Crankage Creep Part 4: Cynthia McKinney, Herman Cain, and the Christian-Shariah, States Rights Crazy Train

A version of this post has been crossposted to The People's View.









"Don't Tom for Mr. Charlie"
-- Civil Rights era saying

What comes after tokenism?

These days, I've been discussing a trend I've noticed, not only on the states rights Christian-shariah right but the crankodoodle left, as well. Beyond political pandering and 1960s-2000s tokenism, it concerns the use of Black spokesmodels as morality chips to advance regressive politics or views that tug at the heartstrings to evince a particular political result. Neither pandering nor tokenism are anything new. But in the age of The First Black President®, the trend is one to watch, because it's not going away.

Quoting the self:

Does anyone think it's a mistake or coincidence that it's the Black man in the GOP race who articulates these anti-Muslim views the loudest?

Does anyone think it's a mistake or coincidence that people let Alice Walker get away with playing the "freedom ride" card when discussing the Gaza flotillas?

Cynthia McKinney, Professional Crankodoodle, has been known to blather Third Position/"beyond left and right" views to whomever will listen.

Some Black people are allowing themselves to be mouthpieces for agendas that either don't care about us or seek to actively suppress us. Don't expect me to be one and don't expect me to condone it. If this sounds like a non-sequitur thinking, it's not.

As much as they recoil from the word, the American rightwing is quite diverse. But our adversaries in any rightwing faction have no qualms with using lefty ideas -- and ideals -- to forward repressive, regressive ideas and policies. Anders B. Breivik, the Norway mass murderer called it using multiculturalist ideas against us to destroy us. Years ago, Chip Berlet of Public Eye labeled it right-woos left. I call today's iteration the leftwing of the far right. In our celebrity culture in the post-Civil Rights era, it goes hand in hand with political showbiz.

Leave it to Ms. McKlanny and her A.N.S.W.E.R. Traveling Carnival Exhibit of Suppport for Genocidal Dictators to once again scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Today, in my usual perusal of RWNJ sources to see what they're up to, I went to American Free Press, a longstanding antisemitic crankodoodle site. AFP is a Willis Carto publication.

Guess who's face is featured at the top of the front page, with a link to an interview with one of their bigots. Go on, guess.

In the interview, Ms. McKinney laments a "shift to the right" (5:44) on the part of the Democratic party. As Michele Bachmann might tell us, she's got a lot of chootspuh, given that American Free Press has been a longstanding mouthpiece of the Elizabeth Dilling/Francis Parker Yockey right.

Who?

Elizabeth Dilling, whose red- (and Jewish-) baiting agitation Glenn Beck was caught peddling on his show.

Francis Parker Yockey, a godfather of today's confederate/neo-nazi rightwing of buttondowns.

Over time, Yockey contacted or worked with many of the far-Right figures and organizations of his day. These included the German-American Bund, the German-American National Alliance, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, George Sylvester Viereck, the American H. Keith Thompson, Gerald L.K. Smith, and James H. Madole's National Renaissance Party. Thompson and Madole, in particular, became advocates of Yockey's worldview. While Yockey's pro-Fascist activities began in the late 1930s, they did not end there. Unfazed by the defeat of the Axis in the Second World War, Yockey actually became even more active in neo-Fascist causes after 1945. From this point forward, he remained dedicated solely to his cause of reviving Fascism. He dispensed with any semblance of an ordinary life, and remained constantly on the move, travelling to wherever he felt he could pursue his goals most effectively, and cultivating countless contacts along the way.

Yockey's ideas were usually only embraced by those, however, who could countenance the necessity of an alliance between the far Left and the far Right, which was a fundamental pillar of Yockey's ideas. The American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, for example, rejected Yockey on the basis of his anti-American attitude, as well as his willingness to work with anti-Zionist Communist governments and movements, as the ANP adhered solely to the ideals of absolute anti-Bolshevist National Socialism, as had been advocated by Hitler.

(Emphasis mine.)

With American Free Press, the nut did not fall far from the tree; in fact, it's still firmly attached to the tree. AFP was the old Spotlight magazine of the Liberty Lobby, started in 1955 by Yockey-ite Willis Carto. Carto is another living historical figure on the neo-confederate, neo-nazi populist right.

