Red Right Blog |
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Rants, Rates, Slags, Slates. Manic-depressive posts from Red Wright-Hand. Because there are thousands of worthless blogs out there and who am I not to add to their number?
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Friday, June 25, 2004
You know, I'm really sick and tired of all the one-sided palaver we continue to hear about Ronald Reagan almost three weeks after his death. I think it's high time somebody said something nice about him for a change. And who better to do that than sweet-tempered Miles Davis... Swear to God, it's true. On page 378 of his autobiography (published 1989), the Prince of Darkness Himself wrote (or spoke to Quincy Troupe, if you will): "When I met the President [in 1987] I wished him good luck in trying to do what he was doing, and he said, 'Thanks, Miles, because I'm going to need it.' He's a nice enough guy when you meet him in person. I guess he was doing the best he could....Reagan was nice to us, respectful and everything." When I remembered that Miles Fucking Davis said that about Reagan, I understood that all the stories of Reagan's legendary charm really had to be true. Any white man who could get Miles Unbefuckinglievably Fucking Davis to say that about him HAD to be one primo smoothie. All the more so as Davis (who met Reagan during a tribute to Ray Charles, eerily enough) had this to say about the rest of the evening: "That was a hell of a feeling I had down there in Washington, feeling embarassed because those white people down there who are running the country don't understand nothing about black people and don't want to know! It was sickening to be put in a position where you've got to teach dumbass white people who really don't want to know in the first place, but feel obligated to ask them silly questions...And the President sitting up there and don't know what to say. Man, they should have written down something hip for him to say, but they ain't got nobody hip nowhere around him. Just a bunch of sorry motherfuckers...When we left, I told Cicely [Tyson, his then-wife], 'Don't you ever as long as you fucking live bring me to no more of this shit, make me feel sad for white folks. I'd rather have my heart fail doing some other shit than I would have it fail doing some sorry shit like this. Let me run my Ferrari into a bus or something.'...After this, I knew it was over between us and didn't want to have anything to do with her." By the way, the entirety of Davis' thoroughly absorbing autobiography, all 448 pages of it, is in this vein. And Reagan charmed this guy? God, I suppose it's true.... |
