Table of Contents

There are 15 chapters in this issue

About BlackCommentator.com

It's Time For A Queer-Friendly Pope: Cover Story - Inclusion - By The Reverend Irene Monroe - BC Editorial Board

Nelson Mandela - Art - Black History Month By Kadir Nelson, San Diego CA

William Wells Brown: Resourceful Reformer, Author, and Physician - Black History Month By Dr. Marion Kilson, PhD - BC Guest Commentator

The Christopher Dorner Episode May Be Over-But the Questions He Raised Remain - Between The Lines - By Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, PhD - BC Columnist

Monsanto Keeps on Moving Toward a Lock on the World's Food System - Solidarity America - By John Funiciello - BC Columnist

Can Black America Survive 'Drone Man' Barack Obama? - Keeping it Real By Larry Pinkney, BC Editorial Board

My Own Demise - Political Cartoon By Eric Garcia, Chicago IL

Drones: Warfare Fit for a Changed America - Represent Our Resistance - By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD - BC Editorial Board

God Particle: Nexus of Science and Religion - Nafsi ya Jamii - By Wilson Riles - BC Columnist

Black Parents: We Must Regain Control over our Children's Education - By Dr. Travis L. Gosa, PhD - BC Guest Commentator

The White Supremacy System - Worrill's World - By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD - BC Columnist

Diversity - Political Cartoon By Chuck Siler

Art - By Ray Ferrer - Urban Wall Art & Murals, New York NY

Quote to Ponder: "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul..." - Nelson Mandela

This is an eBook version of BlackCommentator.com - An independent weekly internet magazine dedicated to the movement for economic justice, social justice and peace.

BC Provides commentary, analysis and investigations on issues affecting African Americans and the African world.

BC was established April 5, 2002 and is published weekly on Thursday.

Executive Editor: David A. Love, JD - Managing Editor: Nancy Littlefield, MBA - Publisher: Peter Gamble

Feb 14, 2013 -Issue 504

Cover Story
It's Time For A Queer-Friendly Pope

Just hours after Pope Benedict XVI announced his unexpected resignation, a bolt of lightning struck St. Peter’s Basilica.

Many say it's unequivocally a sign from God.

If so, I'm hoping it's an Amen moment signaling the end of an oppressive era of LGBTQ bashing as the church now moves forward.

"With the pope’s impending resignation, the church has an opportunity to turn away from his oppressive policies toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgenderCatholics, and their families and friends, and develop a new understanding of the ways in which God is at work in the lives of faithful and loving people regardless of their sexual orientation orgender identity,” said the LGBT Catholic group Equally Blessed in astatement.

This pope has used his papalauthority to hold back the tides against modernity. And the early signswere there long before Benedict became pope. The reaction by manyreligious progressives to the election of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in April 2005 as Pope Benedict XVI had been tempered byeither their faith to keep hope alive or by an apologetic acceptance indeference to Pope John Paul II.

If the Catholic Church waslooking for a religious leader who embraces the world — as it is today — Pope Benedict XVI a.k.a. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was not the man.

Benedict used hisauthoritarian and “Rottweiler” persona of church doctrine to maintainan ecclesiastical lock down on the churches progressives.

For example, just last year he publicly bashed, not surprisingly, a group of U.S. "dissident" nunsfor “focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice,while keeping 'silent' on abortion and same-sex marriage." This rogue group of Catholic sisters were not only undermining the Church's teaching on the priesthood and homosexuality, but they were alsobrashly promoting "certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith."

Benedict pushed back against the tide of progressive theologies by upholding a rigid orthodoxy of millennium-old church doctrines and creeds.

Case in point, Benedict suppressed the growth of Liberation Theologies in Third Worldcountries, the emerging face of the Catholic Church, for their supposedly Marxist leanings that exposed classism. However, Liberation Theologies combines Christian theology with political activism on issues dealing with human rights and social justice. Liberation Theologies emphasize the biblical themes that God’s actions on behalfof the enslaved, the poor, the outcasts like women, people of color, and LGBTQ people, just to name a few, are a central paradigm for a faith that embraces the world — as it is today — from an engaged and committed stance that does justice.

It is Liberation Theologiesthat have given women, people of color, LGBTQs, developing countries avoice. And it's Liberation Theologies that allow us all — churched and unchurched, believer as well as atheist — to stand in the truth of who we are.

Benedict's venomous attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people has been unrelenting.

Just this past December, thePontiff's Christmas sermon denounced same-sex marriage, advocating it would destroy the “essence of the human creature.” In previous sermonicanti-LGBTQ diatribes during his tenure as pope Benedict has stated that marriage equality is a “manipulation of nature, ” and a threat to worldpeace.

The Pontiff doesn’t equivocate his stance on us with the theological qualifier to “love thesinner but hate the sin.” Instead, Benedict takes his stance to a level that invites LGBTQ-bashing justified in the name of God.

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is more or less astrong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” Cardinal Ratzinger stated in a 1986 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons.

On the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith website, directed by then Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote: “Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.”

Benedict believes that evilis born into a person and that it is part of their ontological makeup; therefore, when you remove the bad seed, you ostensibly remove the evil. And many religious conservatives feel that since you cannot remove LGBTQ people from society, then society must either restrain or deny them their civil rights.

And one clear way to do that is to call that group of people “evil” or state that they contribute to, if not create, evil in the world.

St. Augustine argued that evil arose from the original sin committed by Adam and Eve. And St.Thomas Aquinas said that evil derives from man’s abuse of God giving us the choice of free will. However, it wasn’t until the 18th century that philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated that evil was not an intrinsic nature found in man, but instead it was caused by the corruption and constraints of a society. I side with Rousseau.

Evil exists in its various machinations because of systems, regimes, presidencies, and, yes, the Vatican, which allow it to give birth unchecked. As a system whose wheels churn on the absence of goodness, evil reduces people to objects of sin and targets of hatred, thus denying them their basic human needs. And its strength to maintain human suffering is proportionate not only to its political and capital clout, but also to the strength of its religious ideological underpinning.

The problem with evil is not only how it diminishes human life, but also how it denies the suffering it causes.

It's time for a queer-friendly pope. And the bolt of lightning striking St. Peter’s Basilica is no clearer sign.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, the Rev. Irene Monroe, is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. She is the Coordinator of the African-American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at the Pacific School of Religion. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow. She was recently named to MSNBC’s list of 10 Black Women You Should Know. Reverend Monroe is the author of Let Your Light Shine Like a Rainbow Always: Meditations on Bible Prayers for Not ’So’ Everyday Moments. As an African-American feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible. Her website is irenemonroe.com. Click here to contact the Rev. Monroe.

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

Nelson Mandela

Art

By Kadir Nelson, San Diego CA

Kadir Nelson tells the story of Nelson Mandela, a global icon, in poignant verse and glorious illustrations.

Kadir Nelson is anaward-winning American artist whose works have been exhibited in majornational and international publications, institutions, art galleries,and museums. Many of Nelson’s paintings are in the collections ofnotable institutions and public collections, including the U.S. Houseof Representatives and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, as well asin the private collections of actors, professional athletes, andmusicians.

Click here for information about the artist Kadir Nelson or to make a purchase

Click here to contact Mr. Nelson

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

William Wells Brown:
Resourceful Reformer, Author, and Physician
By Dr. Marion Kilson, PhD

On November 10, 1884 both The Boston Daily Globe and The Boston Herald reported the burial of William Wells Brown in the Cambridge Cemetery; two days before his death had been recorded in six Boston newspapers.[1] At the time of his death Brown was probably seventy years old. Born enslaved near Lexington, Kentucky to an African American field hand and sired by her master’s relative, Brown’s birth date went unrecorded. He thought he had been born in 1814 or thereabouts. From these inauspicious beginnings Brown rose to national and international prominence as an anti-slavery and temperance crusader, a pioneering African American author, and a Boston physician.