Via ADL:

Carto's chief aim was always to mobilize opinion against Jews. Liberty Lobby was his chief instrument to bridge right-wing constituencies -- hard-right or paramilitary libertarians, conspiratorial anticommunists, racists -- by inflaming their anti-government and nativist fears and identifying Jews as the country's chief threat. "Zionists," in the group's disingenuous rhetoric, and the "Zionist lobby," were the driving forces behind integration; Communism; the United Nations and internationalism; the moral decline accompanying liberalism; and, obviously, Israel. These sentiments were widely conveyed by Liberty Lobby's weekly tabloid, The Spotlight, which debuted in September 1975. Written and edited by the organization's staff (including, occasionally, Carto himself),7 the flagship publication reflected Carto's conspiracy theory of history, a nightmare vision in which hidden forces -- including elite policy groups like the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations -- manipulated governments and media around the world. Jews continually turn up, not just as Zionists but in other coded forms, including "Israel's American supporters," "dual loyalists," "cultural Marxists" and "international bankers."

Nothing has changed in its incarnation as American Free Press. If there's a conspiracy theory that blames Jews for every evil in the world, you can bet American Free Press will promote it. As we could expect, Ms. McKinney goes into her usual dance around "string-pullers" behind Obama (and now the oligarchs in the Russian Federation) and other predictable, Protocols-lite b.s. in the interview. Another day, another dose of right-woos-left crankage.

So yes, Alan Maki of New Progressive Alliance and other anti-Obama Disappointeds ready to throw in the towel after two years. Ms. McKinney's bedding down with idiots like Daryl Bradford Smith, the pro-Gadhaffi, pro-dictator A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition (which this AFP podcast was intended to promote), and now open association with American Free Press discredit her, and sully your movement. So sure, go on and keep kicking around Cynthia McKinney's name in these absurd "primary Obama" exploits.

Hey, anything beats the their last pandering/educational attempt, sending some ridiculous "Obama is a Republican!!!!" bus around majority-Black neighborhoods. How's that working out for them these days?


__________


Contrast McKinney's forays into the anti-Zionist extremist right with people like Herman Cain, and the Christian Zionist leftwing of the far rightists attending Rick Perry's Ginormous Prayer Meeting. Called The Response, it came and went yesterday in Houston, attracting 20,000 adherents, give or take a few thousand.

Although Paul Rosenberg at Alternet lapsed into No True Scotsman fallacy by the end of his piece, its also worth noting:

“It's surprisingly multiracial, that is, surprising if you you don't understand why,” [Peter Forrest Wilder of the Texas Observer] said. Consequently, people should not expect The Response to be "this white bread crowd that people would expect Rick Perry, this white conservative male would be putting on. In fact, it's a pretty racially diverse movement of people, in part reflecting its deep involvement in overseas evangelizing."

“There's this interesting kind of veneer of racial reconciliation,” Wilder continued. “I wrote about in the article. There's this kind of instrumentality to it, not that it's not sincere, but there's a goal that's attached, trying to overcome racial problems within this community or Christianity or even conservatism, if you want to keep going with it. And that's that, at a base level, you look at what Lou Engel said. He wants a new breed of black prophets to rise up and use their social justice civil rights kind of bona fides to lend authenticity and credibility to the anti-abortion movement.”

A similar critique and catalog of some of their exploits can be found throughout my blog, in tags like Neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic Girls. I've said in other places that my parents could easily have been on The Response's roster. Having had both parents as leaders in a regional Apostolic prayer network and Bible school promoting racial reconciliation, however, it's a mistake to doubt the commitment (and thus the political pull) of grassroots whites and nonwhites involved in it.

I watched with interest this past week as Herman Cain had a falling-off-his-horse moment around his Muslim-baiting, and the immediate smackdown reaction of American Family Association's Bryan Fischer. The AFA was the main sponsor behind The Response. Rewriting the First Amendment by playing a very confused Christian-Confederate card:

States are given, under our Constitution, virtually unlimited freedom to manage religious liberty affairs as they see fit. They even maintain the constitutional right to “establish” a church if they choose, that is, to pick one Christian denomination and make it the official church of their individual state. It would be a bad idea, but not unconstitutional. Nine of the 13 original states had established churches at the time of the Founding, a practice the First Amendment was designed to protect. (They wised up and dis-established them all by 1833.)

