BLOG.LESPAYNE.NET

Limbaugh Mischaracterizes Steinbrenner's Legacy

Les Payne — 2010-07-15T11:00:00Z

GETTY IMAGES

Les Payne

July 15, 2010

George Steinbrenner was saluted in death by a “recovering” drug addict, one Rush Limbaugh, as a “cracker” who made black players rich while firing “a bunch of white guys as managers left and right.”

The Limbaugh eulogy seems a sure sign that the illicit OxyContin addiction that likely made him deaf has clearly numbed him to shame. The penchant for lying, however, is a preexisting condition.

Gloating inaccuracies about the departed owner of the New York Yankees moved me to violate one of my rules of commentary: never kick a dog even when he’s up, especially a mangy one frothing at the mouth.

Unfortunately, Limbaugh’s untimely comment deserves attention this time because the base sentiment is deeply held by millions of Americans who swoon on every word that falleth from the Talkmeister’s lips.

First off, Limbaugh was born in Missouri and should know that, unlike himself, Ohio-born Steinbrenner—who owned the “Yankees” for crying out loud—is not technically a “cracker.” In terms of white-racist consciousness, again, it is Limbaugh, not Steinbrenner, who tops the leader-board.

As for black players, the Yankees owner did not make them millionaires. Steinbrenner earned his billions, and his teams won 7 World championships along the way, by paying the going rate for “free agents.” And if anyone, along with the players’ marketable skills, made this value assessment a reality—it was Curt Flood.

This superb centerfielder, who helped the St. Louis Cardinals win three pennants in the 1960’s, successfully challenged the reserve clause in court that had allowed owners to treat players as chattel property. (Some critics of the LeBron James decision would return sports to this human-as-commodity age when management was totally free to bind and loose labor as it desired.)

In Steinbrenner’s case, Herr Limbaugh, the Yankees paid million-dollar salaries to far, far more white players over the years than blacks. It is the peculiar impulse of bigots like Limbaugh to single out successful African-Americans in such cases as undeserving and to imply that their earnings are diverted from due compensation of privileged white players.

In his post-mortem salute to Steinbrenner, Limbaugh protests that the Boss, as he was commonly called, “fired a bunch of white guys as managers left and right." Here the radio lie-addict nods off under a near overdose.

While it’s true that Steinbrenner fielded some 20 managers in 27 years, firing Billy Martin a record 5 times; all of those he hired and fired—fully 100 percent--were white. Thus, the Boss can be criticized for firing too many managers; he cannot however be indicted for firing too many white managers which suggests that he fired them because they were white. As always, the toxicity of Limbaugh’s race bigotry gets the better of him.

If anything, the Boss could be criticized for never hiring an African-American to manage the Yankees; but Limbaugh, of course, won’t go there. And Steinbrenner’s record should not be laid to rest on this bitter note.

So committed to winning was this Yankees owner that ambition often blinded him even to standard patterns of racist practices in sports. When the shipbuilding tycoon brought his Cleveland Pipers into the American Basketball League, for example, Steinbrenner hired the first black head coach at the professional level of this game, allowing John McLendon to make sports history.

As one of the last baseball teams to desegregate its lily-white roster, the Yankees were not exactly a paragon of fairness when Steinbrenner took over as principal owner in 1973. Inserting such black thunder in the line-up as Reggie Jackson, sometimes starting as many as six non-Hispanic blacks, Steinbrenner revived the lackluster franchise and once again made the Yankees World Champions.

Granted, this towering man of excess was not shy about letting his team know who’s The Boss; but unlike Limbaugh, he was not concerned about winning with whites only; Steinbrenner was obsessed with winning as an absolute birthright, period.

Say It Ain't So, Bill!

Les Payne — 2010-07-14T21:00:00Z

GETTY IMAGES

As posted on TheRoot.com

Les Payne

July 12, 2010

As the dirt settles on Robert Byrd's grave, let us reflect on the wisdom of a former U.S. president offering a post-mortem alibi for the man who began his public service as the Exalted Cyclops of the murderous Ku Klux Klan.

''They mention that he once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?'' Clinton said at Byrd's funeral on July 2. ''I'll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn't have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that's what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There certainly are no perfect politicians.''