Life Story

For almost two decades Brown endured life as a slave. In his case it was a varied life, because after serving as a house servant to Dr. and Mrs. Young as a young boy, he was hired out to various people including an inn keeper, a printer, a slave trader, and a Mississippi steamboat captain; ultimately he was sold twice - first to Samuel Willi, a tailor, and later to Enoch Price, a steamboat owner. Three times Brown attempted to escape to “a land of liberty”; the first two times he was recaptured and punished but the third time he successfully fled from bondage in Cincinnati in 1834. For the following decade he worked on steamers plying the waters of Lake Erie and often brought other fugitives across the Lake on their flights to Canada; he reported that he had carried 69 fugitives to freedom in Canada between May and early December of 1842. In his spare time Brown began to teach himself to read and write by perusing books and newspapers. In the mid1840s he started to lecture on the anti-slavery circuit in western New York arriving in Boston in 1847 to work as an agent with the American Anti-Slavery Society and the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Boston remained Brown’s home until his death, except for five years in Great Britain. In Britain he traveled throughout the British Isles delivering his anti-slavery messages to members of small clubs and to crowds of as many as 3,000. British friends arranged for Brown’s purchase from Enoch Price which enabled him to return a free man to the United States in 1854.[2]

In his half-century of freedom, Brown earned his livelihood by pursuing three different occupations: reformer, author, and physician. Brown did not pursue these occupations successively but simultaneously. He became an accomplished lecturer on the antislavery circuit in the United States and in Great Britain; after the Civil War he continued to lecture focusing on temperance and African American history. Shortly after his arrival in Boston, Brown began his career as an author with two publications in 1847: a book, A Narrative Of William W. Brown A Fugitive Slave Written By Himself, and a pamphlet, Lecture delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, at Lyceum Hall, Nov. 14, 1847. The following year Brown publishedThe Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings which included some of his own lyrics. His Narrative was an immediate success - selling 3,000 copies within the first six months and going through four editions in two years with 10,000 copies sold.[3] Writing and lecturing were Brown’s principal occupations until in late 1864 he began writing “M.D.” after his name. A year earlier he had written a friend that he had been reading medicine for many years but was not yet prepared to become a fulltime physician. For the last two decades of his life Brown practiced medicine from a Boston office while continuing to pursue his activities as a reformer and an author.[4] William Wells Brown was clearly a consummately efficient multitasker.

Literary Pioneer

Although William Wells Brown probably was better known in his own time as an urbane, ironic, and captivating melodiously voiced lecturer, he is primarily remembered in ours as an African American literary pioneer. Brown wrote autobiography, fiction, drama, poetry and history. A lover of poetry, Brown inserted verses - his own and others’ - into his fiction and non-fiction pieces. He was the first African American to publish a travelogue in 1852, a novel in 1853, a play in 1858, and a military history in 1867. By the time that Brown laid down his pen in 1880, he had published sixteen books and multiple editions of several of these volumes.

As a writer Brown was a recycler extraordinaire of tales. He wrote four versions of his novel, Clotel; Or the President's Daughter. Sometimes only the title and characters’ names changed - Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter in 1853 became Miralda; or, The Beautiful Quadroon in 1861 and sometimes the narrative was altered - the 1864 story of Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States ended in Europe during the Civil War, while Clotelle: or, The Colored Heroine of 1867 ended in the United States during Reconstruction. Brown retold his life story not only in the 1849 edition of The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave but in the Memoirs which served as introductions to his first historical work The black man: his antecedents, his genius, and his achievements in 1863 and to his last book, My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People in 1880. Two of his historical works, Black Man... (1863) and The rising son, or, The antecedents and advancement of the colored race (1873), contained biosketches of prominent African American men and women 27 of the 57 sketches in The Black Man reappeared among the 81 in The Rising Son in identical words or only slightly altered.

Numerous incidents often fictionalizing his personal experience and revealing his ironic sense of humor recur in different literary works. In both his travelogue, The American Fugitive in Europe. Sketches of Places and People Abroad, and his introductory Memoirs in The Black Man and The Rising Son , he tells the tale of how he threw wet bed sheets out the window of an English inn; when the landlady demanded that he pay for the sheets , Brown responded “’Oh, yes,…I will pay for them; put them in the bill, and I will send the bill to The Times, and have it published, and let the travelling public know how much you charge for wet sheets!’” The landlady’s response was not only to exclude the sheets from his bill but to implore him never to mention the inn in recounting his experience and to provide him with toasty dry sheets the next time he lodged at the inn.[5] In Clotel and in The Negro In The American Rebellion Brown recounted being forced to sit on a flour barrel in an open freight car as he traveled by train through Ohio. When the conductor demanded that Brown pay $1.25 - the same fare as people riding in passenger cars, Brown refused and asked what was charged for 100 lbs. of freight; the conductor replied twenty-five cents. “’Then I’ll pay thirty-seven and a-half cents,’ said I; ‘for I weigh one hundred and fifty pounds.’…Finally, the officer…said ‘Give me thirty-seven and a-half cents, and I’ll set you down as freight.’” Similar incidents recur in different literary works and genres, such as inadvertent comments to a slave mistress about the resemblance of a mulatto child to her slave master husband or the pulling of the wrong tooth by an inept slave medical assistant.

Brown repeatedly recounted dramatic situations which critically addressed the nature of slavery - the entanglement of southerners, northerners, and slaves in the peculiar institution. Brown recounted the hypocrisy of slave holders, such as the pious Christian master and mistress who cruelly mistreated their enslaved servants; Dr. and Mrs. Young, his original owners, not only appeared in his autobiographical accounts but were the models for Dr. and Mrs. Gaines in his play Escape and in his last book My Southern Home. Northerners also fell under Brown’s critical gaze. In his speech to the Salem Female Anti-Slavery society he commented on how Christians in the North support the slavocracy and in later works he railed against northern color prejudice and its life constraining consequences for African Americans. Moreover, one of the subtexts of Brown’s novel Clotel was how readily Northerners adapted to southern customs: Rev. Peck from Connecticut married and acquired a plantation with 70 slaves and wrote doggerel about “My Little Nig”; Honz Snyder from New York preached to Blacks and poor whites using biblical texts to support slavery; James Crawford from Vermont purchased Althesa as a servant for his wife; and Dr. Henry Morton from Vermont bought and married Althesa erroneously thinking she and their daughters were free and would be free after his death. Blacks were not immune from Brown’s critical gaze; in his writings slaves were both faulted and celebrated for their use of deception and cunning to achieve their interests as well as for color prejudice among themselves. Brown saw American society and character flawed throughout by slavery and its aftermath.

Paula Garrett and Hollis Robbins who have edited a recent collection of William Wells Brown’s writings[6] note that William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass were both extremely popular antislavery lecturers in their own times, but that we today remember Douglass rather than Brown. Garrett and Robbins contrast their rhetorical styles in these words “William Wells Brown’s rhetorical strategy of evoking culture and addressing the concerns of women…differs greatly from Frederick Douglass’s strategy of muscular, fiery, public oratory. If Douglass represented a cognitive approach to the question of abolition by emphasizing a commitment to the founding principles of America and appealing to the mind, Brown represented the emotional approach by emphasizing his role as a doting father and an urbane man of letters.”[7] Garrett and Robbins provide a feminist explanation for Douglass’ continuing prominence and Brown’s current obscurity: “decisions about anthologizing and canonicity have been the purview of men.”[8]

Resourcefulness

How did a young man who was illiterate at the time that he escaped to freedom become a cosmopolitan man of letters, an influential orator, and a medical practitioner? I think that William Wells Brown was able to transform himself because he was a keen observer of human behavior. As a young boy he had been a house servant and later had diverse occupational experiences during his enslavement. These experiences exposed him to a great variety of human situations involving both white and black southerners. He observed as Garrett and Robbins suggest that the slaves who succeeded within the American slave system were those who used “guile and deception to protect and advance their interests.”[9] He himself became something of a trickster. He was a man who lived by his wits - how else would one explain the way in which he transformed the wet-sheet incident to his advantage with the innkeeper and the freight-train incident in which he bested the conductor? These are just two of many examples in his life story and his writings of his clever manipulation of situations to achieve his personal goals.

