Seemingly moments after President and First Lady Obama invited rapper/actor/poet Common to the White House for an “Evening of Poetry” for students, the conservative media machine launched into Defcon 1 full-court press blasting the choice, going so far on Fox News’ Hannity TV show to even give this whole event a name: “The Invitation.”
It’s beyond laughable. I mean the fact that anyone cares about some poetry night (honestly: no one cares about poetry; name the current poet laureate and any other poet other than Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss, or Shel Silverstein… go ahead, I’m serious) at the White House is a rather coup, I must say, since I’m pretty sure most Americans have much more relevant issues to worry about in their lives.
Like Common or not, it’s irrelevant. But, what’s truly worthless is bashing the Obamas’ choice to have him perform at the event as being an affront to “class and decency,” as Sarah Palin called it. The blanket conservative response is to point to a couple lines of one poem, taken out of context, that sound like he’s advocating killing cops and is against former President George W. Bush. (Yes, this only perpetuates the notion that conservatives are tone-deaf when it comes to art in general, solidified by their desire to cut funding to the National Administration of the Arts of all things.)
It’s altogether the wrong response. Sure, it unifies the all-white suburban parents who have never left the towns they grew up in by placating to their ignorant notions that all black kids wear baggy jeans, stroll through class wearing headphones blasting that rap music, and speak only in Ebonics. But those people were most likely already voting Republican anyway.
But it’s no surprise that this is their response, since that’s been the way to treat minorities for the past ten years: marginalize, demonize, ostracize. Instead of bringing the Muslim community even more into the American fray after the attacks on 9/11, they pushed them out, conflating regular American Muslims with terrorists, under the guise of making us safer. And here with someone as ridiculously non-threatening as Common — honestly, this guy was in a romantic comedy where he falls in love with Queen Latifah, for crying out loud, a movie whose entire theme is that true beauty is on the inside — instead of just doing the least amount of work by ignoring it entirely, they’ve tried to expose him as this gun-toting, violence mongering, anti-establishment boogeyman to support the tired notion that Obama is some radical. What a waste of energy.
Instead of further marginalizing people (don’t conservatives remember that when kids hear their parents tell them not to listen to something/someone, that’s exactly what they end up listening to!?), the better move is to do what Obama did: invite them over. Then you’ll see that he’s not the boogeyman that you think he is.
Bill O’Reilly defended Fox News against Jon Stewart’s epic takedown on The Daily Show, arguing again that it’s not so much about Common as an artist, rather how inappropriate the decision was by Obama to have him present at the White House. He points to Stewart bringing up President George W. Bush honoring Johnny Cash – a man who also aligned himself with criminals and talked of shooting men just to see them die – and Sean Hannity being friends with Ted Nugent as being pointless arguments since it doesn’t make it okay just because a Republican president did it, too. But that’s not the argument that Stewart is making. He’s simply pointing out the conservative hypocrisy, how vehemently they attack this Democratic president for things that they support when done by a Republican president. That’s all.
That’s just another day in the life of those who watch Fox News for the “news,” since they live in a bubble. A bubble full of hypocrisy and total nonsense. Everyone’s said something at some point that, taken out of context, could be considered blasphemous. I mean, c’mon: George H.W. Bush invited Easy E to the White House while he was in office. Easy E! The guy who was in a group called N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude)! A group who had a major hit with a song called “Fuck tha Police”! Like Stewart, I don’t bring this up to mean that Bush 1 made an affront to “class and decency” by that invitation at all. Quite the contrary: it was fine of Republicans and Bush 1 to invite Easy E to the White House just like it’s fine for Obama to invite Common to the White House.
People aren’t all bad. People aren’t all good. We all live in that gray area of imperfection, trying to make sense of this world and ourselves in it. The more we can learn from each other – the good, the bad, the ugly – the better we will all be. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away and the more we can understand the other side of the coin, the more likely we’ll make better decisions – and, in the case of politicians, better policies. Which will only help us all.
Image courtesy of Tom Lohdan’s Flickr Photostream.