Byrd was hardly just "trying to get elected.'' First off, he recruited dozens of terrorists for the Klan over a rather lengthy span in his 20s and into his 30s. Furthermore, one did not attain the key ranks of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops in this lynching bee with a mere ''fleeting association.''

Notwithstanding the racism of Byrd's era, Clinton is quite inaccurate in suggesting here that getting elected required a hooded apprenticeship in a cow pasture under a bedtick. Sympathizing with the Klan may well have been de rigueur for Southern politicians on the make; however, few actually took up shotgun and fagot with the zealotry of Robert Byrd, who recruited some 150 friends and associates into his klavern in the early '40s.

Was this wrong? Bill Clinton is not quite sure. ''And maybe he did something wrong,'' the former president hedged during his eulogy. It depends, I suppose, on what your definition of ''kill the niggers'' is. Yes, Bill Clinton, we're talking murderous provocation here.

So common was the abduction and terrorist killing of black men during the '40s that it was not until Jan. 2, 1954, that the Washington Post could editorialize that for the first time, the nation had gone two years without a reported lynching in the New South. Taking this downturn as an apparent affront, Mississippi racists lynched Emmett Till the very next year, followed by an epidemic of Klan murders throughout the South in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision and the civil rights movement that it inspired.

Where, Mr. Clinton, was your ex-Klansman Byrd in all this? The West Virginian politician opposed President Harry Truman's desegregation of the U.S. Army, having written a 1944 letter to arch-racist Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, declaring: ''I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.''

Flame-throwing such racial vitriol for nigh on a half century, Sen. Byrd opposed every attempt to evolve the United States into a non-racial democracy -- including the mid-1960s civil and voting rights acts. He staged a 14-hour, 13-minute personal filibuster of the act when it came before the Senate in 1964.

Alas, it was this empowerment of black voters in West Virginia, as in Alabama with George Wallace and other Dixiecrat states, that likely moved Byrd to tone down his racist activity in public. His conversion, so-called, was not due to altruism and certainly not to Christianity, since he was a churchgoing Exalted Cyclops during his hellbent days of controlling Negroes with extreme prejudice.

After Byrd dropped out of the Klan, Bishop Clinton claimed that he ''spent the rest of his life making it up. And that's what a good person does.'' However, as recent as 1997, we find the senator regretting not so much the error of his ways as the happenstance of his getting caught up in a blow-back effect. ''Be sure you avoid the Ku Klux Klan,'' Sen. Byrd offered as advice to young white politicians on the make. ''Don't get that albatross around your neck. Once you've made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena.''

Would the Klan have been an albatross to Byrd had Negroes not won the vote? Probably not. Otherwise, according to Clinton, he would not have joined the terrorists in the first place. This flexibility of ethics and morals is precisely what troubles decent people about former President Bill Clinton. His values, such as they are, always seem to come down to a quibble. Did he evade the draft? Smoke pot? Have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky? And in the present case, wasn't Byrd indeed a committed white Southerner of his time whose life's work, as that of, say, George Wallace, was for the most part a racist attack upon the best interests of African Americans?

By granting Sen. Byrd a pass, Clinton, I submit, accommodates the senator's peculiar race behavior extending decades beyond his days as Exalted Cyclops. Instead of excusing the West Virginian, the understanding Arkansan should have called him out -- a step Clinton is disinclined to take.

Similarly, during a '95 White House interview, I asked President Clinton if he would name a single white racist other than David Duke and Mark Fuhrman. The politician who made his reputation opposing racism and its practitioners refused to cite a single offender individually. White Americans freely admit that racists still exist, but no one appears to know any personally.

A clear accounting of Clinton on this matter is important here because he once enjoyed unqualified black support but let it slip away on the '08 campaign trail, chiefly because of what Murray Kempton might have called his Machiavelomaniacal self-centeredness. It is not so much that Clinton lies; we all do. It is rather that he shifts about on tectonic plates of dishonor.

Even when caught red-handed, he admits to no foul deed, no matter who else gets hurt. The issue seems always to depend upon what your definition of ''is'' is. Self-righteousness and a seeming immunity to shame are hallmarks of the Clintonian style that have seen him through the good times and the bad.

While being ''too smart to admit anything'' made Clinton a winner with voters, Kempton once condemned him as a sinner with ''God frequently on [his] lips and a habitual tolerance for the seven deadly sins contending for attention within ... LBJ was haunted by his sins, Clinton has absolutely no sense of guilt.''

