I am an asshole. It did not take me all 21 years of consciousness, I can’t remember shit before 3 years old, to realize this. But it did take me a full 21 years of consciousness to decide that I no longer want to be an asshole. This could be characterized as an attempt to exorcise the asshole in me. An attempt to return myself to a point where I can feel proud of who I am. Ironically, first I must dispense of my pride.
Where to start? Was it being born to extremely intelligent and loving parents? Was it never wanting for anything? Was it getting almost everything I asked for? Was it realizing that I was smarter than the majority of my peers? Was it achieving everything that I put my mind to?
I really have no clue. I guess that somewhere between the privilege, intelligence, and achievement a wellspring of arrogance was formed.
Multiple people have told me that I can seem aloof or dismissive. This is not the asshole in me. That is the shy insecure person who is terribly afraid of rejection.
The asshole in me is the guy who struggles to make small talk with people because they have been weighed and measured and found wanting, much like I now find myself. The asshole in me has manipulated countless situations so that they turn out in my favor. The asshole in me has either says what you want to hear or is brutally honest in a hurtful manner. The asshole in me has a million ambitions and responsibilities but continually puts them off because I know I can. The asshole in me has survived two major accidents but still continues to drive the streets like I’m Hancock before he met Charlize Theron, even though my greatest fear is death and within the subset of possible deaths my greatest fear is dying in a car accident. My friends have seen me drive hard, but they have not seen how I can drive when I’m in a bad mood and alone. Welcome to confession can I take your order please? Well father as I turned out of La Seiva I blocked a lane of traffic so I could get on to Saddle road quicker. At the entrance to Maraval I swung around a Frontier cutting it off as soon as the road became double laned. On the corner of Park and Henry I overtook someone on the inside of the road. Turning onto the end of independence square I sped around a pedestrian and swung from the outside lane to an inside lane as I turned cutting off a truck. I drove on the shoulder to overtake a car rather than legally merge on to the highway. On the highway I hit 160 kmph/100mph while weaving through lanes. At the lights in Aranguez I overtook a truck that had stopped at the lights by using a turning lane. All of this stemmed from me waking up from 3 hours of sleep and realizing that I had three cavities. It was after I turned off of the main road that I thought about how pointless everything I had done was, it hadn’t changed the facts that precipitated it, and it had endangered lives other than my own.
I want to stop being that asshole.
They say that knowing is half the battle, well knowing is obviously the easier half. If ignorance is bliss then being self aware but without conscience must run a close second. And, it has continued for far too long. I have not cherished the things I should have and all it has brought me is pain. It is time for me to try harder; it is time for me to be a better friend, brother, son, relative and person.
As everyone's favorite asshole Kanye West loves to say, it's a process, so please help me!

Kanye's rise from the ashes?

A little under a year ago Kanye West was a phariah.

I guess that's just the way the world works, express a valid opinion based on a President's response to a disaster and no one cares. Rudely, but all the same correctly proclaim that Beyonce had the best video of all time and the entire world sides with the pop star major label product. I'm not gonna front, aside from the millions in the bank and supermodel looking gold diggers, dealing with that much misplaced hatred must have sucked. If I had an Amber Rose at my side I too would have said fuck it, and disappeared for a while.

But even more interesting has been his return. It really started with his joining twitter soon before power dropped. He was easy to follow, you got exactly what you expected, silliness, wanton luxury consumption, twit pics of a life led by few, and unexpectedly, some rambling introspection. And as expected, it is a hit.

Power itself was a departure from the normal Kanye opening single. Dark and introspective wit over a track that was patently un-pop. A short teaser video based on an imagery of hell that was only available on the interwebs. There was no upbeat beat or MTV worthy video. I for one wondered what is Kanye up to. I understood his desire to move toward deeper artistry in his work but not how exactly he could do that and sell records according to the industry model.

His next departure from the norm was GOOD fridays, say what, who can resist free music. Great beats, great rhymes what more could you want(phonte voice). It made sense, it kept him relevant musically, and us patient, while allowing him forgo releasing other tracks until he played runaway at the VMA's.

Then there is the masterstroke. The Runaway video. It is an impressive accomplishment. He showcases his music, his desire to have what he makes seen as real art, and the emotional turmoil of the last year in a beautifully shot easy to watch short film. As far as the music, he gives us just enough of it to confirm that his album should be at least good, while again leaving us wanting.

