Martin Brady, A Blogger Beyond Snark

There’s so much in this post that is wrong, bordering on ridiculous, that I almost don’t know what to say in response to it.

Does a girl start with the struggle to find a way to blame the victim?  Or perhaps we should be considering how a grown man reaches the point where he comes to believe there’s some vast Mafia-like thuggery of African Americans in this culture, all sending each other messages full of omerta and death to snitches?  Or maybe it’s the obvious outrage and jealousy the man feels that another man can get away with having a child young and not being forced to marry or even date the mother of his baby?  Or perhaps we should start with the question of just where Martin Brady thinks the moral place for a little girl to be sleeping is?

No, instead, I think I’ll use this post to serve notice to my black readers and let them know that I, like Martin Brady, am on to y’all.  Clearly, using Brady as a guide, it’s safe to extrapolate from what one sees on BET and other television channels how it is that African Americans differ from the rest of us normal folks.  Well, I watch a lot of “That’s so Raven,” and I plan to get together with Brady and inform him that I have seen with my own eyes proof that black people are psychic.

Yes.  Psychic.  Which makes your lack of snitching even more reprehensible, because, of course, you know with certainty who it is who’s done what and when.

You just wait for Brady’s stern lecture about that!

Sharing the Polka with the Younger Generation

SuperMousey is describing the fright I gave her when “Aunt B. grabbed my arms and we ‘danced’. She jumped, I went flying.”

Yep, that tends to be how it goes.  Just wait until it’s some cute old European man who smells vaguely of stale tobacco tossing you around the room.  That’s when it gets really fun.

Random Randomness

–I love Jay-Z’s 99 Problems.  I do not love that the version available on iTunes is just the vocal track.  Thank goodness for Amazon.

–When I listen to Edith Piaf on my iPod, I do miss the sound of the needle in the groove.  Ann Peebles doing “I Can’t Stand the Rain” is the only other time I really, really miss that noise, that warm schusch-schusch, pop, crackle.  That magic.

–I need crochet help.  I can’t decide how to join Mack’s granny squares and I’d like someone with more experience to help me think about it.

–I’m not sure, but I think that Andrew Sullivan is saying that, if only we give up on affirmative action, he’ll stop saying that black people are just naturally stupider than white people.  And yet, I still read him, so what’s that prove?

—Little Pasture reports that Martin Kennedy believes we should do away with pre-K programs, because, apparently, educating children lets parents off the hook for their well-being.  America, I truly believe that Martin Kennedy thinks that, if only parents were left alone with their children, they would rise to the occasion of taking care of them.  When I read stuff like that, I wonder if I’m skewed by my time as a minister’s kid and the brief time I spent working at the family crisis center.  When you hear the deep secret ways so very many families go so terribly wrong, I don’t know how you can’t believe that the more eyes on the kids the earlier the better.  It makes me think that Martin must only meet nice people.

–I cannot stand when people ask me for money.  Not people I know.  Panhandlers.  If I had a gun, I would wave it at them; I hate it that much.  I feel threatened by it, like, if I don’t give them money, they’ll give me a reason to feel uncomfortable.

—S-Town Mike reports that the State is going to put up “Closed at Night” signs in Bicentennial Park.  I’m sure that will deter those law-abiding rapists.  And, really, if they don’t put cops in the park, how will they enforce the “closed at night” rule?

Plank Two–Restoring the Environment

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There’s just one question I’d like you to ask yourself today.  It’s “What the hell are they doing in Spurlockville, West Virginia and why is it turning everything downstream of it brown?”

I’m not really interested in talking about global warming in terms of the environment.  It’s become a distraction–arguing about whether it exists and whether it’s manmade.  Who cares?  The truth is that we are too dependant on foreign oil (a.) and (b.) we’re too dependant on fossil fuels in general.  People die pulling coal out of the ground.  Look at what’s going on in Spurlock and tell me that whatever’s killing stuff downstream is not seeping into the people nearby.

We need to better manage and conserve our environment and the things in it because we are the things in it.  If we build a culture so toxic to frogs and fish and birds and such that they die off, that’s the canary in the coal mine (so to speak).

A lot of the ugliest stuff that gets done to our environment gets done where few people with any power have to see it.  This is one reason we need to enlist outdoorsy people of all sorts–from hikers to hunters–to be on the lookout for stuff.  They go where most of us don’t.  They talk to people who traditionally have no voice.

Being environmentally aware is just smart self-interest.  And being able to back up that awareness with a government that can force changes in industrial practices (see how we circle back to plank one?) is paramount in that.