I came into this book, after having read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and a few other things that I can’t immediately recall, thinking that the basic premise of this book was an historical fact agreed upon by all knowledgeable people. The CIA helped funnel cocaine into American cities as a way of helping to fund the Contra’s in the 1980s. Whether this was all a concerted effort on the part of the white establishment to intentionally suppress African American agency is an issue […]
Two books so close as to be indistinguishable
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]
This Cold War needs a little ray gun to warm things up.
My father bought into the myth of Ronald Reagan like a dying man holding onto the promise of an after life. He spent his life in the military, and would talk about not having actual rounds to fire under Jimmy Carter because of budget cuts. But Ronald Reagan? He gave us our soul back. This country was reborn after Vietnam, and Watergate, and the Iran hostage crises. Ronald Reagan cut taxes, and ended the Cold War, and reigned in an out of control government. He […]