I really think that Kanye West has waged an incredible campaign for our hearts and minds. He may have lain a blueprint for all artists on how to explore your other artistic interests while setting your album up for monster first week sales. I won't call Kanye the official rapper of the internet generation, but one thing is for sure he does get the internet generation, and that will only help his star burn brighter.

Stale Crumpets and Cold Tea

The fall of 2008, the first semester of my senior year, I had the pleasure of taking an amazing class called “Race and Politics”. It looked at politics and its complex relationship with, you know, race. Which is to say it basically looked at American politics since the passage of the voting and civil rights acts, no wait, since emancipation proclamation. Apparently, it is a class that Mike Taibbi of rolling stone should have taken.
Mr. Taibbi’s article on the Tea Party, “Tea & Crackers”, is highly insightful. He chronicles the origin of the tea party, from its birth in libertarian ideals to its hijacking by the upper echelons of republican corporate interests. He provides an excellent look at the motivations of the tea partiers and their narcissistic thought process. However, he loses me when he says it would be wrong to call the Tea Partiers racist.
I say this because in almost all facets of society, especially politics, there is nothing new under the sun. Yes, mankind has seen it all before. And, America has seen this all before.
America’s history is one dominated by oppositional groups. Us versus Them. The most poignant of these is the history of African Americans and white (mainly southern white) Americans. (A quick aside it’s fucking disgusting that American without a modifier is reserved for white Americans, I’m gonna start a movement to call white American’s European Americans and Native American’s Americans. Jk about the second part). After all it is this history that has shaped American politics since it’s inception. Yes, since the declaration of independence black Americans and their relation to white Americans have been a source of consternation and contention.
The best way to examine the long history of this interracial (pause/no porn) relationship is to take a look at a one particular phenomenon of slavery, the escaped slave. It is not the escaped slave who was interesting; after all wouldn’t you try to escape forced labor, heinous treatment, and inhumane living conditions. It was the people who hunted the escaped slaves: posses. Groups of poor white men who would take up their arms and relentlessly hunt down the only people that had it worse than them.
Here’s an inexact analogy to the posse’s situation. I am a soldier. A robot has recently taken my job and income, as such I am poor and idle, scratching out a meager living on my land while the generals I could be serving earn obscene amounts of money because the military no longer has to pay humans, or worry about their well being. It only has to pay for the upkeep of these ever-toiling machines that they can easily replace when broken or destroyed. Say one of these robots develops sentience and makes a break for it. Those generals would now come to me, because they could not risk the robot freeing its compatriots. Now I as the recently fucked over soldier would tell the generals to shove it, hoping that it has a sharp point and reaches their brains. But if I believed that the robot posed a threat to the lives of my wife and children I might willingly enlist in the hunt for this rogue.
The poor white southerner truly believed that the “savage” African slave would not hesitate to kill him and his family if he were freed. Quite frankly, I don’t blame the poor white southerner. If I helped keep a people subjugated in heinous conditions for a long period of time, nothing would scare me like the prospect of them rising up and seeking revenge. The main culprit of the poor white southerner’s attitude was ignorance. Unlike my soldier they never had the benefit of working for slave owners. They were born poor and fated to remain poor due to shitty employment prospects, due to the fact that slaves held the majority of southern jobs, and they were taught to fear dark skin and all the savagery that would be unleashed if this dark skin were to be freed. They never thought, how am I benefitting from slavery? They never thought who is benefitting from slavery? And most importantly they never thought, who is actually suffering from slavery?
This line of questioning could have freed the slaves earlier and launched America on a vastly different path. Unluckily for the slaves, political thought is a top down exercise. The rich and few hold sway over the poor and many.
This relationship has continued throughout American history. It is most severely expressed when the theys, seemingly, stand to benefit.
Lincoln, A Republican, emancipates the slaves probably creating a job market and a white middle class by unintentionally creating a racially segregated capitalist market. How does America thank him, by electing a Democrat.
The dixiecrats maintain a political stranglehold over the American south by preying on the fears of white men that they are sexually inadequate when compared to the black male whose sole desire is to taste the pure as the driven snow sex of the white female. Well this is a gross simplification, but for the purposes of this article it is all I need. As such blacks are segregated, lynched, and hated. In the south they are practically rights less from the emancipation proclamation to the signing of the civil rights act.
When the civil rights act is signed Lyndon B Johnson proclaims to his Democrat colleague’s “We have lost the south for a generation”. Never mind that integration destroyed black companies that could not compete with larger white companies, helping to take a black middle class with it. Never mind that black teachers(and academic excellence) and other professionals, part of the black middle class, became a dying breed crushed under the immense weight of southern institutionalized racism. Southern whites only thought was you gave those niggers rights. Which then ushered in a new era (no fitteds) of Republican dominance.
And the Republicans took the insecurities of white America and kicked the ball further down the road. Barry Goldwater’s nearly openly racist rhetoric of returning safety to America, Reagan referencing non-existent welfare queens, Bush Sr. using the Willie Horton ad to crush an opponent: all example of how the black other has been used to rally poor whites, who are actually in direct competition with poor blacks for whatever scraps fall from the plates of the wealthy, to the republican cause. A cause that has increasingly strayed away from its somewhat noble principles, that are now only truly espoused by libertarians.
The tea party is no different. It is the same ruse worked to perfection. Us and them. The them may not be overtly persons of color, but the racial implications seethe beneath the surface. For instance, anti socialism: why would any poor person oppose a system that would make their lives better by raising taxes on the rich and corporations?
Well to answer that you need to look at the “appeal” of the Republican party. It’s original values were to encourage open competition between all persons. As such your wealth would be commensurate with your hard work and intelligence. The government should not help any specific group of people no matter the circumstances. Socialism is obviously to be abhorred. When applied to America this does not account for it’s racial history or the fact that wealth is accumulated and begets more wealth as generations live and die. What it also does not take into account is that this accumulated wealth provides a false image to the white populous, who see the rich white benefactors of the accumulated wealth of slave owners and think that they are part of a superior people. While the other, the inheritors of the accumulated poverty of slavery, colonialism and second class citizenship are lazy, stupid, criminals. As such under educated whites are drawn to the Republican party rhetoric that soft plays this image of the other.
What has happened with the Tea Party is that the thought of an African American president is too much. It is not the blind faith in their candidates, who are mostly inexperienced and tend to gaffe often. It is the blind fury constantly and wrongly aimed at Obama for all the issues he inherited and an agenda that would benefit the Tea Party members the most and hurt, not that significantly, big business. The fear of being engulfed by an other propped up by socialism seems to have dug in too deeply. It has brought racist vitriol to the front and sent subtlety to the back of the bus. Racist signs are paraded on the street courted by the GOP while it moves with impunity to protect its corporate interests.
Race is at the heart of Tea Party politics, just as it is at the heart of all American politics. There will never be any real progress for the majority of Americans. Until the European American majority begins to understand that their us and them is not black vs. white. It is the haves versus the have nots, with the haves heavily favored, and by siding with race over the potential gains for all they are just helping the other team more.

