Two sickening yet revealing articles you might have missed

  Two really sickening articles were posted yesterday, so sickening that it was almost impossible to comment on them.
  The first is a conversation between disgraced Elliot Spitzer and one of the OWS occupiers. Spitzer gushes over the movement, its impact on society, how wonderful it all is...here's an excerpt from NY Mag, apparently written by gusher Frank Rich:

MM: This movement does not necessarily have a historical precedent. The movements in Spain in Greece are thinking about the same questions we are. Questions like, How do we create communities that aren’t based on capital and valuing things in terms of money? How do you create those sorts of communities? That’s what is exciting about being in a space like Zuccotti Park: It’s a place where you have the chance to radically reimagine the world.
New York: How are you reimagining it?
MM: It’s saying: We’re actually here in this space. We’re going to try and figure out our problems ourselves. How to run a country of 300 million people like that is an open-ended question. But I think talking; letting people make decisions about their own lives; letting people take part in local, neighborhood forms of governance—these are some ways to start.
ES: Look, some people tried to dismiss this movement early on because it doesn’t have specific demands. I said that was irrelevant. The point now is to be speaking with passion about dissatisfaction and setting an agenda for the conversation. But eventually, to succeed, you do need to have some sense of how you change things. Otherwise you’re going around in a circle.

  "How to run a country of 300 million people..." Are we getting a little power grabby there? "Letting people..."??
  It goes on, floundering about in metaphysical terms about the importance of what they're doing down there, piling up trash, sleeping in wet bags and defecating on neighbors' porches.
  Spitzer apologizes for having an office. (How could he?)
  Oh, and it turns out both Eliot Spitzer and the OWS person feed at the academic trough. They're both college teachers, which should really come as a surprise to no one, if you've been watching who the motivators are of this mess.  
  Bah. Academics.
  Reality seldom meets expectations of philosophers.   The other equally nausea-producing article is found on The Daily Beast; Hoosierman wrote about this earlier, astounded at the arrogance of the NY elite, but, really, this article must be read to be believed.  Ulli K. Ryder, a Black female with a Ph.D. who specializes in racial and gender studies, disapproves of Herman Cain. Oh, she disapproves of him mightily.  We must "refuse his use of racial language" as rhetoric!   Why?  Because it's racially encoded to ingratiate himself, a Black man, with white Republicans!  Here's a snippet from the NY Daily News:

We may never know the true motivations behind Cain's public speech choices. He grew up in Atlanta, the son of a man who worked three jobs to support his family. He did not grow up wealthy. Are his choices rooted in this history? Perhaps.

But I see the very real and troubling possibility that Cain's use of vernacular, and his casual assertion of a desire to be called "Cornbread," may be ploys to put potential donors — many of them wealthy conservative whites with few, if any, ties to any black community — at ease. The fact is that Cain has been relying on the support of his conservative, wealthy allies, many of whom have political goals that are diametrically opposed to those of most black Americans, who tend to be troubled by economic inequality and favor more income distribution.
Cain's use of black vernacular speech seems to be a way of telling right-wing audiences that he is a real black man, a real American and not a threat to the racial status quo of the nation.

  Huh. You would have thought President Obama's adoption of a southern drawl when speaking to Black audiences would stimulate some anger from this writer, but no. 
  She also is angry because some folks Black people speak only Black English.

Many critics have also questioned why I am so offended by Cain's speech. The reason I find Cain's race-baiting talk offensive is that there are real poor and under-educated blacks (and people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds) who don't speak standard English. A reason they don't speak standard English is that our nation has failed them in terms of education and opportunity.

  What? Isn't this what academics like Ms. Ryder have been egging for for years? Oh, yeah! In fact, a lawsuit in Ann Arbor helped to determine it. From Wikipedia:

The Ann Arbor Decision refers to the case of Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District. This case was decided on July 12, 1979 by Judge Charles W. Joiner on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The suit was brought on behalf of black students at the school who spoke nonstandard English, claiming that the school district was not taking the language background of these students into account in their instruction. The court ruled that there was a possible relationship between the students' low reading scores and the failure of the school to take into account the home language of the children. The judge ordered the school district to find a way to identify Black English speakers in the schools and to "use that knowledge in teaching such students how to read standard English". ^[1]The case is considered to have established an important precedent in the education of African American students who are Black English speakers.^[2] 

  Though the "need" for it seems to have abated,  the precedent has been set. Teachers have a need to recognize Black English. 
  And certainly that "need" has permeated the culture, considering that speaking to phone operators at various businesses is an increasingly frustrating experience, particularly when the operator can barely speak clearly, whether standard English or not.
  These people reveal their own prejudices.
  Hoosierman's right. They don't seem to be aware that they are far more biased than any of the Tea Partiers they accuse of the same.