Guns and culture.

I started writing this particular post over a week ago, but found the acceleration of time which comes with an approaching yule too intrusive to continue, so it simmered in my drafts folder awaiting revival. And, sooner than expected, here we are.

On that day, NBC sportscaster Bob Costas used his halftime slot to weigh in on the perennial polemic of America's gun culture. Result? Tweeps go apeshit in a manner unseen since the recently concluded, culturally bruising presidential election.

Scant days later America is further traumatized and desensitized by twenty dead toddlers and the latest armed malcontent.

Last week, the gridiron couldn't escape the pall of the public murder-suicide involving a player and his girlfriend. This week, first-grade schoolrooms make an even more shocking pallette. Yet another gun-related tragedy breaks the collective heart of people everywhere, and also, spurs a recurring loop of righteous indignation as the obdurate NRA lobby braces for more heat.

Michael Moore's 2002 docu-treatise "Bowling For Columbine" remains on point in the face of sanctimonious invocations of the 2nd constitutional ammendment. This 18th Century edict is what enshrines and justifies American rights to bear arms today.

It's worth noting, that when said parchment was penned, little was deadlier than a musket and a reload. This elementary school assailant had a Glock handgun, a Sig Sauer, presumably for his second hand, and a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle. Superfluous, considering  one man has only two hands.

Societal history of weapon proliferation is mostly understood. What is harder to accept, in 2012, is the imperative to protect every individual's inviolable right to wield death.

There are some fantastic opinions bouncing around. "Arm all teachers," "More guns." ... Really? Has the United States become a society of double-0 operatives with licenses to kill?

Special dispensation, while people still get locked up for selling Cannabis seeds and certain kiddie bon-bons remain verboten.















Kneejerk logic sure speaks loudly. It reveals social fears which deeply underpin the constitution rationale. Immutable defense of gun ownership rights reminds me of the intensity around other hot-potato topics, like voter registration, affirmative action or institutionalized Confederate flags. Hmmm.

"They want to take away our culture. Take back America."

It's no accident that the G.O.P., clearly based in Southern State traditionalism, is aligned firmly in favor of firearm freedom. What else does the old-guard have, if not weaponry, to lend some sense of security to its phobias?, though, in fairness, there are also Democrats who dearly defend a damsel's right to a Derringer.

This isn't just political. Pandora is out of the box. The die is cast. American culture is John Wayne, Smith, Wesson, Bonnie and Clyde. Here, the shooting of a leader can morph into romantic lore. Honest Abe, himself felled by a gun, is the Spielbergian subject of big Oscar buzz. Stand Your Ground makes a legal defense but somehow it's tough to find French Brie de Meaux outside of a Zabar's or a Dean and DeLuca delicatessen.


















 Which further fuels my lament. More Limburger, less Luger.

If that seems light, and cavalier, please consider these are words, not bullets. They are meant to stress a cognitive dissonance.

Yes, we all reflect our varied histories but, as times change, it's in our best interests to ammend and update strategies in going forward. This is as true for community as it is personally.

Besides, whatever their use, continuing to treat guns as sacrosanct offers greater opportunity to unstable, trigger-happy personalities, the criminally motivated and the violently inclined. The grief we feel over the Newtown massacre was inflicted by an individual who was all of the above. Legal guns were his tools.

To be sure, it's not only the U.S.A. where this argument rages. Canadians acquire guns too and manage to defy the national stereotype on occasion. And Jamaica, my island of origin, has its own peculiar, illbegotten enamorment with the steel bore. Unsurprisingly, politics is culpable there as well.

 

 

Even One Love talisman Bob Marley, who famously, but figuratively, Shot the Sheriff, and survived a gun-blazing Ambush in the night, curiously assessed some replicas.

Impossible to know for sure what ran through his mind in that moment, but informed imagination tells me he would've given a thoughtful Rasta response to any question of gun culture ...

... "gun culture? guns nuh have no culture."
 

White house. Black house.