Like that Bron Bron?

When I say "Like that Bron Bron", I don't mean it as the clipse do in Doorman. It's a rhetorical question. I'm asking are you gonna do them like that Bron Bron? Whereas the clipse are asking, do you like the Madonna look a like you are currently banging?

And I won't say it, I will shout it every time Bron Bron dunks on someone.

And Lebron isn't even my favorite of the trio. That privilege goes to Dweezus.

What can I say. The prospect of watching a season long highlight real has me salivating. They should change the heat's name to the slam'o'rama. Barring injury or truly awful role players the heat are a lock for most entertaining team this season.

Kobe, Pau, and Ron Ron? They will be in the finals next year. Lebron, Wade, and Bosh? Who knows? All I can say for sure that when those three are on the floor together we might OD on all the amazing.

Now usually I don't do this, but uhhh.....

I want these.


I want these so bad that if I ask you for money don't give it to me, because I might buy these. Are they expensive? hell yeah. Would they be worth it? I do not know.
What I do know is they are fresh.
The color, the look of the leather; the fact that they're made to be worn sockless ( Boat Shoes and Clarks crew stand up and be counted). It just seems like it would quickly be my fall shoe of choice.
Well if I had fall. It's flip flop weather year round down here.

check it out at

http://www.highsnobiety.com/news/2010/09/28/visvim-virgil-boots-kangaroo-folk/

Just how dumb do you think we are?