And states also maintain the right to restrict dangerous religious expression as they see fit, whether we’re talking about the KKK and its burning crosses or Islam and its virulent anti-semitism. The federal government is forbidden to interfere but the Constitution places no limits around what state governments may do to deal with religiously-inspired threats to their security, peace, freedoms and individual rights. That’s a matter for state constitutions and lawmakers.

I’m afraid it may be too late for Herman to find his voice again on Islam. But it’s not too late for the United States of America.

This, from the same race-baiter who has also recently claimed Obama wants to give America back to the Indians. Oh brother.

A couple days later, he got another smackdown attempt from Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, ironically one of the few GOTP influences to speak out about it. Playing an overdue, very tattered "but he's Black!!" card, Land fingerwagged,

The glorious First Amendment to our Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an Establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Ever since the Civil War and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 it has been the firm and uniform opinion of the Supreme Court and the entire federal judiciary that all the things the federal government is forbidden from doing in the Bill of Rights, all local and state entities are proscribed from doing as well.

It is surprising that a man of Mr. Cain's ethnicity and age would be so insensitive to this issue. Thank God we put a stop to the "local option" that Southern states put on African-Americans' civil rights during the Jim Crow era. As a result of the bravery of the thousands who marched with Dr. King, Selma and Birmingham no longer have a "local option" on allowing full citizenship to their African-American residents.

That sure is interesting, coming from the head of America's largest church body that formed as part of the pro-slavery Confederate south. The inevitable anti-Black racebaiting of Herman Cain has begun, just like they did Condi and Colin. It never takes these bigots long to start racebaiting the very people some marketing genius told them they need on board, to win over the most symbolic voting bloc in the country (even as our numbers start to decline, our symbolic use as a group will still count in the minds of opportunists for another couple generations.)

Oh and congratulations, Rev. Fred Luter, one of the 17 Black members of the SBC who just last month was elected to First Vice President of the Convention.

Woohoo, I love the scent of progress in 2011.

Snark aside, much like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Perry/Jeff Davis-lite himself, it's a mistake to write off or deliberately misunderstand this faction of conservative Christianity. Crazy may they look to some, stupid may they sound to others, bat-shyt may we think they act, they've never died down, their ranks have only grown. Yesterday's rally was less a revival meeting with a Web 2.0-friendly website, than a show of numbers and potential political clout.

I would not be surprised to find Rick Perry on the GOP ticket if not in the P slot then in the VP one. "The Response" is just the beginning; the extremists of the rightwing have been working towards anti-Civil Rights goals for an entire generation.



(H/t Kris Peterson on the Alternet article.)

Crankage-Creep Part 3: Black Whackodoodles, Advanced Tokenism, Minority Authenticity, and Blackaphilia

Find Crankage-Creep Part 1 here

Crankage-Creep Part 2 is here




So um, who actually bought into this representational nonsense?



Two items: One from We Are Respectable Negroes:

Herman Cain, Grand High Vizier of the black garbage pail kids black conservatives and political coprophagist is upset that John Stewart mocked him. Apparently, when he gets called out for flubbing the Constitution, rank bigotry against Muslim Americans, or silly talk about a 3 page maximum limit on all Congressional bills, it is an act of racism. The critical self-reflection rule would seem not to apply, as Cain, in an act of self-delusion that is enabled by his white populist fan base, quite literally has the complexion for the protection.

And one from The Propagandist

Even after the President dismissed Hamas as a peace partner, said a unilateral Palestinian statehood push is a dog that won’t hunt and promised to veto any such resolution at the UN security council, right-wing activists called him “the worst President of the United States that Israel has ever had.” This is a piping-hot crock of bunk. The sole purpose here is to scare grandma. And if a picture tells a thousand words, what better way to illustrate Republican Israephilia than for the Tea Party's biggest rock star to wear a Star of David around her neck on Yom Yerushalayim. What’s next? Piper’s bat mitzvah?

