Reverend Al et al: Once relevant icons who speak jibberish

Why do news stations still rely on a biased, outmoded thinker like Al Sharpton? Oh sure, he has roots in the civil rights movement but the good Reverend has offered little in the way of innovative thought or ideas to deal with the new realities of ethnic relations in America. In fact, it appears that his whole agenda is to keep alive racial thought that existed in the 1950s. Yes, we all suffer from intellectual ossification and it is often difficult to find thoughts that are relevant to youth who have benefited from the resolution of problems that were very real for the older generation. But at what point do reasonable people finally put people like the good Reverend and his ilk out to pasture?

I remember an old television show called "Amos and Andy." It was incredibly funny with an almost entirely black cast. However, many young black actors and actresses protested the continued airing of the show because they felt that it lacked relevancy and as long as it ran, they stood little chance of breaking into general broadcast. They were, of course, correct. The show was funny and supposedly presented different sides of the black experience from a comedic point of view. Whereas more modern black oriented television fiction deals with broad strokes (no pun intended) of family based interaction, "Amos and Andy" dealt with the individual traits of honesty, integrity, lying and forgiveness. The center of the television show was one George "Kingfish" Stevens and he was a con artist of sorts who prayed on his friend. The benefits of hard work and family values were stressed but they were values based on a white, nuclear family, not a black impoverished family. This did not denigrate the acting which for television of the late 1950s was quite good or the moral underpinnings of the show which could have come from Aesop. The show did not present blacks as inferior or less in any way but it certainly didn't jibe with black audiences who had grown from a completely different experience. (It must also be remembered, that the television version grew out of the radio show. The radio show contained not a single black actor or actress.)

The persistence of Reverend Al on telenews is kind of the same. In a sense, it's racial in a negative sense. Certainly there are better thinkers and younger, more energetic voices that would have a greater relevancy for the black community in general. It's easy to present the wild-voiced, conspiracy-around-every-corner old-line black activist but in a funny sense, it's almost like a political version of Stepin Fetchit. (For those of you who don't know this comedian, some research is in order.) In other words, because his views have so little relevancy and are so based in craziness, keeping him around is almost like keeping the uncle around who is descending into dementia but who every so often says something amusing at the family dinner.

The Congresswoman Maxine Waters throws verbal firebombs also but at least, her exposure in the news is minimized. Maybe people do understand when foolishness overwhelms even ratings but with all her lies, misrepresentations and outright foolishness, it's impossible to tell whether she is effective at anything other than getting reelected from a district that is 90%+ black.

So a good recommendation would be to shelve people like the good Reverend and Maxine and find others who speak with a rational mind and who are more interested in finding solutions to America's problems than stirring up racial problems so they can remain relevant.

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