Special Commentary: A “no” on prop 8 wasn’t a vote for civil rights, anyway.

The faux-secular-leftist, White dialogue of the gay rights movement has always been something that grinds my gears. But nothing makes any less sense than arguing that a law that keeps people of the same sex from getting married is “hate” (as such and in the same way that Jim Crow laws were). The fact that the sexual radicalism that rioted at Stonewall has become so deeply embroiled in a fight to be able to participate in a reactionary dialogue about making “normal” families instead of fighting against the very conception that there is such a thing is repulsive. Why:

Marriage is an essentialist, sacramental institution. The only reason to want a marriage if you’re not worried about divine approval is that you want the rights that get conferred through marriage. (Because, let’s face facts: Your homophobic mommy and daddy won’t love you any more just because the state gave you a paper saying you’re approved.) Why are we not fighting the fact that those rights are conferred through marriage? What business does the state have to ordain relationships, no matter the gender or number of the people involved in them? Where is the dialogue about this?

It’s subsumed. Subsumed by a perpetual gay striving for recognition into normality. The Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, all these organizations aren’t talking about how we make rights – how we expand on the proposed national project of liberty. They’re in a closed up dialogue about “good” families, access to exclusive rights, creating the “right” environments to grow “normal” kids, and needing affirmation for the way of life hoisted onto them by forces beyond their control.

Fuck that.

All of that discussion is a reactionary, illiberal, traditionalist dialogue that seeks agentival limitations and to make the sticky and layered texture of the convolutions of family life and sexual experience into a unitary, linear, sacred, gendered, monetary/social arrangement that is as reactionary as it isn’t universal. We know that that conception of families is not universal, that it’s not holistic, that it’s racialized and classist, and that it’s inherently encumbered by sexism. So why are we participating in the reproduction and legitimation of this system?

Let’s venture to say gays were born that way, huh?

Yes, living outside the mixed-gender, dual-party, safe-for-children environment was an inescapable biological fact. Woe is you, inalienable rights, just like Jim Crow. :: rolls eyes :: I am unwilling to accommodate that kind of petulant, self-unaware plea to be part of normality claimed to be at once harmful and where people will find real happiness. You are not the inherent victim of a system that doesn’t understand the realities of your nature just because you’re a dude who sucks dick. You choose to participate in a dialogue about how you can’t be part of a “normal” family life and try to claw your way back into normal, instead of saying, “So what about normal?” That’s called self-victimization, and it’s pathetic.

That is not the same as segregation. It might be equivalent to anti-miscegenation (however, again, that is a dialogue about creating normal families, which is a dialogue not worth having if your end is how to make people more free). Being told you can’t drink at a public fountain because of your phenotype is not the same as being told that a state doesn’t recognize your love as a valid form of love. You can be seriously harmed by lack of access to water, but you can recognize your own relationship. That is a crucial difference. While on the surface these are both questions of rights and exclusion, not being able to be part of a romanticized, heterocentrist, imaginary and illusory normality and being sprayed down by fire hoses for sitting in the wrong parts of a bus are not even the beginning of equivalent to one another. It is an insult to the legacy of Civil Rights Movement leaders to say that a radical rethinking of what the body’s features mean to participation in public discourse should be treated in the same legacy as a reactionary thirst for an incorrect, ahistorical conception of families, human sexuality, and ways to perpetuate exclusionary rights.

To this end, arguments against gay marriage leading to plural marriage shouldn’t be called ridiculous, as though all non-coupling romantic situations are inherently bad – it should be recognized that it is perfectly feasible to want to form or be a family with more than one person. That is a radical discourse that expands liberty worthy of discussion.

To this end, arguments that children can be raised to be “normal” in homoparental situations should be recognized as a failure: If we can’t raise children able to question gender and who aren’t properly in tune with the power-structures of sexuality and their interplays with race, class, and gender phenomena, then we have failed ourselves and those children and freedom.

To this end, arguments that legitimate and educate children about marriage as a sensible source of tax benefits and sharing your life through the state should be unequivocally recognized as a glossing-over of the sacred to further and falsely instantiate it as part of a secular discourse focused on liberty – which is supposed to be what we’re doing, right? (Public schools have as much right to teach marriage as part of sexual education [which was one of the foundations of the biggest arguments for Prop 8] as they have a right to teach about baptism, Semitic circumcision rites, the Mysteries, or oracular inspiration as means of hygiene and research.)

Why are we not talking about this instead?

Oh, I forgot – because we need so much to be normal within a system that wants us to be its victims instead of talking about why that system is fundamentally flawed.

Go get huffy about something that really matters, please.

