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Tag Archives: Bill Maher

Whiteness, Where “That’s So Raven” Meets “Real Time”

11 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Tags

"New Black", African-American, American Narcissism, Atheism, Ben Affleck, Bill Maher, Black, Blackness, Claude Steele, Culture of Poverty, Culture of Violence, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Disidentification Hypothesis, Islamophobia, Labels, Narcissism, Pharrell Williams, Racism, Raven-Symoné, Real Time with Bill Maher, Reza Aslan, Stereotype Threat, unspecial American, Whiteness, Xenophobia


Black square, or Black is the new Black, June 2014. (http://kennyali.com/).

Black square, or Black is the new Black, June 2014. (http://kennyali.com/).

Why we ever give voice to the vapid and vain I still don’t fully understand. In the past week, we’ve allowed Raven-Symoné (of The Cosby Show and That’s So Raven fame) and Bill Maher (host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and a mediocre stand-up political comedian) to determine our discourse on race, racism, Islam, atheism and terrorism. Proving once again the power of Whiteness in our racially narcissistic nation.

Raven-Symoné certainly isn’t the first Black celebrity or entertainer to declare herself “not African-American” or Black, to Oprah or to the rest of the world. Morgan Freeman’s been making statements rejecting labels like “Black actor,” the term “African American,” and even Black History Month, going as far back as interviews in support of Glory (1989) and Shawshank Redemption (1994) (of course, he also was making the point that he’s an American first). Raven-Symoné isn’t even the first Black entertainer to say they’re “not Black” or “not African American” in 2014. Pharrell Williams holds this distinction, as he allegedly represents the “New Black,” whatever colorblind racist nonsense this is.

Raven-Symoné on Oprah's Where Are They Now, October 5, 2014. (http://www.billboard.com). Qualifies as fair use - picture directly related to subject matter, and of low resolution.

Raven-Symoné on Oprah’s Where Are They Now, October 5, 2014. (http://www.billboard.com). Qualifies as fair use – picture directly related to subject matter, and of low resolution.

It all points to a phenomenon I’ve been calling the “unspecial American” over the past twelve years. The idea that we can discard labels, histories and cultures in an effort to make ourselves unique or special individuals. All of this is born out of a racial narcissism, one which afflicts the most vulnerable to this psychosis — the famous and the wannabe famous. Maybe there’s a bit of internalized racism to this, too — that’s clearly speculation to be sure. But that obsession to be unique, to declare oneself above constructs and labels, but then to latch on to the term “American” as if the world might forget? It reflects on some level stereotype threat, not to mention the defensive posture of someone like Raven-Symoné attempting to preserve their income and elite social status.

Maher’s take on religion, especially Islam, isn’t unique. The idea that he can claim this his Islamophobia has nothing to do with race — his own Whiteness/Jewishness or that of his brown-skinned Semitic cousins — is what makes Maher’s xenophobic argument a specious one. Maher’s is a culture of violence argument, one that attempts to combine the foundational tenets of Islam with the actions of terroristic jihadists in a sweeping indictment of at least half a billion people. HBO and Maher’s friends and fans have let him get away with this ridiculous line of thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia for years. Yet if Maher made the same kind of argument about Blacks, poverty and crime — the culture of poverty hypothesis proposed by the likes of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1960s — he’d probably lose his show.

"Violence is not our culture," 2011. (Wendy Harcourt via http://http://www.ips.org/).

“Violence is not our culture,” 2011. (Wendy Harcourt via http://http://www.ips.org/).

That Maher has no sense of history or understanding of human nature isn’t surprising. He’s a stinking comedian, not a historian, political scientist, religious studies professor or philosopher. At this stage of his career, I’d make a better stand-up comic than Maher would a critic of any culture or religion. That Maher has found himself in arguments with Ben Affleck and Reza Aslan is telling. Maher in his late-fifties has become Ronald Reagan — an arrogant White male who firmly believes in the primacy of his brand of White culture above all others.

Both Maher and Raven-Symoné should take a long look at history and learn from it. Raven-Symoné should learn that Black celebrities who deny the existence of racial constructs tend to crash into a few barriers during their lifelong journeys. Maher should look at violent examples of atheism — the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Stalinism, among others — and ask if these were the product of narcissism and violent repression or the product of a culture of violence based too heavily on the reliance on the scientific method for ultimate truths. And we should continue to ask ourselves why we ever take people like Raven-Symoné and Maher seriously at all.

