AUSET MARIAN LEWIS  journalism, literary fiction, children's stories, poetry

Auset has been writing and doing art most of her life.  She was the first black female columnist for a Gannet newspaper in Wilmington Delaware, has won writing awards, has given political/social commentary on radio and t.v., has performed her poetry in venues from Yale University to homeless shelters in Baltimore, has been guest speaker at many events, and has given workshops on race relations and male/female relationships.

Her written work reflects her political, social, and spiritual views. Adolph Hitler said, "What a great advantage for leaders that the people do not think."  Auset Marian Lewis tries to make them do just that.  She now writes for the "Indyreader", "Znet", and the "Black Agenda Report", online publications.

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BLOGS:  smokingpen333.blogspot.com, weefolk333.blogspot.com; forwhatitsworth333.blogspot.com

Rebranding "The Stupid Party" 
published March 18, 2013, Indyreader

I’m not a big horror fan. When I watch the movies I often have one eye closed. It’s the same way I watch the Nascar wreck of Republican politics, with my hands over my eyes. Ever since Sarah Palin gave her foreign policy creds as being able to see Putin rear his head “into the air space” from her Alaska window, it’s been tough for me. Not to mention the fact that Republican creationists are building a theme park in Kentucky where “Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers.” The Biblical dinosaur thing really kind of did me in. But those examples are just the tip of a very melting iceberg, not from global warming, of course. Frankly, and I mean no harm, it just simply hurts my head to engage the wacky-Limbaugh conservative ilk, but having said that, you know it’s hard to take your eyes off something going off the skids.

So I really had little interest in reading news of the Conservative Political Action Conference where “rebranding” the Republican image was all the rage. CNN Political Editor, Paul Steinhauser wrote: “The conference, which draws tons of attention, has been increasingly critiqued as more political carnival than conference…” and I agree. I had decided not to tune in on the circus elephants, and there’s just so much of “Send in the Clowns” that you can entertain without turning to drink. With Sarah Palin and Donald Trump as headliners, the conference doesn’t pass the laugh test. But for some reason, a quote from CPAC caught my eye. It was Marco Rubio’s epiphany spoken with rhetoric that was as shiny as a new penny: “We don’t need a new idea. There is an idea, the idea is called America, and it still works.” And the crowd went wild.

Okay, now they have my attention. Let’s be clear, the Republican Party, like most corporate havens, has seen the need to diversify. After the last election, I certainly get that. Hispanics, the largest growing demographic, voted 71% democratic and 93% of African Americans voted for Obama. So now Hispanic, “middle-class” (but moving out of the neighborhood and lying about it) Marco Rubio, has become the darling of the Republican Party. Rubio is the new Jesus bobble head on the dashboard of the rebranded, souped-up Lexus headed for the White House. Young and handsome with Chris Christie self-effacing good humor about the State of the Union water incident, Rubio is looking thirsty, but presidential. What could go wrong with this crass tokenism to capture the Hispanic vote? If Republicans don’t have sense enough to be embarrassed, I am embarrassed for them at this obvious, disingenuous feint toward Hispanic inclusion. I hate to even give Rubio ink, but this is politics and he is a contender.

After admittedly trying to disenfranchise the minority vote - which Marco Rubio supported in Florida with the early voting scheme -, the haters of all things Obama have the no-brainer, political savvy to also include Black tokens at the convention, as well. To that end, Allen West and Dr. Ben Carson were more window dressing. Ahhh, we have the beginnings of a rainbow. Allen West, a former ousted congressman, spends his time getting dissed by Mitt Romney and his Black Leadership Council who West admits is reluctant to actually engage African Americans on the ground. Dr. Ben Carson, internationally acclaimed pediatric neurosurgeon, became a token target for the right when he dissed Obama at a National Prayer breakfast last month and became Fox News fodder to be the White folks’ next Clarence "Uncle" Thomas.

Now back to Rubio’s popular pronouncement that the idea of America is all we need. We don’t need anything new, we just need to be who we are, America. Let me get this straight: the conference that Republicans called to figure out why they lost the election at a time when racist minority politics is no longer working because the minority is soon to be the majority, decided not to look to the future but go back to the past. In other words, the brand that they have been selling is so good, that they can’t change it. Now here’s where it hurts my head. But you lost! I thought, is it just me? But then I read the Daily Kos headline about the Rubio jewels of wisdom. “CPAC: America is perfect. And it sucks. And it’s perfect.” See, when you say it like that, it helps me know that I’m not the only one with a headache. I’ll be fine, but I think the party of Lincoln has gone off the rails.

