The Deuce Is Still The Man

I am The Man. It's not a position I asked for or pursued...it was apparently handed to me when I was born. I'm a white man...please forgive my sins against the red man, the black man, the yellow man and women of whatever color. I didn't know what I was doing. Honestly. You should also cut me a little slack because I also have been victimized by slavery...just like every other person on the planet.

Consider this; please name a race, a culture, a society that didn't practice slavery at some time. Maybe the Eskimos. But besides them, EVERY race on this planet has made slaves of it's fellow man at one time or another. Babylonians enslaved the Jews and God knows who else. The "first" civilization, the Greeks, held slaves. The Romans held slaves. The Germanic tribes held slaves. The Franks held slaves. The Arabs, the Chinese, the Slavs...and even the Africans held slaves. Yep...when European and American slavers went to Africa to buy slaves, they bought them from Africans. Black people sold black people...to white people, or whoever else was in the market. Despite what you might have learned watching Roots back in the golden haze of the '70's, middle-aged white fat men didn't run through the African bush with nets ensnaring Kunta Kinte. Instead, those middle-aged white fat men simply sauntered up to the local slave bazaar and put their money down. Done deal.

I can hear you..."But slavery was an Old World thing. Amerindians weren't so barbaric as to engage in the slave trade." Pa-leeze! The Incas, the Mayans and the Aztecs were all into slavery, not to mention sacrificing those slaves to the local gods. So were the North American Amerindians, though they had their own special spin on slavery. Only women and children were taken as slaves, and they were ultimately assimilated into the tribe if they were willing. Adult men of other tribes were killed outright, because they would rather die than be slaves to another man.

White European Americans held slaves...right up to the time when close to a half million white men died in the Civil War, ending slavery. Jim Crow followed...right up until the 1950's. Brown v Board of Education was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954...55 years ago. That's when the civil rights movement for Blacks began. In the scope of world history, 55 years is just a blink of the eye.

That's probably why I am still The Man...and why professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., esteemed tenured Harvard professor and friend to the first Black American president Barack Obama, believes I'm still The Man. And when The Glorious Leader proclaimed that Gates was a friend of his, and that he didn't know all the facts of Gates' arrest, but still damned the Cambridge police as "acting stupidly", Obama showed that he also thinks I'm still The Man. The president thinks I'm still The Man. I feel so empowered.

Go back far enough in history, and just about all of us all have ancestors who were slaves. We have all been victimized. Where do I go to collect my reparations? Where's my affirmative action? Oh. My victimization was too long ago to count. Okay. Fair enough. The question now is how long do I have to suffer people like Sharpton and Jackson and Reverend Wright and Louis Farrakhan and Charlie Rangell and Maxine Waters...and Barack Obama? When will I be cleansed of the sin of slavery? Never mind that I never owned a slave, or that my ancestors never owned slaves ( my Scots-Irish ancestors that lived from 1695 to 1965 in the hills of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee were way too poor to own slaves ), or that I have ever discriminated against someone because of the color of their skin.

Unlike most Americans, I'd actually heard of professor Gates prior to his recent dust up with the Cambridge Massachusetts police. He hosted a PBS TV show some years ago that depicted the African city Timbuktu ( yes, there is such a place ) as the epicenter of black culture in Africa prior to the arrival of white Europeans. He walked through countless mud huts pointing to the books and scrolls rotting on decrepit mud shelves saying, "this is the proof of black science, medicine, history, philosophy and literature in Africa." All the manuscripts were written in Arabic. Truth be told, Timbuktu was the southern most outpost of Arab culture in Africa, not the northern most outpost of black culture in Africa. Professor Gates is a liar and a fraud. Just another example of the largess of affirmative action.

By now most of you are aware of the facts surrounding the recent arrest of Professor Gates. You know he refused to show I.D. when initially asked to by Sgt. Crowley, the investigating officer first on the scene. You know he berated Crowley, calling him a racist, rogue cop. You know he mentioned Crowley's 'mama'. You know he said, "this is what a black man gets in America." You know he attempted to call the Cambridge Chief of Police to report he was dealing with a "racist cop." All this because a neighbor called the police when she saw two men breaking into a house and the police came to investigate.

Despite all the reports in the MSM and on the 'comedy' shows of HBO and Comedy Central, Gates was not arrested for being a black man in his own home. Gates was arrested for being an asshole. He not only played the race card, he played the class card, asking Sgt. Crowley, "Do you know who I am? You don't want to mess with me!" Yes, the famous tenured Harvard professor, published author and personal friend of the president, cried racial profiling and "getting what a black man gets in America", and in the next breath bragged that he was a baaaaaaad maaaaaaan.

When you have a dispute with a cop, you don't fight your battle on the street. Cops win street battles every time. You fight your battle in the courtroom. Professor Gates fought his battle in his foyer, which he got away with. It was after the issue had been settled and the cop was leaving that Gates just couldn't let good enough be. Gates followed the cop out onto his porch and continued to yell at the cop and berate him for being a racist that the cop ran out of patience and warned Gates that he was being disorderly and needed to calm himself or face arrest. Gates apparently did more of his baaaaaad maaaaaan act, and found himself being cuffed and stuffed.

HUZZAH! I love it when assholes get arrested. Yes, the local District Attorney dropped the charges, but not until the baaaaaad maaaaaan did the perp walk and got himself booked and his mug shot broadcast all over America. Now Obama has invited both Gates and the arresting officer to the White House for beers and a "teachable moment", translated as "come to the White House white fascist cop and get schooled on the realities of black nationalism in MY America."

If Sgt. Crowley has half the brains I think he has, he won't go anywhere near the White House.

But hey...as a white man...I'm still The Man. I think I'll have that printed on a T-shirt. I'd be proud to wear it, and I bet there's a huge market for it.