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My Apologies, “M”

11 Tuesday May 2010

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M Line, Q-Brooklyn, Nassau Line

I have a confession to make (as if I haven’t confessed enough the past four years, right?). I owe a few of my former Humanities classmates apologies, though not the kind of apology some of you may expect. For these apologies have nothing to do with what I’ve written on this blog since June ’07. Nor are they about anything I’ve written (or rewritten) to date in the Boy @ The Window manuscript. These apologies are more about my trust and truthfulness, or lack thereof, to specific people at specific moments of time, during my six years of semi-solitude, somewhat self-imposed, I might add.

This particular apology is to a classmate who sat in front of me for most of my classes between 7S and AP US History with Meltzer. For the purposes of this post, let’s call her “M” (I know that some of you will likely figure out who “M” is, but play along anyway, please). M was one of the most curious people I went to school with during those years, which by definition, also made her extremely intelligent. She was part of the Italian crew that seemed to overwhelm me in 7S especially, yet not part of it at the same time.

But I didn’t even know that about M on my first day of seventh grade in ’81. I showed up, white kufi and all, with smiles and a sense of myself that was a combination of naiveté and sheer arrogance that morning. I no sooner sat at my assigned and alphabetically-arranged seat than both Mrs. Sesay and my new classmates of 7S began to ask me questions about my background. M, who sat two seats in front of me, asked, “Have you ever been to Israel?” “Yes, once. I’ve been to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem,” I lied. I’d only traveled outside of New York four times, including my fetus travels in ’69. I lied so quickly that I spent the next several minutes thinking about why.

It was the first of my several Christmas Story moments. I was like the character Ralphie, who was forced by his adoring mother to wear a pink bunny suit made by his aunt. Except that he was never made to parade his social suicide clothing all over town and school so that he could bring even more ridicule and scorn his way than his mouth could earn all by itself. There was no one in my circle who could’ve saved me from the ostracism that would follow me because of my kufi.

M’s question let me know immediately that I was in trouble with these Humanities kids. My elementary school classmates would’ve never asked me if I’ve ever been to Israel. M’s question gave me my first indication that I was poor. It made me think, if this whole Hebrew-Israelite thing was so wonderful, then why in five months hadn’t we gone to Israel? Why had we only been to temple once? Why, then, didn’t I have an allowance? M wasn’t the only one who had questions.

I was mad at M, but more angry and disappointed with myself for lying to her. Over the years, I grew bitter and angry with my family as well, about the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, about kufis and other things. I think that M was the only White person in my classes other than our eventual valedictorian who may have sensed any of this during our Davis years. M, despite the big ’80s hair, Sergio Valente jeans, and constant gum chewing, was not only inquisitive. She had a talent for language that no one I knew in Humanities possessed. I’m sure she worked at it a bit, but still, Italian or not, M picked up the nuances of language faster than any of us, including the kids whose parents and grandparents spoke the language at home.

Unfortunately, she had her own issues in the social pecking order that was Humanities and in the diversity that was Davis and MVHS. She was Italian after all, and as a Humanities student, a nerd by definition. Yet she was attractive and by definition, also needed to be cool. M became this interesting contrast of pop cultural fashion, teenage cool and mostly subtle intellectual prowess, not much different from the main character played by Rob Brown in Finding Forrester. My Italian nemesis A tried, and tried, and tried again with her in those early years of Humanities, only to get shut down time and time again. I loved hearing her  tell A to “Shut up!” in her Brooklyn-esque accent on so many occasions.

I thought that M found me both fascinating and puzzling at times, as if I were a science experiment that yielded some surprising results. I was interesting because in many ways I represented the anti-stereotype, a Black kid who wasn’t cool and cared about grades, a Hebrew-Israelite who actually wanted to learn Italian and learn more about Italian culture. This made me an enigma because I was Black, part of a race that many Italians in Mount Vernon distrusted in the early ’80s. The politics of the town around City Hall, the police and fire departments and the Board of Education certainly helped make it so.

We did get into it once after school, about what I don’t remember. I remember calling her a “slut” for something she had said to me. I was picking fights a lot during my months of infatuation with Crush #1, so I didn’t keep a complete scorecard of every argument and every idiotic thing I said. In any case, I apologize. My bad.

