A Calm, Sensible Reaction to Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor

Jesse Eisenberg is Lex Luthor, because Michael Cera is already booked.

I'm sure that's the kind of reaction that DC was expecting and I'm all too happy to give it to them.  And it's not even because I'm angry about the casting. I actually kinda like it.  I, unlike so many others, have perspective.  The perspective that comes from an reading too many comic books.  I understand that there are many different versions of Lex Luthor, and that Jesse Eisenberg fits into a few of them.  Dare I say, this casting is brave...and bold.  Please, hold your applause, because that joke was awful.

Still, you're gonna have to go through the initial shock of people saying, "The fucking dude that played Mark Zuckerberg is gonna be Lex Luthor?"

I saw a guy on Facebook that said, "Is he going to invent Facebook to defeat Superman?"  Really, that's the level of discourse DC has to face, and it's not like Jesse Eisenberg has given the fans a ton of ammo to throw back at him.  This won't go much past unfunny Facebook jokes and DC will be fine with that, because they already weathered the worst of this storm with Ben Affleck.  That was an epic tantrum, and once we got past that, it's like people couldn't really get that mad anymore.  It was like the world said, "Okay, we all know this flick is gonna suck. They really can't do any worse than this." 

And after that, Gal Gadot just got questions about her physique, mostly because no one knows who she is.  Jesse Eisenberg is just getting bad jokes, like the ones I've written just now.  It's all just been diminishing nerdrage, so we'll probably be done with this story by Monday.  No one even noticed that Jeremy Irons is playing Alfred.

I saw more outrage yesterday that Fox wants Channing Tatum to play Gambit in a future X-Men movie.  It wouldn't be a surprise that Fox was thinking about doing some more bad X-Men casting, but people were legit mad at that, I guess because Channing Tatum is too sexy or can't act or something.  As if Gambit is a character filled with such pathos that only a Shakespearean actor could capture it all.  Anyway, the X-Men flicks are filled with terrible decisions. I still believe that Halle Berry was cast because she was the only black person the producers could name.

Warner Bros. is supposed to be better than that.  Or at least Christopher Nolan is and Zach Snyder are.  And I'm willing to give it a chance, because as I've said trying to talk people off the ledge today, it all depends on what kind of Lex Luthor will be in the movie.  You got your "evil businessman" Lex Luthor (who could stomp ass), and you got your "sociopath scientist" Lex Luthor (who could not).  I think the second one is something Eisenberg can work with.  As long as he's not on there talking about being the "greatest criminal mind of our time," I think we'll be fine.

Dr. King: The Hero I Never Knew

I think most young black men go through a phase where they turn against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I know I did.  It happened to me around the time I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

When I started learning about Brother Malcolm, I got excited.  Here was a guy who wasn't taking no shit off white folks.  He dared them to do something in a time when they could have done it and gotten away with it.  He wasn't concerned with racial harmony or any of that bullshit.  He wanted what was right, and he wanted it now.  He was openly dismissive of anyone who stood in the way of that message.  When you're a young black man in a country that doesn't seem to like or respect you, it's empowering to read his thoughts.  And who didn't want to be the dude telling off these white folks, and they couldn't do shit about it?  I wasn't racist or anything, but I liked to believe that, if I was alive then, I would have stood with Malcolm X. 

Compared to that, Martin Luther King was boring as hell.  Oh, he gave some speeches?  He marched on Washington?  "Man, please.  Let me know when he starts fighting back," I'd think, like there was gonna be a later chapter of his life. "Ol' weak ass Dr. King.  Malcolm X is a real nigga."  That's how young I was.  I used ignorant words like that. 

Speaking of ignorant, that's exactly where that attitude came from:  Ignorance. 

Except for four years, I went to school in the South.  I started out in Sumter, SC, and finished in Biloxi, MS.  And in all those years of school, I learned like, five things about black history.  It wasn't because I was in the South, because the American schools overseas weren't exactly opening the floodgates of black history for me, either.  I can't imagine it was different anywhere else in America.  By the time I graduated from high school, all I had learned in school about black people was "The March on Washington," "I Have A Dream," "Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad," "George Washington Carver," and "Crispus Attucks was the first person to die in the Revolutionary War."  Didn't even learn what Crispus Attucks was doing there.  And what made it sadder was that my history teachers at Biloxi High were all black. 

Point is, if you grow up thinking that's all he did, then you're gonna think he's weak.  Every year, they celebrate this man and all they say is that he created racial harmony through nonviolent resistance.  They paint him as weak willed, like he just took abuse from white people until they felt bad and signed the Civil Rights Act.  Based on what is said about him in the mainstream, Dr. King didn't win because he was determined.  The white folks just got tired of hitting him, and that's how we got our rights.

I kept that attitude about Dr. King for a long time.  After I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I decided to read up on other black names that I had heard about, but didn't know anything about.  I wanted to know about the revolutionaries who empowered us and fought back.  The ones that scared Whitey back in the 60s and 70s so bad that they never talk about them now.  So i bought books about Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, Eldridge Cleaver.  I read books of speeches from revolutionary figures of the time.  I wasn't becoming militant, but I felt like I was learning about who we were during those times that schools don't talk about.  Fighting the power, in a way.

But it never occurred to me that I didn't know enough about Dr. King.  I figured they had to be telling us all we needed to know about him, because white folks love the man.  If he had been militant or anything, they wouldn't celebrate him like they do.  The Panthers.  Brother Malcolm.  This is that real, right here.  So I never bought books about Dr. King.  Still haven't, in fact.

