You have to hand it to Hip-Hop Philosopher and Congressional candidate Kevin Powell; he’s got two great virtues that serve him both as writer and political candidate. The first is an inability to blush, and the second is a boundless imagination.
This week, Powell issued a web video in which he portrayed himself as a change agent in the tradition of Barack Obama, Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. For one supposedly so committed to exploring new and innovative concepts of manhood, Powell has shown here an old fashioned tendency to display some truly elephantine balls.
For nearly a decade, Cory Booker fought the good fight against corrupt-hack Mayor Sharpe James (just sentenced), only to have his supporters harassed by James’ publicly paid goon squads, while Booker himself was attacked by James and his supporters as a tool of the whites and a secret Jew.
Among James’ goon squad was his Deputy Mayor, Ras Baraka, most famous as the son of New Jersey‘s onetime Poet Laureate , Amiri Baraka, author of these inspiring words:
“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away….
…Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion”
Ras later went to the City Council and served there until Booker’s reform broom swept the City government clean.
Ras is also Kevin Powell’s boon companion, co-editor with Powell of “In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers“. When Powell and April Silver put together the “Hip Hop Speaks!" college tour they made sure that their posse included Ras Baraka (the fourth horseman of the preposterous was Atlanta-based turntablist DJ Drama). Ras served on the Host Committee for Powell fundraisers, and Powell has appeared at Baraka campaign events. They were, in their own words, “children of the post-integration (nightmare!), post-Civil Rights Era, abandoned to find our way in a pot bent on melting our culture into mainstream oblivion.”
I’m sorry, but given his intimate association with Sharpe James’ hired gun for the post-adolescent, Kevin Powell has about as much right to claim the mantle of Cory Booker as Mitt Romney has to be the spokesperson for Starbucks, or Larry Craig for safe sex.
Which begs the question people have been asking me all week; why do I so dislike Kevin Powell?
Two reasons; I’m jealous, and the Dude is ripping me off.
First, jealousy.
Voters may not feel safe being in the same room with Powell and a weapon such as a knife, baseball bat or teeth, but they can rest assured that, unlike Jersey Assemblyman Neil Cohen, Powell will never be found with child porn on his computer. It is well established that Powell does not need to look at pictures of children or adults to achieve ecstasy—a mirror will do.
The man even out-struts the Gatester himself. I thought I had established the gold standard for self indulgent websites, but Powell has me beat (read here for the highlights). He gets quotes from Gloria Steinem—I have to settle for Ben Smith and legal beagle Ravi Batra (whose supersized ego and outsized prose style both have an eerie resemblance to Powell’s—Ravi, are you ghostwriting?)
Then there is Powell’s poetry. Frankly, I’ve always thought if one produced this sort of product and wanted to preserve it, one should have it frozen and donated it a local fertility clinic, although Powell may be continuing his long record as a “public servant” by not doing this. Perhaps instead he should bag the stuff and sell it as fertilizer.
Powell’s epic, the pinnacle of his achievement, is a harrowing and endless nightmare entitled “Son2Mother”, clearly the products of endless hours on the couch. Until I read it, I never quite understood that racism was a direct cause precedent to the urge to bite people on the ankles and pull knives on young women.
If you can read “Son2Mother” from beginning to end in one sitting, you will never have to prove your bravery to me again (Spot my “Apocalypse Now” reference? Me, I’d rather eat the shrimp with their heads still attached). Incidentally, the poem provides the title for Powell’s first non-prose collection (but aren’t they all poetry in their own way?), “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” (I would suggest those suffering from such insomnia try reading “Son2Mother” in one sitting).
The thing that most infuriates me here is that I did it first and better.
What follows is my poem, of the same title, as it appeared in the 1976 edition of “Amaranth”, the literary magazine of Paramus High School (yes, Powell, Gatemouth, the Barakas and Springsteen, as well as Neil Cohen, are all Jersey Boys):
“My mother asked why I couldn’t
be more like the boy in the newspaper,
who was first in the class,
going to be a doctor,
and does charity work with old people.
I asked her why
she couldn’t be more like Eleanor Roosevelt.”