So now Bishop Clinton, world without end, has granted the dearly departed senator an Indulgence, absolving Byrd of violent sins committed against a people left out of this saintly bestowal of grace.

The Caldwell Chronicles – as Broadcast on WBAI 99.5FM NYC - June 25, 2009

Les Payne — 2010-06-27T12:00:00Z

President Barack Obama meets with Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of U.S.Forces in Afghanistan,aboard

Air Force One in Copenhagen,Denmark on Oct.2, 2009

Les Payne featured on

The Caldwell Chronicles with Earl Caldwell

as broadcast on WBAI 99.5FM in N.Y.C.

Earl Caldwell and Les Payne have a discussion abou tjournalism, the military and President Barack Obama's replacing Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan,with General David Petraeus.

Denzel Brings His "A" Game To August Wilson's "Fences"

Les Payne — 2010-06-22T20:03:00Z

Photographs by Joan Marcus

Les Payne

June 22, 2010

The performance of Denzel Washington is so insightful in August Wilson’s bitingly authentic play about black life that it is downright surprising, though quite fitting, that the actor won a Broadway “Tony.”

Authenticity usually gets the black artist nowhere with top awards judges soaked in what passes for white culture. Such shameless, self-absorption leaves little room for fair judgment especially of those considered outsiders. Such actors, starting with Hattie McDaniel, Oscar winner for "Gone With the Wind” and running with few exceptions down through Halle Berry and “Precious” Mo’Nique; the strong black actor is expected to play the demeaned character then crawl into the judgment hall hopefully to get rewarded.

Denzel Washington was skipped over, accordingly, for his authentic portrayal of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, a twice-convicted boxer so convinced of his innocence that he bedazzled everyone who listened. Instead of rewarding that brilliant interpretation of a black man in full, Hollywood gave its “Training Day” Oscar to Denzel for casually playing the most corrupt cop in Los Angeles as a despicable black detective; so much for true-life in the LAPD.

In the current Broadway run of “Fences,” Denzel returns to his “first love” in a role made famous by one of his stage heroes. Nonetheless, he probes a rich vein of Wilson’s ’85 Pulitzer Prize winning work that was largely overlooked or incompletely explored by the great James Earl Jones in the original production. (Tip of the hat to the Tony’s for also selecting “Fences” as this year’s “Best Revival.”)

In the ‘80’s version, the roar-voice power of James Earl Jones amplified the athletic drive of the main character at the expense of his other prowess, leaving Troy Maxson as a washed-up baseball player, chiefly. Troy was hell-bent on getting back up at the plate and taking his swing at life and at death. Leaving little room for his stage wife to breathe air into her character, Jones played the ex-con failing at reforming his life with a wife and son in a performance dominated by the baseball aspects of the play.

However, in the current version, when Denzel’s Troy copped to messing around with another woman, his wife, Viola Davis, grounded him with a powerful response made all the more effective because of the vulnerable way Washington had set his character up.

“We’re not talking about baseball,” Rose countered her husband soaring in one of his sports metaphor, we’re talking about life.

It is precisely upon this greater canvas that the playwright paints his masterpiece. "Fences" is not baseball interpreting life, as in the hands of Jones, but rather art, and God what universal art, interpreting life in the magnificent dialogue of August Wilson.

Set in the 1950’s, "Fences" is a highly intelligent exploration of father-son relations as twisted by society, racism and circumstance, and passed along to succeeding generations. As worked out against the broader interplay of wife-mother, brother and cut-buddy, Denzel brings out more of what Wilson intended than the acting range of James Earl Jones would allow.

Never much by way of a romantic actor, say, Jones lacked Denzel’s range of witty tenderness needed to sell the ex-con’s conversion to solid citizen anchored by a job and his passionate commitment to wife Rose and their son. Thus when Troy Maxson relapses to form and fathers a child outside his marriage his fall from grace is much steeper and more dramatic when he breaks the news to his wife.

“I fooled them, Rose,” said Denzel uttering the same Troy lines Jones directed at those wishing to see him fail. “I bunted. When I found you and Cory and a halfway decent job... . I was safe. Couldn’t nothing touch me. I wasn’t gonna strike out no more. I wasn’t going back to the penitentiary. I wasn’t gonna lay in the streets with a bottle of wine. I was safe. I had me a family. A job. I wasn’t gonna get that last strike. I was on first looking for one of them boys to knock me in. To get me home.”

