Excuse Me, But the Revolution Really is Being Televised.

Politically, it’s beginning to look like we’ve started to swim in some very dangerous waters.

Even worse, most of us seem to be content to sit idly by and to watch what passes for the “political news” these days, as if it’s some kind of new spectator sport, or the latest, new "reality tv" show.

As has become our style with such shows, we now watch the political news just to catch politicians saying stupid things (and to watch the videotape of those incidents played back to us, over and over and over, again), to see fights and arguments, and to absorb just enough that we’ll be able to discuss it with our friends, later on. Because sensational political news coverage attracts good ratings and is cheaper to produce than a sitcom, some media outlets don't just stand by and report the ongoing political chaos, they actually promote it. In some cases, they, literally, become a part of it.

The problem is that what we’re seeing now is not just a TV show, at all. It absolutely is real life, and my great fear is that the country, as a whole, is just one, televised, volatile incident removed from being embroiled in mass, social unrest--what the early black nationalists used to so fondly refer to as “revolution.”

Lately, the “healthcare town hall meetings" have evolved to become referendums on the federal government, as a whole, and on the president of the United States, specifically. Oh, everyone is very careful not to actually say the words “black” or “African American,” or even, “colored,” but the racial composition of the town hall attendees, and the messages on the signs they carry, have made the sub rosa agenda abundantly clear.

The people who have attended these meetings – those that you see on TV and those that have not been shown – are starting to do some very scary and historically significant things and, there we are, still watching it all from the comfort of our homes, in a vaguely disinterested way.

We’re watching now, but you and I both know that, once the football season really kicks in, we’re definitely going to tune out. To us, as I said, the current debates seem to be just one more TV show option. If it is real life, why aren't we participating?

Years ago, a Lincoln University student named Gil Scott-Heron wrote a poem that was made all the more famous by the Last Poets. It was called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” That poem, arguably, constituted “baby steps” for the art form that is now called "hip hop" and/or “spoken word,” and many mainstream Americans chose to ignore it. Nevertheless, it perfectly described what we’re experiencing right now – with one big exception.

Today, there really are people in this country who are espousing a “revolutionary” mindset, i.e., being diametrically opposed to all current elected officials; attending public, political discussions bearing arms; espousing, literally, the death of the president of the United States and expressing their intention to "take back their country." These are all things that they’ve said and for which they stand.

The difference – to the great surprise of Mr. Scott-Heron and The Poets, I imagine – is that all of this really IS being “televised.”

Who would have thought?

To refresh some memories, here are a few excerpts from the poem: “You will not be able to stay home, you will not be able to plug in, turn on and drop out.”

That’s not true. We’re doing that every day, as Fox and other news outlets show us the progress of the “unrest.”

“You will not be able to skip out during beer commercials …”

Not true … did that last night.

“There will be no highlights on the 11:00 o’clock news. The revolution will not be right back after a message. The revolution will not 'go better with Coke'.”

What the “Poets” could have never anticipated is that the 2009 version of “the revolution” is not only highlighted “on the 11 o’clock news,” it’s also available on broadcast outlets and on the Internet, all day and all night. It’s inescapable, conjuring up George Orwell’s very worst “1984" nightmares, in that regard.

In addition, another key difference is that, back then, Gil Scott-Heron naively believed that black Americans would be the ones who would be first in this country to get frustrated, strike out and seek to restructure the government.

It turns out that the actual "revolutionaries," today, are mainstream Americans. Black folks, apparently, haven’t gotten the email yet, and still don't show up at the meetings.

Tell me, what else do you call people, other than “revolutionaries,” who appear to have totally lost all respect for their elected officials, who stand chest-to-chest with them, wave their fists and point their fingers in their faces and shout them down on virtually every issue?

How else do you describe a political environment wherein 61 percent of Americans say they believe their country is headed in the wrong direction, wherein 57 percent say they favor throwing out their legislators and “starting over again?” Isn't it "revolutionary" thinking when 42 percent of American voters say “a group of randomly selected people from the phone book could do a better job than the current Congress?” Is it healthy for a country when 50 percent of its voters say they believe that “rigged election results” are the reason that their congressional representatives are repeatedly re-elected, as was recently disclosed in the Rasmussen Report?

Be honest, what does it mean when the Secret Service is now reporting that President Obama is receiving 30 death threats a day (that’s 10,950 such threats a year)? How do you claim a stable government when your nation’s new president has to make his November 2008 acceptance speech, in Chicago, and his inauguration speech, in Washington, DC, from behind a thick screen of bullet-proof glass, as was widely reported? How can the country condone a minister in Tempe, Arizona saying, as part of his sermon, that he “prays at night” that President Obama will die of brain cancer?

How does a stable government allow, on the day following those same remarks, a group of 12 armed men, including a man named Chris Broughton, who was actually in attendance at the “sermon,” to show up at the site where the President was speaking “strapped” very visibly, with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle?

As a sign of the times, a black journalist named Frank James, who is now a “blogger” for NPR, in an apparent state of total resignation and acceptance, recently posted a column about Mr. Broughton and his fellow weapons-carriers, a part of which read, as follows: “So there’s an upside to the “open carry" types, even though they cause a lot of other people great unease. Since they can’t be prevented from appearing outside the event, the rest of us will just have to learn to live with them.”

I don’t know, Frank. Maybe you have to say things like that when you get paid by NPR, but, me, I choose not to just “learn to live with them.”

I think the Arizona crew, the people who issue death threats to the President and his family, the people who want to replace their elected officials with “randomly selected people from the phone book,” are all trying to tell us something.

What they’re saying, I think, is that it’s not business as usual in America, anymore, and that it shouldn’t be treated as such.

If we asked Gil Scott-Heron, even today, he’d probably say again: “The revolution will be no re-run … the revolution will be live.”

Even though this is probably not “the revolution” that he had in mind, it certainly does appear to be the one that we have. It's happening as we speak and we should all be paying close attention.



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