New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: A beastly clich�dies

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: A beastly cliche dies

A beastly cliché dies

One of the burdens of ethnicity in our culture is the idea that one is supposed to become defensive about one's genetic line outside of the United States. By the 1960s, ethnic ideologues began to tell black Americans that Africa was a sacred paradise lost and that it was supposedly distorted and demeaned in every Hollywood film, where Africans in the bush were depicted as drum-beating savages. Actually, it depended on the film, but Hollywood reflected demeaning images of black people that were common currency long before the contemporary minstrelsy of gangster rap arrived.

In that period of race theories, one could hear that the 1933 film "King Kong" was actually about something other than what it seemed. It was a fanciful tale about the boxer Jack Johnson who was brought down from the top of the world because of his love affairs with white women, or it was a metaphor for the way that Negro men were supposed to go crazy over white women, especially blonds.

It would be hard to read a movie that way today because, especially among young people, the old taboos about race and interracial dating mean very little. Certain things have had their day. One could not imagine a major studio today releasing something like the 1914 "Birth of a Nation," a masterpiece fundamentally flawed by the racism of its director, D.W. Griffith. Griffith, for all of his gifts, created a putrid fairy tale about the gallant old South and how the darkies got beside themselves when the North won the war. One was shown foaming at the mouth as he chased an innocent white woman off of a cliff. That one of the most revolting scenes, showing post-Civil War black legislators acting much like lower creatures, would fit in many a rap video today is another issue.

The upshot of the film seemed to be that the Ku Klux Klan was an understandable reaction to brutality that would not be checked until the Negro was put back in his place, or lynched whenever necessary. President Woodrow Wilson, who had been the president of Princeton, had the film shown at the White House and said of it that it taught history with lightning. I guess men with red necks festering in their souls always appreciate each other.

Given such a history in Hollywood, one might look at the new "King Kong" as an update of racist images in the way that too many rap videos continue to be, regardless of intent. But I don't think that was the intent, even in 1933. What I do know is that when I was growing up in Los Angeles, I met men who were picked up on Central Ave. before dawn to play extras in jungle movies - and were glad for the jobs whenever they got them, which might explain the buffoon tradition maintained by black actors in film and TV comedies today.

But what made the original "Kong" such an enduring cinematic fairy tale was that, like all good fairy tales, it was rooted in our fears and our realities. When Kong looks at the blood on his finger that has come from a wound delivered by the machine guns mounted on airplanes he has never seen before and does not understand, the giant ape realizes that he is not safe on the tallest building and that his life is threatened by an unknown and unexplainable force. Whatever greatness "King Kong" has is rooted not in special effects but in the universal recognition of vulnerability and imminent destruction. Neither of those things is lost in the spectacular remake, but they are absent far too often from anything set in our simpleminded world of ethnic reduction, where dull fantasies and clichés continue to dominate.

Originally published on December 14, 2005

New York Daily News - Home - Stanley Crouch: Pryor's flawed legacy

New York Daily News - Home - Stanley Crouch: Pryor's flawed legacyPryor's flawed legacy

Richard Pryor's world was filled with prostitutes, pimps, winos and those others of undesirable ilk.
This past Saturday Richard Pryor left this life and bequeathed to our culture as much darkness as he did the light his extraordinary talent made possible.

When we look at the remarkable descent this culture has made into smut, contempt, vulgarity and the pornagraphic, those of us who are not willing to drink the Kool-Aid marked "all's well," will have to address the fact that it was the combination of confusion and comic genius that made Pryor a much more negative influence than a positive one.

I do not mean positive in the way Bill Cosby was when his television show redefined situation comedy by turning away from all of the stereotypes of disorder and incompetence that were then and still are the basic renditions of black American life in our mass media.

Richard Pryor was not that kind of a man. His was a different story.

Pryor was troubled and he had seen things that so haunted him that the comedian found it impossible to perform and ignore the lower-class shadow worlds he had known so well, filled with pimps, prostitutes, winos and abrasive types of one sort or another.