Today's topic is political solicitation and pandering. It's not just the Republicans trying to rack up all those upper-middle-aged Jewish votes from Florida, or letting people like Herman Cain absorb and deflect the anti-Black race rage of their constituencies for them, all while labeling everyone else with the world's most infamous shut-up, "racists!!!"

It's also leftydoodle Cynthia McKinney's traveling A.N.S.W.E.R. Circus of Crazy, which I was remiss to have missed at the local Universalist-Unitarian church last week, because I was on a deadline. I really wish I could have shown up. Ah, I've no doubt there will be plenty more amusements in coming months.

The New Progressive Alliance (NPA), the latest lefty factionalists who showcase such steering committee members as Cornel West and Cindy Sheehan, is on some pander tour around the Black parts of Washington DC. Which is to say an awful lot of DC, minus the Capitol and toney areas. They are there to inform, um, certain people, that Obama is a Republican!

Just like MLK! oh wait...

Curious Negro Re-education campaign it is, which suggests people not to vote for Obama, yet offers no alternative of their own. Read a fantastic takeapart of this obvious get-the-country's-most-coveted-voting-bloc-to-forfeit-their-numbers-from-Obama campaign at Angry Black Lady's.

Not to be outdone in the downward slide into offline sockpuppetry, there is an emergent, please-pander-to-me type, who raises the concepts of "shill" and "sellout" to the level of a sacrament; who seems to think tokenism is good, desirable, and a symbol of status (even as they are used as status symbols themselves.)

After a tumultuous two weeks for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which included the resignation of the organization’s President, Jarrett Barrios, and seven members of the Board of Directors, Troup Coronado, a former AT&T executive at the center of the controversy resigned from the Board of Directors yesterday of his own accord, according to a statement from GLAAD.

Coronado wanted “to do what was in the best interest of GLAAD,” the press release stated.

Little else was available about the Board member’s departure, but the Board did release parts of Barrios’ letter of resignation from this past weekend.

“Of utmost concern and foremost in all of our minds must be the well-being of GLAAD,” Barrios wrote to the Board. “The staff continues to work hard and does not deserve to work under a cloud, nor do they merit the distraction that it has become from our organization’s fine brand.”

According to Michelangelo Signorile’s blog, Coronado remains on the Boards of several LGBT organizations including the Equality California Institute. While GLAAD stood at the center of the scandal, the spotlight is beging to shift to other organizations tied to Coronado through his work as a Board member or supporter, or his work at a liaison to LGBT organizations from AT&T.

Speaking of Equality California Institute, this scandalette peaked just in time for our transition from celebrations of mere pride to celebration of legal equality.

Nice going, fellas.

This advanced form tokenism conflates being a target market with having political clout. That's not a new observation in the queer community; the critique of the corporate-sponsored commerciality of pride parades, for instance, have been around strong for at least 15 years. I fit your narrow standard of beauty and have lots of money, it says; market your political platform to me and I might reward you with a vote. Regular people call this being a tool. I'm dating myself, here, but we used to call it After the Ball syndrome. Today, that critique goes by that mean epithet, Gay, Inc..

It gets worse in Homotopia. Oh Crap has mentioned before this BDS-creep into the political lgbt world. Ostensibly standing against "pinkwashing" on the part of Israel, this movement seems a pinkwashing, pandering effort itself, to put a gay face on anti-Israel/anti-Zionism.

Hey now don't get me wrong. It's a free country, so far be it from me to stop anyone's boycott of high-end foodie olive oils and fine bath salts I can't afford, anyway.

BDS campaigns seem pretty easy; a lot easier than the boycott of the originary Apartheid state in the 80s and that was even prior to Usenet and Compuserve! Just tack scare words like apartheid and human rights to your social media. That should help in getting the lecture circuit's hottest walking commodities to lend credibility to your cause, and say it's a Freedom Ride, or something. The more Black people recruited for that effort, the better for your perceived, symbolic moral/civil rights standing.

Anyone who thinks I've jumped off the deep end of cynicism should try it, it works (major caveat: if you can find someone to play that role for you.)