Above all, William Wells Brown was a self-made man, beginning with his name. When he was escaping from Cincinnati towards Cleveland, he was befriended by an elderly Quaker. The man insisted that he must have a surname. Here’s how Brown relates the incident in his autobiographical Narrative: “Since thee has got out of slavery, thee has become a man and men always have two names.”

“I told him that he was the first man to extend the hand of friendship to me, and I would give him the privilege of naming me.

“’If I name thee,’ he said ‘I shall call thee Wells Brown, after myself.’

“’But,’ said I, ‘I am not willing to lose my name of William. As it was taken from me once against my will, I am not willing to part with it again upon any terms.’

“’Then,’ said he, ‘I will call thee William Wells Brown.’

“’So be it,’ said I; and I have been known by that name ever since I left the house of my first white friend, Wells Brown.”[10]

Having named himself Brown set out to transform his persona into the celebrated gentlemanly reformer, author, and medical practitioner. As an antislavery reformer he experimented with various formats for conveying his message - lectures, writings including poetry, song, essays, fiction, drama, and even briefly in England a panoramic exhibition of slavery that illustrated his own and others’ experiences and included paintings and a descriptive catalog.[11] In 1856 and 1857 in the United States, Brown substituted reading his plays, The Escape; and Experience, for delivering lectures on the northern anti-slavery circuit with such success that he gave up his formal position as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society to freelance as a dramatic reader.

Brown was an inveterant multitasker and compartmentalizer of his experiences. When you read his travelogue of his experiences in Great Britain and in France, you will find descriptions of visits to castles and cathedrals, of meetings with distinguished statesmen and authors, and of visits to graves of prominent dignitaries and poets, but rarely will you find references to his antislavery lectures that occasioned his travels and provided him with his livelihood. In fact, Brown lectured in the evenings and went sightseeing during his days of travel.

As an author, Brown experimented with various genres often recasting the same narrative into fiction and non-fiction. His experiences as a slave and his self-emancipation loomed large in his imagination and formed the core of most of his writing, except in his more general historical works.

What a fascinatingly eclectic and resourceful nineteenth century American William Wells Brown was!

[1]William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown: Author & Reformer. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp.452-453.

[2] Ellen Richardson of Newcastle on Tyne, a member of the family that had bought Frederick Douglass’ freedom, arranged his purchase for $300. (Farrison: 240).

[3] Ibid, p.115.

[4] Ibid, pp. 399-403.

[5] The American Fugitive, pp. 235-236 ; The Black Man, pp. 29-30.

[6] Paula Garrett and Hollis Robbins (eds.). The Works of William Wells Brown: Using His "Strong, Manly Voice" (Collected Black Writings) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[7] Ibid, p. xxxvi.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, p.xix

[10] William W. Brown, The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. [2nd ed. 1848] (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc. 2003), pp.46-47.

[11] Farrison, pp.173-76

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Dr. Marion Kilson, received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard Universityin 1967 and retired as Dean of the GraduateSchool at Salem State University in 2001. Hermost recent book, Dancing with the Gods: Essays in Ga Ritual was published this month. Click here to contactDr. Kilson.

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

The Christopher Dorner Episode May Be Over-
But the Questions He Raised Remain

One of the most tragic and horrifying episodes in the recent history of our city, state and nation has come to an end…or has it? The national manhunt for ex-LAPD officer, Christopher Dorner, came to an end in a fiery shootout on Big Bear Mountain. There was nothing pretty about this at all. It started ugly and ended uglier. Obviously, it started long before the first shot was fired or the “manifesto” was published. It will not end with the last shot and Dorner’s death.

Dorner reopened a whole can of worms. The wounds are deep and scars are fresh. What would make a man go off like this? It’s too simple to suggest this was just about a lost job. This was a man stripped of his dignity. It wasn’t just that he lost his job, or even as much about why he lost his job. It was about how he lost his job, which caused him to lose his mind.

And he went out backwards, sho’ ‘nuff. He obviously wanted to die, but not without cause.

There is no justification for what Christopher Dorner did. Period. Nobody has a right to take anybody’s life - not even the government. Although we see movies every year about people being pushed to the brink of sanity, losing their minds, not being able to take it anymore and avenging injustice, Dorner’s rampage seemed surreal to us. “Revengers” who seek to “right wrongs,” the wrong way, become dark heroes in our irreverent society. We call them, “anti-heroes.” Anti-heroes, in our society, have all the virtues of heroes but not the recognition or the reputation. They sometimes start out as the villain, but take on virtuous attributes in a stand for what is right. People couldn’t understand how Dorner could be both villain and virtuous at the same time. He was despised for his cowardly acts but heralded for exposing another kind of unjust cowardice once thought a vestige of the past. Everybody knows this is the stuff of movies. Yet, when it plays out in real life, we become judgmental and mercenary around his motives.

Dorner’s motivation was real clear. It was his rationale that was twisted. God avenges while man revenges. Killing everybody is no valid rationale to make up for what happened to him. Dorner was simply pushed past his breaking point. What made some sympathetic towards his plight was that they understood what he was dealing with. It could be stated in four simple words, Los Angeles Police Department. Nothing else needed to be said.

L.A.P.D. has made whole communities lose their minds. Hell, one man is easy. No matter who you talked to, as crazy as they thought this whole rampage situation was, the conversation always reverted back to “the manifesto.” There was something very familiar about the manifesto.

Particularly to the black and Latino communities of Southern California. DWB (driving while black or brown) is real. Seemed like we’d hear it all before. He couldn’t make this stuff up.

Dorner raised some issues that even Chief Charlie Beck was forced to acknowledge. Beck even recanted an earlier decision not to review Dorner’s firing. Of course, he had killed three people already (allegedly) and it was viewed as a ploy to get Dorner to surrender, but the validity of Dorner’s claims didn’t escape us. Hopefully, Beck’s offer was more than a tactic to get Dorner to surrender. It was obvious from the manifesto that Dorner was gonna’ go out on his back. The more the “manhunt” escalated, the higher the bounty got - another vestige of slavery (slave rebellions demanded the biggest bounties), the more talk radio dissected the manifesto.

Then a lot of ex-cops started voicing their own experiences. Suddenly, Dorner didn’t seem so crazy. Irrational, yes. Extreme, definitely. WRONG? Most definitely. But crazy? Nope.

What he said made a LOT of sense to a lot of people who have had “experiences” with L.A.P.D. Inside and out. Seems like Dorner was fired on a technicality. He didn’t make up the event. Maybe he didn’t get all his facts right or didn’t follow immediate protocol of reporting abuse. But he saw something. Oh yeah, and he gave up a fellow officer. Game over. He went against the “blue code of silence” and they served him up.

Dorner even went as far to say that things hadn’t changed and the consent decree should have never been lifted, and the community’s scar had been opened. It had been said that L.A.P.D. morale was back, after the ten year, two “black chiefs” experiment. That’s code for the blue code had returned and so had some of the racial insensitivity for which the department had long been known.

The community had seen some evidence of it over the past few years but nobody was talking about it. LAPD’s rhetoric has changed. Armed with a smile and a revamped public relations department, it’s a kinder, gentler L.A.P.D. rhetoric but rhetoric none the less. As civil rights attorney, Connie Rice, likes to say, “It’s not your grand-daddy’s LAPD, but it’ still LAPD.”

It is our hope that some of the issues raised in the Dorner manifesto can be revisited in the aftermath of this public trauma. Christopher Dorner traumatized the whole state for a couple weeks. L.A.P.D. traumatized whole communities for several decades. People haven’t forgotten that.

The Dorner manhunt was “Racial Americana” on so many levels. Every black man (and even little old Latina ladies) in California was suspect (and a suspect). That’s not usual. What was unusual was the shoe was on the other foot, and the targets weren’t the usual suspects. The hunters became the hunted. Everybody was vulnerable and public panic is no way to live - although some have been forced to do so for a couple centuries. The police panic was evidence of the stress some communities live under, everyday. Police and their families got a small taste of the dangers of police encounters in inner city life. Why should their panic be any different than that of the community’s? Yet it was. Random deadly encounters became everybody’s reality.

