Archive for July 16th, 2004

I’m tripping.  I just watched the episode of Good Times when Michael brought home the bully who had been taking his lunch money.  Now I just watched it, but I’m still not sure how Michael and Florida talked James into letting the bully, Eddie, stay for the weekend.  What I DO know is, Eddie said he wasn’t gonna do any homework to James’ face.  It was a case of the old quote, “Act like you want it and see if you don’t get it.”  Eddie got it.
 
Now, to Eddie’s defense, he didn’t know you don’t fool around with James Evans.  James might joke and have fun sometimes, but he don’t play.  What was funny was the sound effects of the beating while Florida and the kids were in the kitchen.  Had. Me. Dying.
 
Thinking about it in a larger context, though, the second season of Good Times was 1975, almost 30 years ago.  In it, we see a boy get a beating from a man who’s not his father, ostensibly because the man cares about him.  Nowadays, Eddie would’ve been on the phone to the police, the department of child welfare, the ACLU, and anybody else he could think of.  But for all our so-called advancements in parenting, what have we really got?
 
This also makes me think about Bill Cosby’s comments some more.  Yesterday I heard a link to him talking on the Tom Joyner show (which you can listen to here)  in regards to people who have been critical of his comments and the mishandling of the whole even by the mainstream press.  (We may get into that a little later.)  Now, I don’t watch a lot of television…as in none…but I’m betting that there aren’t very many shows where the parents are shown to discipline their kids but clearly love them.  Nowadays, the kids are the hip and the parents are just plugs who, in the best of cases, when the kid has acted a fool, may have had a point after all.  James was not the star of the show on Good Times, but his was the dominant presence.  If the Evans family was the 80’s Lakers, Florida would be Kareem, but James was Magic.  After he left the show, it was over.  To be sure, there were a couple funny episodes, but James had that crib on lock.  The thing is, the Evans family was po- they couldn’t even afford the o-r, but taking them out of the ne’er do well sitcom context, we wouldn’t expect the kids to live in those same circumstances all their lives.  James had a 6th grade education but he was adamant about making sure that his kids got well beyond that; so adamant that he would beat the devil out of a kid he had just met for not-studying.  And saying it to his face.  (But come on, some things you’re just supposed to know.  James was a big, solid man.  Common sense would tell you not to get in his face with a whole lotta jibber-jabber.  Same thing as Ike Turner on What’s Love Got To Do With It– there was no reason to catch a full blow from him.  Once he thumbed his nose, you knew what was next.)
 
Much has been said about villifying the poor or making them scapegoats for the ills of society.  Without a doubt, that goes on too.  But the fact that a person is poor, be it financially, healthwise, spiritually, or educationally doesn’t mean that they have to stay poor.  Too many times I think that people who claim to be concerned about the poor don’t want to do what it really takes to make a difference.  It’s easy to spout off about some government program that costs millions of dollars but only means a few dollars difference to a particular family.  What’s hard is getting in there and helping people to see that their present is their future only if they allow it to be.  James knew it.  That’s why he had two kids who were very strong academically and one who, even though he didn’t apply himself in school, was a talented artist, which requires a good deal of discipline in its own right. 
 
If I remember correctly, Cliff Huxtable won as the favorite TV dad.  The more I think about it, that title should go to James Evans.

This paragraph here, from the article, The Rebirth of Psych  by Bethany Allen, pretty much crystalizes why I lean to the right.
 

I know that everyone would like to believe in the American dream, that if we work hard we can overcome our conditions, no matter how low on the totem pole we start out. But I’ve been at the bottom and I just want to go on record to say it’s just not that easy. At one point in my life, I was once what some people might have and probably did classify as a welfare queen. I know just how hard it is to pull yourself out of that station, and the so-called “assistance” measures that are in place were at times more a hindrance than help. The welfare system as it stands today is full of reverse incentives — most notably the fact that you are generally penalized for trying to save money — and provides little or no help to families transitioning out of poverty. It can feel very much like a trap because there is really no legitimate way to get out of it unscathed and with money in the bank.

What?  Easy and possible are not mutually exclusive.  I think that’s the whole problem, people think that it’s supposed to be easy to move up.  The American dream is not that “everybody will” it’s that “anybody can.”  There’s a big difference between the two.  But here’s the clincher:
 

For people like me and Bill Cosby and the millionaire athletes he accuses of being illiterate, we were able to escape poverty because we have gifts that not everyone has. For me, though I am far from the millionaire bracket (for now) my writing career enabled me to quadruple my income in five years time, but for most people, that just doesn’t happen. People like Cosby and pro athletes have exceptional talents that in addition to hard work got them out of the projects. In reality, it oversimplifies the matter to think that a strong work ethic is enough to get anyone out of poverty, especially when “the system” does so much to keep you there. This is not the assessment of an uber-liberal black who wants desperately to blame white people for my or anyone else’s problems — I’m speaking from experience here. No matter what color you are, it works the same. Just try and save money for Shaniqua or little Bill to go to college — you’ll lose your childcare voucher and your rent will go up, and you’ll be right back at square one, jack.