But that’s not what I’m apologizing about.  Sometime in the middle of eleventh grade in Mrs. Warns English class, we were discussing travels to different parts of the world. M had missed the first three weeks of tenth grade, I think, to spend time in Italy, and was interested in traveling to places like Spain and Mexico, as she was quickly learning Spanish to go with her virtually fluent Italian. When the class conversation turned to me, I admitted that I hadn’t been out of New York State since ’78, and had never left the country. M’s mouth dropped open, as if I’d admitted that my father had tried to get a prostitute for me (which he did the following school year — see my “Secrets and Truths” post, January 2009). Her eyes glared at me, letting me know that she remembered. I stared blankly back at M, not even so much as shrugging my shoulders in response.

So, M, I apologize, and not just for lying. You’re one of only a handful of folks who showed genuine interest in me because of and beyond my kufi during the Humanities years. Yet I didn’t trust that interest at all. I took it as more a passing curiosity than anything else. I never gave either of us a chance to become acquaintances, much less friends. For that, and for calling you a “slut” in seventh grade, I am truly sorry.

Our Flat-Butt Society

08 Saturday May 2010

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Flat-Butt Truck

Picture a world in which the only ingredient needed to achieve beauty was a flat butt. Imagine that this flat butt would guarantee more than an easier time in dating, marriage, and beauty pageants. A flat butt makes it easier to do well in school, to find comfortable fitting jeans, and to gain access to higher education, quality health care, better homes, and steady employment. Now imagine that those who have oblong butts, round butts, bubble butts, or some other combination of butt shapes have limited access to education, employment, medical care, housing, well-fitting clothes, and beauty pageants. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But, despite the numerous exceptions, we live in a flat-butt society.

We assume that flatter is better because some dead person created it as our ideal vision of beauty centuries ago. But this dead person created this standard without the benefit of interacting with people with other kinds of butts. Today we find ourselves in two worlds: the make-believe world of flat butts, and the real world of multiple kinds of butts. Hundreds of years of conditioning have left most in our society with the impression that a flat butt is a good butt and that other butts—especially round and bubbly ones—are unhealthy and symbolize low intellectual stamina. We need to dig up this dead person and ask him a few questions about his flat-butt vision.

Take the symbols of beauty for our culture. Whether male or female, they usually have flat butts with big chests. Round, shapely butts equal obesity as far as most of us are concerned. The ideal flat butt is one that is firm and muscular, an extension of a firm and muscular back. It’s one that a rubber band would boomerang off of. Has anyone ever seen a Miss America or Mr. Universe with anything other than a flat, muscular butt? Between so-called supermodels like Heidi Klum and Gisele, Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, and the constant fawning over Hollywood actors, the women and especially men that are with them should feel extremely lucky. At least, that’s what we’re told by advertisers, journalists, reporters and commentators nearly every minute of every day.

There are of course exceptions to the flat-butt rule. These anomalies are often exotic and rarer than gold, but not the flat-butt norm. The popular press and hip-hop videos tend to cover these unusual people as ones who have exceptional derrieres. This only reinforces the idea that flat butts are normal and within everyone’s reach, and that anyone who doesn’t have a flat butt and isn’t exotic simply isn’t attractive. It’s no wonder that non-flat-bottomed men, women, and girls are spending millions for doctors to suck the fat out of their butts.

Another dead expert decided that a flat-butt person, as the international symbol of beauty, also was more athletic and intelligent. Because those with flat butts already were in the top positions of our society, it was self-evident that anyone without a flat butt lacked intellect or leadership ability. This expert assumed by scientific observation that people with non-flat butts couldn’t lead in science, society, or sports because their butts would get in the way. Over time, those with non-flat butts became leaders in the athletic field, but only in areas where intelligence seemed unnecessary. It’s likely that this deceased expert had a non-flat butt and spent much of his life obsessed with flattening it, wanting to become part of the flat-butt elite.

We can even see the penetration of our culture’s flat-butt philosophy in clothing and in our public spaces. Go to any clothing store in the country, and one will find it almost impossible to find trousers, slacks, jeans, pants, skirts, shorts, and underwear made for people with oblong, round, bubble, or mixed butts. The closest approximation to bottoms for the non-flat-bottomed male or female are ones made for the overweight, another population that fails to meet our society’s beauty standards.