On Saturday, Huffpost reported that Steve King chimed in against "'the rebranding' effort taking place in the GOP and 'political expedience.'" Die hard with a vengeance politics.

Then Rick Perry disavows the conservatives in the last two presidential elections: “The popular media narrative is that this country has shifted away from conservative ideals, as evidenced by the last two presidential elections. That’s what they say. That might be true if Republicans had actually nominated conservative candidates in 2008 and 2012.”

Poor Mitt Romney. He has been carrying the water for the fringe looney-tune brigade, pandering to the Republican base, flip flopping on his own more moderate views (Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health reform plan was so much like Obamacare that they called it Romneycare) and this is how they treat him. As for presidential hopeful McCain, his pro-immigration path to citizenship flip-flop made him the “angry old man” that Republicans love to hate. Evidently, the sun has set on his military heroism but, unfortunately, he doesn’t know when to get off the stage,

Maybe I can make some sense of this now. Although the Republicans lost the last two elections, the candidates were not real conservatives so it doesn’t count.

Rand Paul actually made sense: "The Republican Party has to change, by going forward to the classical and timeless ideas enshrined in our Constitution. When we understand that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then we will become the dominant national party again.” It’s not a shout out to minorities, but it doesn’t hurt your head, either. Of course, Rand Paul’s spokesman use to be Chris Hightower whose blog had “Happy n-word Day” and mention of his KKK hoodie. Paul defended him. Not surprising, but I’m just saying, I could get through the quote without having to take an Advil.

The question is, how have the Republicans dealt with the rainbow demographics that lost them the election? How are they going to overcome the perception that they are inviting themselves into people’s bedrooms, legislating women’s bodies, turning science on its head, obstructing policies that majority of Americans support, holding poor and middle-class people hostage to benefits for the rich, and forcing congressional economic cliff-hangers that leave Americans frightened and insecure? How have they dealt with their 47% image problem?

They can’t just blame it on Romney, throw him under the bus, and pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. Certainly not when the new media hero Scott Prouty, who outed Romney’s $50,000-a-plate remarks, has revealed himself and is burning the 47% gaffe into the memories of average, insulted Americans every time he speaks. And how can they speak to People of Color when their multi-cultural tokens spend most of their time, frankly, trying to be White and reactionary?

“America works,” says Marco Rubio. Gridlocked-Congress America works? Tell that to the predominately Hispanic and Black underclass whose boats are not rising with the White American tide. The wealth gap nearly tripledbetween Whites and Black people in 2009. The Pew Research Center reports that the median wealth of White households is 18 times that of Hispanic homes.

Hispanics and African Americans have real problems. Offering up ambitious, opportunistic multi-cultural sell-outs to camouflage the racist, homophobic, anti-female history of the Republican Party is an obscene gesture at best. Just as Donald Trump thinks he’s perfected the “art of the deal,” with the kind of blinders that obstruct the Right’s view of a browning electorate, Trump et al will have much practice in perfecting “the art of losing.”

Dr. Ben Carson:  Send in the Clowns
published March 23, 2013 Znet

I love America, but she done me wrong.” These are the words of an acquaintance, someone who compared America to an unfaithful lover. 

I submit that American racism is not the annoying bee circling the imperial crown of Mother Liberty. No, but it is the veritable blood that courses through her veins. It is the manna of her genocidal explorations upon which she sups. Racism is the very ground upon which she built her wealth. 

In that regard, it is no wonder that the struggle for freedom and economic justice in America is ever repressed and distorted under the crushing weight of a capital- engorged behemoth drunk on the spoils of a rapacious beginning. You cannot build a moral arbiter to chastise the world on the crushed bones of an immoral past. And yet, people want to ignore the past. 

America…love it or leave it, you might say. Although I am a woman born from the womb of gang-rape terrorism against African descendants, born amidst the ghosts of lynched innocents in the land of twisted words, I love America. 

But I cannot live in the fast-paced, techno-time-stamped present on my way to win the brass ring, and step over the inconvenient eyesore of history as though it was the stinking corpse of a homeless man who didn’t make it to the shelter on a cold, winter night. I cannot live in the reeking present and sweep America’s criminal filth under my Ikea rug. 

