Don't let money fool ya'
Imagine having created something everlasting and then having that thing completely perverted by outside forces. Thus is the saga of the 1973 song and a Grammy Hall of Famer “For the Love of Money” from the O’Jays. It shuffled to the front of my iPod yesterday and I gave it another hard listen. It’s seven minutes and eleven seconds of rhythm, wisdom, and pure indictment of that “lean, mean, mean green.” It’s First Timothy, actually: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
Written by Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff, and Anthony Jackson, and recorded by Eddie Levert and the O’Jays in Philly in '73, it was put to paper at a time when the authors were starting to experience terrific financial success, yet were reconciling their newfound monetary gain with their spiritual values. The tune features an unadorned and cautionary message to match Paul's first epistle to Timothy: “For the love of money/People will steal from their mother. For the love of money/People will rob their own brother. For the love of money/People can’t even walk the street.”
Then more: “People don’t care who they hurt or beat… a woman will sell her precious body… Money can drive some people out of their minds.”
And that it has. The song’s principal hook “Money, money, money, money” has proven to be too tempting to be left by others to its actual intent, and the focus of the song has shifted to one instead of idolatry, greed, and the celebration of money's accumulation. It has been appropriated by boxing champ Floyd Mayweather, Jr. as his “walk out” music. Mayweather, notable for being the world's highest paid athlete, has shown no capacity as of yet for a social conscience. Tax giant H&R Block uses the song unsuitably in television advertisements promoting how much money the company will get back for consumers from the United States Treasury. And of course, most famously, it was falsely incorporated by NBC to anchor Donald Trump’s reality-competition programs
The Apprentice and
Celebrity Apprentice. 'Trump loves money' is the unmistakable message of that show and its poorly-matched theme song. That accumulation of "money, money, money, money" has caused younger listeners, like my wife, to recognize "For the Love of Money" first and foremost, as President Trump's theme song. It followed him from NBC, first, to his appearance on the WWE professional wrestling circuit, and then he started breaking it out last year at his presidential campaign stops, At that point, the O'Jays had to finally gather the lawyers together and pump out a cease and desist.
An attorney's letter to Trump’s campaign co-chair Paul Manafort read in part,
“Your use of our clients’ signature song, and utilizing the original recording, constitutes a patently false implication that Mr. Levert and Mr. (Walter) Williams have endorsed you or your political agenda or Mr. Trump’s agenda. Our clients unequivocally do not endorse you, your agenda nor your party’s views or those of Mr. Trump. On the contrary, Mr. Levert and Mr. Williams have actively opposed these ideals.”
Levert followed with a personal statement,
“[Trump] presents himself as supporting ‘law and order’ but, in truth, he’s not respecting the law at all. Mr. Trump resorts to painting pictures of gloom and doom and suggesting that he, alone, is the one savior who can fix things. This reminds me of another story and that would be the Book of Revelation.”
Could things get any worse for the O’Jays and their message? Let’s hope not. Their other signature song is “Love Train," and there's precious little room on board that one for any misinterpretation.
An anti-racist's creed
In 1985, Miles Davis told Jet Magazine that if he had one hour left to live on the planet, he would spend it choking a white man. “I’d do it nice and slow,” Davis said. Truthful or hyperbole, I like to think that, if Davis followed through with his hypothetical homicide, the white man he chose wouldn’t be Bill Evans. Evans had played piano in Davis’ first great sextet in the late ‘50s and performed on the seminal
Kind of Blue album. Davis cared enough about the man to try to help him kick his heroin habit multiple times. Of course, Evans was already dead by 1985.
Where does that leave the rest of us? I give this question a lot of thought these days. This is an extraordinary moment in global history to rise up and remodel white consciousness. It’s demanded of us. We’re needed. We’re late to it. Our black brothers and sisters are putting themselves in the street. Again. Through some miracle, they have pulled us away from our passionate pursuit of escapism and seem to have garnered our attention, even if many of us feel simply
inconvenienced. They’re marching. They’re picketing. They’re boycotting. They’re kneeling. They’re teaching. What are we going to pay out to cover our share of the rent?
For Malcolm X, the ideal white soldier was an actual soldier, the pre-Civil War guerrilla fighter John Brown. White America, even liberal America, would have us remember Osawatomie Brown as a religious lunatic, a demented dreamer, a terrorist. That wasn't Brother Malcolm's take...
"We need allies who are going to help us achieve victory, not allies who are going to tell us to be nonviolent. If a white man wants to be your ally, what does he think of John Brown? You know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. He wasn’t nonviolent. White people call John Brown a nut. Go read the history, go read what all of them say about John Brown. They’re trying to make it look like he was a nut, a fanatic. They made a movie about it, I saw a movie on the screen one night. Why, I would be afraid to get near John Brown if I go by what other white folks say about him.
