One year ago today, on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

At the time, and like many others, I celebrated this milestone in US history:

Today I think of all the millions of lives who fought for a fraction of what has just occurred. Today I think of all the lives that were lost in the name of racial hatred and in the struggle for racial justice. Today I think of all their deferred hopes and dreams, the progress they knew could happen but they could not live to enjoy. Today I am amazed at the victory of their words, of their ideas, of their blood.

One year later, the blissful exuberance of the election has begun to temper. Many “progressives” see this as a partial failure of the Obama administration, if not the man himself. I couldn’t disagree more. If the “Obama era” has not measured up to your visions of a healthier government, a more humane nation, and a more just world, put the blame squarely where it belongs: on you, on me, on us.

A day before Obama was elected, I wrote the following:

In the upcoming months, progressive people of conscience (“non-white” and “white” alike) will have to begin the difficult work of checking their own assumptions. Many have this belief that because a black man will be in the White House that everything will magically become better. Many expect Barack Obama to take a leadership role in transforming the political system in meaningful ways. But why? Why should this special burden be placed on Barack Obama when it has not been evenly placed upon all politicians? Of course, he does have a special obligation regarding race, but that is the same responsibility we all share–white, black, or otherwise.

One year ago today was an important day. It was historically significant. It was also emotionally uplifting. But it wasn’t the end of something. It was just the beginning. The act of voting for “change” doesn’t bring it; if it is successful, it merely presents us with yet another opportunity to do what is right, what is best, what is just.

So today is the one year anniversary of a new opportunity. Whether that opportunity will translate into a new reality isn’t up to President Barack Obama. It is up to us. As James Baldwin said “No one else can do it. The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”

Now, back to work.

We’ve reached the end of Latino Heritage Month 2009.  Hope you had a good one.  I live every month like its Latino Heritage Month, so for me it’s been as good as life…

I thought I’d leave you with an excerpt of a historical primary source that helps us connect the past and the present in a meaningful way.  I work in the fields of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies.  Founded some four decades ago, as a direct result of student and community efforts to remake the university and create an institution which could better serve the poor communities from which they came, these academic fields began with a political charge in mind.  As the years progressed, that charge often confronted an opposition.  Today, from efforts in Arizona to make Chicano Studies classes illegal to efforts in the Cal State system to begin eliminating the programs for financial reasons, the existence of Chicano/Latino Studies is anything but certain.

Our source comes from Ernesto Galarza, one of the first ethnic Mexicans to receive a PhD in History in the U.S.  Dr. Galarza was the Mexican and Mexican American specialist in the U.S. for much of his professional career, one that spanned academia and work in community service organizations.  He lived what he preached and, near the end of his life, as he spoke to Chicano students at UC Berkeley, preach he did…

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SOURCE: Ernesto Galarza, “Student’s Responsibilities to the Chicano Community,” address delivered at the University of California, April 20, 1977, Berkeley, California.

You Chicano scholars who are here now today must recognize this drastic change on the American campus, and begin to ask yourselves, must we abandon what’s here for us?  This campus contains immeasurable treasures for all of us.  Here is an accumulation of experience that should be open to us for each one of us to analyze and evaluate and put to our own uses.

And you can’t get it off campus—these magnificent libraries and research facilities.  These are public facilities. This is public wealth organized and set up here for your use. Please think very carefully before you abandon this place because of certain difficulties that you’re having.  The thing to remember is that the training, the capability in the law, in sociology, in whatever these disciplines may be called, is available only here. Unfortunately, it is under the control, under the vigilance of people who don’t share your motivation. But that is no reason why you should abandon your claim to these resources.

You do have a claim to them. The point of view that I’m asking you to consider, of course, is not an easy one to carry out.  One of the difficulties that we as Chicanos and Mexicans have always faced is that our universe in the university is so unfamiliar and so distant from the community from which we come.  It’s awfully hard to explain to your families and to your neighbors—neighborhoods that are constantly in turmoil and in the process of change—what it is you’re up to, what you’re doing, what your difficulties are. There’s a gradual alienation between us on campuses and those in the community.

