pretty simple structure. Each episode has a straightforward conflict that gets resolved, with few complications, in about ten minutes. The plot lines have to do with an ever-increasing (marketer’s dream!) cluster of trains. They have train-like conflicts, but the lessons are clearly intended for the rest of us as well. Trains cooperate, trains get jealous, trains get hurt and need repair. Human stuff, you know. An authoritarian figure – called “Sir Topham Hatt” on the U.S. version, called “The Fat Controller” on the U.K. version – wanders about, constantly doling out critique and reprimand. And therein lies the real ideological question: who and what is the authoritarian figure?

Like I said, I’m not altogether troubled by the marketing aspect of the show. Sure, it is annoying to hear over and over about how we HAVE to buy this or that new character in metallic form, but that’s part of kids. There are plenty of annoying repetitions when you have a kid around. Let’s be honest, we hear the same stories and questions over and over (though few cost as much as Thomas, if you’re soft). It’s part of the “charm” of children, right? (It actually is.) What I am troubled by in Thomas the Tank Engine is pretty simple: the trains are always in trouble. The show is full of scolding and punishment. Everyone is always screwing up and getting corrected, and the alleged screw-ups are pretty pedestrian: got dirty, didn’t work enough hours, wanted to stay clean, worked too hard…

You see, I put those four screw-ups out there on purpose. They show that you just can’t win in Thomas’ world. You’re always too much of one thing or another. I’m thinking in particular about the show where James, who’s constantly criticized for being too vain, doesn’t want rain to ruin his new coat of paint. I get that. Not a big deal. James stops in a tunnel to wait out the rain. His penalty for such vanity? An explanation? A quick scold? Some education? No. The workers build a wall on both sides of the tunnel and trap James inside the tunnel to punish his vanity.

I’m hoping a comment or two explores the psychoanalytic dimension of this.

As I write that account of the episode, I’m actually a little chilled. I mean, seriously, what the hell kind of kid’s show walls in one of its characters because he wants to avoid the rain? But if you watch the show, it strikes you as par for the course and not exceptionally cruel. If you’ve watched the show – or been cursed by the books (!) – you know the refrain. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard it: “Usefulness before cleanliness,” he added. Always from the authoritarian figure.

Now, this remark is both typical and fraught. It is typical because the idea of usefulness is the thread to nearly every plot. But the line is also fraught because we know that the trains are constantly in trouble for being one or the other. Too useful and not clean enough; sometimes there’s too much work. Too clean and not useful enough; don’t be vain.

Watch this clip if you want a short example.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i1Yo2Xd88I&hl=en&fs=1]

The title is “Percy’s Chocolate Crunch.” The book is even more troubling, more stark in its moral scolding, but the clip does enough. Percy crashes into a chocolate factory and is covered in its sweetness. The book shows Percy smiling, but the story is actually much bleaker. Percy crashes, then gets in heaps of trouble and ridicule for being dirty…there is work to do, remember. And usefulness is about labor on the authoritarian figure’s terms, no in terms of the play or pleasure of work. There is plenty of play and pleasure in work on the show, though it nearly always leads to trouble, scolding, and punishment. Covered in chocolate – but that’s not funny? Silly? Or even a kid’s dream come true? No. Percy is rewarded for feeling the shame of dirtiness, but enduring it for the sake of usefulness.

The ideology is clear: you never work hard enough and adherence to various values will never be perfect enough. So, expect a world of conflict, scolding, and assume always that you’re in trouble. Let me be absurdly plain about this: Is this really a good “message” for children? Do we really want their introduction to the world of work and sociality be be so fraught and conflictual? I’m not a parent who thinks every kid should live in a scold-free bliss-world. I get the discipline thing and can be pretty hard on my son. But I still wonder, every time I watch Thomas the Tank Engine, why this depiction of life seems acceptable to so many of us. It portrays life as a commodity, something that, once it is bought by the nicely-named “Fat Controller” (he is fat), is no longer your own, even though you inhabit the body and soul put to work on the controller’s terms.

In that way, I’ve come to see Thomas the Tank Engine as a sad and harrowing story about capitalism. Uncritical, on the show’s part. I mean, what else can “usefulness before cleanliness” mean, other than the idea that you’re the property of another first, before you care for yourself? But it ought to also make us ask: if the world is so grotesque in the show (it is), and the show portrays something essential about capitalist labor (it does), then why doesn’t it prompt oh so many questions from us? Maybe that just reveals how familiar that ideology is to us, so it doesn’t register as surprising. That’s how ideology works, after all. If nothing else, the show ought to prompt a pretty simple parental response, one that, in the end, is always revolutionary: you’re more than that, kid. And a world is possible in which you and your friends are not always in trouble for working too little or working too much. Yes, another world is possible…maybe.