The vulgarity of his material, and the idea a "real" black person was a foul-mouthed type was his greatest influence. It was the result of seeing the breaking of "white" convention as a form of "authentic" definition.

Pryor reached for anything that would make white America uncomfortable and would prop up a smug belief among black Americans that they were always "more cool" and more ready to "face life" than the members of majority culture.

Along the way, Pryor made too many people feel that the N word was open currency and was more accurate than any other word used to describe or address a black person.

In the dung piles of pimp and gangster rap we hear from slime meisters like Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, the worst of Pryor's influence has been turned into an aspect of the new minstrelsy in which millions of dollars are made by "normalizing" demeaning imagery and misogyny.

What is so unfortunate is that the heaviest of Pryor's gifts was largely ignored by so many of those who praised the man when he was alive and are now in the middle of deifying him.

The pathos and the frailty of the human soul alone in the world or insecure or looking for something of meaning in a chaotic environment was a bit too deep for all of the simpleminded clowns like Andrew Dice Clay or those who thought that mere ethnicity was enough to define one as funny, like the painfully square work of Paul Rodriguez.

Of course, Russell Simmons' Def Comedy Jam is the ultimate coon show update of human cesspools, where "cutting edge" has come to mean traveling ever more downward in the sewer.

In essence, Pryor stunned with his timing, his rhythm, his ability to stand alone and fill the stage with three-dimensional characters through his remarkably imaginative gift for an epic sweep of mimicry.

That nuanced mimicry crossed ethnic lines, stretched from young to old, and gave poignancy to the comedian's revelations about the hurts and the terrors of life.

The idea of "laughing to keep from crying" was central to his work and has been diligently avoided by those who claim to owe so much to him.

As he revealed in his last performance films, Pryor understood the prison he had built for himself and the shallow definitions that smothered his audience's understanding of the humanity behind his work.

But, as they say, once the barn door has been opened, you cannot get all of the animals to return by whistling. So we need to understand the terrible mistakes this man of comic genius made and never settle for a standard that is less than what he did at his very best, which was as good as it has ever gotten.

Originally published on December 12, 2005

Opinion - Stanley Crouch: The big con - sacbee.com

Opinion - Stanley Crouch: The big con - sacbee.com

x - close Recent Stories By Stanley Crouch


Stanley Crouch: The big con
By Stanley Crouch
Published 2:15 am PST Saturday, December 10, 2005
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had a closed meeting Thursday in which those representing the movement to give Stanley "Tookie" Williams clemency were listened to, along with representatives of California law enforcement who want Williams to meet his end Dec. 13 by lethal injection, which he was sentenced to after being found guilty of murdering four people in 1979. The Williams case is interesting because it is the latest example of how far afield the civil-rights establishment has gone since the glory days of the real civil-rights movement, which we were recently reminded of in the various celebrations of Rosa Parks upon her death.

Williams has the dubious honor of being one of the founders of the Crips, perhaps the most vicious street gang to emerge in the past 25 years, beginning in Los Angeles and going on to become a national menace. But Williams is being held up as an example of redemption because he has "turned his life around," which is not hard to do behind bars, and because he has written some children's books that speak out against gangs and gang violence. He has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times. By the way, almost anyone can nominate a person. A nomination does not prove universal acknowledgement of importance.

Sell It Yourself
What does all of this mean? Little. Since Huey Newton, there have been liberals and radicals who believe that they should come to the defense of murderers because they claim to have a good cause. The late Hugh Pearson's classic study "The Shadow of the Panther" reveals how much of a murderous loon Newton was, and also reveals how easy it was for this dangerous man to pimp what were the either naive or good intentions of those at understandable war with racism, poverty and excessive police force.

When we see the NAACP, Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover and that paragon of public morality, Snoop Dogg, calling for Williams to receive clemency, one is sure that none of those people read Pearson, or, if they did, learned nothing from those pages. This is primarily because the death penalty and race have become so interwoven that some assume that if a black man is on death row it has something to do with bias and an unrepresentative jury pool. That is why one of the men crying for Williams to get clemency cites the fact that he was tried by an all-white jury, none of whom were his peers.