Change, 2 years ago that word served as a rallying cry around the world as America dumped the Neocons out of office and saved the world from what would have been the unmitigated disaster of a McCain/Palin White House. And yet as the US approaches the midpoint of Obama’s first term, it appears that it was simply not ready for change. The right has shifted even further right with its base delving from implicit racism to openly xenophobic and racist sentiment. It has returned to attempting to stonewall any Democratic legislation, particularly those that represent Obama’s campaign issues. It has successfully reduced health care reform to a sham that will for the most part continue to line the coffers of insurance companies while still leaving significant portions of the public uncovered. It has opposed regulation of the banking regulation in the face of irrefutable evidence that regulation is necessary and yet most crassly it has tried to limit the amount of money that the federal can seek as damages from BP. Also, the Republican Governors of states affected by the oil spill have been loath to activate the National Guard for clean up, but quick to blame this on President Obama.
Yet through all of these acts, most of which could be viewed as malicious toward anyone that earns less than $100,000 dollars a year, the Tea Party and what has to be their mostly ignorant denizens have continued to blindly bash Obama for attempting to right the wrongs that the GOP and their had wrought on the US on the behest of feeding the ever growing capitalist beast. At the heart of all this is the familiar theme of fear of the other blinding those who could benefit the most from unity. Yet the knife being twisted in said heart is the continual lack of any form of reconciliation of the United State’s sordid history of race relations and the divides that fracture the US populous as a whole. However, unless a far larger fraction of the white population becomes willing to seek some sort of understanding of the implications of its racially hegemonic past there will never be true change, the corporations win and hope for actual change continues to fade fast.
Recently, in Trinidad and Tobago, change was also adopted as the war cry of the coalition that pushed the People’s National Movement out of power. Unlike the US I held out very little optimism that any actual change would occur. Trinidadian politics has been dominated by the same 2 parties for most of my life, the difference between this party has not been the politics: both parties thrive on corruption and racial pandering rather than making actual progress, whether economic or social. So when I heard that one party had upended the other, just like the last election, I expected more of the same.
What I got was quite frankly a jaw dropping amount of the same old shit. Yesterday the ruling party released their budget. There were some good ideas, such as tax rebates for installing solar water heaters, which could almost be seen as progressive. Then I heard about the less progressive plans that the COP held. Rather than installing a countrywide rapid transit rail system the COP has decided that it would be a far better idea to connect Maracas(A popular beach) to Tunapuna(A town of middling significance).
Let me make it clear why I am this angry. The COP canceled a project launched by a previous government that would serve to reduce traffic congestion, move goods and labor efficiently, and provide long-term employment for many for a project that would accomplish nothing. Some people will be able to reach a beach more easily, but the actual utility of the tunnel to our country would be veritably nil. Further the COP, to tremendous applause, lowered the taxes on oil companies in order to “encourage” investment. I am left with a sinking feeling. This will not encourage further investment, all of our resources are already accounted for, the COP has simply increased the profit margins of foreign oil companies.
The numerous white elephants that have been erected in my absence may have alerted my people that change was necessary, but apparently it did not make them look beyond their usual options. On the back of racial divides, corruption, and a carnival mentality colonial corporations are yet again winning. This begs the question, how dumb are we?

( Jay-Z's voice)This is America People ( Jay-Z's voice)

