Keith David
One of my favorite actors is Keith David. Not for his acting ability – he is at best a character actor, very capable but not distinguished. You’ve seen him in a number of movies: Dead Presidents, Bird, Clockers, Crash, and Platoon, to name some of his more notable engagements. What I love about this guy is his voice, and his gift for narration. I like to call him “the most famous voice you’ve never seen.” David possesses a narrative voice par excellence, and is a two-time Emmy Award-winning actor for his voice-over performances in The War, and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, and was nominated for another Emmy for the excellent Jazz, all by the noted documentarian Ken Burns. David is also quite the commercial spokesman. Though you probably don’t know it, he was basically the commercial voice for UPS until they recently switched campaigns (the guy drawing on the whiteboard), as well as for a host of other products he hawks, unseen, on television. His only contemporary peer would be Morgan Freeman – neither The Shawshank Redemption nor Million Dollar Baby would have been the movies they were without Freeman’s mellifluous baritone.
One of Keith David’s more entertaining screen roles was his portrayal of King in Platoon. As King and his platoon member, Chris Taylor, portrayed by Charlie Sheen, discuss how Taylor got into the army in the first place, King utters the memorable line:
“Ever’body know, the poor are always being fucked over by the rich. Always have, always will“.
Does that sum up the state we’re in right now in this country, or what? Except now, it’s not just the poor that have been fucked over by the rich. As King stated, that’s a constant. But now we’ve progressed to the situation that the middle class has also been monumentally fucked over by the rich, and it’s gone way too far, and now were in the midst (beginning?) of a financial crisis that threatens to bring this country to its knees. How did we get here? Well, it didn’t happen overnight. For quite some time in this country there has been a festering culture of greed, corruption, graft, financial immorality, and laissez-faire economics – fostered by know-nothing, do-nothing governments and manipulative political demagoguery. The result? A profound and widespread suffering and malaise occasioned by a economy on the verge of collapse, and bleak and uncertain prospects about the future.
Again, this is not new. The poor and the marginalized have always lived on the edge, with dubious employment prospects and financial uncertainty. Now these conditions have reached Main Street, and Joe The Plumber is defaulting on his mortgage. What purportedly makes America great has been shaken to its core, and the average Joe is scared stiff.
The controlling interests in the country previously had the benefit of distracting diversions to keep the masses in the dark while they raped the economy. As long as we had our homes, our cars, our toys, our malls, our Brangelinas and our Brittneys to keep our butts soft and our minds mushy, we usually adopted a live-and-let live philosophy while the rich got richer. As long as they let us have the crumbs of a comfortable existence, we turned a blind eye to their machinations. If things got really get dicey, they would usually throw in some fake political issues to get people worked up and divided, something like abortion, or gay marriage, or stem cells – just to keep our eyes off the ball.
I believe most of the suffering in this global economy is caused because somebody else wants to get paid. Banking and housing crisis? Wall Street wanted to get paid. $4.00 plus a gallon gas? Oil speculators wanted to get paid. War in Iraq? Haliburton/KBR wanted to get paid.
The Founding Fathers
The game is a simple one – the rich rape and pillage and their collaborative, expediting instrument is Washington. Much like the founding fathers, Washington continues to be populated by a collection of wealthy individuals who represent nothing but the interests of the wealthy and the privileged. They come to power through wealth itself – who can be elected to public office without a shitload of money? During their tenure they continue to serve the interests of their ilk, until their career progression delivers them to the next stage of influence peddling, lobbying.
Again, all this worked quite well as long as we had our crumbs and our diversions. But the greedy have gone too far, and the house of cards is tumbling. Our basic requirements are being called into question – we don’t have roofs over our heads, we can’t work, our food is unsafe. Hell, even our kids’ toys present a danger. Because Congress has abdicated any semblance of oversight authority, all in the name of even freer markets and smaller government, our regulatory agencies are ill-equipped and impotent to counteract the forces of privilege and greed.
If this is the greatest country in the world, and it probably is at least the most habitable, it just doesn’t say that much for the rest of the world. As my mom used to say, we’re going to hell in a hand basket. Look at the characters our society has produced and is producing: Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Pennsylvania judges Mark Ciavarella, Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, who recently pled guilty to taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks for sending teenagers to privately-run detention centers (jails) for relatively minor offenses, and the poster boys of avarice and corruption for our times, R. Allen Stanford and Bernard Madoff.
I’ll admit it – I have a Jewish “thing.” It’s not anti-Semitism, it’s a “thing.” A few years back, I had the misfortune of working for a real estate company owned by Orthodox Jews. Based in New Jersey, the company has substantial commercial and residential holdings along the East Coast. I came to the company on a project basis, but was eventually hired as an employee to manage one of their properties in Maryland.
