How To Raise Your Dog by Michael Vick

How did someone like Michael Vick ever come to exist?

This was a question posed by Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post Dispatch this morning in an article titled “Vick is latest to take rap for the rap in our culture”.  To summarize, Mr. Burwell wants to know how another African American male with exceptional athletic talent and marketing appeal devolve into self destruction and became yet one more negative statistic in criminal culture.  Michael Vick has a gazillion dollar contract with the Atlanta Falcons, endorsement contracts with Nike and other Fortune 100 companies, and now faces loosing it all over something as stupid and sordid as his grisly dog fighting business on the side.

It is Mr. Burwell’s theory that such behavior comes straight out of a gangsta rap video.  However, it should be pointed out that dog fighting is something relatively new to the black community.  Dog fighting is actually deeply rooted in English history.  For years it wasn’t taken very seriously and was considered a misdemeaner crime at best.  Now that more minorities are getting in on the sport, it is much easier to sell the activity as an evil menace to society.  But regardless of where it came from, dog fighting is indicative of the more common phenomenon of the lack of personal integrity found throughout modern American culture.

It is no longer of any importance for anyone in modern culture to maintain themselves with a sense of dignity or decency.  If your pockets are deep enough one can hire enough spin doctors, lawyers, publicist, and spokespersons and a positive perspective can be put on the most despicable of circumstances.  And if all that fails, big dollar lawyers can use the courts and laws designed to keep order and integrity in the general community to attack anyone whose agenda runs contrary to their client’s from any and every vulnerable angle to assure legal rights are protected at the expense and integrity of society at large.

Are we still talking about Mr. Vick?  Not really.  Because Mr. Vick took his backyard business venture to the road and across state lines it looks like the federal government prosecutors are going to be running this dog and falcon show.  Had the prosecution of this crime stayed within the jurisdiction of the state of Virginia, where Mr. Vick’s calls home, chances would’ve been very good that he would have either beaten the indictment, or settled for a fine amounting to a relative little less than a slap of the wrist.  But with the federal government’s penchant to protect federal laws, especially from black people (I wonder what would have happened if Scooter Libby was indicted for dog fighting), it looks most likely that the fleet footed quarterback is going down quicker than one of his dogs that lost in a fight.

The threat to society at large isn’t Michael Vick.  Mr. Vick is just another sellout who stands ready and willing to conform to whatever image his corporate handlers manipulate him to display.  The threats to society are the corporate malfeasants who work so diligently behind the scenes to identify what is acceptable and non-acceptable behavior for so many African Americans.  Mr. Burwell wrote, “[T]he only way to appeal to the young demographic of the sneaker-buying public was to adopt the negative attitudes of the thug life popularized by black hip-hop/gangster rappers.”  The black hip-hop/gangsta rapper is a cliché developed in the laboratory of corporate media for sale to the image conscious public.  Marketing people have been employed to dissect the fundamentals of what attracts the often brain dead crowd and then kick it up a notch or two dozen to make it the ultimate “got to have it” product.

The image of gangsta rap is exactly what it is, an image.  It is a marketing tool to illustrate what is cool and what is unacceptable in the highly impressionable and appearance conscious American mainstream.  An image of a responsible and respectable African American male who moves heaven and hell to provide for his family and maintain his dignity as an obvious child of Africa is hardly ever portrayed in any type of media.  While people of African consciousness are sometimes depicted in corporate media, these characters are never meant to be taken seriously or respected as responsible individuals to serve as role models for our children.  African American males are left with stereotypical options for role models such as the colorful, loud mouth, always got something so funny to say or do in a serious situation like Michael Epps or the mean as hell gangsta depicted in a video with a ghetto costume pushing twenty-eight inch, chromed, wagon wheels on an Escalade, or the suave ladies man with nothing but sex on his mind at the player’s club.

Make no mistake; there is no excuse that Mr. Vick can offer that can legitimately explain his participation in this bazaar story.  But to say the buck stops with Mr. Vick is incorrect.  The gangsta rap culture that has become so insidious to our society is constantly being piped into all our houses and influences our behavior every single day through radio and television airwaves, through cable and DSL internet connections, and through the distribution of magazines and newspapers.  Gangsta rap music, videos, and images aren’t distributed from the back of Michael Vick’s house but through the marketing and promotional efforts of labels that are the darling of the corporately controlled music world.

Michael Vick has obviously made his own choice to risk his nine figure income to become a dime store thug.  He has no one to blame for his choice but himself.  Stupid is as stupid does.  A criminal is as a criminal does.  But, as amazing as this may sound it should be obvious that there is an influence on our collective conscious that makes the appeal of a gangsta lifestyle and a reputation for violence and objectionable behavior too attractive for even a dumb multimillionaire to avoid.