On Reagan; an open letter to Don Rickles, by M.McCulloh

If you had asked me, Don Rickles,

I would have said that Ronald Reagan had absolutely no “charisma” at all. Perhaps he excited dead little boring froggy-fat nobodies like you because he wasn’t quite exactly as pathetic as you were, but that never made him anything but a dull mind swaying among a dull populace.

He never meant anything to the real people, barring a few who were badly damaged at the time. Perhaps Neil Young or Dennis Hopper saw something in him with their last remaining brain cells, but the real Neil Young and the real Dennis Hopper never would have.

Has your disgusting little body every even felt the slightest exertion of thought? I wouldn’t expect any physical undertaking, but perhaps a little attempt to… pay attention? Did you notice the untold tortures and murders taking place just south of the border? Did you notice the selling off of public land to the polluters for pennies per acre? Did you notice the gross wastage of the national treasury on fraudulent “star wars” weapons systems? Did you, in the end, even notice the actual TREASON? No, Little Fat Froggie just felt all excited about Mr. B Movie Star, who otherwise excited tremors of disgust in most sentient people….

He never had the slightest “charisma.” He was a boring, tedious, phony old moron. And millions and millions of genuine non-froggy-fat-phonies across America despised him. Almost as much as they now despise this unelected Dubya thing, if that is possible!

People may tolerate you because you forgot to die. But that doesn’t mean you’re clever. And even if you manage to be clever, you are NEVER, NEVER wise. So forget it, Don Rickles! Ronald Reagan was an UTTERLY anti-charismatic phony twit custom designed for froggy-fat nobodies like you. But not for much of anybody else.

Get a life, Don Rickles, if there’s still time…

"He's Not Black": Commentary upon Washington Post OpEd

I was inspired by an extremely insightful opinion piece entitled "He's Not Black" by author Marie Arana that ran in the Sunday, November 30, 2008 edition of the Washington Post. It was the first time that I had encountered such a fully annuciated opinion that so strongly mirrored my own views, ones that were restive within me because I had not been quite able to coherently break past the labels myself, although I realized they were greatly inaccurate. Like Arana, I too had keenly sensed that our language was not keeping pace with reality.

I excerpt her words here. Although her original piece is twice as long, it is in the first eight paragraphs that I feel that she is right on the mark.

"He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black. We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

Even Obama himself seems to have bought into the nomenclature. In his memoir "Dreams from My Father," he writes, 'I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.' You can almost feel the youth struggling with his identity, reaching for the right words to describe it and finally accepting the label that others impose.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.

Of course there is much to celebrate in seeing Obama's victory as a victory for African Americans. The long, arduous battles that were fought and won in the name of civil rights redeemed our Constitution and brought a new sense of possibility to all minorities in this country. We Hispanic Americans, very likely the most mixed-race people in the world, credit our gains to the great African American pioneers of yesterday: Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr.

But Obama's ascent to the presidency is more than a triumph for blacks. It is the signal of a broad change with broad ramifications. The world has become too fused, too interdependent to ignore this emerging reality: Just as banks, earthly resources and human disease form an intricate global web, so do racial ties".

In the remainder of the article Arana outlines her own amazing multi-racial identity. She says of a recent DNA ancestry exam that she had performed, "when I got my results from the lab I thought I was a simple hemispheric split -- half South American, half North. But as it turns out, I am a descendant of all the world's major races: Indo-European, black African, East Asian, Native American. The news came as something of a surprise. But it shouldn't have. Mutts are seldom divisible by two".

I started thinking that as a "white American" (a term I rather abhor because it is so vague and so strongly neglects my own sense of my European ethnicity as being Scottish/English, but also Swiss and Russian) that were we all to be required by law or custom to have our DNA examined, that countless of us would be amazed at the diversity of chromosomal soup inside of us. I think that it is safe to say we would remark, as Arana did, "There have been hundreds of intercultural marriages in my bloodline".

I celebrate the broad ramifications of Barack Obama's election as I celebrate the broad ramifications of the genes that have always found a way to bypass societal boundaries.