Lil’ Banania, meet Lil’ Obama

Now, I think it’s pretty obvious from the nature and content of this blog how I feel about Banania – the product made by the Nutrial Corporation and faced by Lil’ Banania – and why I feel that way.  Playing on racism, no matter how seemingly jovial, to sell your products is unacceptable.  However, I’m pretty sure Republicans have just taken it to that next step.  (Editor’s note:  Please follow all links.)

Obama Waffles - y'a bon !

By now, if you clicked, you’ll have seen Obama Waffles – a new product (ostensibly in the same vein as the Kerry flip-flops we all remember so well from ‘04) meant at showcasing how often Barack Obama “waffles”.  Now, this is at least meant to remind people of certain other breakfast pastry spokes”people” – probably not the little Eggo® fork, but Aunt Jemima™ and Mrs. Butterworth®.  (To be fair, Mrs. Butterworth as a character isn’t necessarily black, but she’s pretty dark-skinned for a white girl, and Google asked if I also wanted to search “aunt jemima” when I looked her up….so…)

Now, I think it’s painfully clear that this waffle box is some racist, Uncle-Ben level banania.  (I mean, look at how similar those boxes even look!  Couldn’t even be a different color? more different font? – damn!)  At least on some level, the people responsible for selling this would have to admit, that, right?  Please assess that with the video, which I have put in a separate post below.

Come now.  Not even a little admission that it might be racist to put a black public figure on a breakfast food box in a cartoon?  They even have a little Obama in a turban and little Obama in a poncho/sombrero ensemble and a little rap!  (And yes, that is Jeremiah Wright you see!)  How is any of that not racist?  Clearly these white boys need some help in understanding how Aunt Jemima™ is different from Newman’s Own® and Emeril’s®-brand products:

Emeril and Paul Newman are real people, who founded brands based on their own images based around their talents or passions for something.  Aunt Jemima is a fictional character (unless perhaps something à la Delilah Johnson in The Imitation of Life went down) whose appeal as a good homemaker is a direct instantiation of a racist portrayal of black women as servant/slave mammies.  Uncle Ben is an “uncle” for a reason.  These are images – stereotypical and archetype images – of black people as food servants.  Emeril is a chef and a real human.  Paul Newman was an actor who cared about quality, all-natural food.  Aunt Jemima just wanted to get your chilluns a happifyin’ meal.  Lawsee!

These images aren’t just historical relics or – as Karl Rove look-alike in the video pretended – icons of quality.  They are images that demonstrate exploitation and a systematic denial that that exploitation was even exploitation at all.  In American history, blacks were exploited for labor and for service – they were the cooks.  How is that inventing cartoonish, stereotypical black cooks doesn’t play into that history?  Much in the same way that in France, Africans were exploited as happy foot soldiers of colonialism and that’s what makes our fez-wearin’, y’a-bon-sayin’, Sengalese-army-regalia-porting Banania Man completely unacceptable.  It boggles the mind that the Republicans – and the Right more broadly -, after pulling nearly every (in)directly racist trick they could this election season – short of getting on TV and saying, “Obama is a coon!” – can really deny that these things are even racist at all, like these smirking, self-satisfied porksters are in the video.

I’m sorry, but there’s no defending this kind of stupid racism.  None.  The fact that we can seriously have an election this completely marked up by such unabashed and unapologetic racism just goes to show how far we really are from having a country worth being proud of.  You can put lipstick on banania, but it’s still banania.

Obama Waffles

Reblogged from HuffPo

A response to Palin

I think we all know where I stand this presidential election – the
choice between Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin is clear.  However,
there’s something I really must express:  While I think Biden was a
boring, possibly racially-motivated pick for vice president and that
Obama might not be the optimal candidate, it is absolutely crucial
that we not let Sarah Palin be one sick, 72 year-old’s heart beat away
from being our president.

A picture that could be real - it's not, but isn't that terrifying enough?

No matter how you feel about taxes,
national security, or flag pins, there is no way Sarah Palin should be
anywhere but Juneau after November 4.  John McCain – as though it were
not apparent from his appearances on television – is not in vigorous
health, and if he is elected, there is little serious doubt that he
will die, or at least become incapacitated in line with the
Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.  In this circumstance, and
possibly of her own initiative and that of the fringe Right, Sarah
Palin will come to be the president.  I usually don’t forward/blast
these kinds of things, especially not en masse, and if you find this
emailing inappropriate I apologize, but the dangers that Sarah Palin’s
ideology and candidacy bring the table put each and every one of us in
a truly threatening situation:

