The Opinuary Column

The Opinion "Not even the dumbest, fattest-ass Southern white Republican will yell out like some damn fool yokel in front of both houses of congress during the President's speech on healthcare" has taken a good, long pull on a jug of moonshine and blown its own head off in a terrible bullet catching accident. And yes sir, it is a most demonstrably dead Opinion if ever there was one.

The Opinion, born and raised in a stucco cabin situated on the outskirts of some god-awful creeping moss pile of a town in South Carolina, enjoyed its brief life to the fullest and will be sorely missed by all of us who coincidentally believed that Foghorn Leghorn would stop beating that big hound's ass with a two-by-four every single time the opportunity presented itself. Let's face it: we who thought such things are just as dumb as a post, if that.

Family of the Opinion wish to thank everyone who ever held out the hope that privileged white men who insist that their dicks and the South will rise again will have the good taste to bite their tongues clean in two, the same way that they would have our nation cleaved in two. Talk of brown people, profit-mongering health insurance companies, Big Pharma, a faint hope of a Public Option--who would have thought such a convergence of topics spoken by a mixed-race President could have so agitated a god-fearing white man that he prematurely shot his load with the alacrity of a teenage boy at his first lap dance?

In lieu of donations read the Gettysburg Address or Moby Dick or Catcher in the Rye or whatever lights the bonfires of your mind. You'll be glad you did.

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The Opinuary Column appears Friday afternoons at Jesus' General.

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The Opinuary Column

The Opinion "Joking about assassinating the democratically elected President of the United States, if such joking is cloaked in the parlance of Hunters, is funny or acceptable or defensible or advisable or moral or appropriate for a citizen who would seek public office" has died, having been shunned by rational, civilized human beings. Its final hours spent wandering in a seemingly endless circle, lost and feebly pleading for understanding, the Opinion finally collapsed in a heap of latent bitterness, enmity, racism and despair, where it breathed its last and could project its passive/aggressive venom no more. Any ideology which finds that its defense of liberty invariably ends with impromptu fantasies of the murder of a duly elected national leader whose greatest crime is--wait for it--having been duly elected, has in fact lost all credibility, for non-coerced respect vanishes at the point of a gun--irretrievably and utterly and permanently. Even the grandest of fools cannot un-pull a trigger.

Services for the deceased Opinion are scheduled to be held somewhere in Idaho--perhaps in a cave or bunker, where it has been said that love and understanding may yet live, and peace and compassion may yet survive, if one is patient and knows how to look and listen with a stout heart and a curious mind. In lieu of flowers, relatives of the late Opinion are asking that people stop shooting their mouths off, lest their words fall dead on arrival.

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The Opinuary Column appears Friday afternoons at Jesus' General.

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Rush Limbaugh Announces the Arrival of Barack Obama!

Alas, none hear him in time. Sigh.

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Symbol and Essence: The Power of Naming

ANOTHER BLOG POST exclusive to MTV, as it is part of my Street Team 08 duties! This one delves more into one of my favorite paradigms, Symbol and Essence.

Words that came to me while thinking on our many forms of warring with the Other.

Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Culture Kitchen, and OpEdNews.

Something Stinks in Lima

LIMA, Ohio — The air of Southside is foul-smelling and thick, filled with fumes from an oil refinery and diesel smoke from a train yard, with talk of riot and recrimination, and with angry questions: Why is Tarika Wilson dead? Why did the police shoot her baby?

“This thing just stinks to high heaven, and the police know it,” said Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “We’re not asking for answers anymore. We’re demanding them.”

Some facts are known. A SWAT team arrived at Ms. Wilson’s rented house in the Southside neighborhood early in the evening of Jan. 4 to arrest her companion, Anthony Terry, on suspicion of drug dealing, said Greg Garlock, Lima’s police chief. Officers bashed in the front door and entered with guns drawn, said neighbors who saw the raid.

Moments later, the police opened fire, killing Ms. Wilson, 26, and wounding her 14-month-old son, Sincere, Chief Garlock said. One officer involved in the raid, Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, a 31-year veteran, has been placed on paid administrative leave.

Beyond these scant certainties, there is mostly rumor and rage. The police refuse to give any account of the raid, pending an investigation by the Ohio attorney general.

—Police Shooting of Mother and Infant Exposes a City’s Racial Tension

Ivory Austin, center, the brother of Tarika Wilson, was among those marching Saturday to protest her shooting death and the wounding of her 14-month-old son.

Black people in Lima, from the poorest citizens to religious and business leaders, complain that rogue police officers regularly stop them without cause, point guns in their faces, curse them and physically abuse them. They say the shooting of Ms. Wilson is only the latest example of a long-running pattern of a few white police officers treating African-Americans as people to be feared.

“There is an evil in this town,” said C. M. Manley, 68, pastor of New Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. “The police harass me. They harass my family. But they know that if something happens to me, people will burn down this town.” [...]

“The situation is very tense,” Mayor David J. Berger said. “Serious threats have been made. People are starting to carry weapons to protect themselves.”

