April really is the cruelest month.

Monday morning thoughts:

a. A little two paragraph article in the LA Times reported that over the
weekend police apprehended a young man from La Verne in a hotel room with
considerably more weapons and ammunition than the Virginia Tech lunatic used
to kill 32 faculty and students last week. Inshallah. But for the grace
of God, we were that close to another mindless bloodbath.

b. As my daughter Mara pointed out, the third week of April is clearly a
major bad karma gully. Let me list just a few of the catastrophes that have
occurred during this period:

a. The V-Tech massacre 2007
b. San Francisco Earthquake & Fire 1906
c. Columbine High massacre
d. Oklahoma City bombing of the Federal Building
c. Wreck of the Titanic 1911

These are just a few of the more notorious events of this time period.

c. Hey, Hip-Hop ain’t new really, it’s just Bones & Tambo come back to
entertain the white folks.

Funny how the companies that dumped Mr. Imus, until now our national grouch,
did not dump their holdings in highly profitable Hip Hop music. Imus was a
nasty-mouthed bully, although I doubt that any of the young women on the
Rutger’s Womens Basketball squad ever heard of the old coot. If they did,
they no doubt would have thought he was an ancient relic of decades of drug
and booze binges now on the wagon and less than happy about it.

But Hip-Hop, what a God-damned shuck. The bling draped dudes might as well
be in burnt cork black face cakewalking around the stage of a showboat or in
a tent at a county fair grounds. They kick up a fuss and show the white
folks how different Black folks are. Of course we love them showing us
their mastery over black women -- making them walk on all fours with a
leash around their necks like the “bitches and ho’s” they are supposed to
be. And the hip hop dudes, they don’t sow or reap, they be pimps.

Of course, our two great Pharisees in chief -- Rev’s Sharpton & Jackson will
now go to war against the rappers, right? Like we believe that.

Funny, but the good if slightly sleazy Reverends and the Rappers are all
creations of the white media. Sure some African American entrepreneurs are
colorful fellows -- Don King is more flamboyant than Donald Trump. But how
do black folks get stuck with those two shady clergymen when they could have
Congressman Charles Rangel, Montel Williams, or Charles Barkley as
leaders. And Oprah and Connie Rice, both the Secretary of State and her
cousin, USC Law School firebrand Connie Rice. How about the Dean of
California politics, Willie Brown, Esq. or LA Supervisor and former
legislator Evyonne (?) Burke. Al and Jesse are just not in the same league
as these and hundreds of other African Americans, so I ask: Who elected
them? At a civic luncheon a few years ago my wife Sue and I sat a table
with a group of African American women. They made a series of disparaging
remarks about Rev. Sharpton not being their spokesman. Then they talked
about Brigadier General Brooks, a very young looking Air Force General who
was one General Tommy Franks press spokesmen before and after the fall of
Baghdad. General Brooks was well spoken, tall and lean, one lady said he
looked like a prince of the Masai in camouflage fatigues instead of the
traditional scarlet toga.

More and more African Americans are sick and tired about self-appointed
people speaking in their behalf and having white owned media conglomerates
like Times Warner and Bertelsman, Viacom and SONY (obviously not owned by
white folks) spreading gangster based values on their kids.

It’s a sad story but the rappers strut and pose to entertain the white folks
-- most rap music is bought by suburban kids. They are just Bones & Tambo
come back with bling and their ho’s and bitches. They be bad and reassure
the white folks that black people are different and not like them. It’s
just the same greedy racial game the public got with old time Minstrel
Show and what was call “Coon Songs” prior to WWI. (If you doubt this check
out sheet music and player piano rolls from the period.)

Does it have to be this way? It was forty years ago when Motown was
dominant force in popular music and the songs were listened to by everybody
and AFVN Radio Saigon played the Sherell’s everyday.

d. The French election yesterday shows that the close split of recent
American elections is not just a local phenomenon. In the past year the
elections in Italy, Germany, Mexico and Canada also came down to almost
perfectly even splits -- less than one percent of the vote between the top
candidates. The French electorate appears to be evenly split too. The
common wisdom is that M. Sarkozy (center/right) will take the run off in two
weeks over Mde. Royal (center/left) by five percent. In many ways it is
very much like our potential 2008 election of Rudy Guiliani vs. Hillary
Clinton.

e. Our politics is in near gridlock and will stay there for the near term.
In their need to hold their base I feel Harry Reed in the Senate and Nancy
Pelosi in the House are setting themselves up for PR disaster when they have
to back down in the end and give Bush a relatively clean money bill for the
Iraq war. In the end I see them saving face by including advisory non
binding language in the final bill -- one without the outrageous pork the
House passed version which was stuffed with more goodies than a birthday
party piñata. [pork in a piñata?]

