Free Republic

Stanley Crouch died yesterday at the age of 74. Crouch is best known as a great jazz critic. His biography of Charlie Parker is a classic. But Crouch was also a literary critic and a critic of our culture. Here are some gems from his criticism: On rap: It is “either infantile self-celebration or anarchic glamorization of criminal behavior.” On Toni Morrison: She has a certain skill, but she has no serious artistic vision or real artistic integrity. “Beloved” was a fraud. It gave a fake vision of the slave trade, it didn’t deal with the complicity of Africans, and...

In 1976, Alex Haley authored the nearly 1,000 page, Roots: The Saga of An American Family. The following year, ABC aired a mini-series that was based upon it. Both book and television show proved to be tremendous successes. Now, the History Channel has officially announced that it will remake Root There’s only one problem: Roots is a fake and Haley is a fraud—and a fraud on multiple levels.

The end of the Democratic National Convention deepened observations of American life I have developed over many years. I was especially impressed by the incredible variety of American women who took the stage in Charlotte. These included First Lady Michelle Obama, Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, high-powered New Yorker Caroline Kennedy and Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who, you will remember, was called a “slut” by Rush Limbaugh for her views on contraception. What they all had was soul. Always far beyond class, ethnicity, education and politics, it is the element that defines American...

While, in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Mark Antony said that the evil men do lives beyond their deaths, we now also see how quickly mean spirits can be exposed in the wake of the wickedness they have committed. The result is “Hell to tell the captain,” as they used to say down South. In jangled visions of entitlement, former Rep. Anthony Weiner, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and those of President Obama’s Secret Service men who pulverized their careers in the Colombian prostitution scandal, all showed us something we need to know. They proved they were fools who were crushed for...

In his Daily News column, Stanley Crouch examines China's deeply entrenched racial hostilities, especially stereotypes regarding African Americans. He says that such animus within the rising economic power should not be ignored. Though Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer-winning columnist for The Washington Post, is a serious and highly sophisticated man, I was disappointed by a recent column in which he compared the United States and China. In eloquent terms, Robinson asserted that the Chinese, right now, look more unsentimentally at their problems and are not bluffing the world about taking them on, no matter how large, intimidating and deeply dug in by...

Those who are professional media enemies of the Republicans are having a fine time catching the elephants lying. The only problem to me is that they do not always follow the same rules when a supposedly oppressed group proves that it, like all others, is a contradictory bundle of human realities. Yet Rachel Maddow, for one, is remarkable when it comes to proving in high quality intellectual detail how often the elephants do and say irrational things for the sake of pure ideology. Her proof that President Ronald Reagan did things contrary to what he supposedly believed is perfectly executed...

Americans are finally waking up to see the realities of the day. Last week, as the wings of a flightless bird overshadowed everything with its crass commercialism, a number of developments gave me reason to celebrate a wide range of enlightened American moments and decisions. It is true that ours is a time absent of political compromise and any fair sense of profit, wages and protection of the environment. The most naïve among us assume that, if left alone, the market itself will decide what is right and wrong simply because business is an arena in which only the moral...

Monday, MTV celebrates its 30th birthday while Fox News continues to glance as lightly as possible at the Rupert Murdoch hacking scandal presently boiling in London, where so much wrong has taken place. Corruption swirled up from Murdoch's many media properties to Scotland Yard and even higher, to elected officials in the United Kingdom. Much as MTV has remade music, Murdoch has done the same with the news media. But as far as Murdoch is concerned, there is nothing at all to celebrate. With MTV, music became a slave to advertisement - after all, a music video is just a...

I have absolutely no respect for Sarah Palin, other than for her unimpeachable ability to hunt well, then butcher and dress game on the spot. Her limits are obvious. What we see and hear is what we get: an arrogant lightweight. But however willfully insipid, vainglorious, self-pitying, manipulative and greedy she might be, we would be shocked if Palin were to join the male-dominated school for sex scandal that continues to teach us lessons we should've learned long ago. The hardest and bluest fact is that men, no matter how prominent or intelligent, are too often willing to listen to...

Bryan Pace for NewsSerious black intellectuals privately dismissed Dr. Cornel West many years ago as no more than an academic loudmouth. Cornel West, the Princeton professor of African-American studies who recently made some crude statements about President Obama, has never been much more than a six-figure entertainer, ready to bite the hand that pays him even while reaching for his check. He has never seen a microphone or television camera that he did not like. Publicity, not scholarship, is his true tradition. West often gives his listeners no more than sound and fury, signifying nothing. And he is very good...

