This weekend marks two decades since I finally managed to catch up with the times. Musically speaking, that is. After much mulling over, I ordered a new piece of technology, joining the ’90s just as they had begun. That last Saturday in February, I received a UPS shipment of an Aiwa CD/cassette player combination boombox, with AM/FM radio access to boot. It all came at a cost of $198, not including the five dollars for shipping and handling.

It was in the middle of a period of major growth for me as a person and as a college student. I started hanging out more, much more than I had in the past, going to concerts and clubs, going to movies almost every week or weekend, finding time to do more than just work or study. It helped to have a great group of friends who were willing to put up with me, as sober and as goofy as I could be.

But in the midst of all of that, I began the ’90s happy to see the ’80s go when it came to pop music. Heavy metal was at the tail end of an era of dominance, thank God, and serious rap from PE had temporarily taken hold. New voices of real singers had broken through, including Lisa Stansfield, Caron Wheeler (of Soul II Soul), and, by April of that year, Mariah Carey. Old and more recent standbys like Phil Collins and Richard Marx had new albums out, and Quincy Jones’ multi-genre compilation album Back on the Block was all the rage. Even new and less strange New Age music like Enigma had begun to reach beyond the Andy Warhol-weirdness of Philip Glass. Between that and my friends, I had finally recovered enough of myself to no longer feel like the outcast I was made into by my family and by my school during the ’80s.

Of course, it helped to be able to turn over the calendar in another state, a different city, with folks who knew next to nothing about my life before the second half of ’87. Folks who thought that being smart was cool, and being a bit weird wasn’t a turnoff. People who actually listened to more than just Prince, Run DMC, or Ready for the World in the midst of some alcohol or drug-induced haze. My friends by ’90 including serious jazz enthusiasts, fans of everything from The Beatles to PE, Frank Sinatra to Freddie Jackson, and were as eclectic in tastes then as I am now.

Let me not beat up too much on folks from my first hometown — they were in high school at the time, after all. But I must admit, I think that it’s ironic that so many of them ended up doing something related to music. A fair number started rap groups or other music projects. Some broke into the industry as producers of folks like The Tony Rich Project, or got to know up-and-comers like Groove Theory and Amel Larrieux. Some are in the TV and movie business, weaving music in and out of scenes for our emotional benefit over the course of watching movies like The Cell or shows like Medium. Still, most of these folks were without an eclectic musical side, and certainly didn’t tolerate folks like me, who was often a year behind the times when it came to music, and years behind when it came to technology that would’ve helped me be more current.

I guess that by the time anyone would’ve thought about introducing me to anything new, I was already too far gone into strange-land for my fellow classmates. I was behind for sure, though. First AM/FM radio, September ’84. No cable TV until September ’85, so my first MTV video was Heart’s “What About Love,” and my first BET videos were Sade’s “Sweetest Taboo” and Run DMC’s “My Adidas.” My first Walkman knockoff I bought in March ’86, and my first true Sony Walkman followed in June ’87. To this day, I’ve never seen a Soul II Soul, Doug E. Fresh or Grandmaster Flash video. I never got into the dress of the times, mostly because I never had the money to dress that cool back then (unless I borrowed my mother’s somewhat manly clothes).

But one thing I did do once I began to catch up with my musical side again was to join Columbia House in the summer of ’86, as I couldn’t constantly run down to the city every time I wanted a tape. Everything that I had missed between ’81 and ’84 I ordered, and everything that I thought I least needed to listen to, I ordered. That included Glass Tiger, Janet Janet, and Philip Glass, Thompson Twins and Sade. By the time ’88 rolled around, I decided to order these things known as compact discs. I knew a couple of folks at Pitt who owned a CD-based stereo system, so I tried out these discs on their equipment. The sound quality wasn’t as good as vinyl, at least that’s what they kept saying. These shiny discs were much smaller than albums, though, and had much better sound than even the chromium-coated cassettes that I had in my collection.

