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The A-List: 06.13.03
Compiled by Africana Staff

This week on the A-List:

1. Nothing but net (and sippy cups!)
The A-List contains multitudes, as you know, and some of us like the Lakers and some of us loathe the Lakers, but even Lakers-loathers have to admit: the NBA Finals this year truly suck. It's enough to make us yearn for Shaq and Kobe! How can we care about games in which neither team shoots more than 35% from the floor; where the big men are the supremely charisma-lacking Kenyon Martin, Tim Duncan and David Robinson; and the most exciting drama came weeks ago, when a Boston-based sportswriter admitted he wanted to smack Jason Kidd's wife? Between the false hype over lackluster play and the lackluster news this week that BET's Bob Johnson just named his newly-acquired franchise the Charlotte Bobcats (get it? Bob...cats?) we were yet again instructed in the deep, cynical, all-consuming narcissism that accompanies all corporate mediocrity. (Although, let's face it, the Charlotte story made us glad Colin Powell didn't buy himself a sports franchise.)

If you think you're suffering, consider the lot of Mark Walker, Jr.. First of all, if this league gets any staler or more pathetic, by the time he's ready to lace up (at age 15?) the NBA will be just about as exciting as Bowling for Dollars. Don't recognize his name? Perhaps then you've seen his face, the face of tomorrow's basketball. Just as Sports Illustrated would have you believe Tiger Woods came out the womb with a nine-iron in his hand, and that Venus and Serena became stars in the tennis firmament soon after erupting, fully formed, from the forehead of their mad-scientist dad Richard, so too does three-year-old Mark Walker, Jr., a KC-area toddler, explode on the basketball scene! Walker's basketball skills -- shooting only, so far as we can tell, but to be fair, what chance has he had to rack up real defensive numbers yet? -- have already led to an endorsement deal with Reebok, who has been touting the kid as someone who's "destined for the big league." Right, and Shirley Temple sure filmed a lot of hit movies after she hit puberty, didn't she?

The exploitation of children is a story with a long history and a shifting center -- one century it's hard labor, the next it's premature celebrity -- but nobody except the professional moralists can be very surprised by Reebok's decision to run with the cute kid during this season of snore-inducing parity. (Jason Kidd and Tim Duncan vying for a title?! What's next, a ring for Allen Iverson? Chris Webber!?) Little Mark's freak-of-nature moments aside, (and let's be honest: watching a blank-faced child drain 18 shots in a row on video is cute; being alone in the room with him when he does it is some Damien-type stuff) he is pretty adorable, and it sounds like it would be hard to resist the full-bore publicity machine that is his mother. A former high school athlete herself, Mom reportedly initiated the kid's 90-minute training sessions a couple of years ago, which is to say when he was one, and after BET and ESPN carried clips of Mark some KC television stations claim they had to rebuff her lobbying for local human interest coverage. Why? Mom was "too pushy." (Under normal circumstances we would interpret that "too pushy" as the all-to-common white misreading of focused blackwoman energy, but stage-mothers are a race unto themselves.) Between Mom and the sneaker campaign, some Mark-watchers have been carping that the shoe companies are out of control, that they pander to and hook black kids like the neighborhood pusher, but that's old hat and misses the point: for every kid out there who does something crazy for a pair of sneaks, there are six mowing lawns in order to save up for them -- and 20 pining away until something else comes along to catch their consumerist fancy. And for every Mark Walker, Jr. who is exploited by Reebok, well, there are ten thousand more laboring for chump change stitching Nikes in Asian sweatshops. So: which kid do you wanna save?

The Nets win on Wednesday, BTW.

2. Looking for a Cover-Up?
The New York tabs are reporting that police-shooting victim Ousmane Zongo had not been dead for a day when the NYPD raided his apartment, emptying drawers and overturning tables. His roommate, another immigrant, reports ransacking and terror, while the cops report a routine attempt to "confirm Zongo's identity" -- that is to say, a routine attempt to confirm that the deceased was a drug user who deserved to die. The cops deny it, but stealth eyeball reconnaissance of apartments is common after fatal weapon discharges, searches that are usually conducted with a little more subtlety than in Zongo's case, or, for that matter, Amadou Diallo's. (His apartment went topsy-turvy during a posthumous police visit, likely in search of something to render Diallo's wallet more threatening-seeming.)