“But they depict him in this image because he was willing to shed blood to free the slaves. And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom—in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts. As long as he wants to come up with some nonviolent action, they go for that, if he’s liberal, a nonviolent liberal, a love-everybody liberal. But when it comes time for making the same kind of contribution for your and my freedom that was necessary for them to make for their own freedom, they back out of the situation… We need white allies in this country, we don’t need those kind who compromise. We don’t need those kind who encourage us to be polite, responsible, you know. We don’t need those kind who give us that kind of advice. We don’t need those kind who tell us how to be patient. No, if we need some white allies, we need the kind that John Brown was, or we don’t need you.”
What he’s getting at here is the distinction between what author and educator Ibram X. Kendi calls the “assimilationist” and the “anti-racist.” The assimilationist aspires to equality, but it’s going to be on the white majority’s terms. The white canvas serves as the norm. We’re not going to disrupt the fundamental structure. Indeed we must always affirm it. Act proper, they say to black people, not the fool. Lift yourself up. Your culture needs you to assimilate into one that is not your own to prove that you are worthy. This has been an evolution in racist thought. Booker T. Washington was an assimilationist. He championed uplift. He engaged valiantly in the struggle during a time of Jim Crow terror, but he promoted behavior and the development of educational institutions that mirrored a white ideal. Better behavior among blacks, he believed, could erase racism. W.E.B. DuBois came after. He was an assimilationist that became an anti-racist with the benefit of living to see the failures of attempted assimilation. He lived long enough to march on Washington with Dr. King in 1963. The anti-racist believes that the onus is on the oppressor. Being black doesn’t require one to be super-white. The white oppressor built the racist institutions, the economic system that enslaves, and the military force that polices the streets and imprisons, protecting the de facto imbalance that comforts the white power structure and afflicts the black underclass.
Off on an unusual tangent, assimilationists, who tend to dwell in the middle- and upper-class, hated the early-mid-century radio and television depictions of the comedy team, Amos and Andy, who were first white men portraying black men on the radio, but later the comedic characters were portrayed by black actors on TV. Amos and Andy did not uplift. They were buffoons, uneducated hustlers. But poor blacks made the show a popular one in both media formats. They were grateful for media images that revealed black people to possess the same human foibles that were being depicted for and by other ethnic groups. Being black doesn’t mean you don’t also get to be human. Black people, in reality, are a collection of groups differentiated, according to Kendi, by gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, skin color, profession, and nationality. Getting treated as an individual is actually the finest example of white privilege in the U.S.
Here are other examples I’ve come to recognize recently by investing just a modicum of time and effort, torn from today’s headlines-- carrying guns in a public place, that’s white privilege; the Second Amendment in general; the presumption of innocence; unqualified respect for having served in the nation’s armed forces; getting to define for yourself what it is
you are protesting instead of being told by someone else what your motivation is. This is on us. This is shit for us to deal with as white people. Slave labor built this empire. The police state, which we empower, arm, and legislate, preserves the fundamental
disorder.
What is racism? I was asked this question in the comments thread of one of the blog entries years ago. One of my readers was angry about something I had written, and I came up with an inadequate answer. With the help of Kendi’s book “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” I think I have a better and more educated answer to offer now: If you believe that all people are created equal and are truly of equal biology beneath the skin, then you must acknowledge that all inequities that exist in the culture—in the economic system, in the political system, in the criminal justice system, of opportunity, are the products of racism. That is the anti-racist position. If you do not believe that, that is racism. There’s no other explanation for these stark discrepancies that exist except to believe that some races are inferior to others.
Can blacks be racist? White reactionaries often tell us that they can, and you know something? I believe those reactionaries are correct-- but not in the way they intend to convey. Members of an oppressed race cannot be racist towards their oppressor because racism is part and parcel of the controlling institutions. Racism is systemic and the oppressor controls the system.
But… the reality is that, in a racist society, because racism is a disease, many blacks come to internalize
themselves that they are inferior. Like so many whites, they also buy into the pervasive lie that they are less than worthy, that their culture is less than worthy, that their heritage and their customs are less than worthy. That’s the racism many black people live with within themselves because it’s been ingrained in them. We have a responsibility then, and not an easy one. Our mission is to educate ourselves, to liberate ourselves, to self-critique, to open our minds to help change, collectively, what is the pathological reality of a racist America.
