Red As The New Black

I am glad that tea baggers are running around and defending their way of life what ever that is or used to be.

The tea baggers are the tip of the iceberg of anger in this country about the mismanagement, cronyism, lack of jobs, Goldman Sachs seven figure bonuses courtesy of the taxpayer, and government spending in the final analysis likely to spark hyper inflation as a means to put the final nails into the coffin of the late great middle class America.

Part of this whole cauldron of distress is of course visual on the news with the stars of the Murdock sound machine on Fox News. The tea baggers have many racist placards in their numerous protests showing the President as a witch doctor and of course being a socialist communist RED. Red was the term used in the cold war to denote the godless commies for whom we sacrificed national health care to buy bombs, bombs, bombs as a kind of fear tax.

Red also denotes the states that are electorally in the GOP column as opposed to the blue states for the Dems. Red is a safe, comfortable color for GOPs to throw around in public or so they think. They think they own the word and or term. Yeah right. When they call Obama a Red – we all know what they mean.

Out of this cauldron of seething anger and mis/dis/pis communication I have run into a new street variation of the word for Black people in general. The term is translated from Spanish as “the reds” and is used by the very diverse Hispanic population, which these days comes from dozens of Spanish speaking countries. I have no clue how blacks become reds but in this strange vetting age of the first black president anything is possible.

In many quarters these days, coded overt messages are going about and I think they are related to the past age of race being dissolved away with interracial marriage and minorities like Hispanics arriving on these shores already having exposure and tolerance to states of interracial beauty.

I have been on the Net trying to determine the source of the new term Red for the old Black. The Urban Dictionary (I won’t put the link here in that it is quite a vulgar site and won’t force you to read it) states two references to Red in that Blacks favorite flavor of Kool-Aid is “Red”. And an obsolete racist term “Redbone”, from the South and denoting interracial origins, has been revived and shortened into “Red”.

Of course we are not talking about eggplants, Mulignan, an Italian term for blacks. The term originated in Italy as a derogatory term for Sicilians who were once conquered by the Moors and do have African blood in their cultural whole. The term was used on the Sopranos. Overt, untranslated, translated, transmutated messages seem not to have the full force these days to match another time and another pure white culture of the past. The overt messages are sometimes too diluted now to matter.

Nobody cares. The Black President got elected by the majority of all people who voted in the election. Minority opinions or sour grapes rarely matter.

I am not the thought police and I am not pure or PC in my opinions of the good or bad of cultures, race and language in this extremely diverse American scene. I place no judgment upon anyone in this rather sad/comic beautiful wonderful American way of seeing things.

Perhaps the id of our culture already has an understanding of the cutting edge of the future. Perhaps we do not even know at present that that is what we are doing – trying to fit into a probable future with various code talks all around us at present. Wherever the planet may be going in its future global culture – America gets there first in the majority of those merged future diverse flavors of life and words to describe such.

My question to myself is - do the Glenn Beck idiots and tea baggers of the world, with “Red” on their lips – do they know that they share solidarity with the emerging Hispanic segment of the population and in fact share the same overt message:

Red is the new Black!