Now, I’ll be the first one to admit that childcare can confound any attempts to make forward progress, but let’s keep it real.  First, that’s a result of an active choice.  Some choices just make it harder to make the right decision later on.  That’s life.  Ain’t no good times without scratchin’ and survivin’.  My bigger problem is the elitist attitude that masquerades itself as being one of the people.
 
If I’m everybody and everybody is me, then the only differences between where I am and where they are are 1) the grace of God and 2) the choices I’ve made.  I’ve always believed that I’m no different than the average person.   I’m not in some special category that makes me exempt from the things that every other brother goes through.  I’ve made choices that have kept me out of some situatuations and gotten me into some other ones, but that’s about it.  Anybody else has the same opportunities that I have.  The way I see it, it’s not elitist to say, “I did somethin’ with what I have, now you do somethin’ with yours.”  That’s keeping it real and demanding responsibility from a person.  In the biblical parable, the dude with the one talent didn’t get absolved because he only had one talent.  He was supposed to do something with the one talent he had.  Nowadays, we come off like, “Of course he couldn’t do anything.  He only had one talent.”  Wrong.  What’s elitist is to say, “I came out of those circumstances, but I’m different.  The rest of ‘em can’t do what I did.”  What we need to be saying is, “I made it out and you can too.  Here’s how.”
 
Maybe at some point I’ll talk extensively about how liberal types have made the poor a different kind of “untouchable” and what that really suggests.
 

I love Jesus and I love hip-hop, so it would seem that the hip-hop services described in the Chicago Tribune (subscription required) would be right up my alley.  For some reason, though, it just doesn’t sit right with me.
 
I’m not exactly sure about the source of my discomfort.  I know everybody doesn’t enjoy the same musical forms (and we can get into a debate on the musical legitimacy of hip-hop at some other time.  But before you speak, make sure you can account for The Roots.), and that there’s nothing wrong with expressing the love of Jesus in different genres.  There’s everything right with it.  Still, the idea of a hip-hop service…something seems shady about it.
 
More than likely it’s this quote that’s got me uncomfortable:  “Hip-hop is who we are; it’s how we talk,” Holder said. “We’re foolish if we think we going to communicate any other way.”  I got a problem with that.
 
As I’ve said I-don’t-know-how-many times, I am not a linguistic prescriptivist.  I don’t care about cuss words, I don’t care about non-standard construction, I don’t care about made-up words, I don’t care about anything but making sure that the message is conveyed from the sender to the receiver.  At the same time, the pragmatic part of me knows that no matter how hip-hop we are, no matter what kind of street slang we talk when we’re around the way, we’d better have a different set of verbal “shoes” to put on in different contexts.  I couldn’t get up in the pulpit talking about, “W’sup, dawg.”  I suppose there’s a good discussion to be had on whether I should be able to or not, but there’s no question that I can’t.  So when I read  
 

Church leaders have gotten into the act, as well. In the presence of Kurtis Blow, one of rap’s founding fathers, Suffragan Bishop Catherine Roskam concluded the mass July 2 by encouraging “all my homies and peeps” to “keep your head up, holla back, and go forth and tell it like it is.”

I’m not sure how I want to react.  Part of me wants to bust out laughing.  Part of it is just that I’m not used to hearing that construction in that context.  Forget whether it’s valid or not, I’m just not used to it.  I have to concede that.  At the same time, do we really need to take it there?
 
Personally, I think it would be one thing if there was a groundswell movement by Christian hip-hoppers who started their own congregations and held services like these.  While I would still have my qualms about it, at least it would be legitimate effluence and not a gimmick.  Yeah, the apostle Paul mentioned becoming all things to all people, but Jesus don’t need no gimmicks.  What makes it gimmicky is not the hip-hop element, however, it’s that the people in charge don’t even have the hip-hop cadence down.  When Jesus met the apostles, he spoke to them in terms they were familiar with and could understand.  I’m thinking that he was probably not unfamilar with those terms himself, though.  With my background in funk, soul, and hip-hop, I’m probably not the best one to start some type of heavy metal outreach ministry.  I don’t know the lingo, I don’t have a rubric for evaluating what’s good, and I don’t know what’s popular.  Hip-hop has the (dis)advantage of being very accessible. 
 
Because most people think it’s all about rhyming couplets with a stress on the last word, as popularized by Melle Melle in the early 80’s, just about everybody thinks they can rap.  Because it’s the number one genre worldwide in terms of sales and media attention, everybody has contact with it, and many people think they really know something about it.  Hence, we get all these commentators who wouldn’t know Rakim from Radio Raheem, talking about hip-hop this and hip-hop that, as if that little smidgen they know represents the sum total of what hip-hop is about.  Unless a person deals with it and understands it at more than a cursory ‘I-saw-it-on-the-idiot-box’ level, they probably shouldn’t fool with it, either to critique it as a whole or to try to use it as a tool.  Take some time, learn about it, understand the lingo, get some historical perspective, then start trying to deal with it.
 
All that to say I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea to use hip-hop as a tool in spreading the gospel, but I think it’s probably better left to people who have already built up their dexterity.