Hallowed Ground in New York

World Trade Center

It seems that a building, abandoned for the last eight years on Park Place in New York City, has been purchased for the purpose of tearing it down and building an Islamic community center and people are up in arms. There is a tremendous uproar from people saying that would be disrespectful to the memories of the victims of 911 and signal a triumph of terrorism over good. And more than that, to tell you the truth, I don’t really care.

I could bring up the fact that not all of the people who were killed during the attacks were Americans or even Christian or that the largest amount of Muslims in the U.S. happen to be African Americans. I could also bring up the First Amendment Rights here, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” but I think that’s a no brainer. If the question was ever taken to court, no court in the land would ever think about denying people the right to worship whoever and wherever they want on the basis of it being unpopular. No, what really gets to me is the idea of calling not only the space where the Twin Towers but the surrounding territory, “hallowed ground.”

Years ago when I used to work for a brokerage house right opposite the World Trade center, I remember there used to be an Off Track Betting shop on Church St. I think. Not far from that, there was the Pussycat Lounge which I think was a stripper bar which I think still exists and is even closer to Ground Zero than the proposed community center. I don’t even want to bring up the only time that I stayed at the Marriott Hotel in the World Trade center was because it was only 2 blocks from where Afrodisiak was being held on Fulton St. Afrodisiak was a competitor of the Blatino parties where black and Latino men got together to do their thing. It was the first sex club that I had ever been to.

After the Ex and I found the location of the party, we had to walk up 12 fights of stairs because the elevator was out. Reaching the 12th floor I remember in between my heart trying to explode from my chest and being oxygen deprived, there was sign that said you had to be over 21 and no older than 35 to get in. I think that I had just had my 36th birthday and I thought if anyone said anything to me, anything, I would call the police and, “shut this illegal mutha fucka down.” Suffice it to say, they just took my money and handed me a garbage bag for the clothes and a small towel to cover the essentials.

There isn’t much else that I remember about that evening other than it being really dark. I turned at one point to the Ex while I was being sucked off and wondered out loud how, if I could talk to him face to face then whose chin was I banging my nuts against. I might have thought and said something differently if I had known that it would be considered sacred land in such a short while.

Anyway, in all deference to all those that were victimized during the 911 attacks and all those who have suffered since, that’s why I cannot go easily from sinner to saint and consider all of lower Manhattan as hallowed ground.

And that’s my piece.

"Can't buy me love"

The Beatles once wrote a song about money not being able to buy them love. Since I'm not a multi-millionaire like Sir Paul or Mr. Starr I don't really know if that's true or not...but I suspect that they were right.

I wonder why others don't see that.

Is Andrew Breitbart Another Flim Flam Man?

“Maury Povich has done more for the black family than the Democratic Party has ever done,” was the only line that I remember from the Tea Party rally that I went to last weekend. That was said by some guy at the podium who said that health care, or "Obamacare" as he called it, was a privilege and not a right and that the President was socialist who was going to take the country into the abyss if we weren’t careful.

I was disappointed at not seeing any Birthers at the rally, you know, the ones who swear that the President was born in Kenya and that he is some sort of modern day Manchurian Candidate. But what are you going to do? I did overhear one guy say that the President was a Muslim and so therefore wrong for the country, but no one else.

I listened to all 10 speakers on the stage who said basically the same thing that the Tea Party was not racist. It was the Democrats and the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP who were the racists and who were irresponsible to a crowd that was organized and seemed to be very friendly. As I bowed my head in prayer for one of the speakers and held hands with a stranger to the left of me I thought to myself that everyone and therefore wrong for the country, seemed to be really nice. But then again, they probably thought the same thing in Berlin during the 1920’s and, “how fetching they look in their brown shirts.”

Andrew Breitbart

The real reason that I went to the rally was because I read that Andrew Breitbart, the man who brought down the Acorn organization with videos of pimps and whores getting tax advice, was going to be on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. I thought that maybe he would explain how or why he had slandered Shirley Sherrod who was forced to resign from the Agriculture Department for being a racist. He didn’t of course. What he did do before going to his book signing was find a way of saying that he was being made the victim by the Main Stream Media and the Democrats and so on and so forth without actually saying that he was a victim or mentioning anything that had happened in the past few weeks. “Poor me” he was saying.

I wish I could do that. I wish could say shit without saying shit and walk away the hero of an event and perhaps a little richer in the process. Instead, I would find a way of putting one foot in my mouth by saying what I’m thinking and then figure out a way of putting the other foot in at the same time.

I remember taking a political science class for an elective once that I dropped out of a long time ago. It wasn’t that it was difficult or that I was doing really badly. It was because I was getting C’s and worse than that, I was bored. I see now that if I had stayed in class I might have found out that there really isn’t anything scientific about politics. It should really be called a Political Art; the art of the flim flam.