(D)ude: Man! I am still mourning the loss of Lee Thompson
Young. He was such a promising intellectual tour de force who was most
certainly experiencing a lot of shakeups due to bipolar disorder while
balancing a soaring television career.
(M)an: Dude! He was a truly classy guy and never once
displayed any irritation with the fans who loved reliving “The Famous Jett
Jackson” moments from the Disney Channel Network, a part he landed at that
pivotal age of 13 when things start to fall apart as we transition between our preteen
and teenage years.
D: Man! He loved writing and graduated with honors from
USC’s School of Cinematic Arts on a full academic scholarship. What do you
think went wrong that he claimed his own life with a shotgun wound to the
temple?
M: Dude! The high life is difficult, especially for
successful minorities. I was at a book fair that lasted the entire weekend. You
remember the one you also went to last year? Well, there were exclusively White
American volunteers running the public library event for charity but there were
a lot of presumptions and assumptions in the eyes of the organizers for every
ethnicity that reminded me of the stereotypes embraced by charities right here
in Fort Worth, Texas.
D: Man! What sort of stereotypes? Like the ones I overheard
while looking for a downtown loft for your sister and brother-in-law?
M: Dude! Yeah. Stereotypes like you are what you drive or
that you are where you’re from. Remember how you said that the proprietor of
the property was dressed in Calvin Klein shifts both days and how her attitude
came across as if she ordered them from an upscale department or online store?
D: Man! You know, one of the guys at work told me that his
wife had found three Calvin Klein ensembles after the season was over, for
about two years that is, at a resale shop? Apparently, the proprietor of the
particular condos I toured acted like I was one of those guys who buy at
reduced price retailers like the ones located behind the condos I was touring.
And to make things even more uncomfortable, she offered to walk me to my fifteen-year-old
make of an automobile.
M: Dude! Did you decline her offer?
D: Man! Of course not! Although when I walked out of there
the second time around I recommended
that my sister hire a professional to do
her condo hunting for her. Becoming intimidated by the superficial only begets
more artificiality and actually is very unhealthy for the fate of the manufactured.
M: Dude! At that book event, there were these White American
high school students who came in and tried intimidating the crowds with their
literary jargon. Surprisingly, their choices were overwhelmingly whitewashed
like my skin tone gets in the fall and winter months due to the lack of sun. I
wondered if they would ever list a non-White literary figure, but no! They knew
Ayn Rand like Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and J.D. Salinger like
Hillary Rodham Clinton. But there was one guy in the gang of six or eight that
had soul enough to stump the others with a simple question about the significance
of Giovanni’s Room and Marlon Brando
and Robert F. Kennedy.
D: Man! James Baldwin wrote one, befriended the other, and
met with the last?
M: Dude! Yeah! I saw a lot of political hardbacks and
paperbacks but they did not resonate anything in me. You know, the United
States is in a paradigm shift right this minute- the era before President Obama
and the era during his second term as Commander-in-Chief. The Koch Brothers and
the Republican Party are infiltrating the airwaves rattling the poor and working
class White like us while Chris Christie continues crass comments regarding the
nation’s chief executive embracing him when Christie was a grieving washout
post-Superstorm Sandy, regardless of what he tooted to the Philadelphia
Inquirer yesterday.
D: Man! It was a handshake
like you would shake hands with anyone. It was perfectly natural, casual,
normal type of greeting between two people. And you know, it’s become legend.
If he [President Obama] deserved to
be trashed, I would have, as I had many times before that. But he didn’t
deserve it.
M: Dude! Chris Christie said that because he is conducting
an experiment for the 2014 midterms that the Republican Party intends to win
through cheating and falsely advertising itself as what David Muir of ABC News
has clearly stated the “new wave” of broadcasts via a new ABC Network venture
to attract Hispanic millennials. It is a new cable channel collaboration with Univision
and will go by the name “Fusion” and has me very concerned.
D: Man! Why?
M: Dude! The introduction to the “Fusion” channel, which
debuted today, passionately promotes the new generations of Hispanic youth to
embrace assimilation as a lot of Hispanic millennials have.
D: Man! Assimilation is one of the four types of ways people
choose to acculturate to a host culture, like Mexican immigrants assimilating
into the culture of the United States of America by encouraging the dominant
language of English to be spoken over Spanish, the language of the culture of
origin, which they attempt to suppress to the point of erasure.
M: Dude! There is a psychological cultural crisis facing immigrants
to the United States from all over the world. And it is that the status quo
purposefully throws those who have forgotten their language of origin and their
cultural heritage into a loophole. Like, for example, remember how our Hispanic
friends in grade school were divided into those who were bilingual and those
who spoke English exclusively?
D: Man! Yeah! We have to embrace biculturalism and
multiculturalism! But what is the point you’re trying to make? That the status
quo brings on a feeling of inferiority upon those who are bicultural and
multicultural?