We design our public spaces with flatness in mind. Take a look at the interior, exterior, and posterior of any public transit system in the country. A flat butt fits better in the molded seat of a bus or train than a round one. Public transit vehicles themselves have flat features, especially their rears. Public restrooms have toilet seats with flat butts in mind, as any non-flat-butted person can attest. And only someone with a flat butt would design slides in public parks for children with flat butts. Kids without flat butts tend to get stuck on these slides because the slides aren’t built with enough flexibility to accommodate other kinds of butts.

Sexual relations is one area in which the divide between flat butts and bubble butts (at least) has softened in recent years. It appears that some flat butt people are actually attracted to people with round, even jiggly butt cheeks. Yet this attraction only goes so far. Despite the mixing of flat and round and the recently discovered coolness of the non-flat, thinking in this area for most flat butts remains flat. For them, flat is phat-in beauty, culture, intelligence, and in some cases, athletics. The round, oblong, bubble, and mixed butts still have a long way to go.

What those with round butts need are pioneers to prove that like the world, the ideal for butts is variety and balance, not flat as the ideal. Proving this may require studies that show that a round butt provides long-term health benefits or has no genetic connection to intelligence. Chiropractors could show that those with non-flat butts have a greater chance of avoiding spinal degeneration than those with flat butts. Geneticists with round and flat butts may need to show that the round butt gene is the dominant one while flat-butt genes are recessive. Engineers can prove that rounding off buses and trains will make them more aerodynamic and energy-efficient, and deeper seat moldings will save millions in caring for our backs. Whatever the innovation or discovery, it’s up to the round butts of our nation to make this flat-butt society more round.

Where Grace and Rhodes Meet

04 Tuesday May 2010

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In the past couple of weeks, two incidents have occurred that have brought attention to race and intelligence in America — again. One really is an incident, though, while the other is a continuing conversation about the head-scratching that goes on when someone personifies the idea of the anti-stereotype in a world full of them. Both make me cringe, even as I know that people like me can’t allow others to define us.

Over the past week, there’s been a minor firestorm blowing over comments from the soon-to-be Harvard Law School graduate, the amazing Stephanie Grace. She inserted foot-in-mouth — or, rather, fingers up her butt — regarding her wanting to keep open the option of the possibility that African Americans may be predisposed to being intellectually inferior to Whites. The fact that she sent this out to the Black Law Student Association at Harvard as an email was somewhere between foolish and obnoxiously audacious. The contents of her email, a display of the thoughts of someone about to begin a federal clerkship in the next few months is disturbing. It’s not just because Grace has spent the past three years at Harvard Law. It’s also because she spent that time there in a school with the likes of Charles Ogletree, Lani Guinier, and Randall Kennedy — all Black or Biracial — teaching there.

There will be no rationale refuting Grace’s idiotic email here, because my own very existence as a writer, professor and educator — not to mention the millions of highly educated people of color like me — should be enough. But for folks whose minds remain mesmerized by the eugenics movement and Nazi experiments in the first half of the twentieth century, no amount of evidence against their racist views would be enough.

Just ask Myron Rolle. He was the last person drafted in the sixth round of the NFL draft that occurred a little more than a week ago. All because he took a year off from playing football at the end of his college experience at Florida State University to — of all things — go to Oxford University in the UK to study medical anthropology for a year as a Rhodes Scholar! Rolle became the 207th overall pick because NFL geniuses in the front office suspected that the future neurosurgeon had a mixed set of priorities, that he couldn’t both play football and be interested in another demanding and rewarding career that would require raw intellectual talent. Teams passed on him because he accepted a Rhodes Scholarship and decided to postpone playing in the NFL for a year.

A scholarship that only former NBA players like Bill Bradley and Tom McMillen, and former NFL quarterback Pat Haden were able to obtain. Not to mention such luminaries as former POTUS Bill Clinton, Susan Rice (high-level official in the State Department under the Obama Administration), Newark mayor Cory Booker, and MSNBC commentator and host Rachel Maddow. But, I guess African American male athletes are only supposed to eat a bag full of oats and then run a 4.3-40-yard-dash, rather than explore the neurology of the human brain.