Does that mean that Williams should have had a jury of ruthless gang leaders in order for him to have been tried by his peers? Williams, like all criminals, is a lawbreaker first and has an ethnic identity second, but in the manipulation of public sentiment, ethnicity comes first whenever one of these men is put on trial. This is the big con.

The hard fact is that since 1980, street gangs have killed 10,000 people in Los Angeles, which is three times the number of black people lynched throughout the United States between 1877 and 1900, the highest tide of racial murder in the history of the nation. The actor and writer Joseph C. Phillips discovered on the Internet that the highest-selling children's book written by Williams has sold 330 copies, which means that hardly anyone is reading him, including his two sons, one of whom Phillips reports is in San Quentin and the other is up on charges of aggravated rape.

Williams uses God's name when he speaks of his redemption and of how he and the NAACP are going to work together to fight gang membership and gang activity if he receives clemency. God is very consistent. I've noticed that when Jesus goes on his international rounds, plenty of personal appearances are made on death row, and many convicted murderers have been brought to the light as they stand in the shadow of death.

At the same time, our commitment to redemption is fundamental to our civilization, and should be. In the past 200 years we have made great strides that would not have been possible if the pollution of bigotry were passed on from generation to generation. But in the years since the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, we have seen the same games run on the black community and its supporters by political hustlers who almost never met a criminal who was not the real victim of society, and therefore, should be forgiven all crimes. Look to the bright side. Give the brother a break.

I wouldn't touch that kind of thinking with a garbage man's glove.

But since the anniversary of Colin Ferguson's rampage on the Long Island commuter train just passed, he should come out of his mental fog and start writing children's books. Who knows? Hope springs eternal. Ferguson might join Williams in a nomination for the Nobel Prize and watch the chumps line up in support of clemency for his bloody acts.

About the writer:

Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. His column routinely appears Saturday in The Bee and occasionally on other days. Reach him at scrouch@edit.nydailynews.com. Distributed by King Features Syndicate Inc.

A Republican Tom DeLay Problem - New York Times

A Republican Tom DeLay Problem - New York TimesDecember 10, 2005
A Republican Tom DeLay Problem

It may be dawning on House Republicans that Representative Tom DeLay's time as their majority leader is truly over, despite the bold Texan's resolve to regain his grip on Congress. Whatever the outcome of his trial on felony charges of laundering political money, Mr. DeLay's root problem has been laid bare. It is outsized hubris, which is ever clearer to the public and ever more a G.O.P. millstone.

The question for the Republicans - many of them entangled in Mr. DeLay's bountiful network of fund-raising riches - is how fast they can learn from all this. When, if ever, will they enact believable reforms of Congress's big-money wallow?

Mr. DeLay's downfall came by his own hand, with a successful scheme to bankroll Texas election victories so a Statehouse majority would gerrymander five more G.O.P. seats for him in Congress. The partisan map was faulted as illegal by civil rights staff members at the Justice Department, but they were overruled by Republican appointees. This is political hubris on a national scale, directed at the heart of democracy.

Mr. DeLay's brazenness was clear long before his Texas indictment, as he ignored the normal post-census redistricting schedule and bulldozed the gerrymandering through the Statehouse. His money-raising machine, dubbed DeLay Inc. by his court of donors and lobbyists in Washington, funneled funds through Austin in ways that Mr. DeLay insists will eventually be judged legal. Regardless of what happens in court, the operation was a political scandal.

Mr. DeLay punctuated one day in court this week with another signature fund-raiser, packed with favor-seeking donors, and a guest appearance by Vice President Dick Cheney. Any sense of scandal seemed checked at the door. But the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, propped up in power by the DeLay machine, cannot afford to ignore reality with such impunity. He has every reason, including self-survival, to embrace long-resisted ethics reforms. Meanwhile, Republicans had better begin searching for fresh faces outside the encrusted inner circle of power before their majority fades in tandem with Mr. DeLay.