The bias in CD production toward classical music was obvious, but I knew that folks would have to adapt eventually and that the technology would get better. So I bought about a dozen or so CDs in all between ’88 and the beginning of ’90, just so I’d be ready when I finally got around to buying a CD system to play it on. The funny about all this was that I did this on my own, without any advice, and only because I wanted to take the time out to work this aspect of me. I had no idea that my all-over-the-place music tastes could also be a conversation starter, or that buying CDs a year before buying a CD player would lead to friendship. Moving forward in my own interests in music and music technology helped me find myself, and in the process, meet people more like myself.

My two favorite scenes from the instant movie classic There Will Be Blood are probably favorites for many moviegoers. Both scenes involve the two main characters: a drunk and an oil magnate (whose mannerisms reminded me of my father when I was growing up), aptly played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and a charlatan preacher played expertly by Paul Dano.

Scene one was the moment that Daniel Day-Lewis’ character forced himself to grovel for the last land tract in a small town in central California as part of an embarrassing baptismal display. In wanting to build a pipeline independent of Standard Oil that linked his oil wells to the Pacific for shipping elsewhere, the character needed the Bandy tract in order to ensure that the pipeline would remain below ground. In the process of begging-as-baptism, Paul Dano’s preacher character practically drowns Day-Lewis in water, slapping him over and over again as hard as he could, no doubt because of an earlier scene, in which the oil magnate beats Dano’s character to a pulp.

Scene two was set some fifteen years later, as the character Daniel played by Day-Lewis exacted his revenge. The now floundering and impoverished Paul brought his preaching ways to the now wallowing millionaire drunkard in hopes that he would throw him a few thousand dollars. Instead, Daniel forces Paul to denounce God, only to then tell him that all the oil that was in Paul’s town — including the oil under the Bandy tract — was gone. “Drainage!” became Day-Lewis vengeful refrain before he clubbed the idiot fraud Paul to death with a bowling pin.

Although there isn’t yet a scene two, millions of us had no choice but to witness scene one of Tiger Woods’ version of There Will Be Blood at his public soul-bearing session. I was stuck at my orthopedist’s office following-up on my high ankle sprain and healing hairline fracture in my fib-tib. I’m a medical miracle, according to my doctor, because I never needed a cast or extensive rehab. Moving on. Sitting in the waiting room with the TV set to CNN’s Headline News as the media frenzy unfolded, I had no choice but to listen to the nutjobs as they spewed their verbal vomit all over my eardrums. Talking about how the public must judge Woods’ speech and behaviors on stage. How the public has been in shock and disappointed over Woods for nearly three months. About how they scooped the fact that the press conference would begin at 11:01:30, and not at 11 am! It was ridiculous, and should give The Daily Show and The Colbert Report much fodder next week.

The public statement itself was as excruciating as inflamed hemorrhoids left too long without treatment. I watched my fellow patients become moved by Woods’ speech, which I found quite fascinating. I listened to the tortured nature of Woods’ voice (I sat in a seat away from the screen, but not the sound, of the TV) as he confessed to things in public that most of us don’t admit to ourselves in private. All I really wanted to know was when Woods planned to return to playing golf. That, in the end, was all the media and public was entitled to know.

As I watched, I couldn’t help but think of that baptismal scene from There Will Be Blood and the sense of utter rage — Eightfold Path believer or not — that Woods likely had to tame in order to give his statement. For nearly three months, his sponsors, media talking heads and fellow golfers have played the roles of shocked public, disappointed fans, disgusted judges and Freudian pop-psychologists in attempting to explain his philandering ways. Twelve weeks of this would make Paul Dano’s character’s slapping around of Daniel Day-Lewis look like me getting into a fist fight with a six-year-old by comparison.

I understand that for his foundation, sponsors and maybe even for his wife, Woods needed to give this speech, to show and speak of his contrition. I still don’t think that it’s anyone’s business, and Woods certainly doesn’t need our forgiveness — we didn’t exchange wedding vows with him, after all. I doubt that a single person bought a Nike golf club or Buick vehicle or enrolled their kid in a Tiger Woods Foundation program thinking, “Gee, that Woods is such a swell guy, he doesn’t cheat on his wife or have any marital or personal problems. That’s why I’m buying his products. That’s why I want my kid to excel academically through his foundation.” I still think that he doesn’t owe the public a darn thing.