Now that irresponsible opportunists have brought many of the misled to Washington, we can begin to contemplate what makes bigotry so appealing. Surely, being able to exclude is one of the great joys of the species because it can give a grand identity to the average person. That identity as one of the elect made the red glow in Southern white necks. They felt part of a civilization in which they were looked down upon until they put on their costumes, screamed loudly at mob gatherings and committed acts of violence. While bigotry is as American as apple pie, its...

The Democrats had to do it alone. On a number of occasions, President Obama asked for reform ideas from the Republicans. But their idea of reform was no compromise, no fresh thoughts, no backing away from protecting the health care industry to which they had sold their souls during the presidency of George W. Bush. As I have observed before, the Republicans "protected" the wallets of the American people by passing legislation that made it impossible for representatives of the federal government to barter down the price of prescription drugs. The drug industry was guaranteed about $500 billion in what...

Few of a particular political persuasion are as entertaining or insightful as Rachel Maddow, who is willing to describe herself as a liberal on the left. Clearly, Maddow is terribly allergic to conservatives. She is disturbed by what conservatives think, how they assess what is happening to us all out here, and what the wildest or most cynical of them present as facts, which they often see as nothing more than opposing opinions, even if they come from the scientific world. Her allergy rises to bumps that do not ache or itch as much as they inspire Maddow to what...

I would like to believe that Barack Obama saw all of his present advantages coming. It would be thrilling to believe that his brain was part crystal ball and had every move already in place. In order for that to be true, Obama would have played himself as a sucker so hypnotized by the grand ideal of bipartisan cooperation in the interest of a country caught in the most sweeping crisis since the 1930s. The elephants felt that Obama was such a punk when the fighting actually started that they had the confidence to prove themselves no more than the...

As we close in on the first 100 days of the Obama presidency, something remarkable is taking place. Americans appear to be growing up. The adolescent addiction to instant gratification seems to be not only rolling back, it is being replaced by a mature outlook that is profoundly new for a fast-food culture. As we look at the polls, certain things are rising through the bristles of public ignorance. We now seem to be returning to a realistic vision of how long it takes to fix a sizable set of economic problems that took at least three full presidential terms...

If John Travolta, an avid user of his private jet and a reported Republican, were to be stopped by law from purchasing an armed fighter plane, would the film actor suddenly be surrounded by the same people who sanctimoniously claim that the Constitution protects the private citizen's right to buy and own an assault rifle? That seems an absurd question, but we often find ourselves in absurd circumstances when we get to the gun issue. A hard fact leers before us: on the subject of guns, constitutional meaning and misinterpretation have been mixed together for so long that far too...

If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic nominee for President in 2008, a feat he says he may attempt, a much more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic identity will be upon us for the very first time. Back in 2004, Alan Keyes made this point quite often. Keyes was the black Republican carpetbagger chosen by the elephants to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. The choice of Keyes was either a Republican version of affirmative action or an example of just how dumb the party believes black...

One of the most repulsively fascinating facts about contemporary black popular culture is how it continues to reach fresh lows. It finds new ways of leaping all fences that would bar it from falling into a bottomless pit of tastelessness. All of the insults and burdens of minstrelsy have been bested by black comedians and rappers who have made stupidity, hedonism, pimping, misogyny, pornography and violence their stock in trade. One defense of this amoral sense of life and culture is that black people didn't invent any of it, so why shouldn't they, like the white people, be able to...

When President Bush talked about environmentally responsible energy in his State of the Union speech, it was a surprise to a lot of folks. He was supposed to be a patsy or a puppet for Big Oil, according to his enemies, who grumbled that he was playing against type. But, as one political consultant said to me, "If Bush was actually a pawn of the oil industry, he would never have said that. He would not want people to even begin to think about alternate forms of energy." The harsh and sometimes daunting truth is that, like everything else in...

Richard Pryor's world was filled with prostitutes, pimps, winos and those others of undesirable ilk. This past Saturday Richard Pryor left this life and bequeathed to our culture as much darkness as he did the light his extraordinary talent made possible. When we look at the remarkable descent this culture has made into smut, contempt, vulgarity and the pornagraphic, those of us who are not willing to drink the Kool-Aid marked "all's well," will have to address the fact that it was the combination of confusion and comic genius that made Pryor a much more negative influence than a positive...