Happy Kwanzaa!

The best part of Kwanzaa Is the Carols:Violent Night.Jingle CuffsWreck the HallsI’m Dreaming of a Christmas of colorand of course, the ever popular, “Oh come, all ye Rioters”

On some level I feel sorry for them. They’ve thrown the chains off but they can’t seem to throw them away. They wrap themselves up in them and try to shame whitey with them. The jig is up, that guilt trip was old 20 years ago…

I like Faux-Swahili and Faux We-Wuz-Pharaohs names since they’re useful when the race of a perpetrator is left out of a news report. In fact, the equation of Faux Swahili/Royal First Name + President’s Last Name almost always = black criminal, black athlete, or black athlete-criminal. Feel free to test my theory. Put something like “Rashid Jackson” or “Jamal Washington” into Google images and see what you come up with. They also like old Saint names. I’m going to see what “Jerome Lincoln Arrested” gives me now.

In honor of Kwanzaa, a couple of things some of you might want to read. William Styron has been put in the literary doghouse for being a white man writing about the black experience in his Nat Turner book.Well, in that spirit of whites writing about blacks (hilariously so and with some real insights), try Stanley Ellin’s 1983 “The Dark Fantastic”, about an old “get off my lawn” guy who evolved to that as he watched his New York neighborhood change over time. The author got reamed by the publisher and literary community for daring to write such a book. Which means it is good stuff.Just last weekend I stumbled into Donald Westlake’s 1976 “Dancing Aztecs”. Lots of pee-in-your-pants first person funny stuff about living black in NYC. Perhaps the first written iteration of “din do nothins”? Maybe he invented the term. How he snuck that book out without professional retribution is amazing. Perhaps things changed between 1976 and 1983?

We wuz kangs!

I can’t think of Kwanzaa without thinking of Ron Karenga’s charming attitudes towards torture. Hot soldering irons in the mouth! Followed by detergent and running hoses! Funny those rites didn’t make it into the holiday. I know more about afrofuturism than I did before. Interesting. I liked the intro music for that bit.

I’m not surprised that amusement park director Neil Degrasse Tyson left out Kwanzaa in his anti-Christmas tweet this year. In all fairness, most everybody forgets Kwanzaa. I think that the fad ran its course. For a few years in the 1990s, Kwanzaa built up a head of steam, but these days, you’re only the second person I’ve seen mention it in print in this year.I suspect that Kwanzaa’s decline has something to do with its former role being replaced by #BlackXmas, or Festivus, or the Winter Solstice, or whatever ginned-up December “holiday” fashionably non-mainstream Americans want to mention (but not actually celebrate) whenever they want to signal to the rest of us that they’re too “hip” for Christmas.

I miss Tony Snow

Karenga used to be a sometimes guest on the old Joe Pine show back in the mid 1960’s. Joe once paired Karenga off with some guy from the American Nazi party. Too far back for any specific memory of the show, other than it was, well, colorful. JWM