There’s a thin line between patriotism and payback when those our society has trained to kill are, themselves, violated, abused and thrown away like they are worthless. And as we found out, everybody doesn’t deal with humiliation the same way. The same dignity Dorner had in his work, he lost in his death. But he made his point. The system he once believed in, and defended, is still broken and nobody seems to care. They will care now…or it can happen again.

ChristopherDorner may be dead, but his manifesto,and the issues raised in it, lives on. So do the questions.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist,Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, is a national columnist, managing director of the UrbanIssues Forumand author of SavingThe Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom. His Website is AnthonySamad.com. Twitter @dranthonysamad. Click here to contact Dr. Samad.

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

Monsanto Keeps on Moving Toward
A Lock on the World’s Food System

Arguments are scheduled to begin next week before the U.S. Supreme Court about whether an Indiana farmer is right when he claims that the seeds he planted should not be considered under the control of Monsanto, the giant transnational chemical and seed monopoly, through its patenting of the seeds.

Some are calling it a “David versus Goliath” contest but the farmer, Vernon H. Bowman, of southeastern Indiana, told The Guardian that he sees it as a question of right and wrong. In that, he is up against the power of Corporate America and the various parts of that power are arrayed against Bowman.

A lower court heard the case against Bowman v. Monsanto, one of the most powerful corporations (St. Louis, Mo.-based) in the most powerful nation in the world, and found in favor of Monsanto. The U.S. protects its corporations like it protects nothing else. It does not protect the individual in the same way and, in this case it is protecting the right of corporate hegemony over a single farmer.

Bowman, 75, who works the same land as his father, bought soybean seed from a local dealer, and the seed contained some of Monsanto’s patented “Roundup Ready” soybean seed, mixed in with other seeds. Monsanto maintains that such seeds can be used for feed, but cannot be used to plant a second crop, which is what Bowman was doing. Farmers who buy Monsanto’s patented seeds must sign an agreement that they will not save seed for planting in a subsequent year, but will buy new seeds every year from the company. They also pay a per-acre “royalty” for using the company’s seeds.

Monsanto typically enters a farmer’s land (some would call it trespassing) and takes samples (some would call it stealing), and then has the samples DNA-tested for their patented genes. If any appear, they sue the farmer and, since farmers are notoriously outgunned, legally and financially, they end up settling for an undisclosed amount with the company. The amount is undisclosed because, along with the settlement, there is a gag order and the farmer is coerced into agreeing not to discuss the case with anyone. Few farmers have enough money to take on the corporation.

Around the world, this is Monsanto’s modus operandi. In some countries, where the legal system is not as complicated as it is in the U.S., they work on the country’s business and political leaders and convince them that their seeds will provide better crops than traditional seeds and the company gains entry into the local marketplace for seeds and the other materials necessary to bring forth a crop: petroleum-based fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and, in the case of their soybeans, their brand of glyphosate, Round-up, which is necessary for their “Roundup ready” soybeans.

Monsanto has genetically engineered (also called “genetically modified organisms” or GMOs) their soybeans so that they cannot be killed by their herbicide, so fields can be sprayed while the commercial crop is coming up and the weeds will be killed. About 85 percent of corn in the U.S., 91 percent of soybeans, some 95 percent of sugar beets, and 88 percent of cotton are genetically engineered. Much of this material, for which no long-term studies on human health have been done, have entered the human food supply in the U.S., where a significant percentage (more than two-thirds) of processed foods contain genetically engineered components.

According to the Center for Food Safety: “By being able to take the genetic material from one organism and insert it into the permanent genetic code of another, biotechnologists have engineered numerous novel creations, such as potatoes with bacteria genes, ‘super’ pigs with human growth genes, fish with cattle growth genes, tomatoes with flounder genes, and thousands of other plants, animals and insects. At an alarming rate, these creations are now being patented and released into the environment.”

Those who would patent every life form possible (plant or animal) want the people to believe that genetic manipulation is the same as selective breeding, something that farmers have done since the dawn of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. They are not the same. Fish do not breed with cattle and tomatoes do not breed with flounder. These are experiments that are disturbing the natural order and no one knows what the long-term effects of these experiments will be on humans and the rest of the natural world and, yet, corporations like Monsanto are allowed by governments to free these experiments into the environment, as if they knew them to be safe.

The herbicide that is necessary for the GMOs to grow and thrive is glyphosate, which Monsanto patented years ago as Roundup. Resistance of weeds to Roundup is becoming a problem and now, “superweeds” are found in fields where they choke out the commercial crops. As a result, more herbicides are needed to kill the weeds, giving the lie to the company’s original claim that GMO crops would require less.

Another serious problem is that glyphosate has been shown in studies to be an endocrine disruptor, which has great potential to negatively affect human health. One European study connected the herbicide to reduced testosterone in rats, even in small amounts. Corporations involved in biotechnology experiments with crops (and, eventually, livestock) are plunging headlong into their use and governments seem unwilling or unable to rein them in until they are proven safe, if that is possible.

The promise by biotechnology corporations was that more food would be produced and less chemical application would be needed. Neither seems to have been proven true, but the pressure is still on to genetically engineer food and get it onto the market, from the purchase of the seed, to the food on the dinner plate. Whether the GMO crops produce more food or not does not seem to matter.

What does matter is that the patenting of life forms allows a few giant corporations to control the food system and controlling the food system controls a people. It’s not unlike the oil and gas industry, the banking and finance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and other industries. A small number of corporations control the beef market, the pork market, and chicken production. A recent report of the Center for Food Safety and Save Our Seeds noted that 53 percent of the world’s commercial seed market is controlled by just three firms, Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta.

Controlling the food system will give untold power to a small number of corporations. That’s why in other countries, farmers and eaters are fighting to keep Monsanto off their farms, out of their fields, and off their dinner plates. In a number of European countries, there is an ongoing battle against GMOs because they want to retain control of their own food systems and they want no part of GMO seeds or foods containing GMO ingredients. In India, there are activists and advocates of food sovereignty (control of their own food system) who realize that their agricultural biodiversity will be destroyed by the likes of Monsanto and its products. They already have experienced it.

At the end of the game, such control, whether it is food, oil and gas, or banking and finance, will provide profits that corporate bosses only dream about now. That’s why patents of living things are so important. They give a small number of corporations control over things that should be decided upon by millions of humans and nature, itself.

That is the issue that will be heard before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Vernon Bowman. He may not see it as a David vs. Goliath issue, but one of right or wrong and might believe the case hinges on the exhaustion of patent rights, at least in some respects.

It is so much more than that. The main question is who controls nature, and is the manipulation of the natural order of things a proper subject of profit seeking and control over any and all things? The Solicitor General in the Obama Administration did not want the court to hear this case because in the global race for technological supremacy, they feel there is too much at stake in this case.

Apparently, those incharge believe that the patent-and-profit world will go sailing from GMOs, tonanotechnology, to whatever comes next and nothing should stand in acorporation’s way.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello,is a long-time former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who livesin the Mohawk Valleyof New YorkState. Inaddition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as theystruggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory foodproducers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

Can Black America Survive 'Drone Man' Barack Obama?

"They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement.”

- Frantz Fanon

Perhaps the more encompassing and pertinent question is not only canBlack America survive the 'Kill List,' NDAA signing, slick-talking,corporate Trojan Horse, predator drone man Barack Obama; but can thisnation as a whole, and Mother Earth herself survive him?

Frankly, whether we survive or not remains to be seen, but one thing iscertain: If we are to survive and regain our rightful places as a partof the global human family we must exercise political and socialconscience and consciousness as critical thinkers. We must beprincipled. We must quickly cease allowing ourselves to be perpetualpawns of the 'color' game, which game implies that if a person isblack, then he or she must be given a pass no matter what he or shedoes. This is folly. Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz] wasabsolutely correct when he said, “Wrong is wrong no matter who does itor says it.”

It is time to be brutally honest. Either you are on the side of theoppressors or you are on the side of the oppressed. There is noin-between and you cannot have it both ways simultaneously.