For the past few weeks there has been an uproar about the plan to put a “Mosque” at “Ground Zero”. You will note that I bracketed the words mosque and ground zero, I did this because the building that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf wishes to see rise is not a Mosque but a Muslim community center that happens to have a prayer room, and the proposed site would lie in the former shadow of the twin towers, not atop the gash that still mars Manhattan.
In light of these two very salient points one is forced to wonder what exactly the furor is about. This is not like a conquering moor army erecting a Mosque over a razed town on the Iberian Peninsula, which is one example of the incorrect comparisons that I have recently read. It is in fact a mission of peace being undertaken by an individual with strong interfaith ties and a pacifistic message.
So why so serious Americans, really, what is the issue? A frequent ally of the US wants to erect a monument to the peaceful nature of Islam and yet people turn out in droves clutching white signs reading Sharia in a font that could be named blood spatter. It is actually quite sad, it is not as if there has been a misinterpretation of the facts, they are all easily available online; from Feisal Abdul Rauf’s pacifistic track record, to a correct definition of Sharia. It is willful ignorance that is probably fueled by the racist opinions (fair and balanced news it most certainly is not) of Rupert Murdoch’s GOP attack dog.
I’m saddened that a portion of certain segment of the US population is still acts like it does, I will spell it out later in the post, but for now look at who is marching against the community center and who is marching for it.
However, there are other facts that are far more pertinent.
First, the US is a nation of immigrants; even its aboriginal inhabitants were not here when North America was initially formed. Nope, they traveled many miles and many moons (sorry, had to do it) from Asia, when an Alaskan-Siberian ice bridge existed, to populate the Americas. Without these immigrants the US would most likely be as relevant as Togo in the world village: without slaves there would be no basis for America to be a superpower, without fairly constant immigration from Europe until the 19th century the US economy would have probably stagnated, without the influx of exceptional Asian and African students to the US educational system during the later part of the 20th century, who continued on to work in the US after their educational tenure the US ended, the US would most likely not have outstripped its closest rivals as it has.
Second, there are no grounds, legal, moral, or otherwise (barring idiocy) to protest the building of this community center: political hyenas have far too long trampled upon the separation of chuch (Church) and state, like a toddler in a stadium stampede, to appeal to the undereducated and racist. America has no state religion, if it did, wouldn’t that be like exercising Sharia? Yes it would. Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the constitution, the same constitution that many of the people who oppose the community center would claim to revere. But more importantly, one nation under God is an affront to the founding fathers (sorta), In God we trust is an affront to the founding fathers (sorta), and barring the erection of this community center is an affront to the founding fathers (again sorta, the founding fathers were for the most part still racist dicks, which led to the extension of slavery and the civil war).
Last, the people who are complaining the most about this “Mosque” have absolutely no right to argue against it, if they do then “Native Americans”(misnomer) have every right to picket churches. What we have here is yet another example of the ignorant portion of white America being suckered into hating “the other” against their interests. It has happened before, whether the other were Aboriginal Americans, African Americans, or Asian Americans.
As such the erection of this “Mosque” may be exactly what America needs. Five to ten years down the line, when the world hasn’t been destroyed by a cataclysm triggered by suicide bombers, Americans may look back and say “damn we were dumb as rocks back then, we should smarten up a little bit.”

Well, one can only hope.

Ok, let's try this one more time.

"I'm coming home again, do you think about me now and then, cause I'm coming home again!"- Kanye West.

So I'm going to be returning to the twin beauties of Trinidad and Tobago for the first time in two years. Overdue as fuck, ain't it? Quite frankly, I'm going to be carrying back a lot of baggage, both of the literal and metaphysical kind. However, I also will probably be unemployed for the first 2 months I'll be home. This should allow me to get over whatever humps are ahead of me, as well as allow me a little more free time to contemplate life and its meaning.

No wait, we're born, we grow, we follow our biological imperatives to procreate, then we die: life in a nutshell.

Soooooo, scratch the meaning of life from what I'll be contemplating. But, I will be contemplating a lot, hopefully this will lead to me actually using this blog as the outlet for my thoughts, which was my initial intention.

So if "anyone's out there, cause I feel like I'm talking to myself"(Eminem), I will be making a sincere attempt to post more.

"Thank you, good night and good luck"

Haiti

Paul Shirley should have read The Black Jacobins( CLR James), a little bit about the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, and about the brutal dictatorship that Haiti is only a few years removed from to get a better idea of why Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere before he wrote this:


Dear Haitians –

First of all, kudos on developing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Your commitment to human rights, infrastructure, and birth control should be applauded.

As we prepare to assist you in this difficult time, a polite request: If it’s possible, could you not re-build your island home in the image of its predecessor? Could you not resort to the creation of flimsy shanty- and shack-towns? And could some of you maybe use a condom once in a while?

Sincerely,

The Rest of the World.

According to the rumors page on allhiphop.com the author was fired from his job at ESPN. If this is true I would like to applaud ESPN for taking the correct course of action.