About Syria…Wait. What?

 

I’m so confused.   Here are a list of questions I have about the crisis in Syria that I have no conclusive answers for:

1.  The U.S. government is swearing they are positive it was Assad who authorized the nerve-gas attack on his own people.  Do they really know or do they “know” like they knew prior to the invasion of Iraq?  What’s different about this time to make me feel “sure’ of this assertion?

2. If Assad did this, why aren’t we targeting him, if we are going to do anything at all?  The President is going out of his way to make it clear that is not his objective.  Why the hell not?

3. The chemical and biological weapons the Syrians are alleged to have stockpiled were likely provided from some other world power.  What’s to stop them from replenishing the supply after the U.S. goes in and “surgically” strikes whatever it is they plan to strike?

4. Given the number of sects involved in the Syrian civil war, how does “punishing” the Assad regime help solve those internal issues?  Won’t there be ongoing inhumane actions – some, perhaps, even precipitated by American intervention – that will then become “our responsibility” to respond to?

5. If there is no safe way to destroy the chemical and biological weapons using unmanned technology, what is the point of a military strike?  If it is for the sole purpose of giving the Syrians a symbolic “time-out,” and the weapons stay intact, who will take control of those weapons?  Rebels or Hezbollah?  What then?

 

On the other hand:

If the situation is so deserving of our retaliation, why are we screwing around having broadcast debates and public opinion polls?   And why has POTUS taken a rather cowardly duck under the wing of a Congressional vote, which by definition  not only delays whatever action we’ll take, giving the enemy even more time to prepare, but also appears to be an attempt to spread the blame if our so-called “intelligence” turns out to be bogus again?

Your answers to any one of these questions are welcome.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler: I Was a Spectator at My Life’s Story

 

I am up in years.  I can’t deny that, but the recent release of Lee Daniels’ The Butler really makes that fact take on a bold headline.

No, unlike the subject of the movie, Cecil Gaines, I wasn’t born on a cotton plantation.  I didn’t stand out in the hot sun and watch while the plantation owner grabbed my mother right in front of my father and me to take her off into the bushes to rape her.  And unlike young Cecil, I didn’t watch while that same son-of-a-bitch took out a pistol and shot my father in the head for trying to speak up like a man because his young son said “Aren’t you going to do anything, Dad?” And I didn’t watch my biracial mother lose her mind as a result, leaving me essentially parentless.

But sooner or later, the Gaines family and my own became players in a period of history that will forever be regarded with both horror and pride.  Cecil and I made our ways to adulthood on different paths, but we both made it.  Unscathed we were not.

This ambitious movie lays out the sociology and the political timeline of The Civil Rights Movement by following an uneducated man who was thoroughly educated in the ways to elegantly serve white people.  As we all know, he ended as a butler in the White House and stayed there through the Reagan Administration.

I will say this very simply:  Daniels nailed it.  How he assembled the budget to hire some of Hollywood’s most high-profile and gifted actors is a mystery to me.  Maybe he leveraged his phenomenal success with Precious (2009).  That movie won the American Film Institute’s Best Picture Award for 2009, and it garnered an Oscar win for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Mo’Nique.  A second Oscar for Best Writing sits somewhere in the home of the film’s screenplay author.

The acting in The Butler is top notch.  Even Robin Williams in the unlikely role of President Dwight D. Eisenhower is quite convincing, thanks in no small way to the excellent job done on all the characters by the makeup department.  If you see it, pay attention to the small tweaks in the actors’ features, like the noses.

This film has Oscar written all over it.  I predict an Oscar for the incomparable Forest Whitaker for his poignant portrayal of butler Cecil Gaines, at least a nomination for Oprah Winfrey as his wife, and probably a Best Picture nod.

This guy couldn’t disagree with me more, although I doubt he’s even seen the movie:

Actor Harry Lennix

Actor Harry Lennix, 48, says the movie is “historical porn.” He accused Lee Daniels of “niggerfying” the beginnings and subsequent life of the fictionalized Gaines.  The film includes an introductory “Based on a True Story” in the opening credits, but I have seen media coverage that claims the story is based on real-life Eugene Allen, who served in the White House from the Truman through the Reagan administrations. 

Eugene Allen with Actor Forest Whitaker in the background

In a speech Lennix made at the Comic-Con International 2013 at San Diego Convention Center on July 20, 2013, Lennix made the following remarks:

“I read five pages of this thing and could not go any further. I tried to read more of it, and I’m not a soft spoken guy, but it was such an appalling mis-direction of history in terms of taking an actual guy who worked at the White House,” said Lennix in a July interview with Shadow and Act. But then he “ni**erfies” it. He “ni**ers” it up and he gives people these, stupid, luddite, antediluvian ideas about black people and their roles in the historical span in the White House and it becomes… well… historical porn. I refused.”

Shades of the outcry that accompanied The Help from numerous black contemporaries who think such pictures are meant to demean the actors and actresses by putting them in these kinds of roles.  In spite of the fact that actress Olivia Spencer, who played a sassy, back-talking maid in The Help, won an Oscar for her work and has gone on record as saying she doesn’t agree with the negative critics, there are still those who resent these films.