Still, after I got into my car and turned on my iPod, I couldn’t help but think how silly I am. Coldplay’s Vida la Vida came on, with the words “I used to rule the world, seas would rise when I gave the word,” almost as if they had written the song about Tiger’s rise and “fall from grace.” From the media’s perspective, I’m sure their favorite refrain would be, “there was never an honest word, but that was when I ruled the world.” That then made me think of Cleveland Cavs guard Delonte West’s troubles with guns and guitar cases and Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive,” where they sing, “I walk these streets, a loaded six-string on my back” while riding on a “steel horse.” Or, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” which I’ve turned into “Tainted War” three times in the past thirty years (in ’82, ’91 and ’03), especially with the line, “once Iran to you, now Iraq from you.” You could say I’m a lovable yet lame-ass goofball who has a morbid habit of taking current events and turning them into song.

But rest assured, there will be blood, although not in a literal sense. Woods’ nemesis golfers, his media detractors will all have to eat their words. Sponsors will continue to line up with Woods so that he can hawk their wares. Even TMZ will eventually come groveling, looking for a little financial love, only for Woods to metaphorically yell, “Drainage!” multiple times. It will be glorious!

I have a bit of a beef with folks who think about higher education in only the most practical of terms. A few months ago, I attended an Al Jazeera taping at the Newseum in DC about the level of blame the Obama Administration should take regarding the economic plight of Americans of color since the Great Recession began at the end of ’07. Besides the ridiculousness of the questions and comments from the panel — not to mention the relative irrelevance of the topic — a middle-aged Black male stood up to make a comment. He argued that the reason why so many highly educated African Americans and Latinos were out of work was because they only had degrees in African American Studies or History or English.

This esteemed member of the audience believed that only more practical degrees, like ones in business management, business administration, and information systems and technology would be the only ways for folks of color to get good-paying jobs and make their way economically in the twenty-first century world. But he wasn’t alone. In the two years that I have been teaching at my most recent post, about seventy percent of the students I’ve taught fall into four majors. Business management, IT, accounting and human resources management seem to be the most popular majors in my neck of the woods, and the majority of students with these majors are of color. A smattering of students major in criminal justice, and then a select few in the humanities and social sciences.

There’s nothing wrong with this on the surface. Students — especially adult learners — should have the ability to choose their majors early on. Universities like mine can and should concentrate resources toward majors that students want to pursue. The problem I have — especially when one brings in the current funding emphasis on STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) — is that it suggests the humanities and social science fields, the arts and literature, aren’t serious or practical pursuits.

For the average student, the best majors can only be the ones where there is a one-to-one correspondence between the course of study and the job that could be waiting for them in the real world. If you major in business or HR management or accounting, you can — you guessed right — get a job as a business manager, HR manager or accountant. If you declare a major in civil engineering, you’re first job should be as a civil engineer.

If you major in history, what the heck do you do for a living? Starve to death? Get a job as a barista at Starbucks? Stay in school an extra semester to earn certification teaching high school social studies? Spend an extra two years working on a masters degree in history to get a better-paying job as a high school social studies teacher? Spend years earning a doctorate — like yours truly — so that you can starve to death, hope for a full-time tenure-track or tenured position at a university, or get certified as a high school social studies teacher?

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it’s unnecessarily short-sighted. There isn’t such a thing as a one-to-one correlation between degree, major and future jobs and careers. At least when it comes to most undergraduate degrees. Most successful CEOs and business managers have bachelor degrees in — you guessed right — English, history, and political science. Most future law students and lawyers majored in humanities and social science fields, not in criminal justice or law enforcement. Many a mathematics major has ended up in the education and medical fields. And there are plenty of sectors in our economy — the public sector, the philanthropic sector, the nonprofit sector — that hire over-educated Negroes like myself. Not to mention with jobs that pay well.