> women’s and reproductive rights eroding or being exploded – for example: contraception is not abortion, and she thinks that it is;
> civil rights continuing to be abridged and deleted in the name of radical, neoconservative economics and “the homeland;”
> people’s rights in general – both here and abroad – being bulldozed for the economic interests of 1% of the population;
> a balance between faith and politics being replaced by fringe, Evangelical, theocratic bureaucrats who want to define your morality from behind the cloak of the First Amendment;
> 4-8 more years of an economy based on the same principles as the last 30 years of failed trickle-down, blame-the-victim policies that have left income disparities the highest since the 19th Century and, despite all promises, have led to inflation, homelessness for middle class families, high unemployment, and a crumbling physical and social infrastructure that has caused bridges to collapse during rush hour and mothers with two jobs to have their children go to bed hungry and without health care;
> no-bid-cost-plus-no-budget contracts for companies operated by members of the executive branch of government with zero oversight from ethics committees or the legislative branch – contracts which have put our country into 3 trillion dollars for the Iraq War alone; and
> (To be Republican about it) the birth of a real national security crisis founded on the possibility of electing a fringe Christian fundamentalist with nothing to hold her up but her crazed zeal for stunts like putting jets on eBay, lying about the “Bridge to Nowhere,” and covering up the embarrassing family intrigues (for lesser versions of which the Right impeached Bill Clinton).

It’s crucial that we all take the time to remind ourselves and to
allow ourselves to be reminded how high these stakes really are…

By the way, the world is a community – and it does need to be organized.  Not recognizing this as a fact not only makes someone banania, but evil.

A brief on Banania : Letting the Right Eviscerate Our Country

Editor’s note: This is not a typical banania (though I promise you the topic is). It is a reblogged note that I wish to disseminate.

I’m kind of disgusted that Mr. Change has picked old guard for his veep. As though his post-June 3rd “over-analyzed” stance on Iraq, the surge (cough), FISA; his Hillary-accusation-cum-ver

ity whispers about protectionism to Canada on NAFTA; his views on the death penalty and gun-control; and so many other things haven’t been reassuring reminders to all us Clinton fans that we were right (i.e., that he was just as centrist and willing to “do anything to get elected” as she was, but at least with her we knew it’d be a cold day in hell before she lost the battle for medical reform), Obama continues to drift ever right. Picking Ineffective-Liberal-Who-Supported-Welfare-Reform #1, with his 35 years of Senate experience and milky white skin to make Obama seem “more serious,” has only convinced me that my last shreds of hope for Obama have been lost.

After all, while Obama was telling me about how we were going to quell the rising seas and heal our planet and also walk on water with him to the Promised Land in June, my consolation was that he had gone so far to at least portray himself as a truth-speaking leftist whose integrity was above reproach that it would be impossible for him to make the Clintonian drift that I had been bracing for before Israel became worth “obliterating” Iran over and the gas-tax holiday was the only solution to gas inflation.

But, alas my fellow sane leftists, he has done what, with some audacity, I had hoped he wouldn’t.

With his base betrayed, we still might show up to the polls to support him with the terrifying memories of 2004 living on as a four-year night terror. It should look like France’s example from 2002: Chirac and Le Pen got to the second round of the elections because the left felt disaffected and didn’t show up to the polls, unlike the batshit rightists. Though Le Pen, as a Holocaust-denier and fascist, lost, in 2007 the country’s left came out to support the Socialist candidate fearing a repeat of 2002. Unfortunately for France, those on the center and the right won again in 2007, even though many features of the government that Sarkozy (the right candidate) was a member of had noticeably hurt France economically. I predict that the same thing will happen here. We knew that the War Criminal should have lost in 2004, but he didn’t because Kerry was too much of a putz to draw the American left to the polls and the right was as energized as ever. 2006 saw a Congressional turn over, but the closeness of the most recent polls now indicates that either McCain is going to win with his stupid, neoconservative, pro-war, pro-”free trade,” carbon-trading B.S., or Obama is going to have to play Clinton to scrape by in the clench and do the same B.S.

At any rate, right seems to be making might (instead of the other way around, eh?) despite how poisonous they are. It’s baffling, but we should be audacious enough to have our own hope!

Say a centrist, welfare-reformeresque Obama/Biden get into power, or even that John McCain does (and at this point the differences between those two administrations boil down to women’s rights and Supreme Court appointments, essentially). Either way, I think that we’re going to win out in the long run. How?

The neocon economic agenda loved by Reps and played with by Dems over the past nearly 30 years has devastated the reproduction of the middle class. The children of the middle class are economically worse off than their parents, and many people who were at one time middle class are quickly sinking – due to indebtedness and eroding social services – into lower economic strata. With the privatized infrastructure of the government and the unfunded public infrastructural artifacts of the by-gone time of Keynesian economic policies crumbling out from under them, the middle class is not going to even be capable of carrying the economic burden of the excesses of the economic powers that be that put people like Donald Rumsfeld in a position to declare war on the Pentagon.