People like Harry Lennix were either not around or too young to witness the horrific injustices that were perpetrated daily on Southern (and Northern to a certain degree) black people in the run-up to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. To many of them, it is something they’ve learned about in school while their parents, which includes me, were busy trying to put all that in the distant past by striving to achieve that elusive American Dream they finally thought possible.  It was not the topic of conversation at the dinner table in upwardly-mobile black families. 

It is for that very reason that I disagree with the Harry Lennixes of the world.  It was demeaning, disgusting, degrading and dehumanizing, the way we were treated, but it happened.  Younger black American’s are starting to forget or never really knew the history of their people, the struggle they endured.  That can’t happen.

It cannot happen because, unless every citizen of this country understands what happened in the past, they will never be able to recognize the signs of the American culture slipping back into Jim Crow…or worse.  Those of us with a lot of age on us don’t have that problem; we know the slippage is already happening.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is a two hour and twelve minute experience of life as a black man in the last 50 or 60 years.  It illustrates vividly the generation gap in black families that I witnessed, experienced and felt.  So much happened during those 5 or 6 decades to drive a much-bigger-than-usual wedge between the ideologies of black parents and their children, it was inevitable that children would feel shame about their parents’ subservient jobs – the very jobs that allowed them to even think about equality – and that the parents would simply not understand our willingness to put ourselves in harm’s way for the sake of The Movement.  

We are currently experiencing a similar generation gap in the black community.  Those of us who fought during the 60s have in many cases raised children who enjoyed the fruits of our efforts and have become somewhat dismissive of the past.  Lee Daniels’ The Butler will help bridge that gap.

Eminess* Strikes Again

 

*my name for my recently diagnosed Multiple Sclerosis (MS)

 

As a general rule, Americans don’t much appreciate conversations about bodily functions.  Have you noticed?  I know I don’t…or didn’t.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a commercial peddling a medication for the dreaded erectile dysfunction.  I was suitably shocked for a woman raised in the habitual denial environment of parochial school.  Bedroom talk in public? Never!

Those commercials proliferated vigorously.  After awhile they were so de rigor I started wondering why nobody had invented a similar remedy for married women’s erroneously notorious lack of interest in intimacy.  Ah, but let’s save that for another blog post.

Anyway, having become accustomed to Big Pharma commercials by then, I nearly cracked a rib laughing when I first saw the commercial featuring these “people”:

The ad is for Vesicare, a drug created to address the symptoms of an overactive bladder (OAB).  The use of plumbing pipes to intimate the embarrassing and inconvenient prospect of one’s bladder “leaking” was both stupid and ingenious.

This ad campaign preceded my MS diagnosis by around four years.  I remember wondering silently if there really were that many people walking around freaked out about the possibility of failing to hold their water, so to speak.  And I remember feeling very very sad for them.

I think I was one of those kids Sigmund Freud described who were somehow traumatized by their toilet training.  I have always been obsessed with the avoidance of that so-called urgency those OAB drugs treat.  To this day, I never leave the house without at least attempting to empty my bladder.

Which brings me to the present.

I don’t know how I missed this, but it turns out that 80% of people with MS develop bladder issues.  Just like all my other symptoms, the reason for what I called an irritable and unpredictable urinary tract went undiagnosed for decades.  When I concluded that coffee of any amount would significantly increase my trips to the loo, I stopped drinking it.  When I realized that even caffeine-free Diet Cokes intensified an intermittent sensation of “having to go” immediately after leaving the restroom, I stopped drinking that, too.  In fact, I stopped drinking everything except skim milk and water.

One of the first questions my neurologist asked when I finally found myself in consultation for a boatload of seemingly disconnected issues was “have you had any problems with your bladder?”  Um… well, yes, I have.

I’m sure you can imagine my horror when one morning, after a very rare night of sleeping straight through without waking to stagger into the bathroom two or three times, I got out of bed and immediately became drenched in urine. I remember practically shouting, “No. No. Ohhhhh, nooooo.”

It happened the next morning, too.  I cried and vowed never to leave the house again.

The doctor had given me a prescription to treat my almost daily tension headaches.  Although I had been taking that drug off and on for other reasons, I had never taken a dosage as high as the one the neurologist prescribed.  Suspecting it was the culprit, I Googled the side effects of the drug and, sure enough, there in black and white were the words “urinary incontinence.”  Aha!

I stopped taking that drug that day, just to see.  Sure enough, although I did wake up several times to urinate during the night, I didn’t spring a leak upon leaving my bed in the morning.  Verdict: It was the drug.

So, Dr. Neurologist reduced the dosage by more than half.  And, aside from the truly exasperating dry mouth it causes, I was able to wake up during the night to tend to my increasingly annoying bladder, thus eliminating the totally uncontrollable and humiliating gush upon rising in the morning… until yesterday.

There is a new questionable TV commercial that has emerged most recently:

Yep. They come in pink and blue.