the salt makers

Against my better judgment, I was watching Mad TV yesterday. Thankfully, by the time I had switched it on, there were only a few minutes left in the show. These few minutes featured a performance from the musical guest Ice T. At the end of the show, in classic Saturday Night Live style, the cast gathered on the stage while the band played a soft farewell tune and the host, Mr. Ice T, (Mr. T?) waved goodbye to the audience and thanked them for watching. Needless to say, I felt very appreciated for my brief investment of time.

“There is one person I would like to thank personally,” Ice T said. “I would like to thank Mr. Quincy Jones, the producer of this show, a proud black man!”

In response to Ice T’s raised tone, and raised hands, the crowd cheered wildly, presumably simply because Mr. Jones is black. The cast members also began to clap and cheer. One can only presume they had to because Mr. Jones is the one that signs their paychecks.

After the din ebbed, and the camera began to pull back from the stage, Ice T blew a kiss to the audience with his index finger and said, “Remember y’all, a world with no color barriers, none at all. If we can imagine it, we can make it happen.”

The crowd responded in standard Beatle-mania fashion and practically threw themselves off the balconies in support of such a bold and enlightened statement. I imagine that’s what it was like when Barry Manilow first performed “Mandy” in front of a live audience.

I, among the presumably millions of viewers of that program, was likely the only person confused by the host’s statement. First, Ice T pointed out that the producer of the show, Quincy Jones, is a black man, and deserves accolades for that fact alone. Only a few breaths later, Ice T calls for the eradication of racial lines. This is a stark contradiction.

Modern multiculturalism is the primary contributor to the modern racial apocalypse in western society. This multicultural dogma is not sustainable and will only work to increase tension between races because it is patently contradictory. It is impossible to both celebrate the cultural and racial differences between humans and simultaneously maintain a colorblind society. These two ideas completely contradict each other and only work to cause anger and extremism among those that are viewed as the oppressed because their demands can never be met, and frustration among those that are viewed as oppressors because the best intentions of inclusion and penance, however misguided, can never be adequate.

In his seminal work “The End of Racism,” Dinesh D’Souza states that certain “cultural defects” in the American black community are contributing to a virtual moral apocalypse within their ranks, resulting in low expectations and by extension, low achievements. He points to defects such as high illegitimacy and school dropout rates. This was not a new contention. In fact, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had made the first public outcry in 1965 when he wrote “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” In this report, now commonly known as “The Moynihan Report,” the Senator stated that the destruction of the black family unit, specifically the absence of the father, was statistically on the rise and was contributing to the very defects D’Souza states are causing the modern downward spiral in black culture.

Ironically, even the title of Senator Moynihan’s report would be too risqué to speak in public in these enlightened modern times. Needless to say, Senator Moynihan’s report and Mr. D’Souza’s treatise on the matter have both been decried as works of racism.

Much like in psychiatric therapy, drug or alcohol addition, compulsive or otherwise destructive behavior, the first step to solving the problem is to admit that one exists. Until the black community ceases celebrating the very moral defects that are contributing to their grand dysfunction, such as illegitimacy, poor education, violence, drug use and domestic violence and the like, they will never be able to see the forest through the trees. Unfortunately, we find in our midst an entire corps of individuals that have make their substantial livings from maintaining this status quo of anger and resentment, which is only fueling this destructive behavior and pounding more nails into their cultural coffin.

Last night, my wife and I were having dinner with my wife’s father and stepmother. While discussing plans for the Halloween festivities this evening, her step-mother stated that my wife’s father, until recently, was always very involved giving out candy and trying to scare the children with his now-famous gorilla mask, but that he had become a “scrooge” in recent years. My wife asked why he had absconded from participation recently. He paused and said, “Because of ungrateful children.”

“Because of ungrateful black children” he meant to say. Since the storms of the last few years, which have caused a surge in the population of Lafayette and the surrounding areas, Halloween has become a markedly unfortunate event. Children, unaccompanied by parents, presumably from neighborhoods far away, would arrive at my father-in-law’s home wearing t-shirts and jeans, clutching Wal-Mart shopping sacks and demanding candy by the handful. He even told me about a few girls, no more than sixteen years old, similarly non-costumed, requesting extra candy for their unborn children as they patted their bellies, just beginning to swell. He also told me about some of these same girls, requesting candy for their newborns, as if a three-month-old has any business with a peanut butter cup.

These are not new ideas, but until these glaringly obvious contentions are, at the very least, no longer dismissed out of hand as racism or “hate-speech,” the problems will only get worse. As my father once said, “I’d rather be looking at a problem than looking for it.”

Well, we found it.