Since the A-List, like any collective black news log, faces the possibility of random police violence every day, we've decided to pre-publish an inventory of things in our apartment that could potentially be used to assassinate our characters in the event of their untimely, police-related demise:

Item: Year-old bottle of Vicadin
Explanation: Prescribed after extraction of wisdom teeth
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Narcotic addict / dealer

Item: .mp3 collection
Explanation: We like beats
What it makes us according to the NYPD: CD piracy ring ringleader

Item: Stray cat
Explanation: We love that cat!
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Animal rights terrorist. (If mispronounced "chat" during police briefing, we can also be identified as a "drug user" and/or "Somali warlord.")

Item: Snapshots from yearly Africana office trip to Paint Ball range
Explanation: Yearly Africana office trip to Paint Ball range
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Gun enthusiast and loner

Item: Marijuana cigarette
Explanation: Uh, Rastafarian religious sacrament
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Drug addict / dealer

Item: Bootleg The Matrix Reloaded DVD
Explanation: Feeling that the movie would not be worth 10 dollars
What it makes us according to the NYPD: DVD piracy ring ringleader

Item: Porno collection
Explanation: Downtime between significant others; kinky significant (and not-so-significant) others
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Sex offender and loner

Item: Paperback copy of Edward Said's Orientalism
Explanation: Unfinished masters degree
What it makes us according to the NYPD: Al Qaeda member

Is there something innocent in your apartment that you don't want the NYPD (or John Ashcroft) to use against you? If so, email the A-List and if your list is innocent enough, we will document it here for all posterity!

3. Remembrance of Monkey Dog Pox Past
You can tell the A-List the truth: when you first heard about "monkey pox" you thought about monkeys, right? Monkeys from the country-of-Africa, yes? Don't be ashamed. Your Pavlovian conditioning by the news has been total and complete for many years, so no one is that surprised that the media's never ending game of subliminal word-association took you in one fell, frisson-filled swoop from 50 or so sick Midwestern prairie dog enthusiasts to Africa. Like SARS and West Nile Virus, diseases that cull the 2% of the population that was literally born yesterday or lives in an iron lung while giving everyone else the flu, monkey pox is a mostly conceptual, low-mortality epidemic designed to keep Americans in front of their televisions and away from foreigners, what with their foreign germs and ways and ideas. Since the A-List is a higher form of life evolved past the control of matrix tricknology, we, of course, didn't think of Africa when we heard about the monkey pox, but of our beloved Kansas.

You see, back when the A-List was a small child growing up in Kansas, we were fascinated by prairie dogs, the collectivist critters implicated in the current pox outbreak. We even wanted to be one the pocket-sized, yellowish rodents, standing attentive on their hind legs like impish little Stalinists. This was back before we were assimilated into the anonymous collective that is the A-List, but even then the notion of being part of a mammalian hive-mind seemed tantalizing and attractive. We never saw a live prairie dog, of course, but there were rumors and simulacra. For example, the Natural History Museum had the animatronic prairie dog that would pop its head out of its diorama hole every 60 seconds or so, fiendishly confounding impatient grade-schoolers, who would invariably tire of waiting and turn away just before -- pop! -- he did it. Then there were the schoolyard reports in third grade about someone's uncle having a real-life prairie dog farm, with prairie dog barns and everything! And then there was the roadside attraction advertised on old-school wooden billboards along I-70, promising visitors a chance to see "The World's Largest Prairie Dog," a hoax if you wanted your dog made of meat, blood and fur instead of concrete. Yes, for many years we pondered the nature, inner life and divine purpose of these creatures, bur when we left Kansas we didn't think we'd have much occasion to marvel at them again.

That all changed this week, sending us down memory lane to the American heartland while the media sent everyone else packing to a more Conradian heart of darkness via screaming headlines about THE FIRST OUTBREAK OF MONKEY POX IN WESTERN HEMISHPERE! (As Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show quipped: "Hell-lo Monkey Pox! Welcome to the White Folk Buffet!") Still, despite the Kansas connection, Africa ended up being (place)name-checked more explicitly as the story unfolded, with reports that the pox was passed on to the prairie dogs by a continental cousin: the more prosaically named Gambian giant rat.

That's right, America. Blame the African relative.

