Op-Ed by Clifford Jackson
There is a book called “ Fantasyland” by Kurt Anderson. He describes how America has been enveloped and been sold the concept of “fantasy.“ This goes back to the early part of the 19th century when it came to the rags to riches themes that were prevalent during that time. The “ gold rush” in California was a part of this fantasy of becoming rich where white settler colonialist killed the indigenous population in that area in order to take their land and fulfill their fantasies of getting rich .
It was indeed a fantasy because only the Carnegies, Mellons and the Rockefellers eventually became rich during this century. These ruling families have put forth policies that not only led to the removal and murder of indigenous people via the railroads constructed and the destruction of the ecosystem for profit, but they put in place a economically stratified system that has created poverty that exists to this day. They were able to do this because of the exploitation of slave labor as well as the brutal immigrant labor of the Chinese , Mexicans and poor whites. This milieu was brutal where people did not become rich but were just trying to survive. The barbaric conditions of the factory workers exemplified how barbaric this system was especially during the advent of the so-called industrial revolution. .
PT Barnum said “ there is a sucker born every minute “. What he said was a theme that became a part of the way that people were treated daily in this country and how business , especially Wall Street, was done then and to a great extent is still done. That is one of the main reasons why we have a 1933 and 34 SEC acts as well a Mutual Funds act of 1940 to mitigate this level of stealing that has been going on on Wall Street from the beginning. Swindling and thievery became the norm as far as how indigenous people lost their land, as well as black farmers also having their land taken by whites.
This theme of selling a fantasy became the theme of the circus environment of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus and the foundation of Disneyland and Hollywood. These environments were created for profit and to give people the illusion of an escape from what they thought was ” the American Dream”.
This Hollywood theme like the creation of Las Vegas by Bugsy Seidel has dominated the American cultural scene and conditioned many people to think ,especially subliminally , that Hollywood was real in terms of the almost deified images and messages that this institution has relayed. We see it today with the malaise that is replete within the American cultural psyche.
People are inundated daily with all of the personal details of the so-called stars of hollywood and this information like the level of violence reported by the corporate media is a non-stop 24 hour deluge of information that people are fed. Las Vegas indeed is a part of this fantasy where the major corporations like MGM Grand and others feast on the ” a sucker is borne every minute” theme raking in billions every year and destroying the family structure and lives of millions who have been conditioned to think that Las Vegas is a ‘rags to riches” opportunity.
As of 2017 residents of Las Vegas had one of the highest rates of suicide in the country. I wonder why ? Celebrities are part of the same malaise of exploitation of the American Public. They are not only deified but they replace conciously and subliminally as being the people that millions in this country look up to and define what we like and dislike.
Two glaring examples of this deification and importance of Hollywood are Denzel Washington and Whoopie Goldberg. They have replaced in the minds of many human rights heroes like Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, Martin Luther King and Ella Baker as being leaders in our community. These two examples are a manifestation of how sick this society is as Dr. king said invariably before he was assassinated.
These two so-called celebrities, like many others are NOT role models or Leaders in the community. They are whores that profit from their acclaim and more importantly have no sense of social justice. This is not about attacking these two individuals personally this is about making a statement that there is a malaise in this country where because of the fantasy and myth of so-called celebrities we are conditioned to attach a level of importance to them that we should not.
Goldberg is an ingratiating black woman that is not representative of the struggle of black people in this country. She demonstrated that thirty years ago when her then boyfriend Ted Danson used the word nigger repeatedly during a roast of her. She defended his use of the n word and attacked other people for condemning Dansons racist rant. The reason for this defense was Goldbergs ticket to whiteness that has never stopped. I actually spoke to her over the phone around 13 years ago calling into her website I believe and I spoke to the president of her company. He was intrigued about what I had to say and transferred my call to her and I spoke to her for a good 5 minutes. Believe me when I say she is NOT a very educated person about America History. Her constant theme when you see her speak is to diminish the significance of race. That demonstrates her disgustingly ingratiating mentality to white America.
Especially with the racist evil history of this country that exudes in every sector in the history of this country from it’s inception. She also said “ y’all need to be thankful to have the right to vote in this country because it doesn’t happen in a lot of places. “ Her searing ignorance doesn’t understand that a vast majority of this country’s history black people not only did not have the right to vote but were maimed shot , loss jobs and were killed trying to vote. Only over the last 50 plus years with the votings rights act of 65 and other civil rights acts from the 1950’s and 60’s have black people and people of color had the right to vote unmolested.
To this day pathological white behavior in terms of gutting the voting rights act in 2013 as well as voter suppression continues. Louis Farrakhan made this very point of how American history is a LIE in terms of the voting rights of black people and people of color during an interview with Mike Wallace more than 25 years ago.
Goldberg’s colleague Anna Navarro is certainly in this category of whoreness. She is typical of white Cuban racism and ignorance, even though she is a very colonized lackey of western colonialism from Nicaragua. Her visceral anti Castro Che Guevara rampages ignores the fact that this “ ruthless dictator “ helped purge Cuba from being raped for sixty years of colonial dictatorship rule by the United states. The evil Castro gave military and other resources to the people of Angola and Mozambique in 1975 stopping the rape of their respective countries by Portugal. Castro also gave medical and other supplies to the countries of Jamaica and Haiti when in the case of Haiti more than 250,000 people died in the earthquake of 2010.
Castro also put an end to the racist aparthied conditions in Santa Clara and Havana under Batista that subjected black Cubans to the same racism that black and native Americans suffered in this country. Also Castro does not have the ranking like the United States for the last two generations of incarcerating more people than any other country.
She ignores the more than 100,000 civilians killed in El Salvador and Nicaragua by military dictatorships supported by the United States in the 1970’s and 80’s . Fidel Castro does not have blood on his hands like the United States does. I guess it is that “ American exceptionalism “ nonsense that she has spewed. This shows the lack of character that Anna Navarro has that is exemplified with her relationship with war criminal George W. Bush who by the way was instrumental in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for profit.
Another clear example of how sick the importance and impact of so called celebrities is in this country. Denzel Washington is no Malcolm X. He is a prositute for money and acclaim like the aforementioned. When you say as he has said “ we are free” and to former congressmen JC watts “ I am a fan of George W Bush” as well as not condemning Bush when he was in the throes of slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in 2003 to 2006 in his exchange with actress Meryl Streep you are not a role model by any stretch of the imagination.
Washington recently said “ we are all slaves to information from both sides. “ His ignorance and lack of understanding of social justice ignores the fact that one side is looking to obliterate many people that look like him. So there is NO MORAL EQUIVALENT to both sides as he tried to intimate . His statement also shows that his “ God is Good “ refrain is like many other people of color like him and people in general for that matter that makes his Christianity a categorical fraud. His philanthropy is not doing God’s work as he has said, and another prostitute named Oprah Winfrey has said. Fighting the evils of this system that produces the need for philanthropy is doing God’s work.
Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, Dr. King and Dorothy Cotton understood that. These so-called celebrities certainly do not and should not be idolized.
Cliff Jackson, Larchmont
