I’ve been away for several weeks driving around America in a gasoline powered ve-hicle. I’ve seen things.
This I know: While nobody knows how this presidential campaign will play out it is an absolute certainty that like in 1968, the Empire will be shaken to its core.
W. and crew have taken the GOP so far out on a dead limb that they’ve nominated a candidate who they despise. Hillary, having given the okeydoke to “blue collar America” has smashed the LBJ coalition.
Meanwhile that unsinkable ship, the “USS Sole Superpower,” has sunk. A shocked and addled populace drifts on the waves, clinging to its habits and prejudices while sharks circle the wreckage. They face a stark choice: they can swim towards the small island on the horizon (which may not even have any food or water) called “Obama,” or they can stay put and hope to be rescued before the sharks decide to strike.
(Metaphor switch!) Obama, the Mohammed Ali of politics (see? Americans can embrace a Muslim champ) has, against all odds, defeated the hardest hitter around to take the Democratic Title. The Clintons, like George Foreman, foresaw an early knockout, but Obama employed a “rope-a-dope” strategy. He’s taken some thundering shots to the head and body, which is worrisome, and the tireless GOP waits in the wings like Joe Frazier. The ensuing fight won’t be pretty. Furthermore, unlike Ali, Obama didn’t get a knockout. He won on points in a controversial split decision.
Obama will not use the rope-a-dope on McCain. He’ll float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, stick and jab. To win he must fight his fight and bring it.
The greatest obstacle to this would be a Hillary vice-presidency. The Republicans have a warehouse full of ammunition on the Clintons, sitting unused. Obama would be caught flat footed, spending the entire campaign explaining what the Clintons really meant by this or that. You know the drill.
I know for a fact that Republicans are desperately praying (literally) for an Obama-Clinton ticket. For all of their bluster, GOPs know this: Their candidate might win out only if Obama picks Hillary. They know that McCain is no Joe Frazier. No, he is a Scott LeDeaux, a paper tiger with a glass jaw. A Great White Hope, if you will, though even a LeDeaux could land a lucky punch if he catches the Champ flat footed.
So will “blue collar America” ever vote for Obama? (Metaphor switching back!) As we bob on the ocean, surrounded by sharks, something new develops. Amongst the run-of-the-mill sharks, up swims a ravenous 40-foot Great White named “War on Iran!” Maybe, just maybe, America will decide to swim for that island.
These are the (legal) things Marion Kind has done for money: cabbage picker, office clerk, landscaper, ice cream man, injection molder, forklift driver, film and stage actor, drycleaner, comic book artist, truck driver, dishwasher, fanzine putter-outer, bartender, housepainter, singer, UAW shop steward, warehouse and packaging person, courier, waiter, guinea pig, illustrator, poet, writer, fashion model, five instrument recording artist, assembler, construction, cabbie. Not saying he did them well, only that he got paid.
So I’m flippin’ through the latest Blender like I do every 15 years (or however often it comes out) reading an interview with my favorite armed-to-the-teats lesbian hit man, Alicia Keys (whose portrayal of the afore described villainess you may or may not have caught in 2006’s Smokin’ Aces). From the interview, I learn she is not a member of the Cream tribute band from Ohio, The Black Keys, but she does tell me that it was the government who invented gangsta’ rap to get black people to kill each other.
Now it all makes sense. This government has consistently proved themselves so very competent in so many ways that the effortless play acting performed by Tupac and Biggie, et al, could have been choreographed only by an organization so exacting and perfectionist as that which dwells in halls of power in Washington, D. C.
Is there anything they can’t do? What with the storied cooperation and goodwill that has flourished between the clandestine, information-gathering branches of the government, such as the CIA, FBI and now I guess the late B.I.G. over the decades, how can they be stopped? And they’re so funky too. Who knew?
It was Gore, I bet. Tipper Gore, that is. Stumping away her days decrying and trying to suppress every form of musical expression on the planet, while at night she was in the VP mansion’s basement-studio kickin’ it with an old 808, a tube Neumann, pen and pad and some old school Koss cans. What times those must have been. Remember back when Clinton was running against Bush the 41st? Those bumper stickers that said George Bush and under that Bill Clinton, but the words Bush and Bill were crossed out, leaving “George Clinton: P-Funk in the White House!”
And you thought it was a joke? Maybe that’s what George Clinton did to get back at all those rappers who sample-jacked his jams without paying him. He conspired with the Billary Clinton administration to concoct a popular musical style so diabolical that the performers of it would kill each other in a public gang war. That old wily rascal.
It is a bold stance for Keys to take, however, suggesting that the artists who perform(ed) gangsta’ rap were not capable of fashioning the actual style of music that they so skillfully recorded, produced and performed, but that the government thought it up for them.
Or maybe I’m reading this wrong and looking ahead too far. Maybe Tupac and Biggie weren’t in on the con at all and were just duped pawns being moved around a game board that only the eye of the Man with the gigantic Hand is big enough to survey the enormity of. The Man that controls the world economy and so meticulously guides our domestic and foreign policies with such awe-inspiring deftness.
Keys must be talking about that same government who couldn’t think of anything better to do than sit outside of Manuel Noriega’s bunker in Panama blaring AC/DC and the Beach Boys from speakers propped up on their Humvees until puppet-gone-rogue Noriega caved and came out with his hands up. They used the same tactic towards Saddam’s Iraqi army positions in Kuwait in the Gulf War. These tactics are developed and deployed by the PsyOps (Psychological Operations) division of military intelligence. The work of pure genius.
Then again, if you sat outside my house and played even two Beach Boys songs all the way through I’d come out, guns a blazing–if I had any guns.
Keys says that “If Malcolm [X] or Huey [Newton] had the outlets our musicians have today, [the movement would] be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself.”
I hope she doesn’t have anything in mind like working up a holographic Malcolm & Huey rap duo like that creepy Frank Sinatra ghost she sang a duet with at the Grammys this year. But then, what do I know? Maybe Keys is a genius and she’s working for the government, too.
Long has written about sports, news, music and travel under various names and for various publications, including the Buffalo News, The Beast, Blue Dog Press, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the New York Sports Express, among others. He served a short stint as the guitar player in the Philadelphia metal-hop band, Incognegro. He also played guitar and sang on recordings of the Laughing Hyenas and The Unsane. He has dabbled in documentary and music video. He is a veteran of the US Navy and a graduate of the University of Houston. He lives in Philadelphia. You can google the rest.