Former Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick insinuated that NFL players can’t be thinkers, at least intellectual ones, because that would mean they would get clobbered playing the game. Other coaches and GMs simply questioned Rolle’s commitment. I question their faulty and bigoted logic. It’s not every day that a Black athlete at a NCAA Division I football school can flex his intellectual muscles as easily as he can bench press 400 or 500 pounds. Maybe that’s what was so scary about Rolle.

Except that it shouldn’t have been scary at all. Indianapolis Colts star Peyton Manning stayed an extra year at the University of Tennessee, and not just to use up his last year of eligibility. Having finished his bachelor’s degree in four years (he was red-shirted his freshman year), Manning spent his fifth year working on a master’s degree. Hall of Famer Steve Young worked on a law degree at Stanford while playing for the San Francisco 49ers, during a stretch that included a Super Bowl win. But Rolle isn’t any of those guys. They’re White, and quarterbacks at that. They need to be smart. Cornerbacks in the NFL, on the other hand, don’t need to use their brains to read the difference between a screen pass, an out route, a go route or a skinny post, right?

What both cases show is that there’s an alarming portion of our population who find it easier to believe that African Americans have low intellectual potential. What’s even more significant, though, is that many of these same folks become agitated, even fearful, of educated Blacks, particularly Blacks who are their intellectual superiors. It’s an agitation I’ve been all too familiar with for nearly twenty years. With White professors who’ve allowed students to speak racial stereotypes to and about me in their classrooms, who’ve accused me of plagiarism, and refused to help me find a job because they thought I would just get one because I’m Black. With White supervisors who’ve accused me of being everything but a child of God because they thought I was after their job, or used me as part of a dog-and-pony show to get money from corporate funders. It’s something that I don’t expect to go away anytime in the immediate future.

Which is why I found it astounding to read a comment on another blog about the Stephanie Grace issue last week. A recent law school graduate talking about his experience as a young African American male lawyer, in which he felt he had to constantly disprove stereotypes while proving himself at some New York law firm. He advised folks thinking about becoming lawyers to not pursue the profession, which is about as sane as saying that melanin, genetics and intelligence are inextricably linked.

Even in the absence of racism, we all have to compete, to prove ourselves, to overcome in order to be successful in this world. It’s not about others bigotry and their attempts to stifle your success or career. It’s about proving to yourself how good you are, about how successful you can be, in law or any other field. Not to mention giving yourself financial security, finding work that you can be passionate about (even when it doesn’t bring riches), taking care of your family and yourself, helping other cope and be successful in an insane world. You can’t avoid idiots. I learned that ages ago, the hard way, with my former advisor Joe Trotter at Carnegie Mellon, who, by the way, is African American. We have to keep walking our path, to get beyond the corner of Grace and Rhodes, in order to be to Colossus we hope we are.

Banning the Term “Legislate Morality”

23 Friday Apr 2010

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I love Michael Wilbon’s work as a sports journalist, columnist with The Washington Post, as a commentator on the NBA on ESPN/ABC, and as co-host of Pardon the Interruption (PTI) on ESPN with Tony Kornheiser. I’ve loved his work for a bit more than two decades, certainly in comparison to Pope Lupica and the other holier-than-thou sports reporters and columnists out there these days. I find him refreshing as a journalist and writer, and an unabashed and unafraid host when it comes to how sports and American society intersect.

But I found myself bitterly disappointed in Wilbon’s “can’t legislate morality” comment on PTI on Wednesday, April 21. Wilbon said this in response to the NFL’s six-game suspension of two-time-Super Bowl-winning-quarterback and Pittsburgh Steeler Ben Roethlisberger for the latter’s violation of the league’s personal conduct policy. The NFL “shouldn’t legislate morality,” Wilbon said, as Roethlisberger “hadn’t committed a crime.” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the league, and the Steelers ownership were all “overreacting,” according to Wilbon. Well, Wilbon has certainly earned the right to be entitled to his opinion. But, as my wife has said to me on countless occasions, Wilbon’s also entitled to be wrong.

