Now that all the conclusions about the decline in reading have been laid out, it’s time to weigh in well after the worthwhile arguments have been exhausted. I’m talking about the Negro problem. Think of the television public-service ad featuring that African-American basketball player (African-American sports figures reading? Never mind that rapist Mike Tyson reading Voltaire in the joint. We have well-hung stereotypes to maintain.) or the one depicting a prominent member of NAMBLA (Caucasian, and thus better) reading to a group of young boys shortly before a tête-a-tête. How can anyone get excited about reading when there are so many personal prejudices to dwell upon? After all, isn’t there a larger question here about giving life imprisonment to the Cacuasian and keeping Tyson on death row?

Now, in the wake of a well-referenced ALA report that you, my dear pale-skinned readers in the burbs, haven’t heard about — there’s a movement by these bleeding hearts to get more people reading. There was recently a Barack Obama speech that actually suggested some “slander” regarding a black kid with a book being considered white. I don’t understand. Are the Negros getting uppity again? Shouldn’t we be telling our lovable black brothers to keep their positions as lovable comedians (whether cute and cuddly like Wayne Brady or populist and provocative like Dave Chappelle), supporting characters who get killed off first in horror movies or who serve as magical sidekicks for aging, toupeed and pancaked Caucasian leads, WASPified secretaries of state told what to do by a unilateral administration, and well-hung sports stars?

We cannot permit the black man to read. Because that would involve them becoming informed citizens! They may actually transform the American power base!

To me, the best way to think about reading is to consider it the exclusive territory of the white man. Let those who live in gated communities have their golden libraries! Really, it works out better that way. Keep the inner cities equipped with rotting schools and dilapidated libraries. We gave them Pruitt-Igoe and it didn’t work! Why aren’t they grateful?

I should point out that when I was at 17, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I mention this because I want you to know that there was a point in my life when I was “down with the kids.” Anyway, I was frightened of the Negros. I was certain that a race war was going on, because one of those black people actually tried to introduce himself to me. It was one of the scariest moments of my life. But like any good (now ex-)liberal, I tried to see it from the black point of view. But my two best friends, who showed up to the homecoming cance dressed in really spectacular white gowns and hoods, didn’t like what I was reading.

Well, I saw the light. And now here I am in Virginia still trying to understand why my fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson wrote words against slavery.

Where was I going with this? Ah yes. Words are potent. And we should begin burning books at the inauguration should Uncle George win again. It’s the American thing to do.

(….as soon as the birds leave anyway.)

Guerilla drive-ins are the new best activity:

For three years, cult-movie buffs have been organizing “guerrilla drive-ins” in a number of cities, rigging together a nest of digital projectors, DVD players, and radio transmitters or stereo speakers, spreading the word online, and assembling on parking lots or fields to watch obscure films beneath the stars.

They project the image onto warehouses or bridge pillars, tune their car stereos to a designated FM frequency, and sit back and enjoy the show. The only thing they do not do is ask for permission.

This sounds wonderful. Something must revive the drive-in, not least because it’s the type of viewing that best suits the majority of the big movies Hollywood turns out. You need the easy distractions and odd interface of it, the distance and the other sensory entertainments to make some of these movies, well, watchable. You can eat junk food that makes stadium theater junk food look like soycakes and have a cocktail in your car. Or outside it on a blanket.

Something is missing from our cultural life with the death of the drive-in. I saw Clash of the Titans at our own centerpiece of smalltown life when I was five. When my dad and I went to get extra snacks — (we snuck in sodas and minimal snacks in our trunk; I had no idea when I was a kid that my parents were trying to save money… I thought they were hacking the mainframe) — I got to ask him a question he still remembers with mortification: why was my cousin Anthony on the ground puking near the snack stand? Sometimes boyfriends and girlfriends fight, was the response, and I still remember my cousin’s bleach-blond girlfriend towering over him, playing the conquistador. Would this ever have happened inside a movie theater? I think not.

Just when I got old enough to loiter at the drive-in by myself on weekends, the screen blew over during a thunderstorm. Drive-ins were dying by then, movie theaters switching from showing two movies at a time to six or ten, and it wasn’t worthwhile for the owners to fix it.

Viva la warehouse viewing.

Arizona Daily Star: “President Bush’s re-election campaign insisted on knowing the race of an Arizona Daily Star journalist assigned to photograph Vice President Dick Cheney. The Star refused to provide the information.”