This is good news for us.

No republic can survive without a middle class, or at least a large group of constituents who feel they are doing well economically or being left well-enough alone to do it themselves. America’s main problem blocking progress is that the economy has been good enough for long enough that people had too much to lose by challenging the out-and-out lies and abuses of their government and so have become completely complacent. (And those who weren’t stable but subscribed to the rugged individualism and subsistence living of the poorer rural areas, in the same way, were left enough alone to stake their claims and let that be that.) However, with basic access to any kind of real society gained during the Great Depression being fundamentally compromised by neoconservative lies about economic laws and individualism and capitalism the likes of which are reminiscent of political cartoons about political machines and trusts of the late 19th Century, we’re barreling head first (and willfully, it would seem) toward a very stark change of reality.

The planet is choking on unregulated filth; strip-mined mountains are making drinking water a dream in areas of the country that fancies itself the richest in the world; people are sinking into economic despair while the very few use their governments as ATM’s. Without some shred of economic dignity or hope, this current government will not be able to stand.

And once it’s gone we’ll have a chance for change we can really believe in.

Blaming the South: The War that Pitted Banania Against Banania

After a period of inactivity, the Report is back.  Today’s topic: The American Civil War.  The war that pitted brother against brother is recounted and looked back on with such a one-sided, incredibly inaccurate history that it almost makes me cringe.  The fact that our country is still deeply divided over the issues at the heart of the War (and I don’t mean [just] racism) but that no one is really interested in knowing what really happened so that we can move past them is to me evidence of long-standing banania that must be decried.

This controversial design had many Northern homos up in arms charging Marc Jacobs with racism and insensitivity...'cause they're tards.

The Civil War evokes one of the most reeking relics of colonial racism (i.e., the African slave trade), but that certainly was not what the War was fought over.  After the schrapnel fell and the dust cleared, slavery was ended, and that institution became the avatar of the tensions, but the idea that the North was on some holy crusade to abolish slavery is completely ahistorical nonsense.  Let’s look at the economic facts of colonialism:

When Native slavery and prisoner slavery failed, African slavery built up the colonies of Europe during the “Age of Discovery,” so much so that National Geographic reports that of the 6.5 million people who arrived in lands of the Western Hemisphere between Columbus’ arriving in the West Indes until the American independence, 5.5 million were African slave laborers.  Vast new territory meant the need for vast new labor to quickly develop it into sources for raw materials in the mercanitlist, Westaphalia world that Europeans had set up for themselves.  This means that of almost all the people moved via the Middle Passage and who were commoditized as part of the Triangular Trade who ended up in the United States were brought there when Britain was running the show.  It cannot be a serious question of North-and-South, then, who was responsible for the absolutely egregious crime of the Middle Passage and the beginnings of institutionalized slavery or the economies it bolstered.

Needless to say, having that much free labor was enormously profitable, but for whom?  After all, the South’s plantations thrived on chattle slavery to produce raw materials.  However, as we know from current struggles in the “developing world,” selling raw materials isn’t where the real money is, except for a small group of large property-owners: it’s in finding/being the buyers to process them and resell the materials as goods.

Tobacco, indigo, cotton – all these things are useless unless they’re manufactured into smokeables/chewables, dyes, or textiles and put back as commodities.  And guess who manufactured during the early 19th Century?  Why, it was none other than the industrializing Europeans and cities in the Northern US.  Even though slavery was highly profitable for the plantation owners up the day that it ended, it was only so because Northern and European manufacturing economies had high demands for the raw materials that the plantations produced.  The majority of slave narratives and stereotypes revolve around farming not because there were no slaves in manufacturing (there were quite a few), but because manufacturing was so incredibly rare in regions of the United States (and the New World in general) that allowed slavery.

The macroeconomies of slavery-allowing regions were completely dependent on slavery, which was only made profitable by the hunger for raw materials on which the economies in “free” areas thrived.  Slavery was not an anomalous, inefficient institution supported exclusively by pervasive racism and a retreat from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but the fact of free labor that built the economies of nations later called superpowers.  The Northern and European economies, dependent on slavery’s goods, created a vacuum in which that economic institution was a fact.  Anyone who knows anything about mercantilism will know that this was the fact of colonialism and one of its main drives.

