'Barbershop' Controversy Resurrected at NAACP Image Awards

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The story of Rosa Parks won two NAACP Image Awards on Saturday, although the civil rights pioneer shunned the event over its nominations for the film "Barbershop," which features a character making unflattering jokes about her and other black leaders. CBS' "The Rosa Parks Story" won both its nominations: best TV movie and best TV movie actress for Angela Bassett, who starred as Parks.

"(Parks) wants to thank the NAACP for lifting her up. She wants to thank all of you for loving her," executive producer Willis Edwards, a friend of Parks, said onstage on her behalf.

"She was not happy with what was said about her and she has a right to do that. She has the right not to come," he said backstage, adding he believes she will stay committed to the NAACP despite the rift.

Meanwhile, "Barbershop" lost all five nominations, including a supporting actor bid for Cedric the Entertainer, who hosted the Image Awards and played the character whose remarks started the uproar. Its other nominations included best picture and best lead actor for star Ice Cube.

Parks, now 90, made history in December 1955 when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus. Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system by blacks and led to court rulings that desegregated public transportation nationwide.

Cedric's character in "Barbershop" is a cranky old-timer trying to prove that no conversation is off-limits in the barbershop. He says other blacks also had refused to give up their seats, but Parks got the credit because she was connected to the NAACP.

He also directs an expletive at the Rev. Jesse Jackson and jokes about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s alleged promiscuity.

The scene sparked complaints from Jackson and civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton, but became a $75 million hit.

The film's producers, director and screenwriter apologized, saying they didn't intend to offend anyone, but defended their right to poke fun.

Kweisi Mfume, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has previously said the uproar was "overblown" and noted the film does not endorse the remarks because other characters become outraged.

"I'm going to speak with (Parks) this week, I hope," Mfume said backstage. "I hope to talk to her soon. She's a grand lady and a wonderful member of this association ... I don't think there's a rift at all."

In a letter dated Thursday, Elaine Steele, a friend of Parks and co-founder of the Detroit-based Rosa & Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, said: "We with many others do not understand the endorsement the NAACP gave to the hurtful jokes in the movie 'Barbershop,' about America's civil rights leaders."

With the awards, the NAACP honors people and companies that support positive change for blacks in arts and entertainment.

Cedric has had four consecutive Image Awards for comedic supporting TV actor for "The Steve Harvey Show." He also stars in his own Fox variety show, "Cedric the Entertainer Presents," which lost the variety show award to BET network's "A Tribute to Stevie Wonder."

Show business professionals and NAACP officials from across the country choose the Image Award winners.

Among other winners, Halle Berry won the film supporting actress award for the James Bond film "Die Another Day," defeating a group that included rapper-turned-actress Eve for "Barbershop."

Berry said she wasn't offended by "Barbershop," but said she supported Parks' decision to avoid the show. "I think it's everybody's right to decide what's best for them, and if that's what makes her feel good and that's what she needs to do and make her statement, hey, I say go all the way," she said.

Other winners included "Antwone Fisher" for best picture, while Denzel Washington won supporting actor for that film and lead actor for "John Q."

The ceremony was taped at the Universal Amphitheatre for broadcast March 13 on Fox.

NAACP Image Awards

Leftist idolatry.

Plato's Euthyphro and Apology are a great illustration.

Socrates advances the argument to Euthyphro that, piety to the gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible.

Likewise, morals are such a construction of idols used by the Left as a rationale for them to demand compliance to their wishes in politics, which most often are a skewed mess of fallacies in logic. Morals are a deceptive replacement for the avoidance of sin. If a person believes in a God, it is the conviction of the Holy Ghost by which they are guided and not by the idolatrous vanities of morals constructed by others.

Plato's Apology is a drama that portrays the current Left wing frustration with talk radio in America. The people of Athens (the Left) are demanding that Socrates (Rush) be silent. Socrates refuses and the elite of Athens demand the execution of Socrates. The modern Left wants a figurative execution of Rush Limbaugh and others like him (although 'figurative' would be quickly made actual if the Left ever had the unchecked power they desire).

Radio is the focus of only one of the five senses. A listener has to really tune in to the subject matter and focus on the content of the ideas.

Television is a combination of sensory focus and it is far easier to distract and misdirect viewer attention from essential topics presented.

Considering that 90% of people tend to be more influenced by the visual, television has become a new religion. It is analagous to Plato's cave allegory. Television as a propaganda tool helps create visual phantasms (or as Thomas Hobbes called them, 'phantastical images') of the brain.

There are three ways people are influenced according to the school of behavioral psychology - - visual (sight), auditory (sound), kinesthetic (emotion). The kinesthetic or 'feeling' is also based on olfactory and tactile sense, much like Pavlov's salivating dogs. Visual images and sound portrayed can be used to anchor emotional and/or conditioned responses desired by those that present them, which in the case of television, is the Leftist television media, actors who create phantastical images in film, and Leftist politicians who pander to symbolism over substance (like Rush always says about them).

The visual aspect of that phenomenon is also used by the print media to a degree. Interactve talk radio requires thought, television does not and relies on this as a means to influence viewers...

They worship for gods 'those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream...'

Like the necromancy of the Wellstone funerally, the use of Martin Luther King Day, or constantly invoking the "spirit of the '60's," the Left attempts to raise spirits of the dead as a totem for worship.

Marxism and their forms of Cultural Marxism are a religion, a collection of cults. In many cases they worship a dead Karl Marx like some (and I stress some) Christians worship a dead Jesus, and not a living God. This is no more apparent than in the practice of enshrinement and regular grooming of Lenin's corpse in the former Soviet Union.

It is the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice to pagan idols. It has a similitude to the Teutonic paganism of Adolph Hitler, whose idolatry was the idea of a "master race." In effect, this genocide was a mass human sacrifice to those pagan idols.

The Left is properly identified with a 'confederacy of decievers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by obscure and erroneous doctrines.'

Part of this whole thing is the promotion of "public radio." The government funded NPR and other "public radio" non-profit Leftist crap is not making it.

While I am not enamoured with some of the canned music formats of much commercial radio, I am no fan of the Leftist non-profit NPR like stations that play third world, grass skirt, bone-in-the-nose voodoo music either, with the touchy feely multi-cultural, anti-USA Leftist commentary of the hosts.

Also part of this is the loss of broadcasting licenses by "public radio" stations to a company that is buying licenses to broadcast Christian programming. This is pushing many Leftist public radio stations off the air.

There is more to this issue than most people realize and it is not exclusive to the attack on talk radio (although that is a big part of it). Why else does the Left complain about what others watch and listen to?

The fantastic is, of course, most closely related to the imagination (Phantasien), but the imagination is related in it’s turn to feeling, understanding, and will, so that a person’s feelings, understanding and will may be fantastic. Fantasy is, in general the medium of infinitization…
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Alastair Hannay. New York : Penguin, 1989.

See also:

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.
[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.
[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.
[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.
[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.

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