Also this issue: Fantastic Voyage -Howard Altman Sparanoia -Bruce Schimmel Letters to the Editor

October 17-23, 2002

slant

There's Something About Amiri

The Constitutional right to wax moronic.

by Clark DeLeon

With all due respect to the hard-earned civil rights reputations of the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as well as the literary contributions of New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka, I feel it’s time to state the obvious.

Although I may disagree with what they say, I will defend to the death my right to say, "Shaddup, you morons."

In a matter of days over the last several weeks this baffling triumvirate has managed to tie so many granny knots in the cords of free speech that no self-respecting Boy Scout would trust the rope they tossed from a high cliff.

This rope not only can't handle the weight of truth, it can't handle the appearance of truth.

Not that truth is the issue. The issue is freedom of expression. The right to speak one's mind. The right to challenge and annoy the powers that be -- so long as you don't challenge and annoy the powers that want to be.

And if multiple past presidential election campaigns -- or ongoing threats to mount future presidential election campaigns -- don't qualify Jackson and Sharpton as perennial powers that want to be, then what does a wannabe look like?

They exercised their moral leadership and their knack for publicizing obscure racial sensitivities by demanding editing cuts to the first black-produced, black-written, virtually all-black-acted movie to become the number one box office hit in America for two weeks running. Jackson and Sharpton threatened to call for a boycott of the movie Barbershop if a brief irreverent scene mocking black civil rights icons Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King wasn't deleted from future DVD releases.

Never addressed by either man was the context of the scene and the defining remark of the offending character, loudmouth curmudgeon Eddie, who defends himself by saying, "If we can't talk straight in a barbershop, where can we talk straight?"

The issue is respect, say Sharpton and Jackson. Respect for heroes. Respect for the line that must not be crossed by anyone. "You wouldn't make Golda Meir the butt of a joke," Jackson told The Los Angeles Times, referring to the former Israeli prime minister who looked like a cross between Abe Vigoda and Nikita Khruschev.

This Jew thing -- excuse me, this "Israeli thing" -- that keeps popping up unexpectedly but like clockwork in black political arguments offends me more than anything Cedric the Entertainer said about the implied calluses on Rosa Parks' butt or Martin Luther King's overactive reverend unit. The Jew thing is at the heart of the outraged reaction to Amiri Baraka's poem, "Somebody Blew Up America," which includes the following lines: "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed/ Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/ To stay home that day/ Why did Sharon stay away?"

It is very distressing to someone like, for instance, me to accept that 4,000 Israeli nationals were AWOL from work on 9/11 without someone like, for instance, ME having ever heard such a rumor before (and I did hear the rumor about all the Muslim cab drivers in New York calling in sick). But it wasn't Amiri Baraka's poetic license that drove me nuts as much as his subsequent defense of his preposterous assertions. Not only did the Jews -- excuse me, Israelis -- know all about the planned attack on the World Trade Center, but Baraka told inquiring minds from the press that nations such as Germany and France also knew it beforehand but never told us. Why? Why bother? We already knew. At least President George Bush knew, Baraka claims. Bush permitted it to happen just so the United States could declare war on Afghanistan and now Iraq.

Does that bug you much or even just a little bit? In America today, what could be more sacred a topic than the victims and devastation caused by the perpetrators of Sept. 11, 2001? And now the poet laureate of New Jersey tells us that the Jews knew about it, which he somehow felt was more poem-worthy than the fact that the President of the United States knew it and allowed it to happen. Damn those Jews. I mean "Israelis."

Why do I link the Sharpton-Jackson racial noise over Barbershop with their silence over the conveniently anti-Semitic and absurd allegations presented by Baraka? Because I got a bug up my ass, that's why. Because you can't have it both ways. Because we're all Americans. Because one of them is an 89-year-old lady named Rosa Parks who is still alive, god bless her, after all these years. Because I believe Martin Luther King would have felt more threatened and disrespected and disappointed by the words of Amiri Baraka than Eddie the barber.

Clark DeLeon is a freelance writer. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper executive editor, 123 Chestnut St., third floor, Phila., PA, 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.