Obama - A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

President Barack Obama is a genius in the way in which he adeptly uses the media to drum home his points to the broadest possible audience without resorting to hyperbole or inducing unproductive “guilt trips.” Ever mindful of any golden opportunity to foster a highly teachable moment, as a presidential candidate he seized such a watershed moment in Philadelphia with his historic “race speech,” daring to navigate the third rail in American politics – race relations in the United States.

With cameras rolling at the ancient Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, the American president once again seized a teachable moment, embodying the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

“That looks like me!” the president quipped. “Look at those ears.” Cameras zoomed in to show a hieroglyphic head with prominent protruding ears similar to caricatures of Obama seen increasingly in publications and identified in pop culture with MAD magazine’s Alfred E. Newman. The seemingly light-hearted remark by the youthful president was chalked up by most mainstream reporters as presidential levity, tempered with a bit of earthy humility expressed through self-deprecating humor – personal qualities many voters find appealing and even admire in powerful leaders.

A picture being worth a thousand words, the image Obama pointed to in this instance turns out to be a representation of a god's face on the tomb of Kar, an Egyptian nobleman who served as a priest, scholar, and judge. The camera’s lighting aesthetic, even with a slight shadow, glaringly outlines the image’s prominent Negroid features; the full lips and broad noses phenotypical of Nubians during Egypt’s Dynastic eras. The Kar hieroglyphic bears strong resemblance to Nubian and Negroid phenotypes that populated the fertile Nile Valley in 2,500 BC and suggests the centrality of the African presence from antiquity and lineage to Egyptian modernity.

Mr. Obama only chose to highlight the more sanguine, apolitical physical similarity – the ears. President Obama knows all too well that television images in today's cyber age will have a viral impact via the Internet and an picture indeed is worth a thousand words. [See link to the video “Obama Visits Pyramid” at left.]

Just as race relations have historically been the Achilles heel among American politicians, requiring adroit maneuvering around potentially inflammatory issues, any flirtation with Western historical revisionism could be equally troublesome for America’s first African American president. Right-wing drones like Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and Hannity will no doubt misread Obama’s nuance. As a throwback to pre-inaugural conservative allegations of so called Obamian elitism, they may decipher Obama’s wit as an attempt to identify himself with Egyptian royalty and fail to see the larger picture. We now have a president who is not only capable of making history but whose execution and grasp of big ideas may even aid us by informing history, challenging revisionist fallacies that would deny, distort, and malign the monumental and lasting achievements of people of African descent.

Slippery Slope for NY Post

D-Day Media Group, Inc.
A Message to You
from D-Day Media



Dear Friends,

One need only look at the German press and its complicity during the unfortunate Nazi reign of terror in German history to understand the depth of outrage over using a primate as an ideological stand-in for our president, Barrack Obama.

During pre-war Germany's era of rising inflation, recession, and soaring unemployment Goebbels’ propaganda machine used the press as a tool, caricaturing Jews as sub-human, thus setting the stage for the slippery slope that led to the extermination of six million Jews. We can ill afford to ignore The Post's cavalier response to a serious breach of journalistic ethics and fairness. Editors McManus, Allan, and cartoonist Delonas must go immediately! Moreover, The Post must issue a public apology to its readers and to the citizens of our great nation.

To add your voice to the growing wave of protest against the New York Post go to

http://colorofchange.org/nypost/?id=2472-122858

Cordially,

Dennis Day
President/CEO,
D-Day Media Group Inc.
www.ddaymedia.com
www.myspace.com/dennisdaymusic

AN OPEN LETTER TO SENATOR JOHN McCAIN

Dear Senator McCain:

I want to believe in my heart-of-hearts that you love this country even more than you cherish the notion of a Republican presidential victory. However, if violence were to be fomented against Senator Obama on any level leading up to Election Day, November 4, even a Republican victory would prove a hollow one, void of meaning and incapable of exercising the moral leadership that will be needed to heal the irreparable rupture sure to follow within our racially polarized nation.

Our history has shown us that during times of economic hardship, racial and ethnic minorities and their leaders are susceptible to becoming targets of inflammatory rhetoric, even to the point of inciting riots and bloodshed in our nation’s streets. Today we see a vicious cancer of negative emotion spreading rapidly by the intentional efforts of the McCain/ Palin campaign, and you sir must help to surgically excise it from our body politic.

You, Senator McCain, can take charge by exerting the moral authority that so many ascribe to you, simply by firmly and consistently denouncing the hate language, race baiting, and fear mongering spewed from your supporters at Republican campaign events and the zealots using media to sew seeds of ethnic division and racial hatred.

If you, sir, were to forcefully address the nation specifically on this issue, much in the manner that Senator Obama did before a national television audience in Philadelphia last February in his speech on “Race in America,” you could go down in history as a great American healer and not a divider. Moreover, you will achieve a legacy as one of this nation's most courageous political leaders in history, whether you win or lose the presidential election. Such a bold, non-partisan act of moral clarity and leadership by you is especially needed during these times of great economic and personal insecurity

You decide. On which side of history do you choose to stand? The world is watching.


