Very impressive and a little spooky...

Dear Hallmark... and indeed the rest of the US Population, Kwanzaa is a made-up holiday, it's false, a joke, a falicy, a sad state of affairs...

December 23, 2005

On the First Day of Kwanzaa, My True Love Tortured Me ... (Reprise)
By Gail Heriot

This post has become a holiday tradition at the Right Coast:

If you visit a card shop at your local shopping mall these days, chances are you will see Kwanzaa cards. It's big business. (Well, maybe it's just medium-sized business, but it is evidently lucrative enough for card companies to bother with.) And if you go to swanky private schools like the one attended by the children of my fellow Right Coaster Chris Wonnell, you may well receive instruction on this traditional African-American holiday. Taking Kwanzaa seriously is all part of the spirit of multiculturalism.

Except, of course, Kwanzaa isn't traditional at all. It was invented in the late 1960s by convicted felon Ron Everett, leader of a so-called black nationalist group called United Slaves. I use the word "so-called" because United Slaves' veneer of black nationalism was very thin; most of its members had been members of a South Central Los Angeles street gang called the Gladiators, just as the Southern California chapter of the Black Panthers had been members of the Slauson gang.

In the early 1960s, these gangs were mostly concerned with petty and not-so-petty crime in the Los Angeles area, including the ever-popular practice of hitting up local merchants for protection money. By the late 1960s, however, they discovered that if they cloaked their activities in rhetoric of black nationalism, they could hit up not just the local pizza parlor, but great institutions of higher learning as well, most notably UCLA. Everett re-named himself Maulana Ron Karenga ("Maulana" we are told is Swahili for "master teacher"), donned an African dashiki, and invented Kwanzaa. And the radical chic folks at UCLA went into paroxysms of appreciation.

In theory, Kwanzaa is a Pan-African harvest holiday, except that it is not set at harvest time. And in theory, it celebrates the ties of African Americans to African culture, except that it purports to celebrate those ties using the East African language of Swahili when nearly all African Americans are descended from West African peoples.

But those are just details. Many of the best-loved holidays in the Christian calendar have traditions connected to them that don't quite fit if you examine them too closely. But those rough edges have now been smoothed over by the long passage of time. No one really cares if the Christmas tree was once used to celebrate pagan holidays; many generations of credible Christians have earned the right to claim it as their own.

Kwanzaa is different. It has connections to still-living violent criminals. It is an insult to the African American community, very few of whom celebrate Kwanzaa and even fewer of whom would celebrate it if they knew the full story of its recent history, to suggest that it is an "African American holiday."

UCLA soon found that a bunch of street thugs calling themselves United Slaves can dress themselves up in colorful clothing, learn a few words of Swahili but they will still be ... well ... street thugs. The beginning of the end for United Slaves as an organization came with a gun battle fought on the UCLA campus against the Black Panthers over which group would control the new Afro-American Studies Center (and its generous budget). In the end, two Black Panther leaders--Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and John Jerome Huggins--were dead. Two members of United Slaves were convicted of their murder. (Under UCLA's High-Potential Program, which admitted politically-active minority students during the late 1960s, often regardless of their academic credentials or even whether they had graduated from high school, many members of the Black Panthers and United Slaves were registered as students at UCLA.)

No, Maulana Ron Karenga was not among them. But not long after the incident, Karenga proved himself to be every bit as brutal as his followers when he was charged and convicted of two counts of felonious assault and one count of false imprisonment.

The details of the crime as reported in the Los Angeles Times (and quoted last year by Paul Mulshine in an article for FrontPage magazine) are horrific. The paranoid Karenga began to suspect that the members of his organization were trying to poison him by placing "crystals" in his food and around the house. According to the Los Angeles Times:

"Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."

The Los Angeles Times went on the state that "Karenga allegedly told the women that 'Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know.' "

Karenga spent time in prison for the act. But if you are worried are what has become of him, you needn't be. He served only a few years. When he got out, he somehow convinced Cal State Long Beach to make him head of the African Studies Department. Happy Kwanzaa.
posted by Gail at 12/23/2005 12:46:00 PM

(Thanks to The Right Coast)

http://therightcoast.blogspot.com/2005/12/on-first-day-of-kwanzaa-my-true-love.html

Tuesday.
Went to a SAG seminar entitled, "Prep for Pilot Season". It was a panel discussion comprising a Casting Director (CD), an agent, a manager, an actor (who has been through the pilot season a million times as well as the pilot audition process and has booked at least a half dozen) and a producer.
It was a very interesting evening with so much useful information, it's difficult to know where to begin. Well, the main thing to say is that Pilot Season is as tough, if not more so, on these guys than the thesps who are so convinced that they are hard-done and being passed over because life is so unfair (boo hoo, that's life as an actor - if you can't get up off your arse as many times as you are pushed over by disappointment and rejection then go home to Kansas!). The CD said that they have to cast within days rather than the many weeks they used to have. The agent said that sometimes they have to mobilise everything on a Sunday evening to have people (the right people) in the office for the suits the next morning at 9am. He also mentioned that the submissions to his office climb to over one and a half thousand each week during pilot season. The manager said his level of activity was as per the agent. The producer said that it's as insane as life gets, it's unfair, the vision they had early on is never what the suits want. The bottom line is that everyone is run ragged during PS. They also said it ran for most of the year as opposed to the traditional 1st quarter. Loads more snippets of note which I'll write over the next couple of entries.
Oh, by the way, ran into the agent who I've been tracking over the last eight months. Long story short... a series of banal events led me to be face-to-face with the guy. We shook hands, he remembered me from our discussion mid-last year, I told him I'd be ready for him to see me in a few months when our scene is ready for a scene night. He said he would definitely come (excellent!). I'm also going to be volunteering to usher/check-in at future events. Much talk about the standard of reels (no picture montages, please - just your best work). Max length 4 mins (CD). Make sure your breakdown info is accurate (Mgr). Intelligently submit - only what you're absolutely sure you're right for (agent).
A great night with great people and fantastic info. A spontaneous meeting with an agent I'm interested in and a possible behind the scenes opportunity at union events. A great night.

Well, had a special day today. My friends know what it is, so, 'nuff said.
First class after the hols and worked on the third section of The Pillowman. Went very well and, just like, everyone else, I outlined my goals for the year. The first thing I want to get done is to finish the scene and perform it at one of the regular scene nights held at PHW. My scene partner and I are going to work on a Northern English dialect to take ourselves even further away from 'ourselves' and to stretch ourselves a little more. Don't get me wrong, the idea isn't to make it difficult and to put ourselves through hell so for the sake of it but we both agree that a dialect is necessary for the play's setting.
Park & Dins.

Headed over to our friends in Pasadena and a wonderful time there too! Watched An Inconvenient Truth when we got home and scared the living daylights out of ourselves. For those of you who haven't seen it, why not! WATCH IT. Here are a few facts (not guesses, facts).
And here's what you can do, right now.
It's the planet, our planet... our only planet.

Headed over to our friends in WeHo (a coupla' streets away!) and had a fantastic afternoon/evening.