-xxx -

The following is a response I made on an article in Friday’s Guardian, the
major left leaning English daily newspaper -- when we were young it was the
“Manchester Guardian.”
The article itself was by a Mr. Abromsky, a Guardian staffer who looks like
Borat’s younger brother. He said essentially, he thought the
anti-Americanism sloshing around was overdone. There are many things he
dislikes about America, but there was a lot he likes too. He then explained
why he like to take his kids on vacation to the States and how he enjoyed
New York and also rural American towns.

His article stirred up the damnedest orgy of anti-American drivel I have
ever read in one place. I responded with the following:

[put your letter in italics or indent it from the basic text]

I found the article by Mr. Abromsky open and fair enough. The vile
childish anti-American comments it evoked in many readers is deranged and
uninformed. The American Government is gangsters? Oh really? What about
that corrupt pig Schroeder, or the current President of France? Ah,
Europeans, you sit by silent as Putin demolishes every democratic
institution in Russia and you cluck cluck like chickens as the Sudanese
Government carries out open genocide. Never again? Hardly, “Just leave me
alone” is your typical attitude. It took Bill Clinton to take action when
you morally flexible Europeans were ready to let the Serbs kill every Muslim
they could get their hands on. Didn't do much to stop that one that either,
did you? And in civilized Europe how many cars and transit busses are
burned every night in Paris and a dozen other cities? Gun crime? The UK
will soon equal or surpass most American cities in gun violence.

Please grow up. The empty bitterness of this anti-Americanism seems to be
as much self-loathing as a problem with this or that aspect of America.
Save your Euro bitterness for the French where M. Le Pen is twenty miles to
the right of Bush. What are you going to do if Al Qaeda's recent North
African offensive moves across the water to Spain? Or to Paris or Leeds?

Give it a rest. Better yet, give it a sober rethinking.


RIP, Hon. Boris Nikolaiovich Yeltsin

The news this morning led with the death of former Russian
President Boris Yeltsin. Few men have chance to make history in the way
Yeltsin did and did so with forthright bravery.

A one time Kremlin politician, he was a Siberian from the peasant wing of
the old CP-USSR. However like many Russians who started as believers, he
came to see the burden of the old system and became a leading “reformer” in
the Party. He was purged early in Gorbachov’s rule as General Secretary
only to become a populist figure who was later elected President of the
Russian Federation.

As early as May Day 1989 Russian patriotism became a visible force in the
Soviet Union -- for the first time since 1917, when people marched behind
the traditional white red and blue Russian national flag with the black two
headed eagle of Constantine on the white.

When the Politburo hacks in August 1991 attempted a coup against Gorby in
order to restore Communist Party control they ordered Yelsin’s arrest along
with Gorby’s. The KGB bagged Gorby, his wife, and granddaughter while
Yeltsin led a rag tag collection of Russian Federation Legislators,
students, workers and deserters from the military from the “White House”
which was the seat of the Russian provincial government. Yeltsin rallied
his supporters on top of the few tanks he had under his command and waited
for the Kremlin Guards forces of the Red Army to storm the building. It was
too late and even as the tanks and trucks of soldiers crossed Moscow toward
the “White House” the Russian people met them with Russian songs and
flowers. Before they reached the river and Yelsin’s Russian Government the
soldiers put flowers and tricolor Russian flags on their tanks and went over
to Yeltsin and the Rodina. Russia was now withdrawing from the Soviet
Union. The conspirators in the Kremlin ordered other units to attack
Yeltsin but even when ordered by their commanders the soldier refused to
move and by the end of the day the Red Army was once again the Russian Army
and the units ditched the red banner and ran up the Russian national flag.

That night the coup collapsed and Gorby and his family were rescued. The
next morning the city of Moscow was draped in the traditional Russian flag,
and at a dramatic meeting of the Russian Parliament Yeltsin proposed the end
of the Soviet Union and the return of full sovereignty to the Russian
nation.

What began at the Finland Station in 1917 melted away in the August sun of
1991. It was over. And it happened because Yeltsin was brave enough to
stand on the tanks and risk his life and the lives of his supporters for
something they believed in: Russia their beloved Rodina (motherland).
That night it was like the glorious finale of Rachmananov’s Second Symphony,
known as The Rock. After all the pain and suffering, history spat out the
Communist era and Russia rose from the ashes in hope and glory. These were
heady times. Russian authentic symbols and names reappeared and by the
hundreds statues of Lenin and other Commie big shots were haulled away to
what became literally the garbage dump of history.

Yeltsin was reelected. Californians George Gordon & Joe Shumate ran his
reelection campaign! A made for TV movie told the story with Lev Schreiber
playing Joe Shumate, which was amazing if you know Shumate. Yeltsin’s
daughter was soon his chief of staff and quite competently directed the
Government. Like England, Russia seems to prosper under female leaders.
Things began drifting toward the end of his term, but he was the man who
had the courage to force the inevitable change and do so with a minimum of
blood.

Tonight I’ll lift a glass of a Stolichnaya to his memory.

- xxx -