The confrontation leaves ample room for Rose’s sharp spousal response and Viola Davis earns her Tony slashing away as if with a straight-razor that barely leaves a scar.

Notwithstanding Denzel’s Hollywood celebrity, he, unlike Jones, does not suck all the air from the stage. Rose and the two sons even are allowed to shine through and more fully probe the complexity that August Wilson had in mind with this extraordinary play.

None of this critique is aimed at knocking the Tony-award performance of James Earl Jones—who dare knock “The Great White Hope”--but merely to contrast the contemporary interpretation with the original, as memory serves. Just as Heath Ledger struck a tone as the “Joker” quite different than that of Jack Nicholson’s in “Batman,” Denzel’s “Fences” is a rewarding departure from that played by James Earl Jones.

Still, we need not choose here anymore than we need pick the 10 American plays of August Wilson’s over the 38 Elizabethan works of Shakespeare—let’s just celebrate both masters and resurrect their creations as often as a stage on Broadway or anywhere else becomes available.

Now that’s how that goes!

The World Should Remember Hector Pietersen

Les Payne — 2010-06-15T16:00:00Z

Les Payne

June 15, 2010

At about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 16th, South Africa should silence the raucous fan-noise at the World Cup and pay homage to the blood-stained shroud of Hector Pietersen.

On the morning of that day of protest 34 years ago, as Soweto students massed in an open field—an agitated policeman fired a single shot that sent 13-year old Pieterson sprawling in his own blood. He was in the book of martyrs before he hit the ground.

As his buddy in overalls went screaming down the field with Pieterson’s body, the children of Soweto had marked the point of no return for apartheid. Spearheaded by the Boers, the racist white minority had locked away Nelson Mandela and his comrades for a dozen years; and thus they felt the black majority could be suppressed for a thousand years.

But on June 16th, some 20,000 unarmed students stepped forth to challenge the Europeans who stole their land and looted its mineral wealth. Initially, they protested the use of the Boers’ narrow, Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. The killing of Pieterson ignited the Soweto Uprising that brought in adults and targeted the entire superstructure of racist apartheid.

The Boers exacted a terrible toll in blood as police gunned down hundreds of unarmed African men, women and children who dared rise up against tyranny and barbarism. Blood diamonds, minerals and Krugerrands bought needed U.S. technology and President Reagan—the worst Chief Executive in modern times—offered the racist regime complete White House support under a policy of “constructive engagement.”

Heroic American students of that era broke with the Reagan Administration and pressured Congress into overriding a White House veto and imposing stiff sanctions against South Africa .

Sports—and this is where the 2010 World Cup comes in-- dealt another blow to the solar plexus of this apartheid republic, as decent people around the world forced their governments to alienate this South African assault on all humanity. The national rugby team, the sporting pride of the insufferable Boers, was banned from international competition. And starting in 1964, racist republic of South Africa was banned from all Olympics games.

Destabilized by the revolt at home and going bankrupt under tough international sanction, the apartheid regime was forced to yield. Nelson Mandela and fellow political prisoners were released; their party, the African National Congress, was un-banned and the 350-odd pieces of legislation mandating total separation of the races were stricken from the books.

On the sports front, South Africa , in exchange, was allowed to return to the Olympics in 1992; and its rugby teams once again played overseas. As the Founding Father of the new South Africa , Mandela personified the stamp of dignity granted not only to his South African administration but also to its athletes on the global playing fields.

Thus, the absence of the 91-year old Mandela from the opening ceremony of the 2010 World Cup makes a poetic, if inadvertent statement about the unfinished business of the new South Africa . The majority has gained political authority, true enough, but blacks are quite a ways off from wresting economic independence from the entrenched, settler colony continuing to exploit and hoard the nation’s mineral wealth.

The founding father of the New South Africa, who stepped down as president a decade ago, missed the ceremony as he mourned the death of a 13-year old grandchild killed in an automobile accident. It is a mark of progress that the blood of such youngsters is no longer the price Africans must pay for the liberation of their country.