American Denial & Fear, Courtesy of Family Feud

10 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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9/11, Anti-Arab, Anti-Muslim, Bill Maher, Civil Liberties, commermoration, Culture of Fear, Culture of Imperialism, Denial, Family Feud, Great Recession, Media Coverage, New York City, Racism, Richard Dawson, Rush Limbaugh, September 11, Twin Towers, War on Terror, Xenophobia


The Culture of Fear cover (audio edition), September 10, 2011. (Source/http://betterworldbooks.com).

It’s been a decade since the largest American tragedy since World War II in 9/11 in New York, Washington, DC and central Pennsylvania. And we’ve spent much of the past week in remembrance of this event, what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost as a society since that tragic Tuesday. Cutting through all of the chatter and bullcrap in the run-up to 9/11 the last few weeks has been a part-time job, especially since most of it is wrapped in one of our nation’s best-selling products — fear.

Second plane, Twin Towers, 9/11, 9:03 am, courtesy of Today Show. (Source/http://en.wikipedia.org).

But a few things are clear. One is that we as a nation have spent the past ten years in constant fear, as if the Cold War wasn’t enough for anyone born before ’74. We wasted trillions of dollars on wars that have done more harm than good for us at home and abroad, ruining the economy, shredding the social welfare state and leaving us with curtailed civil liberties. Most of all, we’ve left ourselves in constant denial of our own fear, xenophobia, racism and religious intolerance, making America look even more imperialistic — if that seemed at all possible in ’01 — then we did a decade ago.

Of all the half-truths and total lies we’ve been told — and told ourselves — over the past ten years is how “the nation came together” in the first few months after the attacks. Really? In a parallel universe, maybe. I had the unfortunate experience of riding a Greyhound bus from Atlanta to Washington, DC two days after the attacks. My one-day business trip became three days, with flights suspended, rental cars gone and trains booked ten days out. Two guys, one White, one Black, “came together” on the back of the bus to insult and threaten a Sikh, all because he had the nerve to wear a turban. I had to get between the two dumb asses and the poor Sikh man to tell them that he wasn’t Arab or Muslim. “What difference does it make,” one of the dumb asses said, implying that I didn’t love America because I wasn’t ready to kill the “m-fs,” as he put it.

We came together, alright. To persecute Arab Americans, Muslims, Sikhs and South Asians and anyone else

They Hate Us For Our Freedom (2008), Claire Fontaine, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, December 11, 2008. (Source/http://language.cont3xt.net).

who looked like a potential terrorist. Even now, people like Bill Maher and Rush Limbaugh can agree that because some Arab Muslims are terrorists, that we should suspect the millions here in the US and the half a billion in the Middle East. This makes the Red Scare look like a high school lunchroom fight by comparison.

This is why the reference to Family Feud reference is so appropriate, especially with good-old Brit Richard “Dickie” Dawson as the host from ’76 to ’85. It was a show full of not-so-learned people giving rather folksy answers to questions big and small. I loved the part where one family would get together after a first or second strike, and someone would come up with an answer everyone in the group sounded like it was correct. Then they’d start clapping and yelling, “Good answer! Good answer!” before the buzzer would sound and the audience would say, “Uhhhhhhhh!”

That, and the hillbilly theme music for the show, and Dawson prancing around the set while kissing all of the female contestants, allegedly to wish them luck, were all things I enjoyed about Family Feud. The ’70s were so grand!

So in the spirit of Family Feud, I’ve spliced myself as various characters into an episode from ’81. The topic is about naming the people to blame for our current American mess, at home and abroad. I hope that it’s funny and goofy.

But I also hope that it’s food for thought. For in the end, we are all to blame. For being so entitled and privileged, for worshiping the US dollar and the people who have billions of them. For refusing to believe that America, as great a country as it is, screws up on the international stage, that our politicians have put our nation in a precarious position militarily and economically. For being so willing to buy the idea that the Rapture is upon us, but not the idea that climate change is real and that we can do something about it. For acting as if ours is a Christian nation, despite the fact that Christians, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and yes, Muslims were all part of America’s founding.

I hope that we can somehow find a way to outgrow our petty, stupid, idiotic differences around race, religion and politics and put down the class and corporate warfare against the average person. But our lust for wealth and constant feuding may be too much to overcome. Did those twenty Saudi terrorists win after all? Only if we let denial and fear — and those in power who rely on us voting out of both — lead us over a cliff.

