Spike Lee and Don Lemon Being Stupid on MSNBC

By                                                                           

David Gottfried.

I just read a fine article by Youtopian,  a writer on substack, which lamented the abundance of crappy thought in our contemporary social and political discourse.

This reminded me of a particularly stupid conversation, between Don Lemon and Spike Lee, which recently aired on MSNBC.

MSNBC is one of the better media monsters in the American scene.  It is head and shoulders above Fox News, but that’s like saying that Donald Trump is head and shoulders above Adolf Hitler. (After all, for all his faults, Donald Trump did not kill millions with poison gas.)  Don Lemon is an earnest, civilized guy, whose political assessments are usually correct, measured and with made without malice even if they do seem as soporific as a sleeping pill.  Spike Lee had some good movies, I think.

(I hope I don’t seem to be free-associating, but the televised chat, between Spike Lee and Don Lemon, reminded me of what a teacher, in junior high school, suggested in 1971:  Why do people listen to talk shows.  Are they so lonely that they have to listen to other people talk?  Do they expect to be edified and educated simply because they have had the privilege of listening to two rich and famous people mumble about things in a meandering, meaningless fashion?   Why not read a book, play baseball, or protest the degradation of our environment?    Get off the fucking couch.  Life is short.  Burn your televisions – and if you are on the computer spending 5 hours a day looking at porn, stop jerking-off and get LAID.)

Don Lemon and Spike Lee, quite predictably, said that the world suffered from things like racism and greed.  Their thoughts were very fine if wholly uninspired.

But then Spike Lee commenced to tell us that life was not really that bad because of the great things he was seeing in television commercials.  (This is not a typo.  Spike Lee was dumb enough to say that there were great things happening and that he could see it in commercials for laundry detergent, health care products etc.)

Spike Lee said that America was becoming a better society because he saw more and more educated, professional blacks and women, or actors portraying blacks and women, in television commercials.   If he thinks this is proof of progress, then I suppose that he thought that Sammy Davis Junior’s rendition of “The Candy Man,” at a rally celebrating Nixon’s renomination for the Presidency at the 1972 Republican convention, was as salubrious as King’s Speech at the 1963 march on Washington.)

Now let us deconstruct the commercials that Spike Lee cites as evidence of progress because of the professional blacks in the advertisements.

Commercials are used to sell products.

However, these commercials often make poor blacks and poor whites sick to their stomach and less apt to buy the products advertised. 

When poor blacks see a commercial with a svelte black woman doctor telling us that Preparation H is guaranteed to give you a happy tushy, they are angry and they are apt to yell at the TV:  “Tell it like it is, my brother just got beaten by the cops because he was driving while black.  Stop imagining that we are living in a civil rights Nirvana.”  When a poor white man sees these commercials, he wants to vote for Donald Trump, and he screams, “The Democrats, the media – all of them – sing the praises of blackness 24/7.  I am starving and the black clerk at social services treats me like “poor white trash.”  (I knew on AIDs patient, who was applying for Medicaid, who was told by the black clerk, at a NYC welfare office, that he was “nothing but poor white trash.”)

I thought corporations buy advertisements because they want to sell their products.   Why do they buy air time that annoys a huge portion of the population, poor whites and poor blacks? 

They probably do this because there probably is a  provision, in the Code of Federal Regulations, that enables a company to get a hefty tax write-off for producing a commercial that is socially uplifting.  I suppose they are classified as something akin to “public service announcements” because they celebrate racial healing.  After all, it is so uplifting to be told by a black woman doctor that preparation H will make your anus happy and jolly.

I don’t have proof that such a provision exists and that companies are using this provision to make scads of insufferably sappy,  stupid commercials sporting black woman doctors.  I haven’t researched this issue yet because a) I am not getting paid for this, and b) the Code of federal regulations consists of millions of edicts encompassing every  aspect of life (I am not speaking of Federal statutes, which only number in the tens of thousands; I am talking about the oceans of verbal detritus enacted by federal agencies.  In the pre-internet days, it consisted of well over 100 volumes each containing over 500 pages.),  Although I can’t cite a provision in the Code which enables companies to get tax write-offs for enlightening us with advertisements in which chummy and gorgeous black women doctors sing the praises of creams to shove up your butt, I am ready to BET MY RIGHT KIDNEY that such a provision exists because why would a company post a commercial that makes people hate the company ???.  Also, my hunch is probably correct because the tax code is not designed to raise revenue; it is designed to soak the poor by rewarding the rich with scads of rationales for not paying their fair share.      

In a nutshell, in our phony liberal world, companies make more money, as a consequence of tax write offs, for ostensibly improving race relations when in fact they sow more discord between the races, in particular between poor  blacks and whites, because poor blacks and whites are infuriated by their “messages.”  And if you doubt my contention that poor blacks and whites are irked by their sunny, stupid advertising, you’re probably the sort of rich liberal who hated Bernie Sanders, supported Hillary Clinton and gave us Don, the mafia don, Trump.

I am sorry if I seem like an angry son of a bitch, but I am tired of seeing idiots on TV declaiming on all matters, large and small, with the coherence of a cretin.   Goddamn it, put me on TV.