April 2009 Archives

Texas governor Rick Perry's recent acknowledgement of the possibility of his state seceding from the union was boneheaded on many levels, and some say it was historically tone-deaf. But in fact it was historically quite accurate. Ever since the Civil War settled the question of a state's right to secede over the peculiar institution of slavery, the resulting Southern discontent has more or less driven national politics. The Southern strategy of the '60s birthed a new Republican Dixie base that was more explicitly white-conscious and racially conservative than the old. Today, gun-rights advocates are snapping up product all over the country, claiming that President Obama has a master plan to strip law-abiding Americans of their right to bear arms. Crazy, unless you consider that many Americans arm themselves to protect themselves against a criminal population they perceive as largely black (and Obama, of course, has more Secret-Service heat protecting him than any other president in history). And on it goes.

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I'm rushing into the local Smart & Final to get last-minute supplies for a meeting: fruit, soda, salad mix. Maybe a low-fat sweet, if they have it. Deadly as meetings can be, I look forward to this one. It's a monthly confab at somebody's house around a dining room table that's part social, part social evaluation: a handful of black folks coming together to catch up on each other and on the perilous state of the race. Our state in Los Angeles is always more and less vexing than it is in other big cities--an enigma wrapped in a conundrum. The advent of President Obama has only intensified the riddle. So we need food that's as festive as possible at these discussions, sometimes a little wine. I'm on a mission; the meeting starts in fifteen minutes.

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The writer Charles Bukowski once said that it's not the big traumas in life that kill you slowly, but the little ones--snapped shoelaces when you're trying to get out the door, spilled milk while your dry cereal sits waiting, lost money when you get up to a register to pay for groceries. These are moments in which life literally falls apart in your hands, and you have to sort of paste the jagged moments together and move on to the next. Sometimes, though--especially in L.A., where everybody expects their life to work on some level all the time-- you simply come unglued. You stop, but cannot move on. Maybe you don't want to.

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Michael Reed, 49, sounds like a lot of Southern California boys who grew up at the water's edge, or within ditching distance of it, in the post-Beach Boys golden era of surf. Michael cheerily admits that he ditched a lot as a student at Lennox High, often to hang ten down at Manhattan or Hermosa. He is wiry, upbeat, and partial to t-shirts and tennis shoes; he peppers his speech with words like "dude" and "duh" and "awesome." He loves to rock out to Led Zeppelin, his favorite band. He rides a bike.

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