Dumb, Discussion

31 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Movies, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports

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"Evil Empire", "White Discussion", Barack Obama, Bill Maher, Bill O"Reilly, Derrick Rose, Derrick Rose Dunk, Discourse, Discussion, Egypt, FOX News, Glenn Beck, Japan, Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, Libya, Live, Military Intervention, Modern Journalism, Montage, MSNBC, Obfuscation, Political Correctness, Political Corruption, President Obama, President Reagan, Protests, Public Discourse, Real Time with Bill Maher, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Speeches, Talk Shows, Talking Heads, The O'Reilly Factor, Tsunami, Wisconsin


Inspired by my friends Catherine Lugg (see her recent comments about the Obama Administration and their ignoring of the unemployed) and James Lee via Facebook (running a one-man crusade on our government’s daily hypocrisy), and my Twitter folk, the video above is for all of you. It is my montage to the past thirty years of obfuscation, dissembling, exaggeration, plausible deniability, and spittle-laden spin that is our everyday news and politics. Or, as the post-grunge band Live would say in their “White, Discussion,” (1994) the “decibels of this disenchanting discourse continue to dampen the day/the coin flips again and again and again and again, as our sanity walks away.”

So I put six minutes of video together from President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech (1983), a YouTube video “A Tour of Detroit’s Ghetto” from camosilver, and a couple of pictures I took from the Rally to Restore Sanity here in DC back in October. Along with clips from:

  • The Daily Show (with Jon Stewart eviscerating Bernie Goldberg and FOX News via “gospel,” April 20, ’10)
  • Real Time with Bill Maher (one with Keith Olbermann from last year, the other from a couple of weeks ago calling Rep. Ellison’s religion [Islam] one “filled with hate”)
  • Glenn Beck’s insanity on FOX News
  • The O’Reilly Factor
  • Sarah Palin being interviewed by Chris Wallace on FOX News last year
  • ITN’s coverage of the tsunami in northeast Japan earlier this month
  • Protests in Egypt after January 25 (Russian TV)
  • The protests in Madison, Wisconsin at the end of February (Russian TV)
  • Rachel Maddow’s “Home of the Whopper” segment from the Fall ’10 election cycle (MSNBC)
  • The infamous Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson clip accusing all left-of-center folk of causing 9/11 (CBN)
  • President Obama’s Libya speech from Monday evening, March 28 (PBS).

Now I’ve given credit where credit is due and claim fair use under US copyright laws. But if our American public discourse doesn’t look dumb after watching it with Live’s “White, Discussion” playing in the background, I’d dare say that you’ll need to see an optometrist as soon as possible. In fact, I think we all need to get our brains, ears and eyes checked after three decades of being dummied down.

P.S. Also meant to give credit to NBA and Derrick Rose for a clip of his dunk against the Phoenix Suns last year.

Bittersweet Symphony

03 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, Eclectic, Religion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Atheism, Bigotry, Bill Maher, Christianity, Creflo Dollar, Frederick K.C. Price, Gospel of Prosperity, Hebrew-Israelites, Jimmy Swaggert, Kenneth Copeland, Liberation Theology, Pat Robertson, Televangelism


This weekend marks twenty-six years since I became a Christian. Given how torturous my nearly three and a half years of wearing a kufi and walking in the beliefs of the Hebrew-Israelites (at least nominally) were, I dare say that the turning point for all of my life occurred in April ’84. I’m grateful every day — and I mean, every day — for finding my way to God and Jesus. But, as I’m come to understand myself and Christianity over the years, I’ve also come to regret the religious and anti-religious narcissism that is infused in all of our conversations about Christianity, God, Atheism, evolution and so many other things that require more than scientific knowledge and absolute certainty.

For better and for worse, I have to start with the people who helped me get on the Christian path in the first place. If not for televangelists like Frederick K.C. Price and Kenneth Copeland, my understanding of Christianity would’ve been limited to conversations with my best friend in elementary school and my pedestrian attempts at understanding the New Testament. So I have to thank both for opening my eyes to the endless possibilities that all people have through faith and redemption, salvation and grace.

