Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Stalkers4U

Is there someone that you're obsessed with? Someone you just know is meant to be together forever with you? Has she (or he) somehow never responded to your totally deluded deluge of notes and mail, and staking out her house at all hours? Has she (or he) changed his or her phone number and finally called the police on you?
We here at Stalkers4U know that serious stalking is serious work. And if you are a busy professional, face it, you just don't have the time to obsessively keep track of every moment of someone else's existence.
That's why we created Stalkers4U. Our team of trained professionals is on the case 24/7, documenting any and every movement of your designated one. Even if it's 3 a.m. and that person just goes to the bathroom, rest assured it will be noted and put in our computer profile.
We've also just come out with an innovative new service: StalkerBuddy. Let's face it, stalking can get lonely and frustrating. But with StalkerBuddy, you not only get company, but another set of eyes. Your Buddy, for example, can keep an eye on a back door if the stalkee tries to escape that way.
So remember, here at Stalkers4U know what you do: he or she really wants to be with you!

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

On the mysterious, mystical power of eye-glasses

OK, bad guys, time to ditch the hoodies and start wearing glasses. Because glasses, as every TV or movie watcher knows, are a practically impenetrable, fool-proof disguise.
Take Clark Kent. He's surrounded every day by reporters, police officers, and detectives. These are people whose job it is find out the truth. Yet no one can guess that Kent is really Superman, because, well, Clark wears glasses and Superman doesn't.
Imagine detectives back at the precinct, all rubbing their chins about who could possibly be Superman. Suddenly one of them calls out: "I think I've got it." Clark Kent is exactly the same size as Superman. He's the exact same height. He has the same color hair, as well as never being around whenever Superman is seen. The detectives think they're onto something, until one says, "wait a minute, Clark wears glasses and Superman doesn't." Damn it! Now they'll just have to keep combing the city for someone who looks exactly like Clark Kent, but doesn't wear glasses.
But Superman is nothing compared to the greatest glasses-disguise movie of all time, "Weekend at Bernie's." Bernie is a guy in high finance or something like that. He's killed at his Hampton's home by a Mafia-type, by a lethal injection. Yet all the phonies that flock to his place to have a good time can't tell he's dead. Why? He was wearing sunglasses. Dark ones, or at least dark enough.
This movie could have been a bonanza for funeral homes. Instead of all that makeup they use to make a dead body look less disturbing, they could have just put a pair of sunglasses on the deceased and wham! It's a dead man's party.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

gun whipped in Philly

The ground in front of the Virgin Mary statue seemed soft enough, but the handgun that had pistol-whipped me down outside my church was hard enough. They got away with a grand total of $23 dollars, plus my cell and my credit cards. They also at least temporarily ended my feelings of sympathy for young black men. Taken to a central precinct by Philly cops and asked for a description (black, mid-twenties, wearing a dark hoodie) the computer brought up 780-some pictures.
As a friend said, "round up the whole town."
The obvious caveat is that almost every other black person in or near the church and school, on N. 11th a few blocks north of Girard, had been nothing but good to me the few months I stayed there. How could I judge all of them against the two knuckelheads that robbed me?
The answer, unfortunately, is Darwinism. For weeks (OK maybe months) I gave young black men the evil eye when I passed them, even though I knew they hate that. I wanted to yell at all the Temple students wearing hooded sweatshirts, since they all looked like the Grim Reaper to me now.
Later I went to a half-way drug treatment house that's run by an incredibly couragous nun, who lived in a trailer in a half-abandoned area.
I would sit in the men's house in the morning and listen to street and prison hardened men talk about their pasts, "out there" in the badlands. They told me that many muggers are high when they commit their acts. Some just admitted to enjoying having that kind of power over others.
Young ghetto black men are the last and only group that has yet to fully participate in American society and the mainstream economy. They have become a kind of Barbarian class, to be feared and gotten as far away from as possible.
But remember, what Americans are trying is unprecedented in history: to be a great society that is great without subjugating someone or some group. The Greeks and the Romans had slaves, the British had an empire that spanned the globe which they could exploit. The US had a society where blacks where supposedly "free" after emancipation, but freed slaves had no money, no land, and eventually no vote. All of this ended not in 1865, as high school history texts might have it, but in 1964-1965 when legislation was passed making them full citizens.
But the civil rights movement was largely a struggle conducted by southern middle-class blacks. They were never really able to reach out to the "brothers" on the mean streets of northern cities.
It is this group, then, on which government needs to concentrate its resources. To do otherwise is to keep ghetto blacks as a permanent enemy class.
Instead, we hire private security companies, send children to private school, or move out to lily-white outer suburbs (often called "exurbs"). The last welfare reform was aimed at welfare mothers, as though they are the ones the rest of us are terrified by. To be obvious, it is young men that are the problem, and the principal domestic issue for the nation is how to finally include them in the greater society. Hopefully some day will come when being constantly suspicous of this group can be seen as truly bigoted. Right now, its considered being street smart.
People may say police departments are to blame with "racial profiling," but who is it that tacitly approves constant vigilance against this group? The wealthy and the upper-middle class.
The one year I lived in Detroit is an extreme example of this kind of thinking. The old money enclave of Grosse Pointe, on Lake St. Clair, was bordered on two sides by the decaying and crime-ridden East Side of Detroit. In a car, one could easily pass frame houses that were falling down upon themselves. But upon passing into Grosse Point, the scenery was magically transformed into mansions with manicured lawns rolling down into the lake.
The towns that make up Grosse Point wanted at one time to dredge a "flood-control" ditch on its eastern border. Black politicians in Detroit rightly called it what it was: a moat against the city.
The moat was never built, but police cars drive up and down the street that separates the two places constantly. Is this the idea of the police department, the majority of whom could never afford Grosse Pointe? No. They are simply following the tacit order of the town: keep Detroit (read: most blacks) out.
Blaming "racist cops" for what government and residents clearly want is, not to be cute about it, a cop-out. It lets the affluent pretend involvement and concern for ghetto blacks, while farming out the unpleasant security issues to working-class residents of nearby suburbs.
Republican candidates have prospered by stoking fear of the ghetto their domestic policy. It will take a couragous candidate to own up to our responsibilty, and , not coincidentally what the rest of us get in helping the ghetto poor.
To put it another way, wouldn't you like to walk without fear of black men. Wouldn't you like to be unafraid to someone pulling a gun on you? Wouldn't you like to be comfortable with your fellow man, instead of thinking of him as a constant threat? Or does America somehow need a chosen enemy?
There's a lot of talk about the US becoming a multiracial society. That's fine, so long as our original sin, or original "other" is part of it. One has to remember, as a British friend told me, that the ghetto is a canary in a coal mine. Whatever is done there, the children of mainstream society will imitate it in some way (clothes, music, gangsta-behavoir etc)
So the next time you pick up a newspaper or see a report on some horrific violence in the inner -city, just remember, it's coming soon to a suburb near you.