I heard it on NPR, though you can get the same account from
this SF Chronicle story.
The widow of Huey Newton, Fredrika Newton, is marketing a hot sauce called "Burn Baby Burn". It should be going out to stores in a few weeks.
The recipe was concocted by Panther David Hilliard, with the aid of musician Al Green.
The nonprofit Huey P. Newton Foundation is rolling out the hot sauce and its "Spirit of '66" clothing line in advance of events commemorating the Panthers' 40th anniversary in October 2006.
In the NPR story, they also mention that Bobby Seal, co-founder of the Panthers with Newton, now does a cooking show doing "revolutionary" cooking.
They are very clear that some of the proceeds will be going to charity, but given that Mrs. Newton sells Mary Kay (!!!!!) as her day job, I don't even want to think about "overhead expenses".
I haven't felt this disgusted since I read Jerry Rubin's autobiography "Do It" about two weeks after he became a stock broker.
<But wait, there's more>
Mild profanity ahead.
I vividly recall Rubin recounting how he, and the rest of the Yippies, burning a dollar bill at a meeting, and pissing off the socialists.
The socialists screamed that they should give it to the poor, and the Yippies just grinned.
They just hated money, and in 1980 he became a fucking stock broker, though he claimed that he would be "ethical".
At the end of his life, Abby Hoffman became a pathetic figure, obsessed about the spotlight, which ended in his suicide.
And now the
BLACK PANTHERS are selling
HOT SAUCE and T-SHIRTS?
What the hell is wrong with our country?
How is it that our society is so valueless and tawdry that anything becomes some sort of sick quest for a few bucks?
There seems to be nothing in our society that we won't trivialize for just a few bucks.
I'm beginning to thing that fellow travelers Osama Binladen and James Dobson are right when they say our society is valueless and corrupt.
It's not homosexuality, or aethism, or welfare, or evolution that makes us corrupt and disgusting, it's the "anything for a buck" and "anything for Warhol's 15 minutes of fame".
You hear it in the comfortable corporate mega-churches, where bourgeois parishioners are fed the message that Jesus will get you that new Lexus and promotion, and that poverty is for bad people.
I'm so glad that I don't watch reality shows and own a gun, because right now, I would put a bullet in the TV, and would seriously consider putting one in my head.
Our society is sick, and right now I want to burn it all.
Burn, baby, burn.