Still, their work, and the work of others like Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggert, Robert Tilton, Pat Robertson, Oral and Richard Roberts and others has revolved into a form of narcissism. Their gospel — and the gospel of the megachurches that now populate our nation — should be remembered by historians as the Gospel of Prosperity. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking control over your finances, giving to a church to provide community and social services or even using principles of faith (beyond the religious or spiritual) in order to make one’s life better materially. There is something vitally wrong, though, when this is almost all your ministry is about. I must admit, I was inspired by Price when I was a teenager, listening to his story about how he grew up in Alabama, about the poverty he had to overcome in order to become an ordained minister and establish his church in L.A. It was much later that I learned how enriching a Gospel of Prosperity could be for those with the power of the pulpit and the will to wield that power.

Seeing it firsthand at my church outside Pittsburgh (in Wilkinsburg for those of you familiar with Western Pennsylvania) was what made me realize how incredibly shallow this kind of preaching is for a church and its flock. The leadership began a campaign to raise something in the order of $1 million toward building a new church, as this church now boasted over 3,000 members. That was in December of ’96.

Within a couple of months, we had easily exceeded this amount, which was on top of the amount church member normally gave. Within a week, the pastor announced that God had given him a vision that another $3 million would be needed to help with the costs of building a new church and maintaining the current church building. A vision? Really? I think even God realizes that most of us, with help, can decipher a budget sheet to know what’s needed to build a building the size of a 3,000-seat church. What made this particularly dishonest was that the leadership should’ve let us sheep know what was needed from jump street, not a staggered campaign of visions in order to build the congregation’s confidence in giving. Not to mention the tapping into our American obsession with getting rich or becoming well-off.

Around the same time, Price was doing the same thing via his TV program. A whole series on Jesus as a materially rich Jew living in Galilee, and not as the relatively poor son of a carpenter and fisherman as portrayed in the Gospels. “How could he be poor and feed 5,000 people? Why would a poor man need to hire an accountant?,” Price asked at one point in his series in ’97. Although I think you could argue that Jesus’ ministry was doing well enough to keep him and his disciples in food, olive oil and sandals for three years, I’m not sure what this means for the average Christian or average person. The implication of all of this, of course, is that if you end up in debt, or without significant upward changes in income, or somehow become unemployed, that you somehow didn’t display enough faith. Or give your full tithe to your local pastor or church. Or for that matter, give beyond the tithing to pastors like Price, Copeland, and numerous others.

It couldn’t be about education, the kinds of job individuals have, or the wrecked state of the American economy, right? Or that, no matter how much faith we have, it’s our acting on that faith, having the skills necessary to make our dreams real possibilities, and of course, meeting people who are well positioned in our lives to help us (and oddly enough, vice-versa)? No, our lack of faith in The One is to blame. Need I mention that folks like Price have been saying for at least thirty years that we as Christians shouldn’t worry about the world’s oil reserves running out, as there’s more than enough to carry us all the way to the Rapture?

Before those in Bill Maher’s camp laugh in wild glee, I’ve found in my academic and spiritual walk narcissistic intolerance among many atheists as well. As if all Christians — and all people who believe in a higher power in general — are delusional, are absolutely orgasmic about seeing the world go up in flames and think science is something to be discarded. Theirs may well be the Gospel of Scientific Absolutism, as if science and the scientific method alone holds all of the answers in the Cosmos. I’m not arguing against evolution, the Big Bang, or String Theory. What I am standing up against are overly simplistic answers for the “why” questions — questions that come with weird and somewhat unscientific explanations — that can confound many a biologist or astrophysicist. Or, for the purposes of this post, atheists who refuse the acknowledge the myriad examples of intelligence in the supposedly random universe. While I stand in almost all respects on the side on science, complete randomness isn’t something that I choose to believe in.

So where does this leave me after twenty-six Christian years? In a very lonely place, where I’m both a complicated Christian and a less-than-scientific scientist in a broad sense. I stopped watching Price in ’98, and the other televangelists between ’88 and ’01. Christianity is about so much more than prosperity and pontificating pastors, learning about much more than science. Social justice, wealth redistribution, speaking truth to power, fighting for equality in this life and the next. Both religion and science have this possibility and have provided this for many people over the course of human history.

Unfortunately, folks like Price think that this is about speaking power to truth, and people like Maher already believe they know everything they need to know. Both have missed the point that faith, or belief, is important in every endeavor, and serves as a catalyst for great human achievement and for great human atrocities. So, for me, this Easter truly is a bittersweet one, where my salvation is real, and my doubt almost as much.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

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