The Daily/Nightly Show (‘Burbs)

Discontinuity

Why do Greeks make the best Pizza?

Next week’s guests-

• Monday 7/27: Ted Cruz
• Tuesday 7/28: Tom Cruise
• Wednesday 7/29: Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Thursday 7/30: J.J. Abrams

Ta-Nehisi Coates will be on to talk about Between the World and Me.

“Between the World and Me” (which takes its title from a Richard Wright poem) offers an abbreviated portrait of the author’s life at home, focusing mainly on the fear he felt growing up. Fear of the police, who he tells his son “have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body,” and who also possess a dominion of prerogatives that include “friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.” And fear of the streets where members of crews – “young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage” – might “break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies,” where death might “billow up like fog” on an ordinary afternoon.

The “need to be always on guard” was exhausting, “the slow siphoning of essence,” Mr. Coates writes. He “feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give police a reason.”

Mr. Coates – a national correspondent for The Atlantic – contrasts this world of the streets with the “other world” of suburbia, “organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens.” He associates this clichéd suburban idyll with what he calls “the Dream” – not the American dream of opportunity and a better life for one’s children; not Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of freedom and equality (which the Reverend King observed was “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream”), but instead, in Mr. Coates’s somewhat confusing use of the term, an exclusionary white dream rooted in a history of subjugation and privilege.

Those Dreamers, he contends, “have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world.”

Yeah Ta, I was raised in the world and it ain’t all “pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens.”.  It’s different, not better.  Bullies will be and we all “live down here with us, down here in the world.”  Freedom and equality mean strife and struggle.  Revolution has no color except blood.

Nipsey Russell

Tonightly the topic is Sandra Bland.  The panel is Christina Greer, Jordan Carlos, and Mark deMayo.

The real news below.