Senator Clinton, in Pander Mode - New York Times

Senator Clinton, in Pander Mode - New York TimesDecember 7, 2005
Senator Clinton, in Pander Mode

Hillary Clinton is co-sponsoring a bill to criminalize the burning of the American flag. Her supporters would characterize this as an attempt to find a middle way between those who believe that flag-burning is constitutionally protected free speech and those who want to ban it, even if it takes a constitutional amendment. Unfortunately, it looks to us more like a simple attempt to have it both ways.

Senator Clinton says she opposes a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag-burning. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment. But her bill, which is sponsored by Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah, is clearly intended to put the issue back before the current, more conservative, Supreme Court in hopes of getting a turnaround.

It's hard to see this as anything but pandering - there certainly isn't any urgent need to resolve the issue. Flag-burning hasn't been in fashion since college students used slide rules in math class and went to pay phones at the student union to call their friends. Even then, it was a rarity that certainly never put the nation's security in peril.

The bill attempts to equate flag-burning with cross-burning, which the Supreme Court, in a sensible and carefully considered 2003 decision, said could be prosecuted under certain circumstances as a violation of civil rights law. It's a ridiculous comparison. Burning a cross is a unique act because of its inextricable connection to the Ku Klux Klan and to anti-black violence and intimidation. A black American who wakes up to see a cross burning on the front lawn has every right to feel personally, and physically, threatened. Flag-burning has no such history. It has, in fact, no history of being directed against any target but the government.

Mrs. Clinton says her current position grew out of conversations with veterans groups in New York, and there's no question that many veterans - and, indeed, most Americans - feel deeply offended by the sight of protesters burning the flag. (These days, that sight mainly comes from videos of the Vietnam War era; the senator's staff did not have any immediate examples of actual New York flag-burnings in the recent past.) But the whole point of the First Amendment is to protect expressions of political opinion that a majority of Americans find disturbing or unacceptable. As a lawyer, the senator presumably already knows that.

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: This killing reminds us cops stay when others run

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: This killing reminds us cops stay when others runThis killing reminds us cops stay when others run

We should be able to understand the rage of the cops who were gathered in the lobby of the court to make their statement about Allan Cameron, who is accused of murdering Police Officer Dillon Stewart last Monday morning in Brooklyn. Stewart was shot in his police car after he had pulled alongside his killer. Cameron also is accused of wounding an off-duty officer at an earlier date. If it's all true, Cameron has been a very busy man.

One wonders what Stewart was thinking when he rolled up on the man who murdered him. Cops have told me that they often can feel death hiding out in the atmosphere and know that before their shift is over, someone is going to be snatched, pushed, stabbed, choked or shot from the world of the living into the long darkness from which no one returns. Of course, the cold shawl of darkness is never expected to be waiting for the officer who can feel it coming.

But it comes for whoever is available. The sympathetic noise of weeping and wailing will not be heard for long by the officer who usually does not know when the time has come for the last ride or the last walk or the last pursuit of a suspect. It goes down too fast, the cold comes over the body too quickly.

Whether life leaves them immediately or they seem to slowly edge over the cliff and take that far fall to somewhere that our eyes cannot perceive, it always feels as if it is moving at an express tempo and that we might have saved the one who is now a corpse if we had had more time.

Though Cameron pleaded not guilty, was caught with 53 bags of marijuana and says that he smokes marijuana "all day like everybody else in the ghetto," one wonders who will take this man seriously. Yes, he looks the stereotypical part of the purportedly anarchic young black man with the braided hair and the sweatshirt, but we all should know better than what that stereotype is supposed to tell us. If Cameron is proven guilty, it says nothing about braided hair, sweatshirts or young black men of any sort. If the majority of young black men who look like Cameron actually were violent criminals, our cities would have to be put under martial law because the cops wouldn't be able to handle them.

