Silence

(I wrote this at the end of March, but never published it. Reading it, today, that was a mistake, even if it has no links. Just because).

One of the oldest, unspoken racist myths is that Black women cannot be raped. Especially by a white man. It is one of those myths that, of course, never actually gets said. But you know it exists, like a cancer festering inside, by looking at the reaction when a sister does the unthinkable: makes an accusation of rape that involves, even peripherally, a white man. Or, in this case, the white men who constitute the Lacrosse Team at Duke University. It's impossible that any of them raped her. Because of course, nobody can rape a Black woman.

And especially not a Black exotic dancer, earning her way through college at the historically-Black North Carolina Central University while also raising her two kids.

So, as was once sung in that great countercultural musical Hair in a song aptly called "The Flesh Failures"

The rest is silence.

At least until tiny protests started up three days ago in front of the house, owned by Duke University, protesting the team's failure to step up and tell what happened.

At least until an enterprising blogger who writes about "stuff that matters only to us" posts the photographs, names and parents of team on his website.

At least until Duke forfeited 2 games at the direction of its coaches to punish the boys for having a "rowdy party" at which they served alcohol to minors (not for rape, of course - that still hasn't happened.)

And definitely at least not until the entire, nationally ranked team gets indefinitely suspended by the NCAA as the consequence of their "thin blue line" of silence and refusal to cooperate with police.

Then the story becomes national news. Lord knows suspending some upstanding white boys from Long Island who just want to play sports is detrimental to their future. Since it is their future that matters. Which is why despite the fact that the injuries the victim suffered were enough to land her in the hospital for several days, nobody has been arrested.

Nobody has been charged.

Nobody has even been subjected to a lineup.

And, until a judge said "Enough!", nobody volunteered their DNA (not that submitting a DNA sample under a court order/search warrant is "volunteering" - but you'd never know that from the news reports, which do not admit that the DNA samples were not voluntarily given; all they say is that the boys insist they will be vindicated by them.)

Silence is indeed a central part of this story, because it is the silence -- particularly in the left-wing blogosphere, which normally is up in arms about feminist issues -- that is most telling. This rape allegedly occurred on March 14, 2 weeks ago. If you want an education about the ongoing existence of the devaluation of Black womanhood, do a quick search on mainstream blogs for this story. My search this morning turned up three diaries.

Three.

But the rest is silence. Which means, yet again, that she was not raped. We all know this. Even as yet, we know nothing.

OK That's Just Sad

Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow and their cronies at Enron all face lengthy visits to federal prison (yeah, right, who am I kidding? This is Bush county) for skimming billions from the American economy during the man-made California energy crisis. Executives of WorldCom and Tyco are either doing time or about to for the same thing. Michael Milken, poster-boy for the excesses of the junk bond era, made nearly a billion dollars. Heck, even Martha Stewart walked off with a couple hundred thou for her Imclone troubles.

Yet a prominent Republican brother and attorney, former candidate for the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, Claude Allen, takes a fall not for similarly awe-inspiring feats of corporate or white collar fraud, but for ripping off cheap shit from Target.


Damn, that's pitiful. Pit-i-ful. Pissing away both his law licenses in DC *and* Virginia (moral turpitude, shoplifting is, because it's theft!) and his right to vote in Maryland for years over some shit from *Target*.

Obviously, a brother who is considered a rising star in the Republican Party and has served as *personal* aide to the President still can't afford to shop somewhere where you're not having to fix up the stitching in clothes right after put them in the washing machine for the first time. Allen wasn't busted at Gianni Versace, or L'Uomo, or Kenneth Cole. Ferragamo or even Saks, Neiman Marcus or Nordstrom. He wasn't running his returns scam some place you'd think he should be able to afford to shop after carrying water for Dubbya all these years on the issue of "All you Black people need to do is get good and get God."

He was busted for trying to scam Target.

Target. Right-wing, blood red, anti-woman, competitor to Wal-Mart, home of the discount buy for the (lower) working class. Not that Target's all that cheap, if you really are poor. But still.

I wonder if the authors of twin studies are going to take this thing and run with it. After all, his brother Floyd was "the bad twin", by all accounts including their mama's. Of course, all one has to do is look at Claude Allen's running buddies like Armstrong Williams and Justice Clarence Thomas to know that ethics is a "flexible concept" with Black Republicans, just as much as with white, and that this situation, while pit-i-ful, is not really all that suprising. Well, not surprising except for the Target part. That's just fucked up.

Don't we Black folks have enough to be ashamed about? Is there nothing that we can do right? (Yes, that's sarcasm.) I have visions homeboys on the street who make their living running dope and numbers right now sitting with their heads in their hands reading the story of Claude Allen, feeling the shame that his particular bust brings to the erstwhile Black criminal mind. Not because he committed a crime, but because of how pit-i-ful that crime was, in the larger scheme of things given Claude Allen's ready access to money and power.

What a world, what a world.