We must feel the exact same pain and outrage at the blowing to bits ofbabies, children, women, and men by Obama's predator drone missilesthat have slammed down from the skies over Libya (North Africa),Somalia (East Africa), Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Bahrain, etc.as we do at the gun violence and carnage against persons right here inthis nation. I reiterate: There is no in-between and you cannot have itboth ways simultaneously! Either you are on the side of the oppressorsor you are on the side of the oppressed – no matter where they are –and no matter what their color!

We cannot somehow disconnect the wanton systemic police brutalityagainst black and other oppressed people of all colors right here inthe United States from the murderous U.S. corporate/military 'policeactions' against people in other nations. We cannot! We cannotdisconnect the corporate greed and oppression of people right here inthis nation from the the bloody carnage and wars for profit bycorporations such as General Electric, Westinghouse, General Dynamics,Lockheed, Goldman Sachs, Wall Street banksters & robber barons, andan endless list that won't be missed.

Black America! Make up your collective mind!! Whose side are you on?The side of the bloodsuckers and their pawns or the side of everydayordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation andthroughout Mother Earth? Whose side are you on?!

And what of the so-called 'State of the Union' in this nation in thisyear of 2013? You know the answer! It is both pathetic and despicable!But we the people hold the key to liberation in our trembling hands.Wake up! Seize your humanity. Seize the time - for the time is NOW! Storm the Bastille – in the name of humanity – Storm the Bastille!!

Remember: Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward, then, my sisters and brothers! Onward!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to view Larry’s interview of October 26, 2012. Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

Feb 14, 2013 -Issue 504

My Own Demise
Political Cartoon
By Eric Garcia, Chicago IL

BlackCommentator.com cartoonist/artist Eric Garcia produces historically based, politicallycharged criticism, with the goal of creating dialogue about thecontemporary issues”. That’s how Garcia describes his artwork. Aversatile artist working in an assortment of media, from paintings, tohand-printed posters, to sculpture installations, Garcia’s art has acommon goal of educating and challenging. Click hereto contact brother Eric. His website is southvalleyart.com.Follow Eric on twitter garciaink@twitter.comor friend Eric J.Garcia on facebook.

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

Drones:

Warfare Fit for a Changed America

my sweet old etcetera

aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what

is more did tell you just

what everybody was fighting

for,

my sister

isabel created hundreds

(and

hundreds) of socks not to

mention shirts fleaproof ear warmers

etcetera wristers etcetera, my

mother hoped that

i would die etcetera

bravely of course my father used

to become hoarse talking about how it was

a privilege and if only he

could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly

in the deep mud et

cetera

(dreaming,

et

cetera, of

Your smile

eyes knees and of your Etcetera)

-E.E. Cummings, “[my sweet old etcetera]”

In the dark

They could not see

Who had gained

The victory.

-Langston Hughes, “Peace”

The armed forces of the U.S. government, the CIA, the contracted militiamen and women, the capitalists, corporations from Exxon Mobile to weapons manufactures, to agriculture, pharmaceutical and apparel companies, to foreign puppet and so-called sovereign nations - all contribute to the body count. Yet, it is always uncountable - the 1 or 14 or 60 daily or the 236 monthly, the thousands and millions year after year. Nevertheless, a KA-POW! BANG! SPLASH! accompanies each exit from this world. In addition, the “operations,” accomplished out of the sight of American citizens, rely on the cooperation of taxpaying Americans.

Americans, Liberals, Tea Partiers, Progressives, Leftists, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Green Partiers, and Christians, are unique. The philosophy of American exceptionalism attests to the nation’s unique role in the world and to its difference from the other –isms such as fascism and communism.

Consequently, it is unlikely to witness in the upper classes and the nobility, who waltzed while fellow citizens died of starvation or disease, any parallel here in the United States. So many German citizens turned their heads and held their noses as Jewish men, women, and children disappeared or went up in smoke, but here in the United States such behavior from average citizens toward other Americans is unlikely. So many millions of citizens in the former Soviet Union accepted the “party line” and dared to imagine an alternative vision free of coercive force and outright repression. In the United States however, the land of the free, a vision of citizenry in lock step with a repressive regime is unthinkable.

Come hell or high water, Americans flock to Wal-Mart or their local gun dealer and cherish gun ownership more than freedom itself!

In the meantime, the body count in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia continues to rise and, it seems Americans do waltz, turn their heads, or march in lock step with the notion that the U.S. government is saving lives and sparing Americans another 911 or worse.

The United States is “unique” in that its people professing for 200 years such difference, newness, such a historical awareness of it other nations and its own past in savagery and barbarianism that they today respond to the daily, monthly, yearly tally of the neutralized, exterminated, liquidated with indifference.

It is incomprehensible but no less real.

***

The more things change, the more things advance. Gone is large-scale fascism in Italy or Germany. Gone is the Communist Block. But today, a sovereign and supposedly free Western nation like France, with a socialist government no less, sends a cavalier to rescue “poor” Malians, in a gold an oil deposit rich Mali, at the request of its puppet leadership, from the new evil terrorist. Even the BBC sends its troops of journalists to meet and greet the saved. Americans are not terribly concerned.

It is France, right? France’s former colony, right? Nevertheless, Mali is a “partner” of the U.S. too. Most important, Mali is “an important partner in regional efforts to combat Islamic extremism,” according to a Reuters report, April 4, 2012. Just last year, the U.S. suspended $13 million of its $140 million in humanitarian aid to Mali (Reuters) - a lot of American taxpayer’s money for a rich nation where the body count rises. It seems Malians still starve while the U.S. treats Malian soldiers to expert training in the U.S. - to do what else but kill.

When there are plenty of Dead Presidents to go around who is counting? Just thank the well-armed French troops and the well-trained Malian soldiers for their “partnership.”

Hitler only had a little more than 10 years.

In the old days, when the communists of Vietnam dared to tell France that their days as colonial rulers were coming to an end, the French (of all “revolutionary” people) did not believe in the power of the people. On their exit from Vietnam came the U.S. The tiny nation, too, warned the big giant. You, too, will go. Time is on our side.

Chemical defoliants ravaged the land (see Nick Turse, “The American System of Suffering 1965-2014,” The Nation, January 8, 2013).[1] “Helicopter machine gunners began firing on locals. By 1969, bombing and shelling were day-and-night occurrences.” Villagers fled for the mountains, writes Turse, “trading the terror of imminent death for a daily struggle of hardscrabble privation.” Others still ended up in “squalid” refugee “resettlement” camps. According to one eyewitness and survivor, 78-year-old Pham To:

Those who remained in the village suffered more when the troops came through. Homes were burned as a matter of course. People were kicked and beaten. Men were shot when they ran in fear. Women were raped. One morning, a massacre by American soldiers wiped out 21 fellow villagers.

“Leaving aside those who perished from disease, hunger, or lack of medical acre, at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington,” writes Turse. Of this number, “2 million” were civilians! Another “5.3 million” suffered wounds, “for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall.” Close to 5 million (4.8) were sprayed with “toxic herbicides like Agent Orange” while 11. 7 million fled their homes.

In those days, however, a “revolutionary” and “new” people, staged an era of spectacular protest. A high count of military casualties- and causalities, high and deep among the protesters send U.S. troops stumbling over one another to flee Vietnamese military and villagers and city dwellers alike.

Things are different today.

The U.S. government invaded Iraq anyway just as it had invaded Vietnam in 1965, resulting in an “uncountable” number of deaths. Iraq’s former U.S. puppet Saddam did not send troops to New York, Washington D.C. or Pennsylvania and WMDs were never found, but Americans believe war is the only option!

The daily, monthly, yearly body count keeps Americans safe. The neutralization, extermination, liquidation of other human beings is but a sacrificial offering to the gods, to the universe, for the longevity of the greatest nation the world has ever seen (or experienced!) - not to echo past empires that have said much the same.

The altars, furnaces, gulags, the Dionysian frenzy, and the Viennese waltzes among the stately high rises command the American people to turn their heads and hold their noses - and they oblige because “politics” boils down to the “politics” of Scott Walker and the like. Democrats and or Republicans - and there is no other alternative to this reality. The electoral process has the U.S either in the grips of “socialism” or living out the “King legacy.”