If caution is a characteristic of conservatism, then I must own up to that side of my personality. I sometimes yield to chicken-shit tentativity when expressing observations on the racially polarised landscape we find ourselves living in. But not today.

As one who is given to frequent rumination on such issues, from a perspective of cultural complexity, I'm understandably drawn to, and opinionated on, this discourse - despite assuming a position high above the fray as a proud proselyte of an (admittedly) idealistic tabula rasa (Rasta?). The One Love philosophy.






Racism is the polar opposite of this stance, being based in bias; i.e. the principle of any race's intrinsic preferability over another. Bio-specific minutiae, such as variability in skin-tone and sundry genetic distinctions, are the props it's built on, but racism's broad purview includes cultural corollary to this precept.

Acknowledging that there's a case to be made for racism being a natural characteristic of the human species, there can nevertheless be no doubting that colonial expansion over the last five centuries, for all the wonderful countries founded, also compounded the issue and extended hegemonies, via empire.

In the United States, and other post-colonial societies with historically race-based beginnings, race is a DNA factor that colors culture and political affiliations. Variants apply but this view is through black 'n' white specs.

Sensitivities surround the word racist, even when used as mere explanation. It tends to trigger soul-denial, and render generalization and selective memory powerful psychological tools in the struggle for representative power.

This has fostered a proliferation of codified, and not so codified pejoratives. The establishment of an African-American POTUS has laid bare nerves beneath a filmy epidermis of equanimity, as this remarkable democracy seeks to retain its ascendancy.















"Communist," "dictator," "terrorist," "thief," are nouns from only one comment-thread, in one disaffected right-wing article parsing the 2012 re-election result, but I've seen several such. The same thread is decorated with adjectives like "evil" and "ruthless," with more than one bright spark styling Barack Obama as "Anti-Christ" ("read your bible") and "Son of Lucifer" ("666 - The Beast").

I'll deliberately avoid rehashing cretinous diatribes on magic negroes, bones in the nose, monkeys, makers/takers and nooses. 

So help me Jah, I couldn't make this stuff up. Wry smile. More.

One of the things I grapple with in this climate, is the reluctance of so many white American voters to draw the connection between a Republican vote and a racial slap-in-the-face. In light of palpable idiocy and ill-concealed hatred from right-wing ranks, I'm ecstatic at G.O.P. misery at the polls. Even if Mitt Romney was a financial magician, it would've been regrettable to empower the social luddites and those who refuse to take them to task.

For sure, there is no economic prosperity worth sacrificing social propriety for, and none achievable without it.

The sting in the tail here is, if anyone points out how suspicious this vitriol is, toward Obama's frequently referenced heritage, the charge of racism gets defensively leveled at them.

















Let's get one thing straight. Racists tend to use the unqualified term "reverse racism" with impunity. It deflects the onus of understanding by identifying pushback as the primary impetus. This only serves to perpetuate ignorance and impasse.

"Liberal" and "conservative" are not bad words, nor mutually exclusive from racism, but it does seem difficult for the latter to transcend or decry bigotry. So much so that Obama optimists get accused of being divisive and disingenuous when it's patently clear who really is. Witness voter allegiance.

It's sad, demoralizing, polarizing, undignifying, yet still, somehow fascinating and instructive just how much adrenaline an American election can inject into this dialectic. Nearly all of old Confederacy voted Republican, and a vast majority of non-whites ("minority" is a misnomer now) voted Democrat.

Americans, of the United States, deserve less entrenchment.
 

... extraordinary brothers-in-arms ...

... "I'm not an alien," so goes the quip, "but I play one on TV" ...

... at one point in the not so distant past, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) classified me as an Alien of Extraordinary Ability in The Arts ... my head still swells at the adjective "extraordinary," even as the ascribed primary descriptive "alien" brings to mind fanciful images of almond-eyed Hanna Barbera Martians with ray guns in plexiglassed, single-occupant flying saucers ...

... still, I'm in good company 'cos even the lofty President Barack H. Obama, elected (via rigorous, even tortuous, adult sufferage) to the top office in the-land-which-would-lead-us-all, gets the word "alien" thrown at him from time to time ...