M: Dude! Remember how a lot of teachers became exasperated
by the bilingual and multilingual when we were in kindergarten and elementary
school?
D: Man! Yeah! And then when the time came to pick a language
to enroll in for the course of middle school and high school, the teachers
expressed a slight offish attitude towards Hispanic students who did not know
the language of their country of origin, primarily Spanish. Although I remember
a lot more languages in our cohort than was recognized. What happens at the
university level?
M: Dude! The students who either assimilated or whose
families chose another painful acculturation experience simply known as
marginalization— the process by which people chose to not take any sides at
all, whether for the host or the original culture, and basically decide to
reject both— are confronted by status quo professors and administrators who chide
them about not embracing integration of all their different backgrounds and
remind them of bleak facts and statistics about how languages are either dying
or in peril.
D: Man! We need to embrace bilingual and multilingual
children from the time of preschool. And children enrolled in ESL deserve
respect and encouragement to integrate and love both or all parts of their
heritage.
M: Dude! The experiment that Chris Christie is conducting
right now as he campaigns is to find out how to basically get African-Americans
to vote for the Republican Party.
D: Man! So, let me get this together. The channel referred
to as Fusion is the ABC Network’s
attempt to assimilate and encourage assimilation amongst Hispanic Americans.
And Chris Christie is in the process of assessing African Americans and how to
attract their votes?
M: Dude! Arianna Huffington has created ethnic-specific news
websites in which she and the Republican Party had already begun the research
that Chris Christie is wrapping up.
D: Man! The Republican Party is really into television
channeling! Why?
M: Dude! Let’s see. There are currently two channels already
on cable television that are focused on attracting specific millennials. There
is the channel we have been talking about and that is Fusion. The other one is Pivot, and that is targeted towards
White American millennials.
D: Man! How did they come to be?
M: Dude! In June 2004 eBay’s Jeffery Skoll founded
Participant Productions for projects like the ones Michael Moore made back then,
intended to promote social change while remaining commercially bankable. In
March 2005 Ricky Strauss became the first president of Participant Productions
and movies like George Clooney’s “Syriana” and others brought the company many
Academy Award nominations and occasional wins from then until right now. The
last cycle of Academy Award nominations having taken place in 2012, with Steven
Spielberg’s “Lincoln” securing 12 nominations and Daniel Day-Lewis winning of
course.
D: Man! Then what happened?
M: Dude! Well, in January 2012, Ricky Strauss left Participant
Media conveniently for Walt Disney Pictures and Pivot launched in August 1,
2013. Keep in mind that the Walt Disney Company owns the American Broadcasting
Company, or ABC. And Fusion launched today.
D: Man! That is convenient! Ricky Strauss probably got so
flustered and angry after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election that
he and his corporate ties wanted to present impeachment and “he’ll never be a
two-term president” hype and the corresponding White supremacist campaign to
halt such progress of the Civil Rights Movement. They probably did not
anticipate that President Obama would take office at least two and a half
decades before what Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had estimated.
M: Dude! 2044?
D: Man! I think that’s the estimate that Reverend King gave.
I distrust the Supreme Court males and actually am beginning to dislike them
for having handed over so much control and power that was meant for a democracy
to thrive to White Corporate America via their Citizens United ruling and the
George W. Bush plus Dick Cheney presidencies before that.
M: Dude! David Muir and ABC Nightly News completed the
circle of lies and cheating to be waged upon the lives of millennials now and
tomorrow by referring to Sofia Vergara who is an actress on a record-breaking weekly
sitcom on ABC and reported to be banking around nineteen million dollars to
sell the assimilation and gradual marginalization to the millions of viewers
who tune to peek inside a “Modern Family” and let US not forget Pivot’s attempt
to do the same with its sitcom “Little Mosque on the Prairie” and the resulting
growing number of viewership.
D: Man! Sofia Vergara is the spokesperson and model for
PepsiCo and Covergirl, right?
M: Dude! Yeah. And it just happens to be that ABC News’
senior executive producer Jon Banner left after twenty-five years in the industry
to become the senior Vice President of global strategy and planning for
PepsiCo.
D: Man! When was that?
M: Dude! The press releases indicate the date Augusr 21,
2013, conveniently placed exactly one week before the first day of the 2012
Republican National Convention where Chris Christie, the then-governor of New
Jersey gave the keynote address.
D: Man! That was August 28, 2012! Very convenient indeed! And
now the Republican Governors Association is pumping money into getting Chris
Christie reelected as Governor of New Jersey, and then 2016 when they are
predicting Christie will win and place the Republican Party in a place where Peter
Baker and Chris Christie rewrite history to defend the actions taken by W. and
Cheney, which they can given all the scripts floating about. I think Oliver
Stone’s career will go into overdrive— if we don’t do anything, that is!
No comments:
Post a Comment