4. Original Men Found Even More Original
Unlike Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, skeletons identifying Africa as the birthplace of the human species just keep getting found and found and found! The latest find: three 160,000 year-old skulls in Ethiopia. For non-believers, the skulls are three more proofs of humanity's African heritage to ignore, but the A-List knows that someday the truth will run free and wild in the streets. The only potential negative to this story is the added impetus it provides white hippies and white-identified black folks to silkscreen even more of thise corny "Race: Human" t-shirts.

5. The Negation of the Negation
Check it, we've seen it before: white entertainer attaches self to black style star power only to reap success beyond measure. Usually this is a matter of borrowing culture or energy -- Elvis and blues, all of rock-n-roll and blues, Madonna and black gayness, Quentin Tarentino and the n-word -- but in this, our sensation-starved age, the latest appropriation craze might just involve bringing back an old favorite from the days of Jim Crow: black death. No, lynching's not making a comeback, but it does seem Sly "Yo! Adrian" Stallone is all set to write, direct, and star in, no less, a film about the slayings of hip hop immortals Biggie and 2Pac. Don't worry, he hasn't proposed to play one of the fallen rappers on the screen, but is instead planning to portray renegade LAPD Detective Russell Poole. Poole, long a staple of WH1's Behind the Music, believes that Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur were the victims of a conspiracy planned by a nasty menage-a-trio of dirty cops, rap moguls and gangsters. Yah think? Either way, what we cram to understand is why Stallone has asked Suge Knight of Death Row Records to play himself, who we all know has been implicated a number of times by Poole in both murders. Suge has a reputation, for, shall we say, being touchy, and while he was recently cleared of the Radar Magazine smeared feces prank (it seems the editors of the new monthly got a letter smeared with poop signed "Suge" after they named him one of media's "monsters") we don't necessarily advise getting on his bad side. At best, the casting proves Sly ain't so sly, and at worst it proves this movie isn't about heart, but cash money and multi-media cross marketing. Rest easy, Christopher Wallace and Tupac Amaru Shakur; we know that can be hard at times like these, but still.

6. Help Liberia Help Itself
Only a week after we complained that the international media wouldn't touch the troubles of Liberia with a ten-foot pole, the West African country has started showing up all over the headlines. While we're gratified that the collective attention of the media has focused -- like the dread Eye of Sauron! -- on the A-List, the mo' news coming out of the country is still depressing. President Charles Taylor announced yesterday that there will be no peace in the country, where more than 300,000 people have died since 1990, if a UN-backed court does not drop war crimes charges it has leveled against him. Meanwhile, two different rebel groups are closing in on Monrovia, the country's capital, where a longstanding humanitarian crisis -- no electricity or running water for more than a decade -- has been worsened by the recent tribulations. Other West African nations are making a final bid for peace, but these are grim days for Africa's oldest modern nation, one founded in 1846 by freed black slaves from the United States.

7. Impeach the Imposter President, part 2
If the Dubya knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction -- notice in recent appearances he has taken to talking about the search for WMD programs as opposed to the actual, you know, weapons -- then he can and should be impeached.

Now, the A-List isn't a fancy policy expert or a constitutional lawyer, we just know what we believe. And what we believe is that Bush needs to go. We've said it a few times already -- the "part 1" to this item is, for convenience's sake, an aggregate of all the times we've used the words "impeach" or "imposter" previously -- and we have since started to observe the sparks, pockets and bubbles of similar opinion. As the months drag on without discovered WMD's, and once the Blair administration in the UK falls over its decision to wage an illegal war on the basis of deliberate lies, those sparks, pockets and bubbles will grow into a consensus -- we have been lied to -- at which point all bets are off.

So will leave the fancy analysis to the experts, and instead plan to do what we do best, which is repeat ourselves. We will keep repeating ourselves here until either Bush is voted out or WMD's are found. So: Impeach the Imposter President!

8. Bush To Apologize for Slavery Next Month in Africa!
Sike! However, the White House did confirm this week that Dubya is making a weeklong visit to Africa next month that will sweep through Senegal, Nigeria and South Africa. Bush staffers like to boast that this President has met more African heads of state than any other in history and his $15 billion pledge to fight AIDS on the continent has just been approved on Capitol Hill. That may be the case, but what we'd like to see is the Imposter President touring the slave dungeons at Goree Island in Senegal.

About the Author: The A-List will break you down with a quickness.