O Come Emanuel.
Knowing Rahm Emanuel as I did in his salad days when he vowed grimly to do anything and everything to get ahead, I am unsurprised to see that he cannot display a sense of humor. Not even then when he was a lowly minion raising first what he himself told me was raising money for Rich Daley…then Bill Clinton. Now that he has been a White House political director wherein he sought to snuff out a Clinton impeachment by leaking salacious stories in retribution, congressman who feds think benefited from city employees campaigning for him on taxpayers’ time, chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, a member of Ways and Means and, in his dreams, an appointee to the U. S. Senate representing Illinois after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, he unable to lighten up.
The “Economist” this week features a story about Stephen Colbert, the brilliant young satirist-star of “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central. He does great interviews with members of Congress including one with Phil Hare, the new Democrat from Illinois who once considered becoming a mortician. Colbert asked him: “If you could embalm anyone in Congress, who would it be?” But Emanuel doesn’t think it funny so as the Democrats’ chief enforcer on the Hill he has advised all newly-elected Democratic lawmakers to avoid appearing on Colbert’s show.
Colbert’s witty rejoinder: “There is a new witch hunt in Washington. First they go after Scooter Libby. Then it is attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Now the Democratic leadership has unleashed a vicious attack on everything America holds dear—me. I know what you’re thinking, nation. Why would Emmanuelle, whose erotic adventures taught a generation the elusive art of sensual love, return from space to counsel freshman congressmen?”
Colbert wound up his diatribe by offering Emanuel a replacement for a middle finger he had severed in a meat-slicer when he was a teen-ager…by popping open a box to show an artificial middle finger poking out . Raised.
Whitey, Do More!
What makes the Reverend Jesse Jackson old-fashioned…a relic of the old days rather than an up-to-date spokesman for black needs? It’s because, despite all his bombastic rhetoric, he is entreating whitey to do more for blacks…hoping to nurse a sense of guilt…which is identical to the “please-massah, help us poor folk who can’t help ourselves” of the plantation era. He may put on a pout, strut and shout at Operation PUSH but essentially, Jackson is a relic. And his Op Ed column in the “Sun-Times” is in the same supplicant-style that has characterized Jackson since I started going to “Operation Breadbasket” forty years ago. I. e. Whitey must do more! Please, whitey, do more! Government must do more! Business must do more! Then the amen corner starts whooping it up. I’ve been there all too many times. The band starts up “Raise Ever’y Voice and Sing!” Not much about what blacks should do for themselves. It’s Jackson’s longstanding stock in trade. His is the hoarse voice demanding more—but it is not a self-assertive voice: it is a voice instead of servility: do-more-for-me-and-us. I have heard that voice with few modulations for forty years. And all whitey can do is never enough.
Last week he wrote a column under the headline the newspaper gave him: Young African-American boys are in crisis—and the nation is silent. What is the trouble now? Young African American men born into poor and working class households are not making it. “…[O]nly 42 percent who enter ninth grade graduate from high school.” Then he gets to the point. “These are children increasingly raised by a single parent.”
His peroration: “This is a national crisis—a tragedy of terrible and costly consequence, in lost hope, lost lives, a lost sense of our own decency.” As per usual Jackson has a political favorite to credit for calling attention—John Edwards…but he ignores the fact that the malady of black single-parent households, the malady of illegitimacy can’t be cured by politics or government programs or subsidies or white politicians but by black determination to help themselves through parenting—as Bill Cosby has outlined.
It has to be directed at home by those who can restore a sense of moral decency. That calls for a preacher’s power to turn attention inward to the people who are siring and carrying illegitimate kids. Not just blacks but whites are falling into the illegitimacy trap. When last I checked Jesse Jackson was counted as a minister of the gospel. Why doesn’t he use his column to preach the moral law rather than purvey politics and extol presidential candidates? “The nation is silent!” That is code for Whitey, do more for us rather than us doing more for ourselves to restore living the moral law. Whitey has enough to do to get his own house in order…but illegitimate births are devastating whitey as well, stemming from the cultural sewer that debases the public taste and the inclination of mainline churches to become more pop- social service dispensers rather than advocates of the gospel. Rather than many showing concern, social liberals tout with exhilaration a pop poll showing that sexual attitudes and mores in Illinois are less strict than they were before. Hey, how `bout that?
Jackson…who laments the nation isn’t concerned about black illegitimacy… has been largely silent for a whole generation on morals, the need for black men to embrace marriage over random sperm donating, legitimacy and moral decency—ever since he abandoned pro-life and hustled to the political hustings to square himself with the liberal trendies. How many times has he used the valuable space in his “Sun-Times” column for anything but the crassest political purveyances? He’s thought of as a political liberal but essentially Jackson is and has always been a beseecher of largesse from whitey. “White America owes us…You owe me…you should do more for me!” Poor me!
How terrible: you haven’t done more for us…poor us!...we’re awash in single-headed households, spawning illegitimate births and you haven’t done anything about it! Poor us! Maybe John Edwards will help us. Yeah, right.
"...stemming from the cultural sewer that debases the public taste and the inclination of mainline churches to become more pop- social service dispensers rather than advocates of the gospel.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great description of our contemporary malaise, Mr. Roeser. Thank you. I hope you will let me adapt it...it's a gem!
Reverend Jackson is branded and iconic for all those baby-boomers who suffered through the 1970's with sex and drugs, militants with AFROS, Rock and Roll ethics (or the lack therefore). He is the Uncle Ben on steroids embraced reluctantly by Ron Burkle and Geo. Soros types who have exposed his brood to financial security. His media investments alone place him in the millionaire category several times over. Any attack against his character or his mission is deemed jealousy or hatred or envy, but never perceived as justified by the facts of the disingenuous "do as I say do" mania he calls leadership.
ReplyDeleteThe reverend has established a dynastic venue on the American left from which the mainstream media launches his epistles of grievance-reparations and socialist MUSH for public consumption by blacks and liberals looking for alternatives to Sharpton and Hilary. He is more interested in rubbing shoulders with captains of industry for the short-term shakedown than creating pools of capital to redevelop the wastelands of the 3rd and 4th Wards for wealth creation for "one party state" blacks in Chicago and around the country. Whites promote him more than blacks because he does a racist disservice: he keeps blacks ever-mired in grievance and self-pity and defiance against uncaring whitey, who unfortunately has joined Oprah and quietly turned the page. Certainly the relevance of his generic preachments is just as minute as his actual plans for black empowerment through self-reliance, capitalism, and global markets in Africa in lieu of idle chatter about reparations. Is this hatred?
Ralph W. Conner