Best regards,

Dennis Day
New York New York

Campaign ’08 – Identity Politics Deja vous All Over Again

In an election year in which identity politics remain dominant threads in America’s complex political tapestry; race and gender parity continue to emerge as defining issues after all. Privilege in American society was historically bestowed upon white males who were property owners or members of the slave-holding aristocracy. As America’s political landscape continues to shift under the weight of hard-won struggles for civil rights, women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and immigrants’ rights, ownership and class entitlement as requisites for leadership are being debunked by America’s increasingly diverse electorate. Now prospects of the election of Barack Obama – an African American male – or Governor Sarah Palin – a white female – to the presidency or vice presidency of the most powerful nation on earth are within the realm of political reality.

In 1975, one of the epochal struggles challenging historical views of identity politics was particularly hard fought in Barack Obama’s home State of Illinois. I was a young staffer assigned to the Illinois Speaker of the House’s Committee on Cities and Villages, where I was privileged to witness first-hand the workings of the political process with its built-in checks and balances. I saw how such a system can alter history’s trajectory or sustain the status quo.

During that turbulent era, the war in Vietnam dominated our politics. Images of flag-draped body bags, jungle fire fights, and air lifts of orphaned Vietnamese refugees flooded our living rooms on the major television networks. On the home front, the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), designed to create gender equality, made its way through the process to be ratified in our U.S. Constitution after incessant philibustering, but fell short when the three states needed to constitute a three-fifths majority – Florida, North Carolina, and Illinois – rejected the initial ERA amendment, curtailing its re-introduction before the U.S. Congress for several years.

Political hardball and cultural wars have long been hallmarks in Illinois, a state historically plagued by its deep regional and racial divides. Political residue from a divisive Civil War and the ensuing Reconstruction period often pitted Northern Illinois special interests against those of Southern Illinois, resulting in shrewd political in-fights between a formidable Richard J. Daly Democratic machine in the state’s urban North and moderate Democrats and their predominately white conservative counterparts from counties in the South. These dynamic demographics forged the rough-and-tumble political milieu in which the young State Senator Barack Obama earned his political stripes as a “post-racial,” organizationally savvy leader, skilled at building unlikely political consensus between liberal progressives and rural conservatives. Ironically, it is precisely the same challenge on a national scale that now presents the greatest challenge to an Obama presidency.

In the mid 70’s Illinois’ Southern and Central districts, bound together by shared agricultural rural economic alliances, were largely committed to conservative, Dixiecrat-style politics of the good-ole’-boy variety. Political loyalties forged by upstate versus downstate regional and cultural values were shaped against a backdrop of big-city democratic progressive political forces led by two dynamic African American political leaders from Chicago’s South Side; the Illinois Senate’s President pro tem, Cecil Partee, and Senator Harold Washington, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who within less than a decade would become Chicago’s first black Mayor.

Each day the political drama would unfold and build to a feverish pitch in the Illinois Statehouse as the nation focused its attention on the Land of Lincoln and the political maneuvering willed by upstate Daly loyalists seeking to balance the demands of urban female proponents of the ERA against the conservative tide of well-organized downstate ERA opponents led by the conservative Phyllis Schafley. The media frenzy that shrouded the Illinois Statehouse in those heady days homed in on celebrity activist speakers like Marlo Thomas (of “That Girl” fame and later paramour to Phil Donahue) and Alan Alda, whose top-rated television serial M*A*S*H had given him a high profile and bully pulpit from which to support the ERA.

In 1975 when an anonymous group of staffers, including Illinois legislators, circulated a mock bill to re-name the Playboy Bunny as Illinois State Animal under the pseudonym Rabbiscus Bustus, the mocking good-ole’-boy levity generated by this joke was shared across the Illinois Assembly’s political aisles by a largely male-dominated General Assembly, Democrats and Republicans alike, who would soundly defeat the ERA. The Equal Rights Amendment was intended to address political and economic disparities faced by women, but after multiple attempts, is still not ratified by enough states to become part of the U.S. Constitution.

The mid-70’s drama played out in the Illinois House and Senate chambers pitted rural against urban voters, hawks against doves, bra- and flag-burners against militarists, and blacks against whites, further deepening the divisions between conservatives and liberals. The period was a watershed for the emerging subtext of identity politics – a precursor to today’s so-called cultural wars, which play out in terms of “blue” versus “red” constituencies. In the mid 70’s, nearly a decade after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1965, only one black United States Senator had been elected since Reconstruction; Senator Ed Brooke (R) of Massachusetts. In 1972 there were only 1,469 black elected officials in the United States. By 2000, according to the Joint Center for Political Studies, there were 9,040 black elected officials. In 1975, the U.S. Congress comprised only 4% women, while 10% of all elected officials nationwide were women and 5% of all U.S. mayors were women.