Societies, governments, employers and families “legislate morality” every single day, and have been doing so for as long as there has been a human civilization on this planet. Murder, stealing, banking regulations, adultery, and certainly sexual assault and rape are all examples of us “legislating morality” over the past five millenia. Now, I’m not totally naive — I know what Wilbon was attempting to say (I think). That because Roethlisberger wasn’t arrested, indicted or convicted, that the issue of his alleged encounter with a twenty-year-old White college student whom he helped become incredibly intoxicated is now a moral one, not a criminal one. Yes, this is true. But what would ESPN do to someone like Wilbon in the same situation? What would the University of Maryland system do to me in that situation? Would ESPN let Wilbon continue to show up for work without a reprimand, a suspension, or a quiet termination? Would I continue to teach classes, or would my employer consider not renewing my teaching contract?

We as a people legislate morality in ways that none of us really think about. Like Wilbon, most of us think that crimes are crimes and morals are morals, as if passed down from Moses or Hammurabi completely unchanged for the past 3,800 years. But moral issues have led to things that once were not crimes becoming crimes. The whole notion of illegal drugs or illegal immigrants didn’t exist in this country a century ago. Someone could’ve been a pot-smoking Polish immigrant “without papers” in 1910, and that immigrant wouldn’t have gone to jail. The folks in favor of making marijuana illegal or shutting off immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe didn’t end their crusades (however misguided) by saying, “Well, we can’t legislate morality!”

Or, to use much more recent examples, those White supremacists who said, “you can’t legislate morality” after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. For nearly twenty years, those opposed to Black civil rights argued that the issue of Black equality was a moral issue, not a legal or human rights one. Or those from the Religious Right who said, “you can’t legislate morality” when the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision came down in 1973 or in the wake of the growing Gay Rights Movement in the late-1970s. Of course, in both cases, those in leadership who were influenced by what we now call the evangelical movement have engaged in legislating morality since the early ’90s, attempting to roll back Roe v. Wade and putting laws on books defining marriage as only between a heterosexual adult male and a heterosexual adult female.

On the issue of civil rights, desegregation, reproductive rights and gay rights, what is and isn’t moral isn’t just a matter of perspective. It’s also a matter of power and bias and the people who are wielding that power in order to reflect their bias. I’m not saying that Roethlisberger actually committed a crime, or that he didn’t commit a crime. Yet we cannot say that what Roethlisberger engaged in was simply a violation of the generally accepted morals of American society either. Even if seen in the most optimistic light, Roethlisberger brought significant embarrassment to himself, his team and teammates and the NFL. An executive at a Fortune 500 company could no more get away with going on a bender and attempting to have sex in a public bathroom — an incident that somehow becomes public — than Roethlisberger could. So for Wilbon or anyone else to rally around the “can’t legislate morality” flag is somewhere between idiotic and shameful.

The issue with Roethlisberger isn’t that the NFL’s engaged in legislating morality. Nor is it that the district attorney in Georgia wanted to bring a case to trial but couldn’t because of insufficient evidence. The real issue here is that we as a society have made a thick distinction between what is and isn’t moral behavior and what is and isn’t criminal behavior, because they aren’t mutually exclusive. For progressives and libertarians, the distinction is whether one’s behavior is detrimental to the health and lives of other people. Black civil rights, gay rights, and smoking weed are among the things that most would assume would not harm the lives of other citizens, at least in 2010. Having an encounter in a bathroom that leads to another person going to the hospital with bruising and bleeding, however minor, is detrimental to that other person.

In light of this being Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, maybe folks like Wilbon should be more careful when choosing words like “can’t legislate morality.” Not only do we legislate morality, societies will engage in this kind of activity as long as there is such a thing as a society. So I ask that everyone with a microphone and a camera pointed at them to stop talking about legislating morality as if moral values are as set in stone as the Earth orbiting the Sun. You’re merely reflecting your own bias, against women, gays, Blacks, drugs, science. Or in Wilbon’s case, a need to stay out of the judgment fray that moves us from one scandal to the next, a need to get to the day when Roethlisberger throws three, four or five touchdown passes in a game. On that part I fully agree. But say that, Wilbon, because that’s what you’re good at. Don’t say you can’t legislate morality, because last I checked, this isn’t your area of journalistic expertise.

Raised on Hip-Hop?