What you want in an education is flexibility more than anything else. The more flexibility you build into your undergraduate education early on, the more options for employment and advanced education you have as you grow older. Humanities and social science fields, because they aren’t directed at a specific job for the month after marching down the aisle for a piece of parchment, provide flexibility. Even if your first job is as an over-educated administrative assistant at some small organization on the brink of going out of business. Majors as specific as business management, IT and accounting don’t offer the same flexibility. This all matters, especially if you reach your thirties and forties ready to move into, say, a writing or other soft career.

The reality is, no matter what one majors in, given the volatile economic times, we can all expect to change our careers a number of times over the course of forty or fifty years. To act as if practical majors are a magic bullet for economic success and are recession-proof is simply foolish. Just look at how many real estate agents, investment bankers, accountants, business managers and human resources managers are in line looking for work these days. What really is necessary is for all students to choose majors that they can get the most out of in terms of higher learning. Then fight as hard as they can for the kind of work they want after graduation, and if necessary, to go back to school for an advanced degree that further ensures employment in a field of interest and passion. All practical matters aside, this is the most practical way to guarantee a productive and prosperous life and career.

Twenty-eight years ago this week was the fight that kept me in the gifted track known as Humanities. To think that, with the possibility good grades, forming friendships, crushes, teachers, the needs to be around peers of a similar ilk all before me, and it took a fight for me to finally begin to feel that the move to this strange magnet program might still be good for me? This story is about a fight, but it’s also about being a tweener boy who’s trying to find a way to cope in two impossible worlds, between a deteriorating family life at home and semi-academic and social ostracism at school.

But it’s not like I wasn’t without fault. I spent my first five month in Humanities intimidated by the group of super-smart and affluent White students who had been in the elementary school version of the program since as early as second grade. Or with White students who lucked out when the elementary program moved to their school a year and a half before the first day of seventh grade in September ’81. No, I spent a considerable amount of my verbal resources attempting to convince everyone around me how smart I was. After the way things went in sixth grade, I firmly believed that no one in the world was smarter than me. It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I were on SNL as Ana Gasteyer’s “Celine Dion” yelling that “I’m the greatest singer in the whole world!”

And I tried to let as many people know how smart I was at every opportunity. My arrogant assumption — based completely on my insecurities — was the reason that I was initially overwhelmed by the Humanities Program. Many of the seventh-grade members of Humanities had taken classes together since the second, fourth and fifth grades at the Grimes Center for Creative Education. Teacher after teacher had told them about their genius and potential for the previous six years. Admittedly, I was unprepared for this reality of privilege and entitlement, much less the kinds of diversity that it brought. My Polyanna-ish attitudes about myself and the rest of my peers were difficult for even the most arrogant and affluent overachievers among us to put up with for long. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut in those first days of intimidation and the flaunting of upper middle class experiences by others in our classroom.

My first sign of real trouble came at the end of October. I was not only about to earn my first C+ in math since third grade. I was sub-par in all of my other subjects. It wasn’t so much that the material was any more difficult than it’d been the year before. I didn’t exactly feel at home in 7S. My classmates called me “stupid” and “idiot” so many times that ever so often I honestly thought I was dumb at certain choice moments. I was already all by myself in a class of thirty students. I had no friends, and that really did make me feel stupid.

Now, I also knew that the main barrier between me and most of my classmates was the kufi, the fact that I was part of the bizarre Hebrew-Israelite cult, as they probably attributed most of my weird behavior to it. But the combination of my mouth and my multi-holed woven white cap attracted the attention of a group of who I came to call Italian Club boys, led by a Fonzi-type Italian tweener. They made fun of everything I did. Or, to put it in the language of today’s it-generation, they clowned on me as if I were a cartoon character in South Park! The way I walked, talked, smiled (which was rare), laughed, chewed my food, answered questions. If they could’ve, I’m sure they would’ve beat up on me about my bathroom routine. Instead, two of the Italian Club boys instigated the beat-down I received in November ’81, the one where about half of 7S watched or participated. They jumped me on my way out the door after school. They grabbed, punched, and kicked me, and called me everything but a child of God for about five minutes.