Or, you could just slather those three magical letters "MLK" all over everything. Since we're monolithic, single-issue voters mesmerized by those mystical, thought-stopping initials, I'm sure that will work, too, just like it's working so well for the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln that also campaigns on the Confederate flag...oh wait, you mean that might not work??

Oh.



The United States of Social Hysteria

Pandering efforts towards ethnic, religious, and racial minorities are about as old as they are completely transparent. Yet, they work...for someone. Somewhere.

With Cain and Palin becoming the public faces of both Christian Zionism as well as the victimized-conservative narrative the states' righters have apparently been chomping at the bit to finally try out for themselves;

with white nationalist professional gay-baiters like the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer callously attempting to bless Muslim-baiting Cain as the "real", "authentically-black man in the race"

and Cain, just as antigay, turning right around to say he'd welcome gays and lesbians into his fantasy/fictional presidential cabinet, based on some confused ideas about "Shariah law";

with crankodoodles like C. McKinney and those A.N.S.W.E.R. creeps who never seem to have met an antigay Muslim-supremacist dictator they didn't like (this is currently passing for some form of "progress");

with LGBTs who litmus test on how much you hate Israel, as if that has jack crud to do with anything;

with their absurd Homocon counterparts like Michael Lucas parroting skinhead arguments against Islam and Muslim immigrants to "defend Israel";

and with some of mainstream rightwing's second-string unhinged crazies on board looking like tea party tokens Allen West and Alveda King, the Innisses of CORE, ("A Black Pastor") Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, Palin Mama Black Bear Endorsees Star Parker and Angela McGlowan,

...I don't know who that "someone" is going to be, in the coming election season.

Indeed, it seems the Obama Age is the era in which a noted presence of Black People™ stands not only as symbolic racial redemption, but also are becoming the go-to face for the crazy. Like Chauncey often relates, this gives me the frowny-face.

Meanwhile here on terra firma, Sarah Palin is often derided for her moneybags attitude in racking up those speakers's fees, but she's by no means alone.

Does anyone really believe the Republican party or the hate-Obama left truly want Black constituencies, or a Jewish one? or a Muslim one? No, they want hashmarks at the polling place, a lot like the theater owner wants rear-ends in seats: temporarily, then quickly shuffled out to make room for the next batch of dupes. Neither are poised to get it, in my view.

Showbiz...




ETA: Link corrected.

Prophetessor West: Crankage-Creep Part 2

See this post for Crankage-Creep, Part 1. Part 3 is here.




Oh, how the Twitter device is aflutter about this "New Progressive Alliance" outfit out of Leftybagger Central, Firedoglake.

Oh Crap has been onto them since December. Irregular Times has made several posts on them. Deaniac83 at The People's View had some fun at their expense. The Reid Report's recap of This Week in Race on the Left here.

And while Angry Black Lady caught them trying to post a call for candidates on Craigslist, OCIHACOSP caught early their latest, ridiculous antic, using Cornel West as some kind of red herring to teach the Blacks a lesson.

Time to make – by educating Afro-Americans, and eventually the rest of the counrty – some enemies in high places, no? The folks at blackagendareport.com could also be key allies.

With so-called "allies" like leftybaggers, who needs the tea party.

Regular readers of OCIHACOSP already saw this latest form of whackjobbery coming. Quoting myself:

I don't think the choice of [Chris Hedges' May 16 Truthdig column] title, "The Obama Deception", is by chance. I own the freely-distributed DVD, which finds its home in my crankage stash along with the rightwing, segregationist, and nutball Evangelical materials. I acquired it from a friend who had the displeasure of being in the Haight-Ashbury district the day Cynthia McKlanny's "Power to the Peaceful" chemtrail circus came to town, distributing We Are Change 9/11 truth paraphernalia. With such has-been luminaries as rap artist KRS-One and reformed Jew-baiter Professor Griff, The Obama Deception video is directed squarely at pro-Obama Black youth. Upon viewing, one is to come away with the idea that Barack Obama is a puppet on the string of evil/sinister forces, such as international bankers and the vague, nebulous New World Order.

Hedges' piece, unsurprisingly, uses Dr. West to articulate and repeat similar, tired old tropes.