***

War saves lives! War saves a lifestyle!

It is imperative that those in serve of the Market silence Americans old enough to remember the body count and suffering in Europe and Japan, in Korea, in Vietnam, and the protest body count in the U.S. with revised narratives, for example, regarding the conflict in Vietnam. Omit the millions of civilian casualties but insert a victorious “W” for the U.S.A., and Americans won in Vietnam! Those Americans in 2009, who dared to call into question Obama’s war in Afghanistan and refer to it as “Obama’s Vietnam” (see Turse) were quickly shot down and out shouted from above: David Patraeus’s “winning formula” or horrors that will befall the U.S. if a Mitt Romney succeeds to the White House. Now the U.S. has yet another general who will win the war against “terrorists.”

Turse is right to note that Americans just do not get it. “Reporters, pundits, historians, generals, politicians, or other members of the chattering class” manage “to miss the one unfailing parallel between America’s wars” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia - “civilian suffering.”

The suffering of others goes unnoticed. But how successful has that campaign of change been? What a successful slogan on the other hand, this inertia on the part of the American public shows just how successful, echoed in every regime since the Nixon regime. Behind a Nixon, a Carter, a Reagan, a Bush I and II, and a Clinton in between, Americans listened for the promise of change. And Americans changed, and apparently, Americans believe in this change!

Few Americans, writes Turse, have “ever personally experienced anything like what their tax dollars have wrought in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia in the last half-century.” In Vietnam alone, “the numbers are staggering, the suffering incalculable, the misery almost incomprehensible to most Americans but not, perhaps, to an Iraqi.”

Or Pakistanis or Yemenis or Somalis who, if they do not know it, are the newest sacrificial lambs for the advancement of U.S. military engagement with the “enemy.” It is being mapped out.

Silence some and dazzle the young!

According to a well-tuned propaganda documentary, Rise of the Drones, featured on PBS’s NOVA last month (Lockheed Martin and the Koch Foundation for Science funded this propaganda for the continuation, advancement of warfare).[2]

Incomprehensible, huh? The U.S. works day and night to develop drones of all shapes and sizes. With the help of scientists (like schoolboys, so eager to be in the service of the “good guys,” hired by the military and corporations such as the featured BASF, and others specializing in warfare, the U.S. is mastering the high-tech approach to killing from what looks like basement labs. (Aspects of the changing face of warfare require secrecy, so the American viewer is not allowed to see too much of what lies underneath blue tarps. However, what is omitted: other nations know enough to start tinkering with drone technology!). Nonetheless, America now has the capacity to zero in on individuals on the street, walking, driving, playing, and this work in high definition will enhance the targeting of the enemy - the bug splash! You can imagine the “enhanced” potential for the U.S. government to spy on citizens, including Americans, anywhere in the world. According to the Obama administration, the government will not need to explain why your name appears on the CIA’s or Obama’s kill list. Surveillance or bug splash! (“Capture is infeasible!”).

And the music is pulsating because this is such a revolutionary adventure into the future!

I should add that the scientists and developers of drone technology are just Americans who do not intend for their inventions to be deployed against humans in warfare. They just want to serve the flag. Oppenheimer bought the same narrative.

The “remote pilots” featured in The Rise of Drones are key to the whole operation. Pilots are heroes, so naturally, these remote pilots represent the future’s heroes. For remote pilots sitting in front of computers, maneuvering the drones, the word “kill” is, I guess, inoperative. It is now- “SPLASH!” - as in “bug splash!” (Already acclimated to a video game world where people are expendable “bugs,” these remote pilots are easier to train). “The U.S. now trains more remote pilots than manned Air Force and Navy pilots combined.” So you young folks out there, come on! Combat without your blood!

This shift, change, saves lives! “Pilots” stay at a safe distance, and I suppose the Empire need not worry about misfits like bombers in Vietnam who, witnessing the impact of napalm and bombs on men, women, and children, dared to let the Navy or Air Force know they had a conscious! There is no room for a conscious in a militarized/CIA operation.

The Rise of Drones features the future, the future of warfare! It is inevitable moving of time forward. Who does not want to move forward? As retired General David Deptula explains, it takes too long to gather information on the enemy. Gone are those days - welcome to the future - to forward thinking and rapid responses to a threat!

Where in all this talk in the old ways verses the new is there reference even to a decrease in the body count?

Drones, the tool “of choice for taking out militants outside of Afghanistan and Iraq,” (“Everything We Know So Far About Drone Strikes,” Propublica, January 11, 2013,) are triggered from within the U.S. and from a remote “network of secret bases around the world” (Propublica). No one knows the total number killed by strikes. Maybe add over 3000 bodies (Propublica) to those millions here and there and in the past. But what is another 3000 dead, killed!

While the U.S. Congress stages a show of concern, questioning the legality of drone strikes and the legality of Obama’s (the Executive Branch’s) right to list and kill Americans, the U.S. Empire is working to affect the future of change. Well, is this not the reason Barack Obama selection and slogan of change galvanizes (and enriches) Wall Street, Bernanke, Summers, Spritzer, Brennans, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and Lockheed Martin ($126, 932, Opensecrets.org). Dr. King’s selection by the oligarchy would be incomprehensible to someone with his principles who could not manipulate the national and international laws and declare war on the world’s citizens. King is exactly where Americans in 1968 (and maybe even now) want him to be. Dead!

Drone warfare arms Americans with the right to kill while disarming Americans of their Constitutional right to due process if charged or detained by the legal apparatus of the government. Unfortunately, too many citizens in the U.S., concerned about holding on to their guns, will find confronting a tiny drone outside living room windows a Wow, Bang, Splash blend of the Old West meets Star Wars.

The future of drones is the future of profits for individual Americans as well as for corporations. As we know, the good ol’ American is entitled to be just as enterprising as the giant corporations. America is the land of opportunity! The world of drone warfare offers a systematically high-tech militarized reality, part otherworldly and dazzling, smartly packaged to present Americans opportunities to fulfill their wildest dreams for themselves and their families.

Incomprehensible? No. Drone warfare saves capitalism and with capitalism, an American lifestyle of violence!

In the dark/They could not see/Who had gained/The victory.

The masterminds behind the idea of drone warfare, of perpetual warfare, tap into the psyche of the American people. There is something attractive to Americans in this down-spiraling transformation of themselves and of the State. It is the best of Sci-Fi writ large: a terrifying enemy with exceptional advantages appears on the planet. Before the end of the Hollywood production, the little people wake up from a state of helplessness, glimpse a vision of freedom from the enemy, and begin to fight back- if it is understood that “the enemy” is a manifestation of the fear within.

[1] Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Turse reviewed the archives of U.S. war crimes committed in Vietnam. These reports originated from soldiers and returning veterans. These documents were compiled by U.S. Army investigators for the Pentagon Task Force after soldiers reported witnessing fellow soldiers committing war crimes with impunity.

[2] See Kevin Gosztola, “‘The Rise of Drones’ Is Mostly a BS Infomercial for the Military Defense Industry", Firedoglake.com, January 24, 2013.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has aDoctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

God Particle:
Nexus of Science and Religion

Western Culture prioritizes one way of knowing (the scientific method) above other ways of knowing (characterized as religious). This is a particularly powerful hang-up. Killings, thievery, and all manner of uncivilized behaviors were justified by this cultural bias. The belief in the superiority of science significantly blunted the criticism of horrendous acts through an immoral ends-justifies-the-means paradigm. This ignorant prioritization will not go away despite the plentiful evidence of its stupidity and destructiveness. Marx and Engels were infected with it in their attempt to fashion “scientific” socialism. The latest kerfuffle over this faulty thinking erupted around the advent of the discovery of the Higgs boson, better known by its sexier nickname: the “God particle.”