So I should’ve have felt like I was part of the in-crowd after all of that, right? I seriously thought about quitting the Humanities Program by early February ’82. My grades were unimpressive. I struggled in every subject except in dumb Paul Court’s social studies class, where three years of reading World Book Encyclopedia and forty books of all kinds on World War II made me a nerdy standout. I barely averaged a C+ in math, my Italian teacher Ms. Fleming told me that my “Italian sounded British” when I attempted to speak it, and I was averaging a C+ in art. In Art! All because Doris Mann, who was about as effective a teacher as the late Michael Jackson was at being normal, explained that she didn’t “give A’s for effort. I give out grades based on your ability to create good art.”

It had gotten so bad that folks who wouldn’t have dared to mess with me at the beginning of the year — guys significantly shorter than me and guys who were so superior to me that they didn’t even notice me — started messing with and threatening me. Mr. OshKosh was one of those classmates. The week before the mid-February winter break, our homeroom/English teacher Mrs. Sesay was home with the flu. Our substitute’s idea of managing a classroom was reading a newspaper while the class engaged in verbal and physical combat. It seemed that no one was safe from strife that week, including me. Mr. OshKosh decided that it was his turn to give me a hard time. A ten-second scuffle took place on Tuesday over the usual tweener issues of communism versus capitalism, or to use more sophisticated language, neo-Marxism versus Keynesian economics. He also didn’t like that I had corrected him the month before about Australia’s official language, which he said was “Australian.” I learned that day that you should never correct a tweener contrarian when they think that they’re right.

When I walked into the boys’ locker room for gym class that Thursday afternoon, I was greeted with two punches to my chin and face. He walked away and went through the green double doors to his locker, arrogant enough to think I wouldn’t respond. He muttered “stupid” as he walked away. I think it was the combination of being caught by surprise and being called “stupid” by Mr. OshKosh that got the better of me. Or maybe it was five months of enduring public humiliation combined with the sense that things at 616 were spinning out of control. Whatever it was, I finally snapped. I stared blankly at the red lockers, green doors, and depleted beige-colored walls for a couple of seconds, and then my mind exploded in violent colors. I threw my entire being into Mr. OshKosh as he had started to undress at his locker, knocking him to the floor.

I choked and punched him until I had bloodied his mouth and made his nose turn red. Mr. OshKosh attempted to fight back to no avail, as I kept my weight on his legs while I head-locked him with my left arm and wailed away with my right hand. Just as I began to run out of energy, the gym teacher came in to break us up. He yelled at us and asked “Do you want to be suspended?” When I got off the floor to go my locker, I almost couldn’t believe that I had won that fight. I went into the break with an emotional boost, one that I hoped would lead to better things for me at school.

You could say that only a nerdy tweener boy like myself would find academic motivation in a fight. That’s definitely true. But, where else would I have found it in February ’82? It would be another three weeks before my love of Crush #1 would begin to take shape. And I didn’t have any emotional support from home, much less the spiritual or psychological grounding to persevere. No, boys especially often need to find a spine, to fight their way out of a slump, sometimes literally, to get where they want to go.

Sunday, January 31, 1988. Super Bowl XXII. Doug Williams, Gary Clary, Timmy Smith, Art Monk and the Redskins beat down the Denver Broncos that glorious evening, 42-10. I remember it pretty well. Although I’ve never been a Redskins fan, I was a Doug Williams fan, and more importantly, a fan of underdogs. Williams was the ultimate underdog for this game, because of his career and race, and because John Elway, was, as then NBC announcer Dick Enberg put it, “the man with a golden arm.” Just as important was the fact that I was living down my underdogness vicariously through Williams’ play in this game of games. His performance was part of a series of events that set the tone for my second semester at Pitt, and led to me finally beginning to find myself twenty-two years ago.

That Super Bowl was the same month as the start of semester #2 in po-dunk Pittsburgh. I came back angry but with a sense of sober clarity, like I had been on a drinking binge for the previous six or seven months. The day I had left Mount Vernon to get back to Pitt, my first semester grades had come in. I had earned an easy A in Astronomy, a B- in Pascal, and a C in Honors Calc. All three of those grade I expected. The C in East Asian History was completely unexpected. My grade point average for the semester gave me a 2.63 to start my postsecondary career. That might’ve been good enough for most folks. But of course not for me. My Challenge Scholarship absolutely depended on me maintaining a minimum 3.0 average at the end of every school year in order for me to stay eligible.