But what about people in the South?  Since slaves made up almost a third of the entire population of the South, what were the other two-thirds living like?  According to the same statistics, of that 8,036,700 person white population in the South, only 393,967 owned slaves at all in 1860.  So, a whopping 5% of the white population owned slaves.  (This statistic is often inflated to a “by family” number of about 1 family in 4.  Still, 25% of families isn’t a very great majority for a region that would later fall victim to holding all the pop cultural blame for slavery and racism.)

The other 75% of families and 95% of people?  They were in poverty, finding occasional temporary work on plantations or subsistence-farming their way to scraping by.  As pointed out in the book Poor Whites of the Antebellum South:

The existence of black slavery played a major role in perpetuating white poverty by limiting the development of industrial wage jobs and curbing the need for white farm labor…

The fact of the matter is that, for the vast majority of white people, Black slavery was a huge economic limitation.  The more profitable slavery got by the 1860’s (and business was booming), the more it hurt most people, whose infrastructure was left underdeveloped by a complete lack of governmental interest in the rural poor and whose economic circumstances were significantly hindered from the standpoint of development.

Now, in no way was slavery justifiable, and every (white) person who had access to the social system that slavery put into place economically gained from it.  However, slavery was not supported because of democracy, demographics, popular economics, or anything remotely reflective of the “Will of the People.”  Economic demands from the North and Europe and an economic system more closely resembling modern Europe that dominated in the South kept slavery in place.  Never, in all the talk of banning slavery, were alternatives offered to that economic system.  Northern manufacturers craved slave-made raw materials and Southern manufacturing franchises of Northern companies leased slaves to work their mills while their politicians competed over who was more in line abolitionism.

If the North were on a crusade for abolitionism, as its politicians at the time and contemporary histories portray it, why then did the North continue to deal with the Southern agricultural configuration it was exploiting?  Why not offer alternatives to slavery such as infrastructural improvements and more equitable property distribution among white Southerners to promote cooperative raw materials growing and subsidies to start wage industry?  These facts of Northern life had made slavery less economically beneficial in that region and had therefore ended it in places where Puritan theology didn’t already make it unpalatable.  Why couldn’t these things have been done in the South?  The interpretation of the Constitution and the role of the federal government were not in favor this kind of interaction, but if slavery had been such a terrifying moral issue and had been a fight against good-hearted Protestants versus evil, racist trash, why not?

Because there was no moral crusade at the level of government or business or even of the public-at-large against slavery.  Northern people, much like Southern people (as evidenced by quotations from such infamous individuals as Robert E. Lee), recognized slavery as a blemish on any “enlightened” society, but they didn’t see any way out of it economically.  How then can it be a surprise that the South, offered no other alternatives and constantly hearing from the people who benefited the most from its raw materials cultivated by slave labor that slavery was on its last legal leg, would try to opt out?  The Southern states did not have the economic backbone to even support themselves in a transition without significant redistribution from the booming North.  The Civil War was a failure of an empire to correctly compensate for the circumstances of its chief supplier-provinces.

The War was not a war to end slavery – as Abraham Lincoln made perfectly clear on several occasions.  This is most notable since the Emancipation Proclamation only ended slavery in the occupied territories of the Confederacy.  The Emancipation came 1862 and into effect in 1863.  Now, this did not include the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the newly-minted State of West Virginia, or the other border states, Missouri, Maryland, or Delaware – nor did it include any area of the unoccupied South or territories claimed by the Confederacy.  Slavery would end in these areas not with the cease-fires but in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

So, two years passed with slavery in a government run completely by the North’s anti-slavery crusaders, right?  There’s not even any logic to the completely one-sided history that paints all of the South as villainous racists and the North as angels sent from God to free the slaves.  It also doesn’t take into account the incredible historical circumstances of Reconstruction.

As the South was being “dealt with” after the War, it was clear that steps that would bring social, economic, and cultural order were just not going to be undertaken effectively.  In 1877, when the compromise to put Hayes in office ended Reconstruction, it was nail in the coffin of social justice in the South for the next century and beyond.  While the KKK was already blooming and flourishing and threatening newly-elected and newly-emancipated, politically active Black Republicans, the reconquering North completely refused to take concrete steps to protect Black political participation, equality, or Southern social justice on any platform until far into the 20th Century.  What this led to was an increasingly racist political dialogue, managed by former slaveholders and imposed on war-ravaged population.

Then the North set back, and through its complacency supported, for nearly the next century public segregation, terrifying “judicial oversights” and lynchings, exclusion, and systematized rural poverty that fueled the resentment between the races.  Moreover, this kind of lack of actual attempts from the North to bring all Southerners up to a standard of living that they were enjoying, combined with the ways in which the laws of the time fostered the “pioneer spirit” delusions that allowed the archetypal secluded Appalachian/backwater shack with more shotguns than books to fester in abject poverty and to be poked fun of for backwardness.