But what it is that the cops have to handle often is the result of the rough business that takes place around the sale of illegal drugs in any form, the natural plants that are bragged about because of their difference from the factory-produced powders and pills we call controlled substances. Such rough business demands a gun to protect one's product or one's turf. So perhaps what we need to think about is legalizing drugs in order to remove the profit, which just might remove the need for guns that harm so many people, in or out of law enforcement. I would rather see a lobby for that than waste money and time trying to get the death penalty back on the books.

The fact is that violent criminals are threats to everyone, even to young black men whose taste in clothes is either as casual or as bad as that of the criminals.

All we can hope for and continue to work toward is a much closer relationship between the cops and the honest people in our most dangerous communities. Even so, we should appreciate the fact that cops can end up facing danger anywhere, just as citizens can. The only big difference is that the citizens can run, but the cops shouldn't and almost never do. Dillon Stewart, like almost everyone on the NYPD, was one of those cops who do their job, no matter what it costs them.

Originally published on December 4, 2005

South Korea's Cloning Crisis - New York Times

South Korea's Cloning Crisis - New York TimesDecember 4, 2005
Editorial
South Korea's Cloning Crisis

South Korea's high-flying stem cell researchers - reputedly the best in the world at cloning - have stumbled badly in handling the ethical issues of their controversial craft. Worse yet, the research team's leader, a national hero in his homeland, lied in an effort to hide his ethical lapses. We can only hope that he has not also lied about the astonishing scientific achievements of his research team.

The South Korean team forged ahead of all its rivals by becoming the first to extract stem cells from cloned human embryos and the first to clone a dog, an enormously difficult feat. The team felt so confident in its skills that it even announced plans to open laboratories in the United States and England to create embryonic stem cell lines for researchers unable or reluctant to do so themselves.

Then came the ethics debacle. For the experiments, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk used eggs donated by two of his junior researchers, a practice forbidden by Western standards because there is no way a subordinate's donation can be truly voluntary when her job and her standing with colleagues may depend on her cooperation. One of his collaborators also paid some 20 other Korean women about $1,400 apiece for their eggs. That, too, is deplored by many Western ethicists who fear such payments inevitably exploit poor women desperate for money.

How harshly Dr. Hwang should be judged for such transgressions is a matter of dispute. Supporters claim that he was unaware of these transactions, which were legal at the time and whose ethical status was murky. Some American researchers also pay women for donating eggs, although the National Academy of Sciences has recommended against such payments. But what really torpedoed Dr. Hwang was the cover-up: his repeated lies to the effect that his eggs were donated by unpaid volunteers. These misrepresentations led his most prominent American collaborator to sever ties because his trust had been shaken.

Ten days ago, Dr. Hwang apologized for lying and stepped down as head of his new research center, although he will continue his pioneering work as a researcher. In South Korea, the public has rallied to his defense and women there are signing up in droves to donate eggs. South Korea seems to be emerging from the crisis by imposing even stricter egg donation standards than apply in this country.

The key unresolved issue is whether lying about egg donations suggests that the Korean team may have lied about its scientific results. So far there is no evidence of that. Indeed, American collaborators and observers remain confident that the team's achievements were real. But science is an enterprise that relies heavily on trust. The Koreans should not be surprised if their next scientific breakthrough is greeted with extreme caution.

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Adults must end abuse

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Adults must end abuseAdults must end abuse

Civil War historian Bruce Catton once observed that the best years to take males into military service was in their mid- to late teens because they were still unaware of the fundamental frailty of their mortality and were usually not married, which meant that they were not thinking about their wives and children while at war. They were more prepared to follow orders and perform the daring acts that require great courage.

Jimmie Briggs has written a book called "Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War," which gives us a contemporary update on the cruelest form of child abuse. That is what we need to realize about the use of children to do the dirtiest of dirty work, the torturing and killing of people. This has become common to tribal wars, rebel units, religious fanatics and totalitarian regimes. It is estimated that 10% of the world's fighting forces are under 18.