That was my wake up call to what I’d allowed Crush #2, and my thoughts of her and me — and of her with me — to do to me. I didn’t even give my mother the chance to see my grades. I said my good-byes, which was easier to do the third time around, took the cab to 241st, the Subway to midtown, and the Carey Bus to Newark.

Once I registered for classes and dumped my first-semester drinking buddies (see blog post “Resolve” from January 2008 on that), I channeled my anger by putting everyone in my life in two categories. All guys were “assholes” and all women were “bitches” until they proved otherwise. I didn’t call anyone that, anyone except for Crush #2, of course. It was my way to begin channeling my anger in a way that I could laugh at myself and concentrate on the task at hand. I needed to laugh, because there wasn’t much funny to me about my life in early ’88.

What carried me through that first month — besides a reservoir of anger about the size of all five Great Lakes combined — was a battery of new music that helped focus my anger and reinvigorate my imagination. Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better” and Paul Carrack’s “Don’t Shed a Tear” were two songs that were close enough in lyrics, meaning and emotion to my situation with Phyllis that I smiled a silly smile every time I heard or played them both. Silly, even not quite applicable, I realized even at the time. But they fit my mood just fine. I “should’ve known better than to fall in love with” Crush #2. Yet, as the refrain from Carrack “Don’t Shed A Tear” goes, “all that I saw in you, now I see through.” If there had been an actual relationship with my second crush, I probably would’ve played Alexander O’Neal’s “Fake” that month instead.

That semester, I eventually added Michael Bolton, Brenda Russell, Sting’s latest album Nothing Like The Sun, and Michael Jackson’s Bad to my collection. But for the first time in two years, I started paying attention to rap again. Rob Base, Salt ’n Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, and Public Enemy all began to seep into my consciousness that winter and spring. Geto Boys’ “Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me” would’ve been nice to hear six or eight months before when I was waist-deep in obsession over Ms. Triflin’ Ass.

One other thing I decided to do that semester was to be as much of myself as I felt comfortable being, which was a step up from hiding myself altogether. So, for the first time since I had left for Pittsburgh back in August ’87, I decided to cook dinner as part of my Super Bowl Sunday. I spent the day looking for quality spaghetti (you couldn’t find Ronzoni in the ‘Burgh back then) and Ragu, as well as cheap pots and skillets for the meat sauce and broccoli.

By the time I reached the tenth-floor lounge of Lothrop Hall, there were four guys in there watching the last minutes of the pregame. The adjacent kitchen didn’t provide a good look for the game, but I heard the boos of my fellow dormmates during the first quarter, as the Broncos jumped out to a 10-0 lead. A couple of them even wanted Joe Gibbs to pull Williams from the game. I rushed through the cooking routine so that I could watch by the end of the first quarter.

Once I sat down, Williams, Clark, Smith and the Redskins offensive line completely lit up the Broncos from that point on. Williams tossed four touchdown passes as if he were Dan Marino and Joe Montana combined. Smith might as well have been Marcus Allen, and Denver looked like the team that was too old.

Besides having Carrack’s “Don’t Shed A Tear” in my head throughout the evening — not to mention second and third helpings of my cooking — I thought about how much Williams must’ve had to overcome to get on the field to play in the Super Bowl, much less win the game. I thought about all of the media hype and hyperbole in the weeks leading up to Super Bowl, and how little Williams and the Redskins were part of that wave.

Williams’ performance confirmed for me that what others deem impossible isn’t not only possible. It also showed how small-minded naysayers can be whenever they believe that your reach exceeds your grasp. Like me, not a whole lot of folks gave Williams — an allegedly washed-up quarterback whose best days had already passed — a shot at performing like a Super Bowl MVP. I knew then and I know now that it doesn’t really matter much what other people think. It only matters what I imagine, as well as what I do to make the imagined real in my life.

