They say that Scat singing was invented by Louis Armstrong and perfected by Ella Fitzgerald.  Scat is when a vocalist uses their voice as if it was another instrument, no words just nonsense sounds and intonations of the voice.  You don’t hear singers use it much any more.  The only singer that comes to mind is Van Morrison.  I always thought that he had more fun playing with scat than actually singing the lyrics.

Actually there is a modern day variation of scat singing, except it doesn’t involve singing and includes lyrics.  It’s just that the lyrics are as nonsensical as the sounds uttered by Armstrong and Fitzgerald eighty years ago. The modern day practitioners like the sound of their own voices, so it doesn’t matter if the words don’t include a single coherent thought.

I thought I knew what Black Lives Matter (BLM) was all about, after all the press and Internet have had several months to report on the movement. To be on the safe side I decided to find out about BLM without the distortion of the press.  I found a press release that seemed to report the BLM National Platform with a minimum of added content.  Yup, cops killing black men bad. Black men taking responsibility and acting in a lawful manner, not addressed. I guess it never occurred to these folks that if you are constantly waiting for somebody else to either do or not do something, disappointment soon follows. It is only when one takes charge of one’s destiny like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald did eighty years ago that positive results are likely to follow.

I continued my search and soon happened upon the BLM Website.  The website goes in a different direction.  Much of the rhetoric is devoted to gay, transgender, and transsexual, issues.  This is a significant merging of interests because black civil rights activists have consistently rejected comparisons of the black civil rights movement with the gay rights movement.  This is probably due in part, to the role black clergy played in the civil rights movement Black v Gay Civil Rights.  BLM masquerading as an anti-police violence movement actually casts a much wider net.  One that many supporters in the black community would reject if they knew.

The comingling of transgender issues with other like and unlike movements came up recently with the anniversary celebration of the Stonewall riots. Gays complained that the transgender movement was attempting to claim ownership of the Stonewall Riots.  As one writer put it, the term transgender hadn’t been invented yet.  There is a growing schism between the gay community and the transgender community, Gay/Transgender conflict.  

BLM represents a serious attempt to forge a partnership between two disparate groups by using misdirection.  This is the first time that a “black movement” has woven the fabric of gay rights and black civil rights into whole cloth.

I have always suspected that the “disaffiliated movement” has nothing to do with problem solving.  It is a source of revenue and power.  I’ll go back to the engineer.  Tell an engineer you want a bridge across the chasm in a set period of time at a specified cost. At the deadline you will have your bridge and the engineer will be out of a job.  The situation is different with “social engineers” there are no performance measures, no budget is big enough and there are no time constraints. Employment for life with no pressure to produce anything.  It has worked for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for decades.

Black Lives Matter, if the movement dies the “ole gals” that started it will have to get a job.