... as brothers-in-arms we have that and more in common ...

... not least of these commonalities are convincingly furrowed brows and mesmerising, outstretched arm gestures ...










... chillin' with my actual brother Stephen last week, high above 86th St. on Manhattan's Upper West Side, we formed a fraternal triumvirate-by-proximity with the POTUS, who, if we had a third sibling, would look like the brotha-on-the-book-cover ...

... again, in the not so distant past this would have been an implausible scenario ... and, while it's not enough to profess solidarity with a politician simply because one looks like him, it's certainly comforting that such an official can finally compare to one's own valid countenance - as well as being a measuredly progressive influence on the direction of the U.S. of A. ...

... speaking as an intergalactic adversary from another dimension (legions of Stargate SG-1 fans accept this as fact, so should you), I'm reconciled to a postponement of any assault on fair Planet Earth until after the end of Barack Obama's second term in office, out of respect for his (literally) extraordinary tenure ...

... should America falter at the polls, Apophis may interdict ...

... super whose day? ...

... feels like a blink-of-an-eye since we were last here ...

... d-day on this otherwise unremarkable Tuesday in Spring when a quartet of likely lads, from America's chest-beating right-wing, rage against the machine ...

... in this latest swing of the pendulum, America's quest for democratic equilibrium, there is petty polarity and piety aplenty, which speaks of divergent camps ... ideological options before the electorate are clarified and stark ... decisions, decisions ...

... in the grand tradition of referring to national baseball championships as the World Series, Black Friday consumer frenzies and a grandiose style of doing things, U.S. politics bills this polling day as Super Tuesday, with primaries in eleven States and hundreds of electoral delegates up for grabs ...

... who'll get the cookies from the cookie-jar? ...

... the HBO release of "Game Change" is a timely harbinger ... a screen depiction of that dramatic convention stunt in 2008 when Crusty Crony (McCain) pulled Lively Rabbit (Palin) out of his hat, effectively pegging back the frontrunner ... could we have a repeat of that maverick moment this year? ...

... cynical, smart-money is on a spectacular addition to the Republican ticket in order to boost the lackluster candidate who finishes top ... should Rick Santorum, a man I first heard of in a particularly graphic Dan Savage column, emerge G.O.P. leader he'll need a total makeover and a Latina running mate who looks like Sofia Vergara to make our incumbent look sideways ...

... today's probable winner, Mitt Romney (we'll know around the time this ackeelover observation gets published tonight), carries a yoke or three around his neck and each one is extra-weighted with stumblebum gaffes and halting riposte ...

... it'll take something quite monumental for reluctant Romney to thwart Barack Obama's sophomore term but don't bet the house just yet ... plans are likely underway to co-opt an irresistable candidate, one possessed of credibility and clout ...

... in fact, they've already got the lapel buttons circulating ...

 

... buh-bye bin, bada bing ...

... a tip o' the tam to Tim for reminding me of the a propos quote, "I've never wished a man dead but I've read some obituaries with great pleasure” ... whether or not those words are wholely attributable to Mark Twain, they inspired me to vent on a vanquished villain, that surly Saudi ingrate, phantom renegade and bad egg by any measure ...

... Osama bin Laden was a larger-than-life, xtreme hide and seek player ... after being emboldened by Western support against the Soviets in Afghanistan he came to embody such a perfect foil for American psychologies of propriety that it's difficult not to feel elements of good riddance ... and this is before we even mention his most nefarious misdeeds ...

... enter the frontier sheriff on his sturdy steed, twirling ivory-handled Colts at the hip, down mainstreet Abbottabad ... Barack Obama, faced with mid-term poll recalibrations, second-term boo-birds, and long-term legacy considerations, pulls a six foot-five inch rabbit from his hat and trumps (literally - hah!) the relatively prosaic Saddam-in-a-hole routine of his predecessor ...