This is no innocent question. There’s so much at stake, so the conversation in writing or on the radio is somber and even a bit fatalistic.

And that has bothered me a lot. For a bunch of reasons I wanted to write out, even if in short-hand.

First, I’m saddened that so many us on the left or progressive wing of politics can’t feel pleasure. I thought of this from the opposite perspective after 11 September 2001, where political critique began instantly and few seemed capable of just being sad at so much death and destruction. And now what seems to be a lack of pleasure at a breakthrough most of us thought impossible. Just as pain gives deep meaning to analysis, so too pleasure. Think critically all you want, but don’t forget the pleasure of something as debilitating and despairing as “no black person could be president” falling away, in such decisive fashion, accomplished by a coalition of random, committed people. My first thought: feel good, damn it! Critical analysis can wait. Ain’t nothing going to change in the next couple of weeks. (Bush is still presidente! Ay!)

Second, this worry about people declaring “racism is over” seems poorly placed at this moment. I’ve actually not heard a person say that, so this is a comment on commentary on a hypothetical case. Still, I ask: is there anyone who thought a week past that racism was a problem and suddenly, now, today, thinks racism is gone? I doubt it. Fact is, many people already believe racism is over and out. This just gives them another anecdote when making the case. Fretting about Obama’s election because he is another anecdote seems pretty lame. Not sure how else to put it. After all, the alternative is pretty depressing. Are we supposed to not want a black president in order to limit the number of examples the “there is no racism” folks can evoke? Nah. So what are we really talking about here?

Third, I listened to a great interview on NPR’s Morning Edition today while dropping my son at preschool. I liked the interview, but mostly because it was a concise summary of the other issue: the claim that Obama’s election is just an empty symbol.

I have a lot to say about this, but will be brief. To begin, I’m not sure why symbols are so unimportant – is anyone that radical of a materialist?! Symbols move the world, for better or worse. They have a real human effect. Were it not for the power of symbolic figures, acts, and events, the world would lack myth and literature. And political imagination. Not so empty in Obama’s case, I’d say. It is a symbol that this one thing, the presidency, is now accessible to African-Americans. For so many in my generation and prior, that was unimaginable. Glad to be wrong.

As well, electoral politics are a symbol for which many have sacrificed so much. I have a hard time imagining telling folks facing down police, hoses, and rabid police dogs in Alabama that, hey, this is just an empty symbol. At the very least, it is a symbol that matters in the body and soul. At the most, it changes the world.

Which is my fourth and final remark: what if Obama is just a symbol and he governs like a regular, mainstream Democrat? I suspect he will. His platform was pretty mainstream Democrat idea-laden, after all. He is a symbol the country needs, though, and I’ll say this specifically as a white person. I think we white people need, as a matter of daily, walkabout habit, to see a world in which we might work for, depend for a livelihood on, and ultimately be a citizen under a black person. Progressive politics around, say, affirmative action labor for something specific: a diversified workplace. But the point is not to have horizontal work relations alone. The point, I think, it to eventually have diverse vertical work relations. The reality of diversity in power relations is good for anti-racism at the level of habit, which is where so much political change happens. The symbol of the presidency matters right there, just so much.

In the end, I felt so happy when Obama was elected. I hugged all of my friends. I felt pleasure. I felt cynicism die just a bit, a cynicism Clinton and Bush share – a sense that nothing matters. And I’ll feel all sorts of critique in the years to come. I don’t think racism is over. I’ve not met a person who thinks that who did not think it already.

But I will say this: racism sustained a serious blow in this campaign season. That’s never a bad thing.

The plot of the film is pretty simple and I’m not giving anything away: the planet earth has become so polluted that it is uninhabitable, lacking all life forms and plagued by sandstorms and hot sun. Humans have relocated to a gigantic spaceship that wanders about, awaiting some sign of organic life. If there is organic life, humans can return to earth and re-inhabit the planet. Great. Environmental destruction is bad. No problem there. I don’t want to move to a spaceship!