Hedges isn't the only one, apparently. Dr. West has lent his name to the steering committee of this (supposedly New) Progressive Alliance, along with Inside (hand)Jobber Cindy Sheehan.

Sheehan the Peace Mom, who broke with "the left" years ago, has associated herself with Alex Jones of "Obama Decption" fame since 2007.

As far as I can tell, these "progressives" are retreads of the old "anybody but Bush" so-called "movement", which was so wrapped up in their anti-Bush identity many follwed their leaders like Sheehan and Cynthia McKrankypants into the same J%w-baiting/Zionist-counting 9/11 Trutherdom that sunk Van Jones.

Jones ended up with his name signed to some stupid document at Rense.com, a UFO paranoia site which has long since gone full-blown David Duke (caution: hate site.)

Some of us tried to tell our fellow lefties prone to moonbattery and thus wingnut recruitment into causes against their own interests: check and double check those people's sources, check the sites they promote and constantly peddle (e.g. ; do not believe everything you read just because it's on the internet. And if it tells you what you want to hear, question it even further.)

Predictably, we were (and still are) called Bush-lovers, paid government shills, left-gatekeepers, sellouts, closet-cons and the like, even as literal cons and neo-nazis were recruiting and exploiting them. Too bad Jones' hubris got the best of him, and he did not have the integrity to tell the Obama administration of the views that could and did land him in hot water, ironically, with Elizabeth Dilling-hugger Glenn Beck.

Oh look! Now Prof. West has now been beatified by Chris Hedges into Prophet West.

Prophets put forward during their day ideas that the mass of people, including the elite, denounce as impractical and yet at the same time sense to be true. This is what invokes the rage against the prophet. He or she states the obvious in a society where the obvious is seditious. Prophecy is feared because of the consequences of the truth. To accept that Obama is, as West said, a mascot for Wall Street means having to challenge some frightening monoliths of power and give up the comfortable illusion that the Democratic Party or liberal institutions can be instruments for genuine reform.

Etc., etc. By the way, the exact phrase was, "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats".

Does anybody else wonder why Chris Hedges deems it necessary to showcase Prof. West, or is it hide behind the words of West to call Obama a black so-and-so, as a lot of these other leftybaggers?

How would our supposed allies respond -- how DO they [sometimes rightfully] respond [even if by accident] -- if/when Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, and other celebrity talkers use racialized language regarding the president?

How did the dumb teabaggers respond when a Black liberal man used it regarding Herman Cain? Where are all their loud wails of protest, now?

Why did Hedges decide to refashion West's words and censor out the black-on-black criticism in his latest article when he featured it in his first? Did the inevitable pushback that prompted his latest attempt at West hagiography hit too close to home?

Probably.

My city has long stood as an outpost of moonbattery, some of it deadly. "Drank the koolaid" can be said to have originated here. Carol "Cookies for Truth" Brouillet and her absurd, right-woos-left "Deception Dollars" were a staple of the antiwar left throughout the '00s.

At the same time, under the "antiwar" and "anti-imperialism" guise, straight-up neonazi Wendy Campbell went all over gullible progressive radio station KPFA and Indymedia to peddle her bigoted wares, also showcased at LaPena Cultural Center. Countercurrents published her Nazi 2.0 screeds as late as 2008. This time last year, they were featuring Cynthia McKinney.

Across the bay, they still haven't learned one goddamned thing. According to Adam Holland, professional bigot Gilad Atzmon >appeared at Lake Merrit United Methodist Church, just two weeks ago. Countercurrents still carries Rense.com featured "artist", Gilad Atzmon. It's just a hop/skip/jump to crankodoodlery of the heinous kind, with some elements of the so-called progressive left.

They -- the truthers, the supposed "anti-Zionists" peddling neo-nazi ideals, the Innises of CPAC/CORE, the Alveda Kings, the Cynthia McKinneys, the Cornel Wests -- get away with this behavior because we allow it...just as we allow(ed) Sarah Palin to run roughshod over the populace for two years straight.

From where I sit, yeah, they look the same to me: celebrity opportunists looking out for their personal legacies and not the people they claim to represent. The right-woos-left crankodoodle set deserve each other as adversaries and colleagues. They can have each other.