Even now, the attempts at leveling the playing field of made so unlevel by slavery are dotted with stereotyping and half-assed policies that allow the systematic problems that fuel the racism that lingers from Reconstruction to be a predominating cultural feature of even metropolises in the South (for example, New Orleans and Atlanta) and a terrifying fact of life in the rural South (Jena 6 ringing a bell?).

If the North and its citizens (one of whom recently told me that South was “wrong,” the North was “right,” and that the South “deserved to be punished”) continue to be on the high horse, they at least need to change the systems that continue to this day to exploit the South and then blame it for the social problems that the exploitation causes.  I’m definitely not justifying the racism in the South, but the fact that people from the North see themselves as the enlightened freedom-bringers throwing their pearls before redneck swine is absolutely and atrociously untrue.  That level of self-agrandizing and complete refusal to see one’s own role in the problems of “those people” is one of the truest definitions of banania.

Matt Sanchez on Obama’s Gay Problem

I also thought to title this “this nigga must be joking.”  But he wasn’t.

Go ahead and take some time to educate yourselves on Obama’s gay problem, as described by Matt Sanchez on WorldNetDaily.

Seems pretty standard right-wing arguments against gay people and trying to make people hate Obama, but what a lot of people who read this might not remember about Matt Sanchez is that in addition to being a veteran of the US’ armed forces, he’s also a veteran of gay porn!  (Don’t believe? Do a filters-off Google image search on him.  Or, just click here for some NSFW fun.)

Now, while right-wingers might in fact have a problem with many of Obama’s (and John McCain’s) stances on gays, I find it really hard to believe that someone who has been on film with cock in his mouth can really make a claim that Obama has a “gay problem”.  I’m sorry, Rod Majors – er -Matt, but until someone has Obama on film taking money to dress up like a cowboy and gangbang some guy, he might not have that much of a “gay problem” after all.

The Right needs to wake up, and the Left needs to be the alarm clock on this kind of shit.  All indicators would point out the fact that Right – not the Left – has the “gay problem,” notably, dispassionately wishing to dispose of all the sinning queers from this Christian nation while having gay sex in airport restrooms, self-identified gay children, being Claymates, soliciting gay sex from cops in parks, etc.  Why can’t liberals just shut up about their support for gays (instead of just shutting up and trying to give a cop a blowjob in a park)??  I’m sorry, but no one who just wants people not to have to live their benign sexual and bodily choices for fear of being excluded from society (either throughout criminal or civil statutes) has more of a problem than people who hate baselessly and willfully – especially when they themselves are making those same choices!

We all know I’m not a big Obama fan, but saying he has a “gay problem,” Matt Sanchez, when your dick has been in other guys’ assholes, is just far too banania.

UPDATED

See Matt dicking a guy in the ass!  Obviously this gay problem is NSFW…

Huckabee-Banania 2008

So, as much as I dislike Barack Obama in all his banania glory, I can’t fucking believe former fat ass and Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee.  Recently, at an NRA meeting in Louisville, this asshole responded to a loud noise by saying:

“That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He was getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him, and he dove [sic] for the floor.”

I refuse to allow him not to get nailed to the wall for this shit.  (Seriously, who wants to chip in on some ad space in Times Square?)  Joking about someone’s assassination – someone who, might I mention, despite having Hussein as a middle name and a first name that sounds like Osama and the specters of Islam, slavery, and elitism dancing around above his head was still more presidential and popular than Huckabee – is never OK.  I wish this bastard would explain how this “off-hand remark,” as he called it in his apology for it, isn’t racist and wasn’t meant to be offensive.

How great thou art, Mike Huckabee.  For a former preacher toting Christianity around like a badge, you sure know how to fight animosity and promote nonviolence.  You know, WWJD?  He’d go to a room full of gun-toters in a city that has its share of racial tensions and suggest that someone in the room is trying to shoot the nation’s first real black candidate for the presidency.

I hope that gaffes like this demonstrate to everyone voting just how unworthy the Republican Party as an organism is to face a world in which you have to deal with people who aren’t like you by doing something other than shooting them.  

Mike, it’s a shame that a former presidential candidate can say about three sentences and become the most racist and inappropriate figure for a party which has been peddling Reverend Wright clips and has dedicated the last 7 years to killing everyone who doesn’t pass the brown paper bag test in the Middle East.  Hell, you’re more efficient than even John Hagee!  Go promote your “fair tax” instead of peddling such unabashed banania.