This price--of political freedom at least--was paid in full by the revolt of the people. It started that fateful morning at 10:30 a.m.; when Hector Pieterson made his way through the teargas wafting over that Soweto field and stood up to face the guns of the police even as they began to flash and roar.

Without Hector Pieterson the world may never have come to know Nelson Mandela; without them both South Africa most assuredly would not be hosting the 2010 World Cup.

What Happened To Artur Davis?

Les Payne — 2010-06-07T21:00:00Z

Artur Davis - Eric Schultz / The Huntsville Times

Les Payne

June 7, 2010

When pondering the recent defeat of Artur Davis, I puzzle not so much over the politics of my home-state, as over the compromise of this Democrat vying to become the first black governor of Alabama.

Didn’t Davis learn anything from Barack Obama; or Harvard, even? What about Percy Sutton?

In addition to showing black candidates how to win, generally, Obama blazed a specific, Democratic trail for his fellow Harvard alum to win on in Alabama. Blacks stampeding to the polls constituted 51- percent of the ’08 primary voters when Obama smashed Hillary Clinton there.

With the nomination his for the running, Davis turned his back on this base constituency and spit over his shoulder into their eyes. Ignoring even his fellow black legislators, the four-term congressman refused to attend their political functions while chasing longingly after every such white gathering not burning a cross in a cornfield at midnight.

And in a bold, public turning of his coat, Rep. Davis tauntingly voted against Obama’s national health care bill. Already local, black politicians had smelled enough. The Davis stench drove Birmingham’s first black mayor, Richard Arrington, for example, to endorse the little-known, white, Agriculture Commissioner, proving yet again that African-Americans, as others, vote their interest; though most often, as with Arrington, they have to hold their nose and settle for their near-interest.

As the world now knows, Davis, the odd-on favorite to romp away with his party’s nomination and even to compete in Nov. against the Republican for the state house—was crushed 62-38 percent in the Democratic primary.

Davis has been considered a member of that new and winning generation of Ivy-league trained black politicians that include Obama and Corey Booker, the mayor of Newark, N.J.. Not surprisingly, each candidate tasted bitter defeat at the polls before President Obama laid down the rules for black American candidates, rules that Davis, the Harvard-trained lawyer, flatly refused to follow down in Alabama.

The compromise demands of politics, the Obama rules state, do not permit the African-American candidate to forsake the black community in chasing after white votes. Doing the math, Obama strategists figured that, as with Clinton in ’92 and again in ’96, he could win with a minority white vote—provided he excited black and other voters with the hope of not forsaking them yet again.

Obama won with 43-percent of the white vote and given his ’08 victory margin might have won with less than 40-percent, depending on how these votes were situated regionally. With the demographics of Alabama, Davis could possibly have won the general election in November with 33-percent of the white vote—provided, like Obama, he excited black voters into a historic turnout for him at the polls.

Instead, he panicked and chased single-mindedly after the white vote. In this he recalled not Obama in ’08, but Percy Sutton in 1977. Running for mayor of New York City that year, Sutton initiated his campaign office not in Harlem, his home base, but in white, suburban Queens.

The symbolic abandonment of his base was made real as candidate Sutton, hat in hand, chased hopelessly after the white vote. When someone suggested that his beard made the fair-skinned African-American look Arab, for example, Sutton promptly shaved it away. The abandonment complete, blacks chilled on Sutton, as they did on Davis; and the defeat was sad, sealed and delivered.

And now, just when Harvard was getting over its reputation as spoiling more Negroes than are ruined by bad whiskey—along comes Artur Davis.

A Vietnam Veteran's Reflections On This Memorial Day Weekend

Les Payne — 2010-05-29T10:00:00Z

Lt. Les Payne accepts "Best Battery" honors from Ft. Bliss Commanding General, on post parade field. U.S. Army Photograph 6 Oct. 1965

Les Payne

May 29, 2010

Vietnam has been dragged back into the news this Memorial Day weekend not as foreign policy but as a bragging point for a politician on the make who back when it was time to put up—he shut up.

As a Vietnam veteran, I find Richard Blumenthal amusing.

Running for a senate seat in Connecticut, he has been exposed as claiming falsely that he served in Vietnam. Instead, as the New York Times revealed, young Richard hid out in the National Guard after exhausting all non-uniform means to duck the military call up of able-bodied men.

