inner city blues (make me wanna holler)

yeah, it makes me wanna holler
throw up both my hands...
panic is spreading
god knows where we're heading


the high priest of socially conscious soul, marvin gaye, wrote those words. he hasn't been with us on earth for 27 years now, but i think if he were, he'd invoke these lines again today. good, sweet lord, the damn birthers won. the president of the united states of america gave in to the pressure of a motley troupe of psychopaths and demonstrated - AGAIN - that he was born here. now, keep in mind, the only reason this is an issue in the first place is that there is a dangerously insane swath of our population, which now has power because a) there's an internet and b) there's entirely too much time to fill on television networks, that just can't accept the fact that a black man with a weird-sounding name got elected president. that's the truth. this is xenophobia, racism, and unbridled paranoia, and that's all.

what president obama should have said, from the very beginning, and every other time, is this: you only ask because i have a foreign-sounding name. if i were named barry o'reilly, you wouldn't care. (oh, and by the way? if this were about 110 years ago, a man named barry o'reilly would be way too irish to be president. hell, jack freaking kennedy was almost too catholic to be president.) that was, and still is, the only answer that applied. you don't legitimize crazy by taking it seriously. you treat it as it should be treated. you IGNORE it.

it's not like this is going to calm them down. hell, andrew breitbart said on twitter that (and this is a direct quote) film-flam [sic] the mystery man president has earned skepticism over his bio. i wanna see the college courses and professors he sought out. (ew. i feel dirty linking to that talentless, raging hack.) see? it's on to the next thing. nothing the white house does to attempt to pacify the fear-drunk rattled nutballs will ever be enough. this is why the man says that the internet is destroying society: it gives these people a forum, an echo chamber really, where they can talk to each other, and seeing their insanity in print makes them think it's real.

you might think that i'm being intemperate, that it's too partisan of me to be this mad, or something. um, no. this isn't about politics or ideology. this is about the fact that today, delusion triumphed - trumped, if you'll excuse the pun - over reality. and this happens WAY, WAY too often in 2011. when i was a young adolescent, a baby adult if you will, i used to say all the time, i can't wait for the grown-ups to start acting like grown-ups. you think when you're young that the adults are serious, sober-minded people who think logically and follow the rules. well, if there was ever a time in which that was true, that time is as dead as marvin gaye himself is.

sane people SHOULD be angry about this, regardless of ideological difference with the president. this is a full-on assault on so many things that make america amazing. are we really going to be bullied, cowed into abeyance, by a bunch of mindless twits who can't stand the idea that a non-white person holds the highest office in the land? that is so powerfully un-american that it makes me shake with righteous indignation. they're always on about wanting to take "their" country back. these people aren't motivated by american patriotism. the trash they spew sounds more like iran, to be honest with you. america is a country for everyone and anyone. we do not distrust people because their names sound funny. we are better than this.

so congratulations to the carnival-barker birthers and their ragged parade of stupid, venal bigotry. congratulations for dragging us further and further away from our best and brightest ideals. this is the united states of america, damn it all, and we are BETTER than this. we are better than these tiny-brained wastes of DNA. the sooner we remember that, the sooner we can heal this insidious infection that's eroding our core. the sane, the rational, the reality-based part of america, the part of our populace that refuses to succumb to this beck-fueled mind rot? WE'RE the ones who need to take the country back. not just OUR country. THE country. e pluribus unum, remember? out of many, one. those small, petty fools want to splinter, to divide, and to subjugate anything they think is "other." that's not our way here in america. WE. ARE. BETTER. THAN. THIS.

makes me wanna holler indeed.