10 Saturday Apr 2010

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About seven years ago, I had lunch with a young woman and my former boss (see “What We’ll Do for $$$” post, July ’09) at some overpriced Dupont Circle restaurant specializing in Russian cuisine. It was just before the birth of my son Noah. There was so much wrong in that lunch, in that conversation, in the dynamics of that conversation. But in between the idiotic moments of conversation, there was something completely unrelated to it mentioned that topped everything else. In describing her background in the arts and humanities, the young woman said, “I grew up on hip-hop…”

“Huh?,” I thought. Where did that come from? At the time, I was thirty-three, and she was twenty-seven. That would’ve meant that the young woman was born in ’75 or ’76. Hip-hop was barely an embryo the day she was born, and hadn’t become a truly national phenomenon until the end of ’86. Even then, it would take until the ’90s for hip-hop to dominate the music scene. And, given that this individual had grown up in the mid-Atlantic region and in the Midwest — not exactly hotbeds for the development of hip-hop — I found her statement somewhere between ridiculous and as true as a hollow bell.

It did get me thinking, though, about how circumscribed lives in this country of ours can be when we believe that everyone should see the world the way we see it. As if everyone else’s experience can be encompassed in our little life story. “I was raised on hip-hop” sounded to me like this young woman’s family, friends, community and education was completely immersed in the development and growth of hip-hop. Short of her being best friends with Russell Simmons, Sean Coombs and MC Lyte, the statement’s unbelievable on its face. But it’s also a refusal to recognize that the idealized way in which we describe our lives and world doesn’t really add up to what our world was, is, or the way in which we would like it to be.

Now, there are a whole generation of folks who’ve grown up listening to nothing but hip-hop, dancing in nothing but hip-hop rhythms, reading hip-hop-based novels and watching movies with hip-hop themes. Those folk, born after ’82, have the right to say that they were “raised on hip-hop.” But what does that mean, really? That they see the world through the lens of hip-hop culture? That American politics, globalization, social justice, education, popular culture, sports and entertainment can all be seen by folks simply and completely through the lens of hip-hop culture? If it does mean that, then I guess that’s a’ight. After all, that’s how some of these people in the hip-hop era have grown up.

I suspect, however, that this isn’t what folks like the young woman I described earlier mean when they say that they were “raised on hip-hop.” They’re asserting a sense of Blackness, an essence of an understanding of being Black or African American that they assume cannot be distilled as easily through their parents’ R&B, Jazz or pop music, through dance or art that’s more consistent with more culturally integrative times. For them, hip-hop is being Black — or “keepin’ it real” — a step beyond The Lost Poets, a phase past Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, a grittiness that can’t be expressed through Diana Ross, Michael Jackson or Quincy Jones. Hip-hop is being Black in an urban and impoverished context — or being real and cool, I suppose — even when the people growing up on it aren’t impoverished or aren’t even Black.

And I have problems with this assessment of what being “raised on hip-hop” means for so many who have embraced it without understanding the eclectic origins of hip-hop. Or without acknowledging that too much drink from this well can be as isolating as only embracing neo-conservative ideology or only believing that one denomination of a religion — much less an entire religious ideology — can provide all of the answers we will ever need in this life.

The rhythms of my voice, my ability to speak and write in standard English, my eclectic music collection and my understanding of math and science, all illuminate the fact that I have lived a life of many textures. Yet I am still a Black man whose life was shaped by poverty, racism, community, education, music, sports and so many other things that other African Americans of similar backgrounds face and often embrace. I would never claim that I was “raised on hip-hop” any more than I’d say that I was “raised on physical abuse.” I heard Sugar Hill Gang, Doug E. Fresh and Run D.M.C. between ’80 and ’86, and I experienced physical abuse, but I wasn’t “raised” by either. My experiences are a part of me, but they don’t define me, and I certainly wouldn’t allow myself as an African American be defined by them.

To misquote Laurence Fishburne’s character Morpheus from The Matrix (1999), I’ll say this: “What is Black? How do you define, Black? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘Black’ is simply a social construct interpreted by our brains.” Being Black isn’t all that’s hip-hop, and hip-hop isn’t all that makes or defines anyone as Black. It’s the totality of our experiences and actions that do so. Even if we were “raised” on country music, lima beans and Ex-lax.