What do Bert and Ernie, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon have in common? They all remind us of our youthful sides, of how opposites can banter on and on, of what two friends passionate about working together can accomplish. That, and the reminder that a skinny and a round Muppet have helped define our ideas about unique friendships for more that forty years.

About a dozen or more years ago, someone finally did an article that drew interesting parallels between Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street and the late Siskel and Ebert of Siskel & Ebert and The Movies/At The Movies. It helped that Bert and Siskel were skinny, Ernie round, and Ebert rounder. Although Bert was a skinny banana with slightly more hair on his head than Siskel, and Ernie’s body type was built on a really round orange, there were a number of similarities. Bert was the more intellectual one, Ernie the more laid back and fun-loving. Ernie would come up with insane ideas that Bert would shoot down. And then, of course, Ernie would get distracted by his rubber ducky. Siskel, with his generally more critical and conservative takes on films, would balance the slightly overreaching Ebert, who occasionally exhibited the same appreciation for comedies and other zany films as he did for epic dramas of cinematic significance. It was a great combination, cut all too short with Siskel’s death in ’99.

About the only thing on TV that’s replaced the Bert and Ernie parallel in the past half decade or so has been ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption. I had already known about Wilbon, as I’d been reading his reports and columns since the early ’90s. Kornheiser’s stuff, not so much, although I remembered liking his Washington Post columns in the Style section. But PTI wasn’t the first time I’d seen them work together. It was on another ESPN show, The Sports Reporters, where I watched the two of them duke it out with Pope Lupica on a number of occasions. Anyone willing to stand toe-to-toe with that piece of work is pretty good in my book. Remembering all of this was how I came to watch PTI in the second half of the ’00.

As I watched, I recognized how much Wilbon and Kornheiser reminded me of Siskel and Ebert — and by extension, Ernie and Bert. Wilbon brought a sense of the laid back, of charisma and hipness to the table. But unlike Ernie and Ebert, no rubber duckies or falling in love with movies that are so bad that they’re good to watch. Just good critiques, something through the lens of race and class, of sports and related issues in society, although too many comments on the supposed beauty of flat-butt blonds to my taste.

Interestingly, Kornheiser is the more unhinged between the two of the them. Although the slightly more thoughtful of the two — which, by the way, provides the appearance of being more intellectual — in many of his comments about the sporting world, Kornheiser often has to be talked down from his emotional high chair by Wilbon. Maybe that’s a sign of a New York or Long Island upbringing, maybe not. Still, the two of them provide an entertainment that’s rare on TV and even rarer for sports.

Why rare? Because it isn’t fake or planned. It’s spontaneous, it’s completely caught up in the moment, like kids opening up Christmas presents, like, of course, Bert and Ernie, Ernie and Bert. We need more Wilbons and Kornheisers in the media world, not set up to disagree, to juxtapose, to manipulate the biases and passions of the simple-minded folk of our world. No, Wilbon and Kornheiser, Kornheiser and Wilbon provide an education in the art of entertainment as two friends attempting to help us understand a world that many of us can only glimpse. Like Bert and Ernie, they provide the sharp-tongue wit of adults with child-like enthusiasm, tantrums included. For someone who occasionally needs the dessert that entertainment and sports can provide, Wilbon and Kornheiser — my current Ernie and Bert — are my creme brulee many a day.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote “On Being An Ignorant American,” mostly about folks in power, privileged, entitled folks, who display their arrogance and ignorance to the world every day. As a matter of fact, I made the argument that it was our hubris as American that has made us ignorant and defined our ignorance. In honor of Black History Month, I’m putting a spotlight on “Ignit” Americans. For those who don’t know, it’s a colloquial Black term that refers to folks who wallow in their ignorance like pigs who, in searching for water to cool off, choose mud instead.

Although I’ll mostly discuss Black “ign-ence” here, you don’t have to be African American to be ignit. You just have to be the type of person who loves to not know anything, to not care about not knowing. You have to be the type of person that feels entitled to being as close-minded as a stereotypical eighty-year-old who believes that they’ve learned everything there is to know about living, even though life has been passing them by since the end of high school for them six decades earlier.