The reason that these children work so well is, just below or just entering adolescence, they possess very malleable minds and have not had enough of the life experience necessary to perceive a clear moral relationship to other people. The revolutionary doctrine or the traditional tribal animus or the religious rhetoric will suffice to corrupt them.

On a much larger and more horrific scale, they are used the way our urban drug dealers have used children because of their desire to follow, to get along, to do the right thing, to gain the sort of power that comes, as Mao said, through the barrel of a gun. Through extremes of violence, they enter into a world once reserved for adults and become false grownups while emotionally remaining children. They are toy men with real guns.

In a sense, they are playing three-dimensional versions of our violent video games that are made progressively graphic so that the line between reality and play need no longer be provided by the imagination; the electronic figures take on more and more human qualities and bleed the sort of fountains that became common in the most violent Hollywood films of 35 years ago.

Briggs takes us into these worlds where everything is real. We see these abused children as they become killers and as they tell their stories or try to address the horrors of the things that they were told to do long before they learned any better.

This is an important book because it underlines the universal fact that ours is a time in which our perhaps naive sense of childhood innocence is under assault in both the advanced and developing world. The young are exploited either by the popular entertainment that dehumanizes, fills them with terrible appetites, encourages irresponsible behavior, or promotes, like rap, the hatred of women.

That exploitation, however, is no more than the result of decadence, greed, moral ambiguity and indifference, all propelled by the power of profit.

In "Innocents Lost," Briggs reveals to us the power that is sought through the use of children to dominate or destroy others. Yes, this is the worst form of child abuse. So Briggs makes one unwavering fact clear to those of us who don't know: Humanity is not something you are born with, it is a feeling for life that is passed on to you by your culture and is always the responsibility of adults.

Originally published on November 28, 2005

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Film sheds light on forgotten load carried in Africa

New York Daily News - Ideas & Opinions - Stanley Crouch: Film sheds light on forgotten load carried in AfricaFilm sheds light on forgotten
load carried in Africa

Modern-day plague rips heart out of the Third World

Today is World AIDS Day so it is fitting that HBO, which always stays in the mix, is rerunning "Yesterday," its Academy Award-nominated foreign film, for its viewers this evening.

"Yesterday" has monsters, but none of them are rendered in comic book style and they neither come from outer space nor are they the result of magic. Oh, but you can see them. They appear in microscopes.

The film is the story of an AIDS-infected African woman that proves the same thing we should all know if we have kept our eyes open out here. The women always get it first and get it worst, no matter what it is, it seems. So it is much harder for a woman in a backward culture to prevail through the troubles wrought by disease, war, superstition and poverty. This is true no matter how charming and lively the people around her might seem.

Things are so bad in Africa and for so many reasons that it is often hard for people to face all of the vestiges of "underdevelopment," which actually means backward. That is because we are still caught in a sentimental attitude toward cultures outside of Western civilization. We believe they have something pure to tell us.

We also sometimes feel so guilty about how Western countries have dealt from the bottom of the deck when dealing with the Third World, that we find it impossible to critically look at what goes on, which is often the result of beliefs that arrived without the benefit of science. Those bellies can crush people down.

"Yesterday" is so powerful because it is set in South Africa and the people have a three-dimensionality that we so rarely see when Africans are depicted. Part of the reason is that the relationship between the AIDS-infected mother and her daughter is so realistic and contains conversations between the two that have a beguiling universality. Another is that we all recognize rural types when we see them and are only so ready to be shocked by how their warmth can be drained away by superstition and brutal customs.

When the main character discovers that she is one of those millions in Africa who carry the worst plague of our time, we do not see some wonderful future for her hiding behind a shack. We see how everyone is failed by superstition and doomed by poverty.

This is an important film and one that makes serious observations about the tragic circumstances in which men, women and children can be caught all over the so-called underdeveloped world. If we expect to get more light cast on the burdens imposed on the Third World by disease, poverty, religion, custom and superstition, "Yesterday" can show us the way.

Originally published on December 1, 2005