Draft avoidance was common, back then, among patriots immune to shame and irony. These middle-class heroes got the jobs and a career leg up on their brethren who leaped to the cannon roar. Two such opportunists became two-term, U.S. Presidents, one selecting as his number-two, one Cheney, a "hero" who avoided the military draft five times.

Blumenthal’s public boast about Vietnam should have been a tip-off; most veterans hold their tongue about involvement in this particular war.

Thus, I was caught off guard, when at the recent funeral of Lena Horne; a fellow Vietnam veteran asked me if I had been embittered about my battlefield experience. Neither of us had talked much about it over the years.

Perhaps, it was the moving tribute paid to Lena by the octogenarian members of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen that brought it all back. Ms. Horne had sung for the airmen during WWII and became their sepia pin-up girl.

I told my fellow veteran on the steps of St. Ignatius Cathedral that I house no bitter feelings about the war or, for that matter, much feeling about my service at all. Back then, the thought of avoiding the military obligation of citizenship no more crossed my mind than the thought of accepting less than my fair share of the civilian benefits.

It is over this citizenship equation that I part company with the likes of Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney and Richard Blumenthal, running for Sen. Christopher Dodd’s seat.

These narcissistic gluttons—as with the chicken-hawks—consistently place narrow group interests above country and themselves above all else. Yet, this Memorial weekend, each of them—along with the Tea Baggers and the whole of the Republican Party-- will station himself, flag pin in place, hand over heart, yakking some boilerplate about love of country.

As with all males of my family, I was determined to make my parents proud, and to shatter the Army stereotype about black leadership.

“Leadership is not imbedded in the negro (sic) race yet and to try to make commissioned officers to lead men into battle—colored men—is only to work disaster to both,” wrote U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson in his diary on Oct. 25, 1940. “Colored troops do very well under white officers.” (Substitute “coach” for “officer” and, with rare exception, you have the thinking of most team owners in professional sports in America today.)

As a 24-year old, 1st Lieutenant commanding a 138-man, multi-million dollar Nike Hercules missile unit, I repeatedly won quarterly honors as the “best battery” commander at Ft. Bliss, Texas. Up against seasoned captains, many of them West Pointers, my unit out-performed all others on technical inspections, administration, barracks upkeep, as well as accuracy in tracking and shooting down drones with anti-aircraft Ajax missiles.

White army officers, and more than a few Negroes, who somehow felt—as did Secretary Stimson—that “leadership is not imbedded in (African-Americans),” were irrevocably dumbfounded by my “best battery” commander citations.

Conversely, I was astounded at every turn by the level of white, male mediocrity, which by 2001 would make its way into the White House. Meanwhile, I had to make do with General William C. Westmoreland as my boss during the year I served in Saigon as the army’s version of a journalist.

This son of a South Carolina textile worker, who commanded the 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, had harassed the only black cadet in his ’36 West Point class by giving him the “silent treatment.” Westmoreland and other white classmates didn’t speak to Benjamin O. Davis outside of duty because he was black and they hoped to drive him out.

Avoided like the Ebola plague, Davis never had a roommate, ate alone in the mess hall, and he rode to football games on crowded West Point busses—sitting alone on his bench seat. Despite four years of alienation, the man who became the first African-American general in the Air Force, finished 35th in a class of 278; Westmoreland finished 112th.

North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap had fun chasing this racist piece of mediocrity from delta to highlands and back again.

As for me, I arrived in Saigon as an Army Ranger Captain at the start of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Fireworks, 24-7, were not good for the nerves, however, fear has a short shelf life and we soon became numb even to the sounds of B-52 carpet-bombing.

From that first day to the last, it was clear that U.S. forces did not belong in Vietnam—and I said as much and often. By the hundreds of thousands the GIs arrived with the simple ambition to stay alive and get back to "the world.” LBJ and Westmoreland had ordered them to bend the Vietnamese to the will of Boeing, Raytheon and General Dynamics. No one told them the Vietnamese were unconquerable.

In its naïveté, America loosed its technology against a people about whom it knew zilch. And it trusted execution of that policy to mediocre generals out of West Point. Their nasty campaign against Vietnam ran counter to history and, as with all wars, its inhumanity was waged against what is right.

Conducting war against both history and right at the same time, as John Foster Dulles once counseled, will not achieve victory ever.