Great way to unify the votnig blocs, George! Now pass us all some of dem white trash sweetmeats!

In response to a request from Edith Wharton to produce a poem for her 1916 anthology, The Book of the Homeless, WB Yeats took the opportunity to issue a general put down to poets who get involved in politics. In On Being Asked For a War Poem, he advocates a policy of conscientious inaction, suggesting that “a poet’s mouth [should] be silent”, and claiming, rather bombastically, that “We have no gift to set a statesman right”. While there is scope for a charge of hypocrisy – a performance of Yeats’s nationalist play Cathleen ni Houlihan at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin was later credited with sparking the Easter Rising – Yeats’s message is clear: politics and poetry don’t mix.

John Kerry, apparently, does not agree. The presidential hopeful who yesterday gave his address to the Democratic national convention has adopted Let America Be America Again, the title of a 1938 poem by American poet Langston Hughes, as his official campaign trail slogan. What’s more, in case anyone missed the point, he has gone on to quote extensively from the poem in his campaign speeches. When announcing his choice of John Edwards as running mate at a rally in Pittsburgh, for example, he chose to round off his speech by proclaiming the association between his position and aims and those of the poet. To resounding cheers, he said:

“Langston Hughes was a poet, a black man and a poor man. And he wrote in the 1930s powerful words that apply to all of us today. He said ‘Let America be America again. Let it be the dream that it used to be for those whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, for those whose hand at the foundry – something Pittsburgh knows about – for those whose plough in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again.’ “

The Guardian on John Kerry & campaign trail poetry. Elsewhere, Slate‘s Timothy Noah is less than pleased with this adoption, saying that Kerry–in his preface to a newly published book featuring the poem–is willfully misreading and performing “a whitewash” (pun intended, you betcha) on the Stalinist vision Hughes was espousing. Here’s Kerry:

It was in that climate that Langston Hughes, Black America’s unofficial poet laureate, wrote his powerful poetic lament, “Let America Be America Again.” While it is the litany of the great promise of opportunity that has drawn so many of the world’s disaffected to our shores, the poem is also a call to make that promise real for all Americans�especially for the descendants of slaves.

Not unmindful of the duality of meanings, I was drawn to incorporate the words of the poem in my 2004 presidential campaign, because it reminds us that America is a nation always in the process of becoming, always striving to build “a more perfect union.” We must not forget that African Americans and women were written out of the Constitution before they were written in.

Now Noah:

Chatterbox applauds Kerry’s political message, but as lit crit, this is a whitewash. What “duality of meanings” is Kerry talking about? The poem has only one meaning: America’s golden promise is hooey. It’s hooey for blacks, it’s hooey for the farmer, it’s hooey for the Native Americans. It’s hooey for the entire proletariat. Time to seize the means of production!

Jeez, Noah. Trying switching to decaf or maybe looser underwear. You want to go back to the dark days of Reagan’s Born in the U.S.A.? Well?

The Rake has the scoop on the DFW essay in this month’s Gourmet. Apprently, it deals substantially with animal rights. And Rake says it kicketh ass.

[UPDATE: We somehow managed to pick it up while running from one meeting to another. We read it last night at some ungodly hour, shortly after watching a grainy feed of John Kerry’s speech (feels like 1956 again!), and laughed ourselves silly over Mr. Wallace’s solid thinking on the animal rights question (in part, because we too have avoided eating lobsters for the same reason — that and because of a real hellish childhood experience which we won’t go into). In short, we concur with the Rake. The essay is among one of DFW’s best and, as Carrie rightly suggests, it may represent a new direction in DFW’s writing. We also picked up the latest issue of The Believer, which we hope to respond to in depth under a new feature called BELIEVER WATCH, an effort to come to terms with our strange prejudice w/r/t the Eggers/Vida/Julavits question (though clearly not as bad as Clifton’s). Our immediate impression is that we approve of the ancillary details included with the book reviews. But we’ll weigh in probably several weeks from now with a more informed and thorough take. Perhaps too, because of the recent DFW read, we’re also taken with long update paragraphs in lieu of actual posts. Of course, there is only so much time. Q.E.D. We apologize for engaging in this pretentious and flagrant stylistic aside, but we’re damn giddy because things are coming together in the most amazing way, which strikes us as a fantastic final week with which to exit our twenties.]

[ALSO: Mark is a sexy MF. Please remind him of this posthaste.]