Ultimately, being Black and ignit comes down to isolation and bigotry. Not the kind of bigotry that is equivalent to institutional racism, for the most part, but needless and hurtful bigotry nevertheless. African Americans are nearly a half-century removed from the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet we still have skin color issues — redbone, high yella, cafe au lait, light-skinned, dark-skinned — that remain a holdover from the Jim Crow era (not to mention American slavery itself). All manifested in our relationships and friendships, in bleaching products, colored contacts and other beauty products. In the past year, we witnessed the death of Michael Jackson, who himself struggled with this very issue, all references to a skin disorder aside. Although I’m sure most of us aren’t trying to be White — whatever that means anyway — but I do think that African America still tends to validate the lighter folks in our group.

If only being an ignit American was only melanin deep. We have prejudices toward so-called others, a heightened sense of bigotry when it comes to Afro-Caribbeans, Africans and Latinos. Of course, the same can be said for many first, second and third-generation immigrants from all three groups, as I have experienced firsthand. And even though this kind of other-persons-of-color bigotry has declined in the past two decades, it’s hardly gone. For so many of us, a different accent, a different look, a different way of seeing the world seems about as non-threatening as the fear of losing a good job. This is a reality for so many of us, despite intermarriage between these groups, not to mention the shared experience of racism and living in the same communities. This kind of ign-ence, unfortunately, includes my mother, who blames “West Indians,” “Spanish people” and “Orientals” for the loss of jobs in my first hometown and in New York City as well.

The big one in terms of ignit Americans revolves around homophobic and heterosexism. Blacks are hardly alone in treating the subject as if it were radioactive waste without the proper lead lid and lining around it. But we are notoriously silent on the issue, as if there are few Black gay and lesbian folk around us. Except at many of the megachurches. There, our pastors and other spiritual leaders can blame the Black LGBT community for the spread of HIV/AIDS among heterosexual Blacks — not to mention other diseases — as well as high rates of crime and poverty in our poorest neighborhoods.

We still use the limp arm and hand motion to call something someone did or said as “gay,” use idiotic terms like “no homo,” and make a point of being overtly masculine or feminine in public and private to prove that we’re as heterosexual as the biblical Adam and Eve. It’s disgusting and disappointing. Despite all evidence, science and friends and family to the contrary, we still engage in the mythology that anyone gay or lesbian, anyone overtly different from the hyper-heterosexual model is a social pariah and should and will go to hell.

All this is a function of the less obvious but ultimately the root cause that leads to Americans becoming ignit — the shunning of intelligent Americans. This is one that even the most enlightened of African Americans participates in every day. Although most of us believe education is important, the idea of being academically successful scares both many parents of academically gifted kids and those kids blessed with academic awareness. And for Black males, academic success at an early age can lead to social and soul destruction. Boys and young men especially aren’t supposed to display in any way their academic talents, their analytical abilities, or their keen insight into the world around them. Those of us who do are automatically weird, nerds, even seen as “gay” — as discussed in the previous paragraph — because we don’t fit in with the other guys who learned at an early age to embrace ign-ence.

Speaking in standard American English without learning how to code switch, having dreams that you may make it to the age of thirty with a college degree, wanting to experience the world beyond your neighborhood, city or country isn’t allowed in the world of ignit Americans. It’s better to learn a jump shot, work on running fast, or figure out how to rap or sing with rhythm and harmony, so as to cover up your constant striving to learn. There’s little tolerance for Black kids who aren’t cool, especially when they’re smart. No wonder even many of the smarter ones act as if they are as dumb as a door post. No wonder many of our dreams remain unfulfilled.

No one wants to feel isolated, to be alone, to be ostracized. It takes truly unique individuals to break through the traps set by those ignit Americans who may determine cool, but can in no way determine success. Otherwise, so many Americans, Black and otherwise, will succumb to the not-so-blissful ign-ence of our peers, to their cool and unimaginative ways of thinking about and going about living in this world. This is the thing that Black History Month must yet take on and continue to strive against. History and education is the work that our society must continue to emphasize, even as we strive in ignorance to make nine-month-olds read and sixteen-year-olds ready for Harvard.