Israel, and the Americans who enable it

Barack Obama might consider Israel a stalwart ally, and Hillary Clinton might be willing to obliterate Iran over it, but the facts still remain: You are a banania colonial power whose egregious actions will come back at you if there is any such thing as justice in the world.

Here at the Banania Report, I try to be fair, but there really isn’t a lot to say for Israel. While US-Americans and their banania European cohorts continue to protest and shake fists at China, they’ve completely missed the boat on condemning the continued degradation and veritable genocide Israel is perpetrating every damn day.

Unless, of course, you buy the theory that a 2000 year-old political map justifies taking someone else’s land from them, pouring in immigrants (known in other contexts as settlers), expelling those people from that land, and then systemically starving them to death or exiling them every time their population builds back up. I seem to remember something like this happening in world history before…

It’s called colonialism, and it’s an ugly politico-social arrangement where people who don’t have any right to the land and resources of another people come in and usurp those things with bogus justifications that only end up being about serving their self-interest. England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Germany used to do this to Slavs, Africans, Americans (you know, the actual ones), Asians – anyone they could reach by land or by sea. We’ve since come to look down at such racist, ethnocentric, self-serving, and illegal behavior. …Except, of course, when it comes to Israel.

Now, before you get all uppity – yes, I recognize that the Holocaust happened and that it was terrible. But genocide isn’t a free pass to getting someone else’s Holy Land. (That goes for you too, Kosovo!) No matter what happened to you, that doesn’t give you a right to take someone else’s land. If anything, the only land you’re owed is German – real talk. But I guess Germany was never Israel. Let’s look at a map, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries:

Please open that map in another window so you can get a really good picture of how the geographical location of Israel has been traded off since the days of David.  Got it?  Look at the first two maps.  It’s beyond real question that Solomon’s Kingdom was solidly Jewish, but that ended in the 140’s BCE.  That’s right: Before there was Jesus, that kingdom was long since over.  Now, some imperialist bullshit with Rome, some Ottomans, and the British came to pass, and during that time the map become the nearly full field of Palestinians you see on the top right – a map of Palestine.  That’s right – in 1917, the British created Palestine out of their old colonial territories for Jews.  But that wasn’t good for Zionists – they wanted the land in their names.  They couldn’t let the people who were actually living there have it, even though they had no right to it whatsoever. Follow the maps and you can see what happened after Israel unilaterally declared that the land and other lands around it were Israeli as well.

Since then, this stalwart ally worth obliterating Iran over has expelled all the people who were in the lands they both “legally” and patently illegally occupy (all that lighter orange on the bottom right-hand map), and has systemically continued to push them out to keep the Jewish population at some sort of pretend majority.  Then, after pushing them out, cuts off food and fuel supplies to the places it forces them to go.  And the retaliations for these actions?  Of course, that’s all terrorism from Hamas.

Fuck you, Israel.  And fuck America for supporting you.  You don’t deserve the soil you are on, and you never have.  Even if you bought into the Bible’s historical account of your kingdom, you’d know that you didn’t even much start off there.  You danced into and took over someone else’s land once, and now you’re doing it again.  Fuck that.

Lots of Gypsies, Slavs, Catholics, queers, and all manner of other folk were killed in the Holocaust.  Sorry you were Judenschwein, but that shit wasn’t Palestine – it was Germany.  Take Bavaria, if you want it.  Fuck your sense of entitlement to go in and execute a genocide with the blessing of the international community.  Get the fuck off that soil, and talk to Hamas and Palestinian politicos to get those people their homes back.

The right of return is inalienable, you asshole bananias.

Obanania and his panderings

So Barack Obama once again has to take criticism for an elitist remark made in the name of his campaign. His wife’s saying she wasn’t proud of her country until her husband got popular was stinging, but his recent comments about rural Americans are just too insane not to call out here on the Report.

“So it’s not surprising then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.” (as quoted by huffingtonpost.com)

Obama, what the fuck were you thinking? You called rural Americans bitter – but you also called them racists, xenophobes, religious zealots, and gun-happy. That’s really the unifying voice that will grab red-state voters in November! And his explanation, from his own website, is that the quote is taken out of context. Let’s offer it up: Click here to read the transcript.

While Obama would like to assert that his comments are related to the first thing he said – that work needed to be done to cut down on cynicism about the government – what he actually said about those cynics was this:

The people are … misunderstanding why the demographics … in this contest have broken out as they are [sic]. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ …[There] were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today – kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.

So, the Times is saying it’s a race thing? Or is that just “how it is”, Barack? People in these big industrial states are skeptical of black people. So all those people are racists, huh?

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.