The war in Vietnam revisited
Ken Burns'
The Vietnam War is dynamic, to be sure, and endlessly watchable. It's 18 hours in full, and I've been plowing through it as quickly as I can (only 2 of 18 remain) with a plan to double-back for a complete encore. The iconic filmmaker that has already given us
The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The West, and so many memorable other historical templates can't tell the entire story of this most important war-- even with such a vast canvass upon which to operate, and he was never going to go as far as he could-- or should-- in his editorial condemnation of the war. He would have to declare Johnson, McNamara, Nixon, and Kissinger all war criminals to do that, and this taxpayer-funded production has to appeal to the widest possible audience to be what Burns wants it to be-- an art piece that will be a touchstone for the populace. America's not ready to fully face the reality of our crimes in Southeast Asia, and I fear we never will be. We've spent four decades since its conclusion still debating the war, and we could spend four more just debating
Ken Burns' Vietnam War. I feel he has touched on everything that I've felt was important, coming into it as I did with my natural biases, though he hasn't hit some as hard as I would have liked. We need to know about the fragging though, the mutinies on the battlefield, the aerial holocaust, the shameful ambitions of government technocrats, the unequal sacrifices of so many ethnic groups, in general, and American families, in particular, and broadly speaking, we need to know about and accept the moral failures of our leaders and of ourselves. Precious Lord, how we need to know about the moral failures. I hope that the current United States President was watching, but I'm certain that he wasn't.
Burns lets the men and women of that time tell their story. He lets the war's engineers indict themselves with their own words. We have Oval Office recordings that tell us precisely what we need to know about the inadequacies of those men. Perhaps it's best, actually, if Burns doesn't give us exactly what it is that I wanted from the film in advance. The truth is there for all to see, without our being bopped on the head with it. I hope people found it or eventually come to it. I've been shocked at how little cultural buzz and critical analysis it has garnered.
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I haven’t written about television in forever’s time. In May, I recall seeing Michael McKean’s witness stand meltdown as Chuck McGill on
Better Call Saul (an episode entitled "Chicanery") back in June and declaring him instantaneously the winner of 2017 Emmy’s award for best supporting actor in a dramatic series. And then McKean didn’t even garner a nomination. With the Academy now discredited by that sin, it probably doesn’t matter then that Maggie Gyllenhaal just rendered the rest of the field superfluous-- in the contest for the best lead actress in a drama-- with her performance in the fifth-ever episode of HBO’s
The Deuce. The episode this past Sunday was called “What Kind of Bad?” and it featured a tour de force scene of fiction on the streets of 1972 New York City, supported as she was also on the screen by the artist known as Method Man. Wow. Just wow. You will see it and you will be transported in a gale of wind.
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Quote of the day: Umberto Eco once wrote of the classic film
Casablanca, “Two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.” If it was me that had said that, and not him, the world could really just kiss my ass.
The end of things
A great legacy of Hugh Hefner's life was his work for civil rights. He gave the comedian Dick Gregory his start in Chicago in 1961. At the Comedy Central Hefner Roast in 2001, Gregory punted his chance to heckle Hef, saying instead, "You had the courage when no one was bringing in blacks and minorities, and let you stand flat-footed in America and just talk, you brought me in. You didn't give me a lecture. You gave me no instructions... I come here tonight not to roast you, but to say that had you not had the guts back then, we black comics that the world has been able to look at and understand our genius, we would be in some pot, roasting in debt, knowing we were never going to make it."
Gregory and Hefner nearly left together. Gregory died August 19th. The comic also noted during his life that it was Hefner that gave him the money that he used to go to Mississippi in 1964 and help locate the bodies of the three slain Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
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The Cardinals' season has ended, a second in a row in non-playoff disappointment. The name you'll need to know next year is
Tommy Pham. Actually, you should have heard more of it this year. He didn't debut until May 5th, and still posted WAR (that's wins above a replacement) of 6.25. The National League leader, Giancarlo Stanton posted 7.55. It's an accumulative statistic and Pham spotted the rest of the field 27 games and the entirety of April. He's the Cardinals' first 20 home run, 20 stolen base player in 13 years. He posted a .300/.400/.500 season, meaning a .306 batting average, a .411 on-base percentage, and a .520 slugging percentage. The OBP was good for third in the National League. He walked 71 times and scored 95 runs though he played only 128 games, and too many of those coming off the bench because his manager believed more in others.
Nobody knows who he is. Looking up these stats, I find that he is only "owned" in 80.7% of ESPN fantasy baseball leagues. Those must be really winnable.
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Future Hall of Famer Yadier Molina and his wife have set up a GoFundMe campaign for his native Puerto Rico. You can find it here:
https://www.gofundme.com/pray4prteammolina4pr.
But don't you hate it when athletes mix sports and politics?
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I thought I'd heard all the great Don Rickles' lines, but remember that he was still working up to the end. From the new
AARP web series
Dinner with Don, on the talent of Peter Lawford: "He knew how to carry a casket."
