roots, and hope

I’m a big Chris Rock fan—in addition to his comedy, he always has very perceptive and smart things to say. In February 2004, for example, this interview got me thinking:

All this celebrity news is just some bullshit to get your mind off the war,” he said. “I think Bush sent that girl to Kobe’s room. To get your mind off the war. He sent the girl to Kobe’s room. He took the little boy to Michael Jackson’s house. Bush killed Laci Peterson. Bush was fucking Paris Hilton. All of this shit is to get your mind off the war.”

The crowd erupted.

Mr. Rock continued. “Bush lied to me, man. He said we got to move on Iraq because they’re the most dangerous regime on earth. If they’re so dangerous, how come it only took two weeks to take over the whole fucking country? You couldn’t take over the Bronx in two weeks. You’d need a month to get the Grand Concourse, man.”

“They’re looking for weapons of mass destruction. They can’t even find a whiffle-ball bat!” he said. And later: “I didn’t go to no fancy school or no shit, but weren’t we after bin Laden. What the fuck happened?

“When I heard we were after Hussein, I was like, really?!” Mr. Rock said. “That’s so 80’s. The whole war feels like a bad VH1 special. Hussein is back. And Bush is back. And Cheney is back. And Paula Abdul is back. Shit, before you know it, it’ll be Hammer time again.”

“The whole country’s got a weird mentality. A really pumped-up gang mentality. Everyone wants to be in a gang,” Mr. Rock said. But the beauty of his comedy and the reason he is pop is that though a tough moral streak runs through his comedy, Mr. Rock remains steadfastly nonpartisan.

“Republicans are fucking idiots and Democrats are fucking idiots and conservatives are fucking idiots and liberals are fucking idiots. Pretty much anyone that makes up their mind before they hear the issues is a fool, O.K.?” he said onstage at Madison Square Garden to healthy applause. “Everybody wants to be in a gang. Why don’t they just fucking make up their own mind.”

The interviewer tried to get Rock to be a little more specific about politics, and it was his answer that gave me the idea to call this blog Infotainment Rules:

Well, did Mr. Rock think that Republicans or Democrats were better at creating the kind of distractions to which he was referring earlier? “People like distraction,” he said with a smile that suggested he was not going to be fooled into committing career suicide. “Nobody likes to sit down and write a novel. You can’t wait for something to distract you.” He laughed. “Nobody wants to do work. Hard work ahead of you? Look, a bunny rabbit!

“I’m just saying the world’s addicted to distraction,” Mr. Rock said. “It’s the oldest drug in the book, distraction. We know what has to be done. We know how to do it. But it never gets done because we’re addicted to distraction.”

Wise words to think about as we watch, say, Campaign ‘08.

But back to Rock. At New Year’s Eve 2008, Rock was interviewed by the New York Times and made some very thoughtful remarks about his responsibility as a performer:

By this point in his career Mr. Rock, 42, has done thousands of interviews and is not content to accept the nomenclature that is handed to him. He complains about nothing and is nobody’s victim. The responsibility, as he sees it, is all his, here and on the stage. The audience is there for the winning, but it takes work.

“When you get up there that first time and you don’t do well, you’re basically hearing ‘No’,” he said, looking out the window of an office from which you can see all the way to Harlem. “How are you going to approach this ‘no’? Are you going to respect it and put the blame on yourself and improve who you are, or are you going to blame the audience like an idiot?”

“It’s never their fault,” he said. “No matter how late it is, no matter how much they did or didn’t drink, no matter what the sound system is like, no matter how hot the building is or how cold the building is, it ain’t the crowd’s fault. You want to get up there, you want to be a good boy, you want to headline, that’s what you have to go in there with.”

His politics had become more focused, too [e.a.]:

Now Barack Obama is running statistically even or better with Hillary Rodham Clinton in Iowa and beyond.

“You can’t say he’s not a sign,” Mr. Rock said. He once covered the Iowa caucuses for Comedy Central but has resisted the urge to bend his tour around a few Iowa dates this time around.

“I believe in real wins, I don’t believe in symbolic,” he said. “But it’s neck and neck against a woman whose husband was the president, and he’s a black man that no one knew a couple years ago. That is an unbelievable achievement.”

“I love Hillary Clinton,” he continued, “but to me she is the Democratic version of George Bush: someone who is running, and the only reason you know who this person is is because of their name.”

Mr. Rock, who has made a career out of speaking the unspeakable, decided to go there and then some.

“She has much more in common with George Bush Jr. than she does with Oprah Winfrey,” he said. “Not that there is anything wrong with having a name. My kids are going to have my name, but their path is going to be easier. That’s just what it is.”

I love a guy (or gal) who makes up his own mind and then speaks it.

But that’s not what this post is about. What I wanted to note about Rock was something that I read in today’s New York Times, in a review of a PBS series that examines the backgrounds of some contemporary African Americans, using the latest DNA technology:

“I conceived of these series as roots in a test tube,” Professor Gates says early in “Lives,” which will be broadcast on most PBS stations in two hourlong episodes on Wednesday and two on Feb. 13. Through the prism of the individual stories of rapes of black women, the failed promise of Reconstruction, the great migration of black Southerners to the North, the struggle for education, land, and freedom, Professor Gates lays bare the basic contradiction of the American dream.

Mr. Rock can be seen wiping away a tear after learning that his great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, served in the South Carolina Legislature, and died owning dozens of acres of land. He never knew any of that history, Mr. Rock says in the program. He recounts growing up in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood and being bused to a white school where he was bullied.

“Until I lucked into a comedy club at, you know, age 20, just on a whim, I assumed I would pick up things for white people for the rest of my life,” Mr. Rock says. “If I’d known this, it would have taken away the inevitability that I was going to be nothing.”

This is stirring stuff, and the campaign of Barack Obama—no matter how fancifully he’s being marketed—is a deeply meaningful event in the history of our country.

Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, there should be no turning back on hope. No American should ever feel, as Chris Rock did when he was a young man, that his failure is inevitable. That must change.