... the daring in this act of leadership is magnified by the timing ... fresh from being carded (which is effectively what happened when this President was compelled into taking special initiative to produce an obsolete form of bureaucratic paperwork testifying to his very legitimacy as citizen-of-the-land), Obama stewards a checkmate for the ages ... going from (not-quite) zero to sixty, in the political equivalent of a nanosecond ...

... the only foreshadowing precedent I can recall is the classic 1974 Mel Brooks spoof film "Blazing Saddles", and, based on the way things developed for the new-man-in-charge in that blueprint, I predict more quasi-comic moments and coolly managed scenarios, with only the occasional glitch, before this dude proudly hangs up his badge after about eight years leading the posse ... and rides off into the (Hawaiian?) sunset ...

... flee from hate, mischief and jealousy...

... I had no intention of starting the year on a heavy note because the outlook for me depends on positive vibrations, but news of the shooting and loss of life in Arizona this weekend touched a long-exposed nerve ... in the U.S.A., a country with so much to offer the world, there are some baffling smoke signals ...

... "life is one big road with lots of signs" ... this 1979 Bob Marley lyric from the strident anthem "Wake Up And Live" goes on to advise ... "flee from hate, mischief and jealousy" ... Bob's focus was on metaphorical signs and scriptural prophecy rather than literal letraset and amateur calligraphy ...















... it's either naive or deliberately negligent to overlook the connection between the election of the first African American to the highest office in the land and the overt vitriol that comes to the fore when progressive energies meet conservative resistance in the current political tug-o-war game ...

... inflamed passion can manifest as insanity in ways stranger than fiction and it gets even more distressing when people (who should know better as citizens of the self-proclaimed leader of the free world) resort to calling for (or alluding to) gruesome deaths for holders of opposition viewpoints ...

















... democracy, as fair a blueprint for governance as humankind has yet devised, needs to see itself as just that, a man-made template that requires periodic updates in the manner of today's state-of-the-art electronics ... other countries have experimented, the time is past-due for U.S.A. Democracy 2.0 ...

... after centuries of not-entirely-proportionate division of assets, the U.S. is now left to deal with a quest for equilibrium ... while it's understood that there'll be disagreement along the way, surely there is nothing to be gained by obstinately defending a right to bear ever-more-destructive firearms instead of voting towards enlightened alternatives ... even compromise would be improvement, but no, we must adapt for hollow-points and Glock semis because founding fathers decreed it for a bygone age ... some floundering fathers continue to decree it, with defensive and offensive rationale, while the walking-dead in America and it's regional slipstream continue to live nine-millimeter lives ...
















... in this part of the world we are able to lean on the democratic cornerstone of Freedom Of Speech but do we really require an M-16 to defend that right in a mall parking-lot or at a tea-party? ...

... it doesn't take deep contemplation to imagine what some people feel at the sight of a confident Michelle Obama, speaking freely as FLOTUS, when simian references recall another lingering archaic notion intended to injure ... elsewhere there's the oblique approach, but the words you twist to make your own today may return to haunt your tomorrow ...
















... I saw a re-run of "Bowling For Columbine" last week ... the shock factor has diminished significantly since first release due to repeated cases of people "going postal" and the hawkish stances staked-out by the paradoxically called "right-wing"...

... Limbaugh disciples and ilk, with clear kneejerk reactions to a wave of first-time-evers in American politics, unquestionably kindle brush-fires that feed on the feeble minded and potentially trigger actions like the barbaric attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her constituents ... tell it like it is ...





















... despite the proliferation of signage, or maybe because of it, the astounding reality of Palinite sophistry will not have the power to ultimately carry the day, I predict ... common sense tells me so (to reclaim a favoured phrase from the pipsqueek braintrust), but it is also possible that the sign-makers could worsen matters by learning to spell, correctly pronouncing "nuclear," "Iraq" and "Ahmadinejad," while re-loading a full ammo magazine into a semi-automatic weapon before getting shot or subdued ...

... an afterword-to-the-wise of A(mer)ri(ca)zona ... don't shoot that sheriff (Dupnik) ... check his post-event remarks, then resume the Bob lyric ... "riiise, from your sleepless slumber"...