(P.S. I don't buy the "evil twin" story floating around the netroots for one minute. This is not just all Claude Allen's brother. This scamming was done with Claude Allen's credit card. With bills that went to Claude Allen's house. That means, at a minimum, if his twin Floyd was the bag man, then Claude Allen kept the books on the take. Either way, Claude himself is dirty in this one.

Bill or Blog II

This month is kicking my ass, work wise. Of course, it would be the same month as we get news overflowing on all fronts: nascent civil war in Iraq, Feingold's Censure resolution, Conyers' impeachment resolution, not to mention the increasingly loud implosion of the hard-right as it eats itself alive over the prospect of getting it's ass kicked at the polls come November (assuming, of course, that the Democratic Party can actually get its rhetorical act together and make a coherent, non-apologetic, non-tea party polite case for why we should throw the bums out; a big assumption.)

So I've not been able to write much. That's disappointing to me. But it's that or piss off a judge. No way am I going to do that.

No Wonder He Carried His Ass to India

Obviously Bush knows when to haul ass.  I guess he figured he was politically safer being outside in India (although you have to love their welcome wagon, after poll numbers like these and while the newspapers are reporting that his own subordinate, John Negroponte is now publicly admitting what anyone with 1/3 of a brain stem knew was likely before we bum rush invaded Iraq for no damned reason 3 years ago - civil war in Iraq may indeed be on its way, with worldwide risks because of resultant regional instability:

If chaos were to descend upon Iraq or the forces of democracy were to be defeated in that country ... this would have implications for the rest of the Middle East region and, indeed, the world.

(Thank you, Mr. Negroponte, for telling us the obvious.  You shit-eating power-enslaved human rights violation supporting monkey.)
In honor of this "Tell us Something We *Don't* Know news about Iraq and its slide into civil war, I have written an open letter to President George W. Bush.  Here it is:

Dear Mr. President:

Congratulations, Mr. President. As the late Richard Pryor's grandmother told him when he flushed $1600 of cocaine down the toilet:

You dumb motherfucker!.....You don't have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot with the directions on the bottom!

But the truth is what it is, no matter how many times you stick your ugly-ass chimp head in the sand so you don't have to see reality rushing to bite you (and, unfortuntely, by extension all of us in terms of world economic standing and world opinion) in the ass and say stupid shit like this:

"I don't buy your premise that there's going to be a civil war."

Yeah, and I don't buy the premise that America needed to invade a sovereign nation that hadn't fucked with us first, either, but I have to live with that premise at present. What's your excuse?
You can't hide from the truth, Dubbya. You also can't hide from yourself. And it is YOU, Mr. President, that you need to run from.  Because you are the problem.  You destroy everything you touch professionally when you're left to do what you want.  Everything.  (How many people's companies lose money investing in oil in Texas for God's sake??!).  You've destroyed Iraq.  Some could make a pretty convincing case that you're about to destroy America if you haven't already (news travels slow in The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave when it comes to "it can't happen here - but it has".)
Do you, Mr. Bush, have *any* fucking clue about how utterly stupendous your lifelong failures are at this point? Most people learn from their mistakes, but you seem instead to be hell bent on finding new ways to make them, except with bigger and better toys.  Like your toy, the formerly sovereign nation of Iraq.  Unfortunately, where Iraq is concerned you appear to be setting new speed records breaking this particular toy - an entire country - by bringing it to what appears to be inevitable civil war all by your lonesome.
As my late mother always said:  Hard head totes a soft ass.  Your ass must be soft as the Pillsbury Dough Boy by now, Mr. Hard Head.  In terms of both opinion polls and the actual results of your He-Man invasion of Iraq, it is clear that you are getting your ignorance and stubbornness handed back to you on two fronts now served up on a rather out-of-control platter.  Here'a  free safety tip:  Denying reality doesn't change reality.  No matter how many times media members of your cult of personality come up with every reason under the sun to say you're being treated unfairly by pollsters.  The reality is that Iraq is now a failed war crime committed in our name.  The reality is that our country's economy is nearly destroyed, and the American dream destroyed too for anyone who actually works for a living.  Our idealism is nearly gone too.
But numbers like those in the CBS poll give me hope, however, unrealistic, that we might just save the country from you yet.  If we fight back. 
So I wanted to let you know I'm fighting back.  And that I have friends.
My advice to you, Mr. President, is that you'd better start asking Daddy what you're going to be doing if you get booted out of the White House early, as more and more voices are demanding.  After all, we all know that you've never been able to get or keep a job on your own, and have regularly been propped up by his help, his money, and his friends.  Let's face it - you're such an incompetent and arrogant mutha that your daddy appears to have embraced your sworn political enemy as the son he always wanted, instead of you.

Perhaps it's time you just faced up to the fact that you're a fuck up, sir.

Respectfully,

Shanikka

P.S.  Yes, I'm pissed at you.  Headlines like Headlines like this one, and this one and  THIS ONE make me cranky.  You dumb motherfucker.  Don't like it? You know where I am.  Come git me.  I know you've been listening to my babygirl and I diss your ass 2x a week on our international calls anyway.  That's why we joke about whether we'll end up in the same torture camp in Syria despite being extraordinarily rendered from two different places.