I liked the commentary at Slate.com by Daniel Engber. The writer focused on the unfair and inaccurate connection the film suggests between obesity and environmental destruction. Blame fat people. I think the author overplays that angle in the film a bit, as it is unclear to me if the humans were actually obese when on earth or if in fact they only became obese after generations in space. Alas. It is certainly true that the dirtiness of the planet is associated with the slovenliness of the humans. So that complaint has actual traction.

What the reviewer didn’t note, and something that has stayed with me since seeing Wall-E, is the idea of the human person at work in the film. If I’m right, and I think I am, that the humans become slovenly and grotesquely obese (they can’t even walk, really) only on the spaceship, then that slovenliness is not related to environmental destruction alone. In fact, the slovenliness is related to the absence of work. Robots do everything to produce material needs and wants. Automation utopia, really.

Automation – the absence of the need to work for survival – creates slovenliness. Or, perhaps more precisely, automation brings the slovenly out of us. We become who we already are, what we’ve always been, but had forestalled by the necessity of work. Leisure time is equivalent to self-destruction. Sin. I’m not reluctant to use that word – sin – when describing the slovenly humans. We’re certainly not meant only to laugh. We’re supposed to condemn the humans for inactivity.

And herein lies my big complaint with the film. It reproduces a very Protestant work-ethic and morality, where leisure is temptation and corruption, rather than a place where other parts of our humanity come to flourish. Work is salvation. Or at least what keeps us from self-destruction. Left to our own intellect and desires, Wall-E suggests (or even insists), we become blobs. Barely human. This is the fat-mocking version of the old thing about idle hands and the devil.

I object to this. I really do. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man remains, for me, an exemplary argument against this anxiety about leisure. Sadly, this book is pretty marginal in academic circles – Marcuse committed the sin of academia by becoming “popular.” Marcuse makes a convincing case that new forms of creativity and innovation emerge out of a new leisure, something increasingly possible with automation. Automation isn’t our death. It opens upon new possibilities.

Wall-E is emphatically anti-Marcuse, really, as automation leads to leisure leads to sin. Only toil gives salvation. Doubt me? The back-screen to the credits, which celebrates the human return to earth and happiness, depicts humans working. What does work look like? It looks just like the ant farms I had as a kid. Making perfectly symmetrical tunnels. I don’t think that’s Pixar art. I think that’s ideology.

That’s very much our anxiety about leisure or free time, no? Not to be trite, but kids have scheduled childhoods. Wow. So I’m not surprised to find that Wall-E thinks free time will make us fat and dumb.

Why fat and dumb? Why not freed from the toil of survival for art, science, and alternative possibilities in human relationships? In Wall-E, the spaceship is full of mindless consumption. Not a hint of art, literature, philosophy, religion, science…nothing that comes from human curiosity. That of course could open up a debate about human nature and the like – which is why I teach philosophy, I love that shit – but I’m content here to underscore our still very Protestant work ethic and its attendant anxieties. Indeed, for those who saw Wall-E, there is the question: did the association between toil and happiness make sense? Did you even need to question the connection between leisure and slovenliness?

Of course not. That’s how ideology works best, most efficiently. Not only does it seem natural and invisible, but you actually come to see yourself in it. Thanks, Louis Althusser! Wall-E as an ideological state apparatus! We recognize not only a return to our best state (the toil of the final credits), but also our greatest anxiety: left to ourselves, we’re shit.

Wall-E, I beg to differ.

What you find, for better or worse, is Isaac Hayes as composer of the Shaft soundtrack, so contributor to that certain look, style, and sound of the late-sixties, early-seventies. Jimi Izrael gives the best version of this at TheRoot.com, recalling the importance (albeit in a largely iconic pose) of Hayes in his own life…playing the theme from Shaft as he walked down the aisle to get married, even.

Great write-up. The template has been used in most of the remembrances.

But you can’t really get a sense of Isaac Hayes as an important songwriter, and that bothers me. You don’t have Stax records without Hayes’ songs. He wrote for Carla Thomas and Sam & Dave, for god’s sake, but that slips by as article after article talks about his role in South Park. There’s surely something to be said here about irony, racism, and racial representation, but I’ll pass on that for now – not quite in the mood, and it makes me sad.

I can’t say I’m surprised. The iconic rules, after all, so it seems pretty trite and lame to lament the loss of Isaac Hayes the creative master, the pop songwriter who’s matched by rare few for classics, hits, and just solid songs recorded and sung by the best. “Hold On, I’m Comin’” is as good as it gets in the mid-sixties. He and David Porter changed pop music, making hits that were soul music when r&b had taken over.