The question this Memorial Day weekend is: has America learned this lesson about what’s right--and about history--in Iraq and in Afghanistan?

It does not seem so.

What Is The Role Of Rand Paul?

Les Payne — 2010-05-24T12:28:00Z

United States Senate candidate Rand Paul, at a press conference in Frankfort, Kentucky. Rand Paul portrait by

Gage Skidmore 12/30/09

Les Payne

May 24, 2010

Far too much is being made of Rand Paul; and at the expense of the greater threat to civil liberties that African-Americans won on paper only during the mid-1960’s.

Granted, the Republican senate nominee from Kentucky would likely vote to roll back the ‘64 legislation that allowed blacks to eat and drink at private restaurants open to the public. And the racist backwardness of nominee Paul should be avoided at all costs--and him along with it.

However, the bedeviling detail in the pursuit of Rand Paul has the media chase making him something of a scapegoat. Driving out this straight-talking libertarian would not get at the more organized, entrenched, white-racist forces bent on “retaking our country” with stealth.

The little-or-no-government Libertarian Party has long enjoyed a kook license to crack its pots in obscurity. It has been dragged out into the light of day now, as Rand Paul’s distaste for federal action--even against state-sanctioned racism--has intersected with the Tea-Party’s drive to make the first black U.S. president the last.

Unable, or unwilling, to expose the Tea Baggers’ racism by euphemisms, the corporate media could not ignore the blunt spoken bigotry of Rand Paul the libertarian.

Even here, it took the counter-cultured Rachel Maddow, of the somewhat irregular MSNBC, to nail Paul with his own words Wednesday night. By the weekend, much of corporate media, including the New York Times, had confirmed in the Tea Party what had been exposed under the smirk and glower of Rachel Maddow.

This racial defect clearly had been a key, motivating factor for Tea baggers all along; and Paul has now gained a foothold in the Republican Party.

Rand Paul told Maddow that he had concerns about the ’64 Civil Rights Act as it applied to private business. “Asked by Ms. Maddow if a private business had the right to refuse to serve black people,” according to the New York Times, “Mr. Paul replied, ‘yes’” The paper of record wrote that these “views reflect the libertarians philosophy that Mr. Paul and many Tea Party members have embraced.”

Returning to states-rights rule appears to constitute precisely what Tea Party loyalists consider “getting our country back.” And the freaky Rand Paul remains just as insensitive to the barbarism that the pre-1964 system allowed. Their white brethren empowered back then, ran a brutal, undemocratic system that deprived blacks of justice under law, equal protection, liberty, and, yes, even life.

Alabama law, for example, categorically excluded white female nurses from assignments on wards or rooms in hospitals, either private or public, in which male Negro patients were present. Beer and wine in Georgia were sold under racial exclusivity that did not allow merchants to dispense these spirits to blacks and whites "within the same room at any time."

In Florida, the state had to house white and black juvenile delinquents in separate buildings "not nearer than one-fourth mile to each other." White and black, amateur softball players in Georgia were barred from playing on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of one used by the other race.

Louisiana had a thing about circuses, requiring that before the two races took their separate places under the Big Top; each had to be processed through a separate ticket booth, "with individual sellers," and said booths "shall not be less than twenty-five (25) feet apart."

In these post-Obama days, the Tea Party would likely go beyond denying African-Americans these rights, and zero in on the ’65 Voting Rights Act that gave them the ballot. It was, after all, the exercise of the black vote that got Barack Obama elected president—despite the 55 percent majority of whites who voted against him.

The inability of this white majority to prevent the election of the nation’s first black president has panicked the Tea Party and its Republican host into thinking—quite falsely—that whites have lost their country. Such unpatriotic fanatics, of course, place racial identity over national identity and purpose.

Just as Paul’s victory exposed the Tea Baggers’ bare-knuckle bigotry, their growing influence within the Republican Party lays bare the racial panic among the white majority that voted overwhelmingly for the goofy Sarah Palin and her pimp-mentor John McCain. (Just imagine this ditzy duo at the helms of the Republic in these trying hours, facing the cataclysmic mess left by the Bush-Cheney Administration.)

While denying Rand Paul a U.S. senate seat strikes a blow for decency, driving him out as a scapegoat only buys time for the cancerous racism spreading unabated within the tissue of the Tea- as well as the Republican Party.