Surrounded by farm country known for its German Catholic roots and conservative politics, Lima is the only city in the immediate area with a significant African-American population. Black families, including Mr. Manley’s, came to Lima in the 1940s and ’50s for jobs at what is now the Husky Energy Lima Refinery and other factories along the city’s southern border. Blacks make up 27 percent of the city’s 38,000 people, Mr. Berger said.

Many blacks still live downwind from the refinery. Many whites on the police force commute from nearby farm towns, where a black face is about as common as a twisty road. Of Lima’s 77 police officers, two are African-American.

“If I have any frustration when I retire, it’ll be that I wasn’t able to bring more racial balance to the police force,” said Chief Garlock, who joined the force in 1971 and has been chief for 11 years.

Tarika Wilson had six children, ages 8 to 1. They were fathered by five men, all of whom dealt drugs, said Darla Jennings, Ms. Wilson’s mother. But Ms. Wilson never took drugs nor allowed them to be sold from her house, said Tania Wilson, her sister.

“She took great care of those kids, without much help from the fathers, and the community respected her for that,” said Ms. Wilson’s uncle, John Austin. [...]

Within minutes of the shooting, at around 8 p.m., 50 people gathered outside Ms. Wilson’s home and shouted obscenities at the police, neighbors said. The next day, 300 people gathered at the house and marched two miles to City Hall. [...]

Smaller marches have continued every week since the shooting. The N.A.A.C.P. will hold a public meeting on Saturday to air complaints about police brutality. The group will soon request that the Department of Justice investigate the police department and the Allen County prosecutor’s office, Mr. Upthegrove said.

Junior Cook was a neighbor of Tarika Wilson. He says that he watched from his front porch as the SWAT team raced across his front yard, and that seconds later he watched a police officer run from Ms. Wilson’s house carrying a bleeding baby in a blanket.

—Police Shooting of Mother and Infant Exposes a City’s Racial Tension

NOW IN LIMA, a symbol of many problems and injustices that exist every day in this nation of ours for many people. A mother shot dead and her children left without the only person who stuck with them and fed them. Citizens tell us that racism from cops is ubiquitous in their lives and violence against them commonplace. Cops aren't saying a word, aside from "internal investigations have uncovered no evidence of police misconduct" (as we can well expect them to say) and the article assures us that "local officials recognize that the perception of systemic racism has opened a wide chasm." Damn perceptions! They are always hurting folk.

Tarika's life and body have now been swept into such a chasm, and if Britney spears flashes her stubble or Bill Clinton compares Obama to Sugar Ray Leonard, this story may well be swept there, too. But we ought not rest. Answers are needed. Change is required. The rot of racist violence and police brutality must always be exposed to light. Let us lead the media in highlighting this important issue.

in that spirit, please feel free to lift the above "justice4tarika" image and use it to spread the word

original images from nytimes.com, sombrero tip for story to the police brutality blog

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican, Corrente, Culture Kitchen, and OpEdNews.

Because Dreaming is Not Enough (Vlog 1-23-08)

CLICK the pic to the left to find yourself magically transported to a page hosting my latest MTV Street Team '08 video, which was shot in Eugene, Oregon at a Martin Luther King Jr. rally and march on January 21, 2008.

All shooting, editing, and sleeplessness by Nezua.

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican, Corrente, and Culture Kitchen.

Mainstreaming Our Confederate-American Heritage

Tony Perkins
Family Research Council

Dear Mr. Perkins,

As much as I enjoyed the part of your "Reclaiming America for Christ" sermon where you took Islamunism to task for being a very violent religion, I found the last part, the piece centered around the story of Phineas, to be much more uplifting. It's a story we just don't hear enough in these politically correct times. Thankfully, people like you aren't afraid to hold up the story of Phineas, and his use of impalement as a means of combating miscegenation, as an example of what Christianism should be and what American Christianism is becoming.

Sure there were others who preached the gospel of Phineas before you--good Confederate-Americans and heroes of the Heartland like Joseph Paul Franklin, Eric Rudolph, Byron De La Beckwith, Buford Furrow, and Paul Hill--but none of them had the kind of standing you have. You're the only person who has the ability and the will to take the Phineas Priesthood into the mainstream.

I salute you (straight armed) for trying to do it.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

Elswhere: The story of Phineas told with Legos (helmet tip to Albatrossity).

Deconstructing "Falling Down"

Nez goes to the movies:

...mainstream media plants destruction and hurt into the heart and minds of those who grow up absorbing it. Especially in regards to ethnicity. Although as I go on in this journey, I find that so many share the same story. Women in almost horribly ubiquitous and invisible fashion. (Or maybe that invisibility is simply part of how accustomed to it I had become.)

I assure you, amig@, At the Movies With Nezua will be both fun AND annoying! But that's a night at the movies with Nezua, after all, carnál! Our goal here is to create a space where we lay bare the workings of these spells, of these weapons, where we can unspool the conveyer belt that adheres to the swiftly shifting gears of a tiny, spiny, rotten avacado-engine heart.

Elsewhere: The result of what Nez is writing about:

A Girl Like Me



Heartbreaking.

A helmet tip to John Lucid and Diane Sweet.