Stupid Republicans

Fred Thompson, the Law and Order actor now running for President in the Republican primary, is the fourth GOP candidate to turn down an invite from a debate moderated by Tavis Smiley, and to be held at an historically Black College. The supposed savior of the conservative Right joins Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain in their open disregard of speaking to America's black population. As the Huffington Post reports:

"There is a pattern here," Smiley told the Huffington Post. "When you tell every black and brown request that you get throughout the primary process that 'no, there's a scheduling problem.' That's a pattern... Are we really supposed to believe that all four of these guys couldn't make it because of scheduling?"

The Republican frontrunners' snubbing of Smiley and PBS comes on the heels of their rejection of a debate sponsored by the Spanish-language network Univision (McCain was the only GOP candidate to accept that invitation). This past June, only one Republican presidential candidate, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, showed up at the convention of the National Association of Latino Elected & Appointed Officials.

"It's not just that they are not coming. It's that some of them are visibly insulting us," Cecilia Munoz, vice president of NCLR, told the Politico.

For myself, the first thing that came to mind was "stupid Republicans." Which, of course, reminds me of that famous Lalo Delgado classic poem from the early days of the Chicano movement. Old school. Brown Beret times. As his New York Time obit describes Delgado, "a poet whose writings about the hardscrabble existence of Latinos in the Southwest made him one of the grandfathers of the Chicano literary renaissance of the 1960's and 1970's...[his] writings helped set the tone for much of the poetry and fiction produced by Chicano writers in the last 30 years, with echoes of his words heard in the work of Jimmy Santiago Baca of New Mexico, Ana Castillo of Illinois, Juan Felipe Herrera of California and others." I'll take any excuse to post one of my fave poems. So from way back in the day...

stupid america

By Lalo Delgado, 1969
From Chicano, 25 Pieces of a Chicano Mind

stupid america, see that
chicano
with a big knife
on his steady hand
he doesn't want to knife you
he wants to sit on a bench
and carve christfigures
but you won't let him.
stupid america, hear that
chicano
shouting curses on the street
he is a poet
without paper and pencil
and since he cannot write
he will explode.
stupid america, remember
that chicano
flunking math and english
he is the picasso
of your western states
but he will die
with one thousand
masterpieces
hanging only from his mind.