The Clock is ticking.

PANEL DISCUSSION: ETHIOPIAN ART & CULTURE

Les Payne — 2010-05-07T16:06:00Z

PANEL DISCUSSION: ETHIOPIAN ART & CULTURE

A panel of experts on Ethiopian visual arts will discuss aspects of the cultural, political, social, and economic forces that have influenced its people and the evolution of their unique art.

Noted scholar, Achamyeleh Debela, an artist himself with a brilliant international reputation, will participate, along with professor Yemane Demissie, of NYU, and Bill Karg, a local art dealer. Filmmaker Haile Gerima, whose latest work, “Teza, is currently running in selected theaters, has also been invited.

An exhibit of some 60 ETHIOPIAN paintings from Addis Ababa highlights the two-day event that is open to the public all day Saturday.

TIME: Saturday, May 8, 1pm-2:30pm

PLACE: Theater, Paley Center, 25 West 52^nd Street,

Manhattan.

Moderator: Les Payne

Panelists: Achamyeleh Debela, PhD, N.C. Central University, Dept. of Art

Professor Yemane Demissie, of NYU

Bill Karg, Contemporary African Art Gallery, NYC

The True Makeup Of The 2010 Tea Party Movement

Les Payne — 2010-04-19T12:00:00Z

Les Payne

April 19, 2010

The “overwhelming majority of supporters” of the Tea Party reveal themselves as likely racist, according to data in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

This point was not made in the Times headlines saluting the supporters as simply “wealthier and more educated” than the general public. Nor did the story draw such a conclusion. However, the “detailed look at the profiles and attitudes” of the tea baggers went beyond anecdotal musings to indicate that their total dismissal of the 44th U.S. President has less to do with policy than with his race.

Nailing this broad-based sentiment among whites in deep denial about race is never easy. However, poll questions have been designed to detect a prevalence of racism among respondents.

Newsday once subjected white Long Islanders to the Gallup poll consisting of the control question: Do you feel blacks are better athletes? It was paired with four hardcore queries about false notions of blacks’ assumed values, intelligence, attitudes and work ethics. A “yes” on the control question coupled with acceptance of a hardcore negative stereotype indicated that the respondent housed strong “racist” tendencies.

The Gallup poll revealed that some 67-percent of whites in Nassau and Suffolk county were clearly “racist,” a result that shocked Newsday’s top editors. They declined to take the test themselves.

A recent Tea Party rally at the state office building in Suffolk County featured confederate flags on the Island built up after WWII as a series of segregated, white suburban townships. Another reminder of racial attitudes on Long Island showed up in the recent Times/CBS poll.

Question #47 put to the tea-baggers about President Obama is a variation of the standard poll query used to test white respondents for racism:

“Do you think Barack Obama shares the values most Americans try to live by, or doesn’t?”

Some 75 percent of the Tea Party supporters--with little to go on other than that Obama is black--slammed the duly-elected U.S. President as living by a different “value” system than most Americans. This racial bias, as indicated by the report, is overwhelmingly held by the supporters without regard to what Obama might say—or actually do.

This hardcore, “different values” question regarding Obama, while not conclusive singularly, is a strong, trace indicator of racism. Going beyond anecdotal evidence, the Times/CBS poll indicates a very high probability that “an overwhelming majority of the Tea Party supporters” would be graded “racist” by a fairly administered poll keyed to measure such tendencies.

Some 18 percent of all Americans—and thus a higher percentage of white Americans, some one out of four--support the ultra-Conservative “patriots” targeting the sitting U. S. President as a “socialist” who can do nothing right. Only 7 percent, in a poll with a 3-percent “margin of error,” have a “favorable” opinion of this Harvard lawyer-scholar ever eager to please his opponents.

This lily white Tea Party--with a statistically insignificant smattering of quite strange blacks--is made up mainly of middle-aged, married white Republicans who voted for McCain-Palin and get most of their news from Fox-TV.

And God, are they angry.

As the Times story indicated, they grant President Obama no benefit of the doubt, no margin of error, no possibility of learning-curve growth that all other presidents have experienced. For those attuned to polls, this new development about the racial tendencies of the tea-baggers should raise grave concerns about their true motivations and the dangers they pose to domestic tranquility.

There may well be a shit-storm coming.