Before explicating the immoral cultural quagmire that has adhered to the God Particle, let me describe some unassailable understandings of human kind’s – at least – two ways of knowing. These ways of knowing are basically structured into our brains in terms of lateralization (localization of function on one side) tendencies. Long ago, brain experts discovered that the halves of the human brain generally work differently. Although both halves are to some degree involved in most brain functions, there is a tendency for the right half to be more involved in creative, novel and spatial functions and the left half to be more involved in repetitive learned behavior and linear thinking. The right half does easily what computers find very difficult to do (like face recognition) and the left half is outpaced in its step-by-step functioning by the power of computers. IMHO, science – as it is purported to be practiced – is a left brain function and spiritual knowing is a right brain function, generally. Western culture tends to emphasize and reward left brain thinking while other cultures set the balance of emphasis and rewards differently. Of course, reality – both in terms of human behavior and in terms of the reality that we can know – is much more complicated than this.

The next two unassailable understandings, for the purposes of this column, have to do with examples of special human knowing that science is unable to explain. Science does not dispute the reality or the truth of the knowledge gained from these special ways of knowing but science is unable to comprehend how some humans are able to find and know the truths that result.

The first comes out of the experiences of a very small number of people in the world who are considered to be blessed with what is called savant syndrome. Savant abilities are usually found in one or more of five major areas: art, music, calendar calculation, mathematics and spatial acuity; all these functions tend to be performed by the right half of the human brain. The abilities of savants are extraordinary beyond those of prodigies or what might be considered within the range of capabilities of other humans. Daniel Tammet, for example, of Great Britain, is able to do mathematical calculations faster than a mechanical calculator and can easily recite the number Pi up to 22,514 decimal places. Tammet says that he is able to do this because he sees numbers as colors, shapes, and sounds! Tammet is one of about 40 currently living savants.

The last unassailable alternative path to knowing I will discuss in this column concerns the abilities of the ayahuasqueros or shamans of the Amazon forest in South America. I was blown away by the fact that 74% of the modern pharmacopoeia’s plant-based remedies were first discovered by “traditional” societies. The Amazon contains half of all the plant species on Earth. [You should know that the big pharmaceutical firms are trying to steal traditional knowledge because modern medical science cannot do what the South American ayahuasqueros can do!] These highly successful shamans are able, through the use of “traditional ceremony” and hallucinogens, to discover specific plants and preparation procedures that can treat sophisticated human ailments. The choice of the plants and their preparations represent an understanding of the workings of the human body and of chemistry that is way beyond what could be discovered by trial and error!

The hallucinogen ayahuasca itself is a case in point. The drug is a combination of two plants which must be boiled together for many hours. One contains the substance dimethyltryptamine, which is also secreted by the human brain. But dimethyltryptamine has no effect when swallowed because a stomach enzyme called monoamine oxidase blocks it. The second plant contains substances that inactivate this precise stomach enzyme, allowing the hallucinogen to reach the brain. So here are people without electron microscopes who choose, among some 80,000 plant species, the leaves of a bush containing a hallucinogenic brain hormone, which they combine with a vine containing a substance that inactivates an enzyme of the digestive tract, which would otherwise block the hallucinogenic effect. And they do this to modify their consciousness so that they can know plant remedies that cure human aliments!

I do not know about you but I cannot deny that there are ways of knowing truth other than through the scientific method. Some may want to maintain their biases in the face of such evidence but I would have to conclude that those deniers do so for some reason other than recognizing truth. The history of Western culture – rejecting all knowledge that is not under authoritarian imperialist control – leads me to question scientific chauvinism and to condemn Western imperialism. Roman Emperor Constantine shaped the Gospels to reject beliefs that questioned his chosen Church leadership and reject beliefs that emphasized the power of individuals to find their own truth. Since Constantine’s time, the Roman Catholic Church continued to marginalize and reject anti-imperialist understandings whenever they were rediscovered by Christian mystics – seers. It is as much a fallacy to attribute all understandings of spirituality to all religions and religious people as it is a fallacy to attribute the understandings of all scientists to everyone who claims that he arrives at his conclusions only through the scientific method.

A close look at the history of science has exposed the flimsiness of Western culture’s claims of a superior way of knowing. I know that since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition in 1962, historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have questioned the meaning and objectivity of science. Kuhn recounts the non-scientific origins of many so-called scientific discoveries. Often scientific discoveries have appeared in dreams or have been appropriated from indigenous sources and then have been fit into a scientific understanding – many of these scientific understandings have later been found to be wrong without accepting – in some major way – the indigenous belief systems. Acupuncture, which is based on the concept of energy meridians and the flow of Chi through the human body, will be another example. However, despite many examples, some folks are so deeply hooked in to their cultural chauvinism that NO number of examples will ever convince them that there is more than one way of knowing truth.

On July 13, 2012, Chris Lisee published a piece on the God Particle. He recounts that “In 1993 when American physicist Leon Lederman was writing a book on the Higgs boson, he dubbed it ‘the goddamn particle’ An editor suggested ‘the God particle’ instead.” It was the editor’s choice that reignited the ongoing schism in Western culture. Much of the rhetoric in this debate is nonsensical and unproductive. In a Huffington Post article Philip Clayton, dean of Claremont School of Theology and a researcher of science and religion, said that discussing whether the discovery “disproves religion or supports creation” misses the point. “The fans and the foes of religion...are overreaching on both sides. The quest for the Higgs boson, and its ultimate discovery, neither proves nor disproves God.” Attempts to articulate reality fall short on all sides because all sides – when pushed pass the limits of cultural, imperialist chauvinism to ultimate honesty – must admit that reality cannot be translated into human speech. Early Hebrews spoke of Yahweh as a linguistic place-holder that could not be spoken. At the most basic level, physics speaks of quantum indeterminacy, that which is not a determined thing but is by its nature a probability. That means that it is not knowable not that it is not known yet. Both the religious and the scientific way-of-knowing posit that at the most basic level, all things are ONE.

For the sake of proving their moral or practical superiority, some are so stuck in the Western cultural either-or paradigm that they miss the truth and the glory of reality and of humanity. On both sides, the history and the stamp of intolerant imperialism arise and all thought and description from the other side is seen as evidence of nastiness. So Lawrence M. Krauss, an Arizona State University theoretical physicist can say, “That’s the difference between science and religion. We don’t require the universe to be what we want - we force our beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality.” He falsely believes that the imperialism of Emperor Constantine which attempted to force an “authorized” belief on human society and the subsequent ripples of that imperialism is part of the basic nature of religious practices. Krauss is wrong. One might condemn all of modern science for beginning with the conversion of an ingredient of a Chinese children’s toy (gun powder) into a weapon combined with the calculations of the trajectory of cannon balls and the “alchemical” skills of metallurgist. One can condemn all of science for the abomination that is its greatest achievement, the hydrogen bomb, a weapon that is so destructive of life and planet that it cannot be used!

Krauss and many of theproponents of the superiority of scientific knowing stridently ask us all todeny our own personal experiences of knowing: consciousness. Everyday we wake up to a real experience that science cannot explain and that allowsus to reach beyond, in some way, the materialistic andtemporal limitations to which science would chain us. Out of our naturallyderived two ways of knowing, humans have produced truths that are of great use.Neither pro-science nor pro-religion folks can validly deny this truth.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Wilson Riles, is a former Oakland, CA City CouncilMember. Click here to contact Mr.Riles.

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

Black Parents:

We Must Regain Control over our Children’s Education

Last week’s controversy at Bronx, NY Junior High School 80 highlights the sad state of public education in America. According to news outlets, the school’s principal, Mr. Emmanuel Polanco, moonlights as rapper “El Siki,” whose music video involves poppin’ champagne and carousing with bikini-clad video vixens.

The El Siki case is no isolated event. Career Day at Crawford Long Middle School in Atlanta, Ga recently featured gangster rapper Gucci Mane. The school seems to believe that rappers who pander songs about drug dealing and sex should be role models for our children.

These events are allowed to occur because we are asleep at the wheel, no longer stewards of our children’s education. Too many Black parents remain uninvolved in their children’s education. The students of Bronx JHS 80 knew the principal’s alter ego, but parents are just now finding out. Likewise, some parents at the Atlanta middle school claim that they were unaware that an ex-con rapper was scheduled to speak at their school.

Structural racism and poor school conditions contribute to the so-called “Black-White achievement gap” - a phrase we should be fighting to abolish. But the “hands off approach” taken by many Black parents also contributes to the problem.