But I did make an effort to learn more about the man, out of respect, really.  I mean, he got shot with firehoses and had dogs sicced on him.  And he suffered the indignity of having Paul Winfield play him in a movie.  So here and there, I'd pick up little factoids or read articles about him online.  And I came to understand where he was coming from.  I also saw that he wasn't the weak-willed simp I always believed him to be.

I also understood why they only teach us two things about him, because this man was trying to bring this whole system down.  Yeah, white folks like him now, but they didn't like his ass back then.  They weren't embracing his message, J. Edgar Hoover was tapping his phones.  They thought he was a terrorist and Communist, bent on destroying America.  Yeah, nice ol' Martin Luther King.  Sure, the FBI was on Malcolm X and the Panthers, but they were just criminals to the FBI.  No one considered that they were toppling anything.  Not even with Malcolm X's plan to speak before the United Nations.  White America truly feared Dr. King. 

Some of them still do, because there are tons of websites bent on discrediting everything Dr. King stood for.  The man's been dead for almost 50 years and they're still throwing dirt on his name, as if he's gonna come back and lead the revolution again. 

And that's because he was a true revolutionary, planning to bring the poor right to rich folks' doorsteps.  He was against the war in Vietnam, because he could see that it was just another way to exploit poor people.  He wasn't just trying to help black people, he was trying to change this whole system.  His "second bill of rights" was so ambitious that this country would be unrecognizable today had it fully been implemented (it probably wouldn't have, but still).  The only reason why rich people celebrate him now is because he's dead and couldn't do all of the things he had planned.  If you hate socialism, then you should just go ahead and start hating Dr. King retroactively.  Dr. King thought so much bigger, and even though we celebrate him today, we're actually doing him a disservice by reducing the expanse of his vision.

That's what should be taught in schools.  Racial harmony is cool and kids need to learn that, because kids are assholes, but they also need to see the totality of his message.  I wish I had seen it when I was younger, and I'm ashamed to say that it took me until my late 20s and early 30s to learn what I do know.  I'm not done learning about him, though.  I've found that I identify with him more than I ever did Malcolm X.  In today's world, Dr. King resonates more than ever.  Which says a lot about where we are as a nation.

You should be ridiculed for caring about Dwyane Wade's outside kid

You people express shock at the dumbest shit. 

Dwyane Wade and Ludacris were revealed to have knocked up their side pieces in the same week.  Both are in relationships (but were on breaks at the time).  Dwyane Wade is an NBA player.  Ludacris is a rapper.  The only thing shocking here is that they didn't knock up the same woman.  I mean, we don't know that rapper and ballplayer sperm can't do that.  

If anything, it's your own fault for believing that a pro basketball player or a rapper would stay faithful to his wife.  And I don't say that because I think they're bad people.  I say it because they're constantly having random model/stripper ass thrown at them as they travel in luxury around the world.  The man who can resist that forever either has supreme will or is already gay.  The rest of us would have to have his wife standing next to him at all time, like Doug Christie did.  As freakish in the face as Doug Christie looked, the only reason why he got through his day without tripping into a pair of strange, spreadeagled thighs is because Jackie Christie was never more than 10 feet away at all times. 

True story.  Sat in on his interviews and everything. 

So, I don't see why what Wade and Cris did was anything outside of what you should expect from them.  If you want to call them out for anything, call them out for raw dogging their jump offs.  I mean, I assume they've both had enough jump offs to know better.  I also don't see why you're coming to Gabrielle Union's defense all of a sudden, because y'all know y'all hate Gabrielle Union. Gabrielle Union was this generation's Robin Givens until people stopped casting her in movies.  And the hate came solely from the fact that she was too good at her job of playing smart-mouthed shrews in every flick she'd been in.  It wasn't even based on real life.  So let's not act like you're doing this for her benefit.

And I'm sure, somewhere out there, someone's thinking about the kids, because Dwyane Wade and Ludacris (I guess) are supposed to be role models.  And if you're letting Ludacris's example raise your kids, then you're a worse parent than Siovaughn Wade.  Allegedly.  There might be an explanation for that day she sat on the corner wearing a sandwich board. 

But anyone who would look at Ludacris as a role model shouldn't be allowed to raise the kids that they're claiming to protect.  I mean, this is the same person who led off with "What's Your Fantasy," "Phat Rabbit," and "Ho," and followed up with "Area Codes," "Move Bitch," "Splash Waterfalls," and "P-Poppin."  These are probably the parents who post videos of their twerking children on YouTube.  The video would probably be set to a Ludacris song if he had any hits out right now.  As for Wade, true, he has a fatherly image that would be a good example for young boys. But so did Bill Cosby, when we were kids.  And look at how our generation turned out.  Our generation didn't follow his example.  Our generation didn't even eat the damn pudding pops. 

Also, I'm not throwing shade on Luda for those songs, because I own every last one of them.  Believe me, I ain't judging.  I'll be able to recite the words from "Ho" when I'm on my deathbed.  I'm just saying, if your kids ever knew the words to those songs, you're a horrible parent, that's all.

So what are we really talking about here?  Two men who ruined the concept of a "break" for black men everywhere, for starters (a ridiculous concept, anyway).  And a bunch of women who care more about two strangers' relationships than their own, evidently.  Also, I'm seeing that I have a far different concept of what is "shocking" than everyone else.  Magic Johnson was shocking (and scary).  Tiger Woods was shocking (and hilarious).  No one's been burnt or driven into a tree in either of these stories, which makes them quite boring.  I need to be scared or entertained, so I refuse to pay attention until we hear that one of the women is actually a man or something like that.