Recently I was at a symposium and it was a White man from North Carolina who reminded me of our awkward roots. He pointed out that we are still on the plantation and that most poor Whites are like the plantation overseer:  barely a cut above a slave, but faithful caretakers of the Massa’s criminal wealth (his dark human “chattel”.) Funny, when he said that, I had a different image of the overseer. Often the cruelest of overseers was the benighted, psychologically engineered Black slave who had been thrown a few extra scraps. 

That brings me to Dr. Ben Carson. Dr. Ben Carson loves America, too. He is a celebrated Black neurosurgeon, who made his people proud when he separated those Siamese twins; he did what even the great White hopefuls couldn’t. His brilliance garnered him international fame that spread from the corridors of Johns Hopkins University, a college right in my neighborhood. And wasn’t I proud. Dr. Ben was actually right up the street from me, striking a blow for the dignity of Black people, weary from the stigma of criminal thuggery, suffering from the violence of billy club justice. Dr. Ben…wow, I might even meet him one day, I thought. That was until I realized that Dr. Carson was just another benighted, grasping overseer who, rather than standing respectfully on the shoulders of those who had bravely paved his way, was trampling their memories on his carousel ride to snatch the brass ring. 

It all started with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast with the President. This respected icon of medicine criticized Obamacare, presenting some off-the-top-of-his head, lame health savings account program for newborns. It might as well have been a black-on-black, drive-by Obama hit, as far as the “if it bleeds it reads” mainstream press was concerned. The sharks circled and a media feeding frenzy ensued. Dr. Ben Carson’s stock rose and he became the next best thing. Of course, Fox news couldn’t resist this Obama hater in black face spouting some of their political quackery. He was definitely a candidate for Token Negro of the Month. Sean Hannity featured Carson (who is an Independent) on a “Saving America” special, prompting him to run for president. Not to disappoint, Carson, who was invited to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (also known as the Crazy People Action Conference,) dropped breadcrumbs leading to the Oval Office in his remarks. “In 106 days I will be retiring,” Dr. Carson teased. “I’d much rather quit when I’m at the top of my game. And there’s so many more things that can be done.” http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-03-17/health/bs-md-carson-at-cpac-20130316_1_hints-at-political-future-carson-political-waters

Sorely disappointed at the Fox News sycophancy, I decided to google the rising star to see what he was all about. Dr. Ben Carson had done a 360-degree pivot from being a neurosurgeon, poking in people’s brains, to being a political pundit, blowing people’s minds. This Johns Hopkins scientist actually does not believe in evolution saying that it reflects moral and ethical vacuity. He’s big on religion and unfortunately, like so many conservative Bible thumpers, is constantly bringing God in to, frankly, bless his mess. After reading his views on evolution, I finally conceded that the CPAC event was made for him. He couldn’t be in better company. Sarah Palin with her wacky Russia geography, wing nuts with dinosaurs in the Bible, global warming naysayers, male rape “experts” with a new view of a woman’s fail-safe reproductive organs, he was right at home. 

Of course, Carson, just to be current, also weighed in on the gun debate with media charlatan, Glenn Beck. “It depends on where you live,” he said. Further, if you live “out in the country somewhere by yourself” it’s okay.http://www.mediaite.com/tv/conservative-hero-ben-carson-to-beck-you-have-no-right-to-semi-automatic-weapons-in-large-cities/ In his estimation, assault weapons are fine in areas that are not heavily populated, (like urban areas,) but White Timothy McVeigh rural enclaves should do fine with them. After all, they’re mostly known for murdering their family members, oh, and bombing small children in an Oklahoma daycare center.

When Herman Cain topped Clarence Uncle Thomas tokenism by breaking into song for White people with his minstrel stylings, my jaw literally dropped. But Ben Carson really caught me off guard, too. I guess it’s because I hadn’t read his book, America the Beautiful. This Samuel L. Jackson-Django turncoat with his “American exceptionalism” ideas, is walking on the graves of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Mae Hamer, Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells, who if she were alive, probably would shoot him with her Winchester.

Dr. Ben Carson is a well-trained plantation fox, guarding the hen house of White supremacy. He is infected with the delusion of individualism and Bill Cosby boot-strapitis. He can be found on his way to the White House, tripping the political, racist land mines set for his demise. Just think, he could live in Baltimore, not far from me. Well, there goes the neighborhood.