'Bridge' does its part not to burn truth
Stanley Crouch
Monday, April 19th 2010, 4:00 AM
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http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/04/19/2010-04-19_bridge_does_its_part_not_to_burn_truth.html#ixzz0lZEg6EjNIn his biography detailing how Barack Obama became President, David Remnick displays his vast skills and calls his book "The Bridge" for good reason. On one level it is a bridge to serious journalism, apart from the calculated misinformation provided by right-wing pundits or the equally untrue conspiracy "theories" ranted by demagogues like Louis Farrakhan.
For example, at the ludicrous 1995 Million Man March that would have made it impossible for Obama to become President if the nation were as gullible as those who attended, Farrakhan (pictured above at the march) introduced the Willie Lynch Big Lie. Reading what he claimed was written as a letter of instruction for slave owners who wanted to keep their chattel in line, Farrakhan made an actual contribution to black American myth.
That myth has become an explanation of why Negroes have not been able to organize and get the dirty, deceptive, back-stabbing white man off their backs. One hears it referred to often as one of the most enduring legacies of slavery.
Spelman College Prof. William Jelani Cobb became tired of hearing that explanation in discussion after discussion with his students. Cobb decided to investigate the Willie Lynch letter. He found that it was a fraud and made use of language and sentence construction that was not yet in use during the time that the purported document was supposedly written. Hmmm.
The various forms of right-wing entertainment grounded in bad faith and paranoia are in a photo finish with people like Farrakhan. Farrakhan supposedly has the integrity one could always respect from the Nation of Islam because it neither asked for nor demanded any favors from the almighty white man. The Nation's followers were taught that the white man was an evil force, a devil "grafted" together in a laboratory 6,000 years ago by a mad black scientist. Science fiction, "Frankenstein," and black militancy met in another irresistible form of diversity.
That form is extended today by the ongoing saber-rattling that Farrakhan learned at the feet of the X-man, Malcolm, his former mentor, later enemy, and now revered saint of black extremism. That Farrakhan once bitterly referred to the X-man as a traitor for denouncing Elijah Muhammad as a hypocrite who fathered children by teenage girls out of wedlock and distorting Islam itself, does not matter.
In keeping with the X-man's propagating of the racial mythology basic to the Nation of Islam, that man called Farrakhan has added some big lies of his own. One has been that Jewish "forces" have reviled him for being too, too much of a truth teller; another is that every attempt at black "unity" has been frustrated by a clear design put in place by the white man and intended to keep the Negro confused for centuries.
Rules such as fact do not apply to the worlds inhabited by loons and loon worshipers.
Sometimes when one witnesses snake charmers kissing the heads of poisonous reptiles one realizes that the only answers that should be expected from the objects of such affection are intellectually fatal bites.
There it is.
crouch.stanley@gmail.com
Read more:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/04/19/2010-04-19_bridge_does_its_part_not_to_burn_truth.html#ixzz0lZEU5CFE
