My piece in this issue is called "The Aloha President." It's not on the site, but here is a teaser:

Consider the wry, half-inward-facing, half-defiant smile that ghosts the President’s lips whenever he refers to himself as a “mutt.” Or recall the passage, early in his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father, where Obama notes the amusement his maternal grandfather took in toying with young Barry’s racial ambiguities. “Sometimes when Gramps saw tourists watching me play in the sand, he would come up beside them and whisper, with appropriate reverence, that I was great-grandson of King Kamehameha, Hawaii’s first monarch. ‘I’m sure your picture’s in a thousand scrapbooks, Bar,’ he liked to tell me with a grin, ‘from Idaho to Maine.’”

Stanley Dunham died in 1992, five years before the boy he and his wife Madelyn helped raise won his first seat in the Illinois state senate. But his words were prophetic. Not counting the issue of Bidoun now in your hands, it has been estimated that since November 4, 2008, close to 300 million scrapbook-ready magazines and newspapers have been sold with Barack Obama on the cover, enough pages to stretch from Idaho to Maine many times over. Even Dunham’s reference to Kamehameha seems slightly uncanny. Hawaii’s great unifier brought the archipelago under one-man rule in large part by outspending his enemies, the islands’ other rulers playing overmatched Clintons and McCains to his Obama. Kamehameha’s last opponent, Kaumuali’I, gave up without a fight after watching him amass the biggest armada the islands had ever seen, right down to newfangled foreign-built schooners and cannon. The triumphant warrior king showed a great interest in the problems of war and the treatment of non-combatants, promulgating the doctrine of Mamalahoe, or the “Law of the Splintered Oar,” which asserted the right of “every elderly person, woman and child” to “lie by the roadside in safety” during battle. Looking forward, Kamehameha’s grandson, Kamehameha III would propose an early Declaration of Rights of Man, his assertion that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the earth in unity and blessedness” preceding Obama’s career-making and echoing assertion at the 2004 Democratic National convention that “there's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America” by 165 years.

Indeed if there is a racial fantasy worthy of object, it is not the oft-bruited notion that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim or a Marxist or an Indonesian, but Stanley Dunham’s sly assertion that his grandson was the scion of Hawaiian royalty. White recoil from Obama has often latched onto the supposed injustice of his rejection of his mother’s whiteness in favor of an identification with his absent African father, but it is far easier to project the face of Queen Liliuokalani, last reigning Hawaiian monarch, onto the President’s features than his own mother’s. The regal posture, the multi-layered, sun-kissed skin tone with its ghostly archipelago of freckles suggest a genetic transit that skips the American heartland altogether, jumping from Kenya to the middle of the Pacific in one hop. His grandfather, who had been primed for such insights after being instructively mis-identified as “some kind of wop” by his wife’s family, could not only see this connection but made it possible by picking his family up and planting it on Hawaii’s fertile volcanic soil during the 1950s. Obama’s autobiography describes at great length how his grandparents were unsuited for life in the moist, conflicted American south and drifted steadily west like pollen caught on steady wind. They needed a different greenhouse for growing the future.

Go buy a copy, or, better yet, a subscription!

Also: Bidoun is a finalist in this year's National Magazine Awards, in the General Excellence under 100K circ category! Congrats to the whole crew over there, but special xoxo to my droog and editor there Michael Vazquez, as well as Senior Editor Negar Azimi, Creative Director Babak Radboy and Bidoun's Founderix/Editorix in Chief Lisa Farjam. Fingers crossed!

see you in the morning.

h/t Jerome

44; 4 years to change everything, or at least fix them; another 4 if we are lucky; 4 + 4 years are make 8; 8 years make me 48; half of 44 is 22, 2 + 2 =4, 22 is the day my mother and I were born; my mother called me 4 times this morning to make sure I was taping the inauguration for her.

I wonder what will I write about 44 8 years from now? It all seems a good omen, and the google gods agree:

Four (4) has the primary numerological meanings of foundations, achievement, earth (the element), and success.

