Nurture vs. Nature

We all root for the wrong thing sometimes. It's human nature. That's why we are almost always competitors instead of complimentary thinkers. But (and Chomsky didn't necessarily believe this) language is not an innately generated competition, it's a beautiful agreement between two or more speakers (see Bakhtin). Some people think that that shutting out what is most horrible is a survival mechanism. Some people think that resisting is survival.

Mike Moore made a brilliant move in the middle of editing F 9-11 by the seat of his pants. He realized that he was just making this wack-off thing that no one except stupid white men could follow anyway (how about that almost unintelligible segment about the oil pipeline through afghanistan) and suddenly discovered he could make something that approximated Peter Davis's 1974 Vietnam war classic "Hearts and Minds" (even drops the title in one segment).

The shut-out-the-bad-karma latent buddhists got all antsy, even Richard Gere seemed puzzled, but we can all agree that the one cliché we can't keep hearing enough of is War Is Hell. Like the Weatherpeople said, the worst violence is being silent when violence is being committed wholesale, like a marketing program. That's why Kitty Genovese was such a big story back in el day.

Ozomatli seem to have figured it out. Their blow-away set at the quien sabe mercury lounge on Tuesday should have been seen by a central park, mass-audience crowd.

THE LATEST NEWS FROM COSBY-WORLD

Bill Friggin' Cosby is really pushing the envelope these days. He's loutishly insisting on blaming the victim. Personally I'm waiting for Dead Prez or somebody to drop some science on Dr. Huxtable. A long time ago, someone advised me that the best way to read the mainstream newspapers is in reverse-pyramid fashion. Which means that since the pyramid principle of classic journalism demands that the most important fact is in the lead, the way to get the real truth out of a mainstream newspaper article is to read the last paragraph first. So here's the last graph of the Daily News story:

Cosby also said he didn't care whether racist whites used his words "against our people."

"Let them talk," he said.

I never was a strong believer in Tough Love, much less Scared Straight methodologies. Dr. H should be looking at underlying economics that are more or less conditioned by racial and class discrimination, rather than reducing this all to blaming people for indulging in a nihilist orgy of "hating whitey." The News, fresh from its own orgiastic crucifixion of Joel Steinberg, goes on to say:

Cosby, who made headlines in May when he accused poor blacks of wasting the opportunities that the civil rights struggle gave them, also ripped his African-American critics for trying to hide the community's "dirty laundry."

"Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other n----- as they're walking up and down the street," Cosby said.

"They think they're hip," he said. "They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere."

Now is this because kids and their parents are involved in a nationwide conspiracy to engage in a self-destructive minstrel show, or does it reflect the wholesale de-funding of public education in the years since Mr. B. got his Temple track and field scholarship? And what is the solution, private school vouchers to solidify a talented tenth that will drown out the n------ noise? Let a thousand Oprahs bloom.

Here's what Bill Cosby should do. He should apply for a job backing up Colin Powell doing his Village People drag show.



Actually, how about playing Paul Bremer during his neat, clean, quick exit from Iraq during this week's "transfer of power" to the "new Iraq government"? I think it's a friggin' natural.