What was initially interesting about the company was the manner that their orthodoxy infused their business practices. The corporate offices closed early on Fridays, the women in the offices always wore wigs and you could not touch them, as in a handshake (only their husbands are allowed to touch them) and the managers were always spouting Torah-based principles about business and dealings in money, and so on. You could sense in their behavior an air of superiority, as if they truly were the chosen people. It was a little weird, but not totally disrupting.
What was discomforting was their business model. As I learned more about the company through my job as a Property Manager, I came to realize that their business model seemed to be based on a portfolio of what they called “B” properties, on the residential side of the business. Invariably, these properties were large apartment complexes, predominantly populated by either Blacks, Hispanics, or Africans. In actuality, these were “C” level properties, just short of slums. And in operating these properties, they exhibited an extremely off-putting behavior of obsession with profit and disregard for humanity that was disturbing and made me feel very uncomfortable being employed by such an outfit.
What was striking was their fake humility, piousness, and talk of honor in business, while at the same time they were exhibiting behaviors that mimicked the stereotypes of the “Jewish slumlord.” Here were these guys, running around, wearing their religion on their sleeves, while all the time taking advantage of other human beings in a manner that bordered on deplorable.
Eventually, we parted company, after approximately fifteen months of association. Their financial shell game – they treated their creditors almost as badly as their tenants – was catching up to them, so they used the time-honored trick of “reorganization,” to hide their misdeeds. I was out in the reorg, and I was relieved. I would have quit sooner or later. While in their employ, I tried to be as honest in my dealings with my property as the situation allowed.
I’ll admit it, the situation scarred me. It bothers me, but I don’t deny it’s there. Since then, I look at Jews differently – much as I’m sure people who have had a bad experience with another group find it difficult to get past. I’ll repeat it, as I must, I’m not anti-Semitic, but I do have a “thing.”
Bernie Madoff
I bring this all up, in context, as Bernard Madoff is a Jew, and the perpetrator of perhaps the most massive financial fraud in history. Many, if not most, of the investors in his nefarious scheme were Jews. Additionally, there has been public wailing about Madoff being a Jew, and how could he have done this to other Jews? Nobel prize-winning holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, a Madoff victim, stated that “psychopath” would be too kind of a characterization of Madoff (Whew, mess with some people’s money, huh?).
What’s offensive about all of this, besides the facts that he stole from people, is that this should have nothing to do with him being Jewish, or that he stole from Jews and Jewish charitable institutions, but more about his being greedy and evil. But again, here are some Jews, whining about being taken by one of their own, and professing some sort of alleged higher morality about dealings in business than others. To that, I say “bullshit.” I guess it would have been okay with them if more of Madoff’s victims had been gentile. There. I said it. There’s my Jewish rant. Don’t get me started talking about United States relations with Israel in the Middle East. Take it as you will, and let’s move on.
Now back to the economy. Somebody help me out here. This country has basically been built upon a notion of Darwinist Capitalism – only the strongest, brightest, and most entrepreneurial prospered and made it big financially. If you didn’t, it was because you were marginal, mediocre, didn’t work hard enough, or somehow or other didn’t have the right stuff. This propaganda ignores inherited and institutionalized wealth, unequal and uneven playing fields, privileges and advantages, prejudices and racism, and so forth. Nevertheless, most of America buys into this stuff. Because government can get in the way of the rich getting richer, conservative and free markets theorists, like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, argued for less and less government interference with the workings of the markets. Okay.
What I don’t get, and I realize this is a simplification, is why the financial sector now looks to government to bail them out of the mess they are almost entirely complicit and culpable in creating. As a taxpayer, I’m paying to put back on their feet the very people who have devoted their existence to screwing me. That makes no sense whatsoever. No wonder they’re taking the money, keeping it and paying bonuses and throwing lavish parties. This is nice work, if you can find it. Wait until the stimulus money starts to flow.
I look at President Obama struggling, trying to sort through this mess, and I sometimes think, “he doesn’t stand a chance.” We don’t stand a chance. The forces allayed against him, and us, are too powerful, too intransigent. Even his democratic brethren in Congress are grumbling and starting to oppose his efforts. The stakes are high, and money is on the table. And we really don’t know yet where Obama is really coming from, though in our hearts, we feel he’s an honorable man. Obama won the election on a message of change because the message appeals to the only thing we have left – hope. Pretty much everything else has been taken away.
Change? We’ll see.
No Diggity
the birth of my only child, Allison Elizabeth Smith.
This Irritating Life 