No More Box

Kanye was on the Ellen show the other day (I didn’t see it but my mom apparently did so I checked it out online). A couple of quotes.

“It was just so emotional. I just felt there were so many things that I had been hearing and bullet points that I’ve been hearing that weren’t on those Teleprompters. And I told Mike Myers, ‘Yo, I’m going to ad lib a little bit.’”

“People have lost their lives, lost their families. It’s the least I could do to go up there and say something from my heart, to say something that’s real.”

“I’ve been brutally honest since I was a little kid”

Don’t know in what order these were aired as I didn’t see the show. I agree with his gut feeling that it seemed like a dreadfully long time before a proper response was made. Whether or not any preferential treatment was given to rich white people over poor black people, I (and probably Kanye too) am not in a position to know. I know what I saw on TV, but having lived through the Tornado at Florida Christian College in ‘98 and the Fires in Daytona the same year, I know that the media tends to air what it feels will get ratings and reaction and ultimately make them money. Truth is secondary. Even the mighty FOX News which tends to be more truthful then others spent a good hour or so in last years hurricanes talking about this guy who was trapped on his boat. Great ratings. Lets watch their exclusive. Turns out no guy on the boat. In ‘98 there was no power, minimal food, and probably a day before a full response team arrived. The college (students and staff) filled in and made it happen. But the news crews were there immediately. By the end of the day there were probably 50 of them, each with their own generator, while everyone went without power.

Kanye is contributing to the media’s distortion of reality. He says he is brutally honest, but what he means is that he is brutally honest about his opinion and perception. Maybe George Bush really hates the poor and the black and he planned the whole hurricane (followed by snipers) to help rid us of them. My guess though, is that circumstances outside of Kanye’s knowledge kept the government from responding in a timely manner. The media has skewed the facts, as usual, and Kanye percieves this as an attack on black people. We are always blindly defensive of those we love. I don’t know how many petitions I get in my email of Christians defending the rights of Christians about an issue that isn’t even real. I respect Kanye’s willingness to say what he thought was right; but to say it on television, where people assume that what you say equals fact, contributes to the insanity, rather than solving any issues.