I remember that Isaac Hayes. You can say it is personal taste. I also think Hot Buttered Soul is a fabulous album, and he and Marvin Gaye put out the most interesting concept albums in the soul music genre I’ve ever heard. Strange combination. I’m not much for concept albums, but, hey, those two did it well.

The iconic will always trump artistry, I fear, until we live in a very different world. Isaac Hayes was both. No small feat. Download some Stax tunes he wrote with David Porter. It’s a bonus: in addition to appreciating Hayes-Porter as the best soul songwriting duo, you’ll remember why Sam & Dave are pretty hard to beat as singers and performers. Or why Carla Thomas is (sadly) so underappreciated outside Memphis (she’s still big there!) We all win, eh?

Mostly, rest in peace, Black Moses. Thanks for the songs. So many of them.

Well, now and again, when my sweetie is busy and the boy is in bed, I’ll turn on Fox News. I want to know what it’s really about, rather than work with other people’s impressions and stereotypes. It’s true, the stereotypes: they’ve lost their damn minds at Fox News. They really have.

I tuned into that Sean Hannity show, the one where some inarticulate loser plays the “liberal” role to Hannity’s rantings. It’s really ranty, to be honest. I’m not just saying that because I find his politics disgusting. It’s true. Funny. I remember the eighties, how “liberals” were painted as complainers for criticizing the government. The Right took that page and plays it so much better. What a complainer! That’s what I thought.

But there was an interesting segment dedicated to whether or not Obama is “out of touch” and “elite.” For some reason, the in-contempt-of-congress Karl Rove came on to talk about it. Surprisingly, ha, Rove agrees: the dude is an elitist, the arrogant type. There were some reasons, including having taught at U of Chicago (a notoriously conservative institution…alas). The centerpiece of Rove’s and Hannity’s list, however, was a strange one.

“Rumor has it” that Obama will replace the bowling alley in the White House with a basketball gym.

That’s elitist.

Apparently.

Here’s what Hannity said, with Rove nodding emphatically…

Now you were the first person to use the adjective arrogant to describe Barack Obama. We had the incident with the presidential seal. He’s going to replace the bowling alley with basketball courts. No TVs in the Lincoln bedroom.

(No televisions?! I thought conservatives thought television was trash and corrupting! I can’t keep up.)
So, is basketball elitist?

Of course it isn’t, because, let’s be serious, bowling is an occasional hobby of some people, whereas basketball is what kids and adults everywhere play, watch, and (most importantly) buy various expressions of in t-shirt, shoe, and poster form. If you really wanted to talk about elitism, then you’d have to have some basic numbers. If it’s elite, not that many people do it and you have to have some sort of capital – cash or cultural – that others lack. Sailing is maybe elite. So is reading highly theoretical essays on art. Most elitism is pretty harmless, truth be told.

But, basketball courts are elitist?

Basketball is such an interesting cultural site. Really. It is one of those ever-more-numerous places where black and white people meet up in conversation or play, where good and bad representations are battled over (the “thug” image of this or that NBA player, the saturation of national consciousness with multi-racial teams and fans). So it is obviously also a fraught site, a place where anxieties get played out. See the battle over how to represent the NBA. I’d go so far as to say that basketball is where a huge percentage of our racial anxiety as a nation is discussed, in however sublimated a form it might take.

Which gets me back to Rove. Like Satan (just sayin’), he’s clever. Building a court is “elitist.” That was such a strange thing to say, except when you imagine how difficult it is to call out racial stuff when you’re Rove (folks are on to you, dude) and the candidate is a pretty boring guy with (as luck would have it) a funny name. Elitism, I predict, will be our code for black in this election. Elite = not familiar, even when something like playing basketball is just so familiar.

Is “Barack Obama” an elite name?

I thought that remark to Hannity was strange and made no sense. It does, of course, because, like Satan (just sayin’), Rove is clever. This musing on the remark is kind of a prediction, but also a reminder to myself that racism in this election is going to take some strange and unexpected turns. Like basketball becoming the new elitism!

It’s also a question I ask myself: is such a desperately abstract a sign of how regular old racism is withering away – which requires a more nuanced idea of racism and anti-racist action – or is it just a sign of how nothing has changed except the code? I don’t know. A lot to be said in each case. I’ll leave it at that.