I contend that the solution or the effort to overcome that alienation is ours and not the community’s.  We understand what causes it.  We know why we are victimized by it.  We know why the community itself is victimized.  But you cannot ask a person who has not had your opportunities to become mentally critical and professionally competent to dig at, to go at the fact that you need to establish a thesis.

Captain Lou Albano has died.  He was 76.

The brazen, rubber-band-wearing figure of professional wrestling achieved “crossover fame” in the 1980s when professional wrestling did the same.  Many who would never have seen him in the ring knew him instead from Cyndi Lauper videos and periodic antics on MTV.

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the man.  I can remember the very morning I started watching professional wrestling addictively.  Capt. Lou was on the screen.  He screamed at the screen with his Popeye-esque forearms and mouth frothing with spit, with kinetic hair and rubber bands fastened to his cheek.  It was the most fascinating thing I had seen on Saturday morning TV.

My fascination with pro-wrestling lasted from about 1984 to 1988, not long, but oddly long considering I was in high school by 1986.  I subscribed to the WWF magazine, I watched the stupid Saturday morning cartoon, and I bought the action figures.  I own it all still, in a box in a closet at my folks house.  I also went to two wrestling events.  Big Lou was in the corner for one of them.

You can read more about his life here, here, and here.

But here’s all you really need to know: “Albano’s 75th birthday party last year at a Yonkers restaurant turned into a drunken battle royal, with the arrest of one wrestler.”

And this is as good a thing as any to remember:

BTW, click at your own peril.  This is the entire 12 minute version of the video.

Today is October 12th, which is many things all over the world (Día de la Raza in Mexico) but in the U.S. is officially “Columbus Day.”  I wasn’t go to write anything about it since, I figured, at this point in our collective consciousness we don’t need another person explaining why this is a stupid and offensive holiday.  Then I went to Twitter, where the phrase “Happy Columbus Day” was trending.  When I read the feed, very few of the uses of that phrase seemed to even consider this might be so.

So here it goes…Columbus sucked.

Columbus Day is nothing–let me repeat, NOTHING–other than the commemoration of European imperialism in the Americas.  Nothing.  You can’t put a good spin on what came after.  Disneyland doesn’t absolve a series of deliberate and knowing attempts to commit massive genocide.

Since most of the tens upon tens of millions of indigenous Americans who died in the centuries after this Italian accidentally landed in the Caribbean died due to disease–most probably never even saw a European before they perished of smallpox and other ailments–you might think this is an overblown reaction on my part.  It’s not.  Disease was often used as a conscious weapon in the war to destroy native America, both by the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and later, the British.  Even in those many instances when it was not so, the imperialists are not absolved.  They shouldn’t have been here in the first place.

And that’s what it comes down to.  The global forces which propelled this Italian to sail under the Spanish flag were forces we still struggle with today.  They are suggested by words like racism, cultural superiority, religious intolerance, and war.  They are contained within the results of over 100 million people being dead in less than a century.  Today is the day all these things and more were unleashed on the Americas.  Human history has never been the same.  And I’m not saying that in a good way.

Liz Cheney–spawn of Dick–shared her views on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize on, of course, FOX News.

She labeled Obama’s award as a “farce,” not because he is a wartime president but because the Nobel Committee wants us all “to live in the world where the US is not dominant.” She said Obama should refuse to attend the award ceremony and instead send the mother of a soldier who died in combat, to stress the importance of war.

After all, each member of the Nobel Committee “sleeps soundly at night because the U.S. military is the greatest peacekeeping force in the world today.”

You can read and watch more of her rantings and warmonggering spew here.

It would be easy for me to dismiss Cheney as “evil” since, well, I’m pretty sure she is. But she is nothing magical, nothing all that unique. She is morally bankrupt, serious and dedicated to fomenting a form of political fascism steeped in nationalistic fervor. She advocates for a world of desperation, of the starvation of rights and humanity, all in the name of pride and profit and a narrow vision of who is deserving.

She is a visceral reminder of the national and global context in which Obama won this distinction.