Academic Showbiz, Celebrity Profs, and Crankage-Creep on the Left

This is part one of a series. You can read parts two and three here
and here.




Here at OCIHACOSP, I do love my showbiz. I can't stop talking about it. It could be political showbiz of the Palin/Trump ilk that melds tabloid television with politics. It could be medicine shows, vaudeville, and classic film, like what's covered at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule or at Ivan's Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.

Who could forget February's DeVega vs Cain Revue?

Or it could be one of my favorite forms of showbiz: the academic sort.

It was bad enough when Judith Butler, otherwise an intellectual hero, got into a fracas after calling Hamas and Hezbollah "left movements". Oh, please. Male-supremacist bigots and genocidal homophobes have nothing in common with me, I don't care how loudly they claim to be fighting oppression. They'll live without my support, I'm sure.

The latest place to see and be seen on the academic showbiz circuit is apparently the Israel-critical BDS/Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement, complete with whirlwind tours, and rising starlet profs. Everything's a holocaust, now. Everything's apartheid, now.

The Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights Movement have now been repurposed as Perdana "peace" flotillas, so sez Alice Walker.

The ongoing handwringing in Black academia over the person and symbolism of Barack Obama would be just as merely amusing/annoying, were it not for the celebrity status of profs like Cornel West.

Recalling the Alex Jones conspiracy movie title, this Chris Hedges piece showcases -- or is it trots out -- West's discontent with Barack Obama the man, not Barack Obama the president. One gets the sense it's in the service of something much larger than West's personal dismay with the POTUS.

Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of [former Obama administration chief of staff Rahm] Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

And on it goes.

I don't think the choice of title, "The Obama Deception", is by chance. I own the freely-distributed DVD, which finds its home in my crankage stash along with the rightwing, segregationist, and nutball Evangelical materials. I acquired it from a friend who had the displeasure of being in the Haight-Ashbury district the day Cynthia McKlanny's "Power to the Peaceful" chemtrail circus came to town, distributing We Are Change 9/11 truth paraphernalia. With such has-been luminaries as rap artist KRS-One and reformed Jew-baiter Professor Griff, The Obama Deception video is directed squarely at pro-Obama Black youth. Upon viewing, one is to come away with the idea that Barack Obama is a puppet on the string of evil/sinister forces, such as international bankers and the vague, nebulous New World Order.

Hedges' piece, unsurprisingly, uses Dr. West to articulate and repeat similar, tired old tropes.

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.

“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.

West's characterization of Obama the person has not been lost on his colleagues, or mine. MSNBC's Ed Schultz staged a little fight between West and Princeton colleague Melissa Harris-Perry. For those looking for sparks, no one was disappointed.

My colleague Deaniac83 at The People's View caught it:

See, Barack Obama is the child of a brilliant black father (read: a black man with books is obviously acting "white" unless he uses his intellect to talk only about racial issues) and a white mother (how disgusting that West has to get into a latent bias against interracial relationships between a black man and a white woman). Being a child of diversity, evidently, makes him "rootless." And since Barack Obama, a brilliant man himself, also did not spend all his time fighting and talking about racial issues, he must not count as black.

I didn't know you could be this offensive to this many people in the space of two short paragraphs, and I wouldn't have believed it had I not read Cornel's screed. Barack Obama is a "white man with black skin" - why don't you just call him an Oreo, Dr. West? I am neither black nor white, but I am wondering just who gave Cornel West the right to define what a black man is, what a white man is, and when someone can be pejoratively called an Oreo.

[...]

I am tired of this divisiveness, racism, religious intolerance and every other form of tearing us apart - no matter whether it is employed by Glenn Beck's fringe Right or Cornel West's fringe Left. I am not the only one.

No, Deaniac83, you're not. Did we not already go through this with Ralph Nader's expression of similar Uncle Tom/talks-white sentiment?

There is a cynical game being played with historical imagery here. If celebrities like Judith Butler, Alice Walker, Cynthia McKinney, KRS-One or Cornel West say so -- whatever it is -- no one is supposed to take issue because of their status, as Hedges puts it re: West, as moral authority figures. Well, I disagree with that.

Is anyone else tiring of this crankage-creep on the left?