TGATP’s Take On for 5/31/11 – Remembering Gil

 

This has been a hard couple of months with the loss of so many people dear to TGATP.  Over the holiday weekend, the world lost a Poet, Musician, Militant Voice, and a helluva person!  I first met Gil Scot Heron back in 1999 and had the honor to see him many times in performance.  Despite the drug demons that plagued him most of his adult Life, Gil was a great mind, militantly progressive in his  thinking, and an extraordinary musician.  I once set up an interview for a very naive film director, who had not done her homework on him, before the taping.  She naively asked him, “How did you become politically active.” To which, he looked at me exasperated with her silly question, but then said with a sly smile, “They f@%&ed up when they taught this Black Man how to read.”

Five years later in 2004, we were discussing the sorry state of the nation and I told him how apt his song “Winter In America” was to the current state affairs and he later dedicated the song to me.  If you don’t know much about him, I love this take on Gil “Fourteen Reasons Gil Scott-Heron Was Cool.” I know he would approve.

“Charlie Sheen’s War,” the Mark Seal article in this month’s Vanity Fair and the announcement that Ashton Kutcher has been tapped to star in “Two and A Half Men,” has me thinking about the whole Charlie Sheen career meltdown again.  Back in late February, I was approached to print a story from porn star Kacey Jordan, in which she described Charlie Sheen’s peccadilloes, party habits, and even appendage size!  But I decided to pass on it.  Oh sure, it might’ve sent my traffic way up, but I had to pass nonetheless.  Because the Charlie Sheen episode is one of the most heinous displays of media gone mad in American History!  The world, quite literally, watched a TV star go mad, with some idiots even paying to witness the rantings emitted from his spongy, drugged out, mess of a brain.  There were so many things wrong with this story that is was impossible to keep track of them all.  From the network initially saying that he “did his job well” and seemingly supporting his bad behavior until their Frankenstein monster turned on them, to his ex-wife Brooke Mueller hanging with him and his two supposed “Goddessess” when they have toddlers to raise, to the toddlers then being left in the hands of said porn stars,  to Sean Penn suggesting that Sheen, who was obviously not well, was somehow equipped to do charity work in Haiti — the story got more and more ridiculous by the minute!  It was clear and simple two months ago and is clear and simple now.  Charlie Sheen needs immediate help or his family and the world will be mourning, rather than, enabling him.

Thank God, that the idiotic “birther” nonsense is finally over!  Honestly, even if Obama had been proved to be not born in America, what would that have really meant?  Learn your history idiots!  The Founding Fathers weren’t born here either!  Donald Trump’s involvement was as much of a career meltdown as Sheens and he did himself a disservice to enter into that silly ruckus.  But fortunately, Obama had the last word with his hosing of Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Lindsay Lohan needs to do time. Period!  This kid gloves treatment is so blatantly unfair that every person in a LA jail should sue the state!  Any other citizen would be forced to do their time with this many violations.

The Arh-nald Schwarzenegger story is another sad saga of a high-powered pleasure junkie man, who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants!  What is it with these politicians?  Yahoo recently ran a story about how the media had “gone too far” in exposing the maid.  But honestly, Mildred!  You slept and produced a child with the husband of a woman, who treated her like a member of the family!  You gave birth to your son with her husband within FIVE DAYS of the birth of her child which means that you had unprotected sex with the Govenator at the same time he was impregnating his wife!  You then continued to associate with the family as if nothing was up for 13 years!  With an act that callous, you’ve thrown your so-called privacy rights out the window.

And finally, whatever was up with the jurors in the NYPD rape case!  Were they sleeping through the trial?  Honestly, the pure fact that these fools went back to her apartment THREE TIMES points to guilt in my mind!  And how idiotic and obvious for the cop to claim that he was “consoling” her.  Since I believe he got away with it, I fully expect to see this one charged with something else in the future!  But let this be a wake-up call to young women everywhere.  Do not get so drunk that your wits are totally gone since should a crime be committed you may not remember as much as you need to.  TGATP admits to doing so in my drinking past and, while I was not raped, I once had my apartment robbed ’cause I fell asleep with the front door open.  There are perils to legless drunkenness that must be considered, dear hearts.  Please honor your Selves, and your safety, above all else.