President Barack Obama has chided Black parents for allowing academic achievement to take a backseat, as ballplayers and television personalities, rather than black intellectuals, serve as role models. During the 2012 Chicago Teacher’s Strike, teachers pointed to uninvolved parents - not just overcrowding or dilapidated buildings - as a major reason why they should not be held responsible for the educational crisis there.

For decades, education research has confirmed that children succeed when parents spend time at school meetings, volunteer, read and help with homework. Unfortunately, Black parents are much less likely to exhibit these pro-schooling behaviors.

A national study published in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues last September shows that Black parents are less involved at their children’s schools. Lower socioeconomic resources play a factor; it’s hard to juggle multiple part-time jobs, daycare, and bake cookies for the school fundraiser. Still, the authors of that study say they were surprised to discover that Black parents with higher education and income levels are still less likely to get involved.

In the hands of politicians, these findings can be used to unfairly blame Black parents, and feed on racist assumptions about irresponsible Black mothers in particular. Last month, Republicans in Tennessee proposed cutting the cash welfare payments to families with low achieving students. The image of lazy blacks spending money on designer nails and Lexus SUVs, instead of books, is an old favorite of conservative politicians and Bill Cosby.

The truth is that Black parents, like all parents, want their children to succeed. Part of the problem is that, as a study published last month in Journal of Educational Research found that, Black parents are only likely to get involved when schools have formal outreach programs. Some Black parents are intimidated by parent-teacher conferences, and are afraid to confront school authorities because of previous bad experiences.

Likewise, there is a tendency for Black parents to only react when their child is misbehaving or having academic difficulties. The threat, “Child, don’t make me come down to that school” may be out of love and concern, but does not increase student achievement. An on-going presence at school, along with structured educational activities at home, is the key to ensuring school success.

We need more Black parents, regardless of social class, to become everyday-activists for their children’s education.

Ms. Gabrielle McGill-Carpenter, a Black mother, articulates this message for middle-class black parents in a recent Washington Post commentary. According to Ms. McGill-Carpenter, the black parents in her affluent, suburban school district spent too much “time, money, and energy on sports,” while their children were failing in school. By simply organizing black parents around academics, they were able to ensure that their children gained access to honor courses and mentoring in the school.

Part of reclaiming control over our children’s education should also ensure that Black culture and history are part of the formal or after-school curriculum. Research shows that when Black children feel good about themselves, they are more likely to achieve. Black book stores are wonderful places to gain knowledge of self, especially for families that choose to homeschool.

Schools don’t always act in the best interest of Black children. Engaged and vigilant parents have to be the first and last line of defense.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Dr. Travis L. Gosa, PhD, is Assistant Professor of AfricanaStudies at Cornell University. He teachescourses on educational inequality, African American families, and hip hopculture. Click here to contact Dr. Gosa.

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

The White Supremacy System

How many times have you heard someone of African ancestry say that “Black people are our own worst enemy”? If you have lived among African people in this country for any length of time, I am sure you have heard this remark made many times.

Unfortunately, the system of white supremacy developed in the western world, has caused far too many African people in America to believe that the problem we face as a people is “us.” We must remind ourselves, time and time again, that African people in America were captured from Africa and brought to America against our will. As the “1974 Black Capital” article asserted, “Our introduction to the West was in the form of a commodity raped from Africa to be used as labor, capital, chattel, and currency to build a nation for someone else.” In the article, it explained that “...our history tells us that we were below slaves and less than human. We were things who were traded for horses, our women used as breeders and our children raised like chickens.”

Finally, the “Black Capital” article pointed out that during the slavery process - “The level of our existence was based upon the skill and the will of those who owned us. They had the right to deem that which was best for their property. Therefore, the profit motive and the skill of the slave master determined how this Black wealth would bring the highest return on his investment.”

This formula is still at work today. Just examine the role of African people in the entertainment and athletic industry. White people own and control these industries and use African people to “bring the highest return off their investment.”

If African people are going to ever have a serious mental breakthrough in terms of how we analyze our condition in America, we will have to resolve the question “are we our own worst enemy,” or has the system of white supremacy created a set of conditions that continue to keep us in an oppressed state?

We must accept responsibility for answering this question as well as accepting responsibility for solving all the problems we face as a people. But in accepting responsibility for addressing the problems we face as an African people in America, we must have a framework out of which to properly conceptualize our problems.

In 1852, the great African thinker in America, Dr. Martin R. Delany, wrote one of the most important books that accurately described our condition at that moment in history that is still applicable to our condition today. The title of the book is The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States.

Delany wrote, “Unfortunately for us a body, we have been taught that we must have some person to think for us, instead of thinking for ourselves. So accustomed are we to submission and this kind of training, that it is with difficulty, even among the most intelligent of the colored people, an audience may be elicited for any purpose whatever, if the expounder is to be colored...”

Further Delany wrote, “and the introduction of a subject is treated with indifference, if not contempt, when the originator is a colored person. Indeed, the most ordinary white person is almost revered while the most qualified colored person is totally neglected, nothing from them is appreciated.”

In resolving the question of whether “we are our own worst enemy,” we should reflect that for over three hundred years white people openly discussed African people as a problem (1600 - 1900). Today they still discuss us as a problem but the language is coded differently.

As Dr. Anderson Thompson has written on the discussions that white people have had on what they have historically called “the Negro Problem,” “There is a duality in the story of western white man and his culture, which, paradoxically, is thrown into sharp relief wherever the Black man appears (or is dropped) on the scene.” Dr. Thompson says, “Whenever or wherever the white man exists in proximity to the Blacks the Negro Question appears.”

The idea of the “Negro Question” is discussed further when Dr. Thompson writes, “The Negro Question in Western society has been a perennial subject of endless international debates, actions, decisions, wars, riots, lynchings - all of which flow out a recurring western dialogue: a conversation (for Europeans only) which for a long time took place between white men over what should be done with, about or to the Blacks they found in their captured territories.”

Concluding on this point, Dr. Thompson informs us “The International Negro Question, or Nigger Question has, for the most part, been an integral past of European Civilization. Wherever in the world there existed. Europeans in proximity to the African, inevitably the question arose as to how (not why, I nor whether) the Black man should be exploited or should be eliminated.”

Weare not our own worst enemy - even though some African people in this countrybehave in manners that are not in our best interest. What we must continue todo is to understand this negative African behavior and assume responsibilityfor changing it. The enemy and problem is white supremacy and its continuedimpact on us.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is theNational Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here to contact Dr. Worrill.

Feb 14, 2013 -Issue 504

Diversity

Political Cartoon

By Chuck Siler, Carrollton TX

BlackCommentator.com artist/cartoonist Charles E. "Chuck" Siler's works feature a variety of themes ranging from New Orleans' lively and unique jazz scene to its lively and equally unique political scene. He uses his art and political cartoons to comment on life's complexities, warts and beauty marks.

His creations include fine watercolors and acrylics and pen and ink cartoons. His cartoons are featured on a regular basis in The Louisiana Weekly.

A Katrina evacuee, Siler has spoken on New Orleans history across the USA at universities and culural events.

Click here to contact Mr. Siler

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

Youth

Art

By Ray Ferrer

Urban Wall Art & Murals, New York NY

“Youth” is a piece currently on display in Chicago between now and February 22nd.

It measures 24" x 30" and is Spray Paint & Acrylic on Canvas.

Ray Ferrer ~ Urban Wall Art & Murals

Click here to contact Mr. Ferer or to arrange a purchase

Artist Statement: I'm from NY born and raised. I was in the Army for 6 years. I have my MBA from Auburn University and was a management consultantand business strategist for many years. I've traded it all in for a paint can and love what I do. I make very unique and custom artwork for people and businesses all around the world by hand cutting stencils and painting them onto canvas and onto large walls. I travel to client sites for larger murals and mail out smaller pieces. I will go anywhere to do a mural! My artwork is inspired by wanting to see things I absolutely love in a different light.

Represented by BlackCommentator.com

Feb 14, 2013 - Issue 504

Quote to Ponder

Click here for moreabout Nelson Mandela