August 4, 1961 = 8 + 4 + 1961 = 1973 = 20 = 2

The 2 Life Path is about cooperation, passion, service and balance. Being generous, honest and caring will help you to bring out the best in yourself and others. Often others will seek you out for information/advice/help. You can be exceptional at organizing and fact finding and these things can make you the most happy.

Jewish Qabalah: The Number Four is the fourth Sephira, the union of the second and third Sephiroth. The name of the fourth sephira is ChSD, Chesed, Mercy or Love (also called GDVLH, Gedulah, Greatness or Magnificence).

The number four (4) is representative of the mighty one. —Aleister Crowley

This is too large a subject to enter on here, but it is most significant that we get the number four in its concentrated form in connection with q#&em@ed@a: DAMASCUS, which is the oldest city in the world. The number of its name is 444: thus—
d = 4
m = 40
# = 300
q = 100
444

We have seen that three signifies Divine perfection, with special reference to the Trinity: The Father, one in sovereignty; the Son, the second person, in incarnation and salvation, delivering from every enemy; the Holy Spirit, the third person, realising in us and to us Divine things. Now the number four is made up of three and one (3+1=4), and it denotes, therefore, and marks that which follows the revelation of God in the Trinity, namely, His creative works.

Famous Life Path (4) Builders

Famous Life Path (22) Master Builders

Read the crawl:

Well, dude actually pulled it off. I don't know what to say. Truth be told, I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago stricken with an abrupt, late-blooming fear that Obama was going to lose the election. (I think it's all the time I've been spending reading NRO's The Corner.) By all accounts he was up, but, as the saying goes: "who are you going to believe: the desperate hopes of white racists or your lying black eyes?" Over-confidence is a sin, but there is something deeply sad (and borderline pathological) about how a history of losses trains you to distrust your instincts. Having experienced this campaign, or more to the point, having my side win this campaign, it will become easier to lay down in bed and tamp down future night terrors, get some sleep so I can get to work in the morning.

Until you have that first win, you just don't know what's possible. And once you have that first win, things are just plain different. Some of you know that among my various side hustles is managing websites, and I owe my entire career pretty much to the fact I have a single metrical win on my resume - blackplanet.com. That's it, and my first time at bat, too, BLAM, out of the park. It's like going to Yale: I will be 100 and there will still be practical professional use-value to be extracted to having managed BP last century. Yes, being the one time ruler of a kingdom devoted largely to black-on-black nookie (and it's various admirers) is a step below running the free world, but a win is a win, right? The fact that I inherited an amazing software platform, was privileged to work with an amazing group of people, was hooked-up with a gig by a bud, and was essentially in the right place at the right time in history, are the end, for me to know, and for you to find out. (By which I mean, "for you to find out" if you ever hope for me to respect you. Nothing warms me to another human being like gentle cynicism about random-but-generally generally praised people, places and things.)

But winning changes things. I don't know about every thing, but definitely some of them. For example: even up until a few days ago, I would not have bet my life on a black man being elected the president of the United States. Several hundred dollars in donations, a few hours phone banking, lots and lots of forwarding, phone calls and so on, sure, but my life? No way, and therein lies the difference between me and Barack Obama. The power of leverage is such that my meager contribution can be multiplied into real power when the right tools are in place, but at the end of the day I would have been heartbroken if Obama had lost but not necessarily surprised. Next time around, though, in whatever shape next time takes, I will have new data to help me make a decision: "it's possible for black men to win the highest office in the land." That is a truly nifty piece of information to carry around with you.

Last night my man Wesley was texting this to everyone he knew: "Whitey may be on the moon, but we're in the white house!" Someone shot back, quick as digital lightening: "Fuck that: We're going there, too. Mars, bitches!"

Why the fuck not? I thought. Who better to send us to Mars than a black president? And that, my friends, is changed between today and yesterday. More shit is suddenly possible, some of it wonderfully outlandish. I have been reading a lot about the meaning of conservatism the last few days on the right wing blogs. This is what Peggy Noonan had to offer:

Prudence. A sense of reality. Understanding limits. Respect for tradition — it didn’t happen by accident.