So, then what? The “so” here is really fascinating coming after a generalization about skepticism concerning black men that’s just part of this blob of industrial, rural voters. With Obama, it seems to work out kind of like this with these voters: “Because Barack Obama is black and I’m inherently cynical about government, I want to hear what he plans to do for me. Note that I don’t trust him both because he’s black and because he’s part of government.” But obviously, telling these people what he will do isn’t enough to persuade them:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

As a historical note, I’d like to ask Obama what “successive administrations” came between Clinton and Bush “over the last twenty-five years”, but we’ll table that for a second. After all, what Obama is saying is true: The jobs that were “there” are gone or leaving and have been for quite a while. A lot of people “there” asked for government to help them and never really got anything in return for “their” investment in the government. But is it fair to say that that’s only people in rural areas? What about the cities? Surely those people, since they’re suffering, too, would be having bad times.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

But that’s what makes those urbanites different from the rural folk! They don’t bitterly cling to their guns and their religions! After all, people in rural areas take their cynicism – which is already compounded by the skepticism they have about black people, right, Obama? – to their local Klan meetings, guard border fences, and exercise villainous protectionism so that they don’t have to deal with their frustrated cynicism. Those poor rural people don’t really want to think about the real causes to their problems or how they can help themselves – they just want to blame everyone around them that’s not part of their in-group.

Meanwhile, back at the podium…

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.

Ah, the good old ass-covering debrief. Obama wasn’t talking about everyone – and of course even in places you’d think were above cynicism you’ll find skeptical people. Thank you, kind Obama.

In the end, what really happened was that Obama called people from rural and industrial places throughout the US (read: red states in 2004, and the red parts of all the blue states) racists (because they’re inherently skeptical of black men [those people who don't look like them]).

He also said that they cling to their religion and to their guns as means to explanation of their frustrations. It’s amazing to think on how this argument reversed onto the black churches Obama defended during the Wright controversy or onto black neighborhoods in urban centers that have real problems with gun violence might have panned out if Hillary or McCain had asserted them. After all, are all those black people frustrated with how they think the white man holds them down clinging to religious institutions like Wright’s? Are the gangbangers clinging to their guns to escape the realities of the political system by creating their own?

I also like his assertion that they cling to anti-immigration and anti-trade: In reality, they are anti-outsourcing. Most farmers in the Midwest and rural South hire migrant workers – they are weary of migrant workers being exploited by companies that they work for as a cheap labor source. Also, Wal-Mart dominates these markets and by no statistical majority do American-made products dominate either on the shelves or in the customers’ carts.

Of course for Obama, it’s easier to explain away people in rural areas not liking you if it’s not about him, his misconceptions, his short-comings, or his unwillingness to consider valid points of view that come from the other side of city or county boundaries if all that can be explained away by the simple fact that people in these areas are gun-toting, Bible-thumping, anti-immigrant, jingoist racist Yosemite Sam-types who will prove the New York Times right – after all that’s just “how it is”.

As someone from that terrifying red mass of America – you know, the part that feeds the enlightened cities – that lies between the coasts – I can only say what the hell kind of mismatched and disappointing message are you trying to push, Obama? The fact that the media are letting you off by saying you only called ME (because I’m from a family that works in factories, that believes in the 2nd AND the 1st Amendment) bitter instead of what you actually said is fucking sickening. You seemed to understand in Philadelphia not even a month ago how misunderstandings, not bad intentions and exercising of rights, can lead to seeming racism and anti-immigrant sentiment where it just isn’t and how it’s important to see past that for what it is.

That’s why your speech on race fascinated me – because it was so right-seeming -, but you proved the greater point that only you could make that speech: You can say whatever you want to about poor people you imagine as white blocks of racists etc., then you can call Geraldine Ferraro’s statements racist and patently absurd. No one will call you enough on this kind of pandering, illegitimate claim about decent people for the racism that it – as you presented it – is.

The majority of the people I know at home are these decent, intelligent people whose very core values about their rights, their religions, and the importance of their being able to work to earn livings for themselves and their families are condescended to every day by city-owned media outlets and whose “backwardness” is exploited for economic and political gain. All this while they sit in a stagnant economy stifled by dim-witted domestic and international policy that tethers them to industries that are being subsidized to move away (that’s that anti-trade sentiment for those of you keeping tally). Maybe if Washington politicos spent more of their time trying to lift the people of rural America (industrial America, Appalachia, agricultural America) above the line of poverty, out of the shadows of illiteracy and state-dependence, and improved the infrastructural support needed to grow the economies of these areas, maybe those people you scorn wouldn’t be so bitter after all.

So, for calling the geographical majority of a country you want to lead a big pack of racists who don’t know what’s best for them because of their guns and religion, Obama, you are officially banania.