As I look back upon my brief tenure in the service of the Speaker of the House of the Illinois State Assembly, iconic images in my memory capture challenges that linger even after three decades of struggle for equality of opportunity and equal justice under the law for minorities and women. In the Spring of 1975, Comedian Dick Gregory, in a near death-defying act of moral civil disobedience, chained himself to the inner Rotunda of the Illinois State House and waged a heroic fast that nearly ended his life. Phyllis Schafley and Marlo Thomas became poster women for the conservative right and liberal feminism respectively, while Illinois State representative Susan Catania garnered national publicity defying all social norms of the period by bringing her infant child in bassinette on to the floor of the Assembly, discreetly breastfeeding as she passed legislation, arguing that a child needs a nurturing parent.

In this year’s 2008 presidential campaign, once again a media firestorm rages regarding a woman’s role within the workplace and in leadership as Republican Sarah Palin has chosen to accept her party’s nomination for Vice President. Palin’s decision, as a mother of five including a four-month-old infant with Downs Syndrome, has jolted more than a few Good Ole Boys, even among media pundits concerned over a mother’s capacity to serve as both leader of the free world and a sufficiently loving, attentive mom. Critics have been quick to point out that the question of whether a father is capable of the same would never be broached in a major election. Thus, the cultural wars continue.

The ERA was never fully ratified, yet women have made steady gains in the realm of politics and other fields of human endeavor. The last laugh in 2008 may be on that generation of anonymous good old boys who constitute that viral resistant strain of irrational racism and debilitating chauvinism that threatens to derail the great American experiment. They will have to get over it and select either an African American man as President or a self-proclaimed hockey mom as Vice President. To close with a cliché from the 70’s I’ll simply say on behalf of each of these historical candidates – You’ve come a long way, baby!

“All Things in Time” – New jazz CD coming in July

The old adage that music is the balm that soothes the savage beast could never have had more meaning than it does today during these difficult times.

Music has played such a significant role in my life that, whatever pursuits and challenges have engulfed me, my passion for music has beckoned me back into its warm embrace like a torrid love affair.

My new CD “All Things in Time” will be released on my birthday this year – July 16, 2008. This project is for me a musical career highlight allowing me to share a bit of my soul by singing lyrical stories that I hope will entertain, soothe, amuse, and stir soulful reflection for generations now and to come.

The great musicians appearing on my CD share a singular common trait; an abiding love and deep appreciation for our great African-American jazz tradition. Many of these great artists continue to shape the music’s global evolution as major jazz innovators. I am deeply grateful to call many of these artists friends. They have played a big part in my musical odyssey over the years.

I hope that newly initiated listeners and old fans who have wondered what might have happened to me will take the journey with me and find enduring enjoyment in the 12 great American songs and medleys presented here. Above all, I give honor to God through whom all blessings flow.

Even though the CD isn’t released yet, Herb Boyd, one of America’s finest writers and a notable jazz critic, has penned a review that appeared in the Amsterdam News this week (May 8 – 14) (See attached). All that is needed now is for those of you who love the music to help sustain it by supporting it. I’ll keep you posted when the CD is released.

America - Yes, They Can!

As a former teacher in New York City's public schools, I am acutely aware of the daily challenges faced by teachers and students alike – nagging peer pressure, abetted by corporate media’s subliminal yet unrelenting television commercials and hip-hop music videos that extol the values and perceived virtues and rewards of a glorified “gansta” life style. Teachers face an endless task of devising creative methods and curriculum designed to motivate and cultivate young minds. They must constantly look for fresh and relevant opportunities to introduce content to engage students’ personal and broader social exploration of self and society.

The candidacy of Barak Obama this year has offered urban educators precisely what pedagogical types refer to as that coveted “teachable moment.” Obama’s candidacy when, framed by a masterful teacher like Mr. Jackson Shafer in the Bronx High School for Performance and Stagecraft, as seen in the video posted here [See link on left], offers a platform to engage students in their favorite subject: ME. Mr. Shafer’s students explore how, as individuals and collectively, the Obama narrative connects with their own lives and personal challenges. In Obama’s quest they are able to see their own possibilities and life potential and to recognize how their individual lives intersect with broader communal, social, and political concerns.

This is learning and teaching at its finest.

Whether or not Senator Barack Obama becomes the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America in 2008, his emergence as a viable candidate of color continues to inspire millions of minority youth in America and around the world in ways unimaginable.

I hope you agree that this powerful 13-minute video is worth viewing and should be seen in classrooms and among those responsible for the education and uplift of America’s youth.

Irresponsible Media Distortions, Manipulation? You be the Judge

This You Tube video clip offers a broader context of Rev.Wright's post 911 sermon than that being shown on Fox TV and other networks that created a firestorm of controversy. Excerpts from other Wright sermons are also being aired out of context. For my commentary,please see my blog post, April 4, Television, Race and Obama .