Seriously, fuck all that shit. My disinterest in the above is, in underlying terms, why I am not and will never be a conservative. I am a citizen of a country that does not fully exist yet, although, by becoming a country where a black man can become president, we got significantly closer. But ultimately, I think I am a citizen of the United States of Space. I hear the president of that shit is a Kenyan-American Hawaiian.

I don't understand why these people have jobs, especially in a weak economy.

Obama is on board with Democratic capitulation on retroactive immunity for warrantless wiretapping, but promises/hopes to do an accountability do-over later down the road:

This leads me to the latest backward attempt to analyze Barack Obama and race. I think the MSM, frankly, needs to just give up on this whole topic, their record is disastrous. First Obama wasn't black enough. Then he was so black that he couldn't win the nomination. Now the question is "How black is too black?" Lemme explain something to you, dog: I just watched a black man carry Iowa and Oregon and then carry roughly nine out of ten black voters. Don't give me that business about Appalachia. You know damn well if I had told you three years ago that a black man would do that you would have laughed at me. With that backdrop I've gotta say, I don't even know what the phrase "too black" means.

One thing I do know, the Times definition of blackness--"a sense of black grievance"--is a joke. And if it weren't Al Sharpton would have dominated the black vote. That sort of flat rendering of black America, keep up this false idea that the most unifying factor of black culture is the ability to make white people feel guilty. Look, I know this is tough to believe, but black people aren't nearly as obsessed with white people, as media would have you think. Fueling that notion is a cheap and easy way to fill some column inches, while not giving a flying fuck about stripping the humanity and complexity away from black folks. [full ta-nehisi]

The NYT op-ed that Ta-Nehisi is shitting on was written by Marcus Mabry. I actually (usually) like Mabry's work, (we might be friendeded on some or another social network) but this strikes me as a case where a (youngish?) black writer was ill-served by white editors who didn't know enough to him ask the right questions. When you're the only member of your tribe in an editorial encounter, and when, moreover, the underlying narrative of that encounter involves you being imported in order to explain said tribe to the publication and its readers, well, you're basically blogging with the aid of a highly compensated human spell-checker. Your editors are very often useless in guiding the piece and are themselves basically sweating it out on their side of the computer screens praying they bet on the right horse/native informant.

h/t Oliver Willis on the youtubery. Also:

bumpity

[El Pais cover h/t gawker]

My man Siddhartha, like many people, refers to Obama as "The Hope" but every now and then a wire gets crossed and he calls him (or maybe I just hear?) "The Truth."

How to be useful?

That's the thing I've been wondering since last night. How can I, ebog, myself, personally do my part to help insure Obama becomes the next president of the United States? Hillary Clinton and her dead-enders don't think Obama has a chance in hell of becoming POTUS, so they're not just going be useless moving forward but flat out detrimental. I think these people could actually see him becoming the Democratic nominee - TO THEIR INCREDULITY AND CHAGRIN - this because they're the kind of self-hating "liberals" who believe their party is self-destructive, weak-willed and uniquely susceptible to racial bullying. These kind of White Resentment Democrats completely agree with Rush Limbaugh that black people get things handed to them on silver platters, and up until last night they imagined a future for the party where the mark of its strength would be its ability to resist being "mau-maued". The dream of such a Democratic party probably ended last night - provided of course, Obama wins.

So: how to be useful? Blog? Volunteer? Phone bank? Donate? What are you planning to do?

