The show was marred by a weak poem by Alice Walker. She called it her inaugural poem. I’d call it Hallmark lite full of syrupy bland sentiments. The problem with Ms. Goodman and other white progressive feminists is that they are so desperate for the approval of black womanists, who smile at them when buying their books but secretly despise them, that they are responsible for promoting some of tritest of black literature none of which has the quality of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, which, for me, was the best of the four inaugural poems that I have heard. While Barack Obama reached back to the eighteenth century for a George Washington quote, Ms. Alexander went back to Anne Bradstreet, in a poem that combined the rhetoric of the Puritans with the concerns of the proletariat writers of the 1930s while using the literary devices of the modernists.
Hats off to C-Span and MTV for providing, in my opinion, the best of the inaugural coverage. C-Span let its cameras roam without being interrupted by pundits who are wrong most of the time or who are there to deliver asinine and saleable tough-love lectures to blacks. While MSNBC has right-wing black global-warming denier Michelle Bernard, certainly more evidence that MSNBC is favorable to Obama, CNN uses Tara Wall from Rev. Moon’s paper. (Michelle Bernard asserts her right-wing leanings from time to time, interrupting her pasted on smile. She opposed the equal pay for women bill that Obama signed.) C-Span permitted one to snoop in on some interesting sights and sounds. Like when the Carters passed by the Clintons on the way to being introduced to the crowds. While they greeted the Bushes warmly they snubbed the Clintons. Maybe it’s because they know the extent of the Clintons’ vindictiveness, still sore at those who supported Obama. Maureen Dowd reported that they were responsible for derailing Caroline Kennedy’s Senate bid as payback for her and her uncle supporting Obama. Instead of patronizing those whom they view as their target audience with comments about the inaugural from athletes and comedians, etc. C-Span had a first-rate African-American historian Daryl Scott, Chair of Howard University’s history department, to act as its guide to the Inauguration.
The corporate media won’t give the new president a break, regardless of what himbo and Imus lover Howard Kurtz said about the media being one hundred percent behind Obama, one of those media hoaxes that’s been refuted by three studies. He wants to be beyond race but the TV producers won’t let him. He may have a rainbow cabinet and a rainbow following, but those who control the opinion industry don’t include a variety of colors. This not only applies to the corporate media but the progressive and liberal media as well. Their ridiculing the Republican Party as a white country club is a case of people living in glass houses. This media country club will pounce upon every Obama misstep.
Though millions of people of different backgrounds, races and ethnic groups all over the world applauded, they view him still as the black president. Some might find this limiting. When they interviewed Obamakins in the crowd of two million, they focused on the views of blacks, (but in studio he was evaluated by mostly white panels and the right-wing black help). They won’t give the guy a break.
When he gave speeches that were soaring in oratory and rhetoric they said that he was trying to be a rock star or, as Mrs. Clinton said, all he has is a speech. Then when he delivers a sober low-key recitation — a list of the crises faced by Americans — Jeffrey Toobin, who got his job as TV commentator for his comment that blacks shouldn’t be “patted on the head” because they supported the decision of the O.J. criminal trial, complained that the speech didn’t include flights of oratory.
Other establishment elements are using his election to suggest that the fight for racial equality has been won. The New Yorker had a cartoon suggesting that blacks were “Free At Last.” They had a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. above an angry Bush leaving town. The Bush administration had a higher percentage of black contributors than The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Nation and other hip publications that supported Obama. In October 2009, Eric Alterman of The Nation commented on the decline of white American power. Not to worry. Whites still have The Nation where, like Pacifica, ninety percent of the commentary is by white males and an equal percentage of books reviewed by white male authors.
That cartoon in The New Yorker reminded me of what the great Chester Himes once said. He said that if you made a black man a general in the army you could do anything you wanted with black enlistees.
If, as The New Yorker and other publications have announced, we’ve reached King’s mountain top, I guess I’m a lousy mountain climber. I hear all of the shouting and cheering at the top as the Obamakins survey the Promised Land, but I’m down here struggling with these rocks. If I were a nineteenth-century cartoonist like Thomas Nast, I would label the rocks: discrimination against blacks and Hispanics by the mortgage industry; racial disparities in the health industry; racism in the criminal justice system, including prosecutorial and police misconduct; the flooding of the inner cities with illegal weapons.
And while the media are heralding the election of Barack Obama as signaling the advent of a new post-race period, their own profession has seen a virtual purge of minority journalists, eight hundred and forty lost their jobs during the year of his campaigning. Moreover, if the visuals they chose during inauguration are any indication, Barack Obama is the post-race president whom they won’t allow to be post-race.
Since then, millionaires and billionaires who own the media have used their talking heads to pounce upon any of Obama’s plans that are injurious to their interests. Already AOL news has shifted from presenting its daily black athlete in trouble to taking down Obama and while a first-rate writer and journalist like Amy Alexander is having trouble finding a place to place her copy, AOL employs the imported intellectual mercenary Dinesh D’Souza to write about black culture and politics which is like it would have been had Hollywood hired Strom Thurmond to write the screenplay for The Martin Luther King Story. MTV’s Youth Ball demonstrated that if the corporate media doesn’t repair its relying on the ancient carnie act, The Wedge, to raise ratings they will go the way of the Republican Party. Tennessee identified some of the MTV performers for an old school person like me. She and I get into it about which period is the best. I say the 1940s, she says now and maybe the 1960s. When I saw the enthusiasm of these young people, black, white, brown and yellow, helping to build houses, repair schools and “all fired up and ready to go,” I, who have been critical of some of Obama’s cynical political moves, after all he’s a politician, thought that he might just bring it off his “Yes, We Can.”
I was wrong about Obama’s being elected. I thought that Clinton would win. I voted for Cynthia McKinney because her political views are more compatible with mine. (One of Obama’s accomplishments was that up to now black men have been seen as evil; now maybe we’re the lesser of two evils?)
But I wasn’t ready for the Obama phenomenon that swept over the land like the legendary Big Wave that surfers talk about. I should have known that something different was happening when I heard a black man call into C-Span’s Washington Journal. He said, “When I hear Obama speak, I feel like just getting up and doing something!”