Make no mistake. The Clinton surrogates (not to mention the Clintons themselves) who will be campaigning for Obama over the next few months will do so half-hearted and with the fingers crossed. They just don't believe a black man can ever become POTUS. That's not saying they think it would be a bad or anything were such an event to occur (some of my best friends, and all), it's just that they don't think it will happen given what they think they know about America. That's why Hillary Clinton was willing to praise McCain and attack Obama in the same breath:

[h/t Ta-Nehisi]

That, or they're just terrified that politics, like popular music or big league sports, will be transformed by the rise of Obama in ways that will make it difficult for the average white politician to effectively compete. I have had my issues with The Hope, in that there are aspects of it that strike me as the political analogue of the Oprah-approved Secret, but I have never bought into the idea that Obama supporters are "cultish." Some people connect with Obama so deeply not because they're pre-disposed to be mindless followers, but because this particular candidate offers those who are properly configured unique and novel ways to connect. Obama's race, his youth, his demeanor, his facility with popular culture, his message, his looks, his interactions with his wife, his embrace of the internet, his calm, all of it - as the total candidate package Barack Obama just offers more facets, channels, textures and hooks for people relate to and latch onto. The difference between him and Hillary just at the level of candidate craft was often like comparing an analog broadcast tv with a digital HD in surround with TIVO. If you'd never experienced the new and better version of the tube, people who spend a lot of time fiddling with it and all those features might seem cultish to you as well.

Every black "first" changes the game they enter irrevocably, for the simple reason that overcoming the structural obstacles between them and the playing field often calls upon them to be "better" in some aspects than most of their white teammates, sometimes heroically so. The irony here, of course, is that Hillary Clinton had a chance to be a first too, but she squandered it by clinging to the most regressive elements of her party and the most shameful riffs in American political rhetoric. Nobody jumps from a minor, chitlin, girls or other marginal league to national "majors" that they were previousl excluded from by offering solid familiar fundamentals. They do it by offering something so unusual that it makes up for them being negroes, minor, chitlin, girls or marginal. They do it by being useful.

There's a risk of exceptionalism and essentialism in the idea that black participants by definition bring new qualities to any field of endeavor that they've been previously excluded/absent from (whatever the reason). But the one thing you can safely say they bring is the experience of being excluded from the job on the basis of race. I imagine that there are gigs where that specific background and experience adds little to a person's conduct of their job, this even as the reduction of an inequality increases the general amount of good and justice in the world. But I don't think the presidency is one of those jobs. I think a black president is by definition a better president because of the unique understandings, rhetoric, ways of connecting to country, types of moral suasion, demons and, yes, pressures they will be under. There are things that a white Democratic president might do that would be simply impossible for a black Democrat to do. Oppose reductions in mandatory drug minimums, for example.

But since so much about racial psychology is contradictory, hand and hand with the fear that Obama can't win is the equally racist fear that he can't lose. This fear about Obama isn't that he'll be, as Pandagon's Jesse Taylor put it, "Blackazoid, the Nubian Avenger, here to right all the perceived wrongs black people illegitimately feel were heaped on them since we solved racism in 1963," but that he'll be Oprah, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. This fear worries that no "regular" white person will ever win again once Obama has changed the game, especially not in a nation where millions and millions of potential voters recognize a Hova reference when they see one. And yes, I know there are lots of white stars in the NBA. White folks know them too, and know that they're Croatians and Canadians and Spaniards and so on.

The beauty of this terror is that it encompasses not just the black body that inspires it but all those bodies - black and otherwise - that are sympatico with that originating black body. White Resentment Democrats don't just resent black people, they have issues with the young and the cool and the internet and youtube and loud music and the agile - everything really that leaves them feeling out of touch and falling farther behind day by day. They disdained Kerry for being a "snob" and they would have resented John Edwards for being too good looking. Hillary doesn't represent these people, she roused them from a stupor in hopes of using them against Obama, and now she's about to slink off and leave the mess for him to fix.

But it's amazing, isn't it? A black nominee for the president of the United States! And not some Colin Powell ex-soldier bullshit aimed at the lizard brain, his blackness painted over in a protective layer of medals. Who woulda thunk it?

I didn't bother to read Edward N. Luttwak's May 12 New York Times op-ed President Apostate? because: A) it seemed stupid, and B) it seemed stupid, so I missed this example of assassination spam:

Apologies for the Hamsherite sourcing on that clip, but it was too good not to share.