Black culture is not American culture. As you said yourself, "Native Americans, Latinos, Whites, Blacks, and Asians have all contributed to the concept of what is American." That means no one culture is America. I said the same thing about Germans, Italians, Irish, et al. that have contributed their unique flavors to what is, yes Virginia, a largely white, European culture. Sorry if that upsets you, but it happens to be true.

I was originally responding to something GK said about certain aspects of the black underclass. There is a black underclass, folks, and I'm sorry if it hurts your ears to hear a white person say that.

I sure hope the discussion of race in this country can get back to where we were, briefly, 40-odd years ago, when you didn't have to pretend shit didn't stink.

A man of peas? A man of pizza? A man of pleats? A man of...oh, please, stop! You're killing me!!

I don't agree that I miss the point of the quote. The preceding sentence was, "...whites are comfortable with black people, but much more uneasy about certain aspects of black culture, those associated with the so-called black underclass." And that's what I was expanding on, out of my own experience and opinions.

I'm sorry you thought I was condescending or whatever. I was talking about the 60's when yes, it was a very big deal that we thought finally the stresses and strains of the black-white thing were going to disappear. And yes, we thought that meant that black culture would subsume into American culture as so many others have, enriching it, modifying it, but not overpowering it. We were naive, obviously.

If you knew me, knew my life, you would take back the most insulting parts of your post. Guarantee.

I used to live there, and I don't remember a neighborhood that didn't have particularly bad parking.

And I agree, 33 mpg seems very low for a roller skate with a hat on.

"Being black is OK; acting black, in certain ways, isn't."

Spot on. I'm white, came of age at Berkeley in the 60's and thought, then, that the black-white divide was finished, that we would all become equals, brothers and sisters. Blacks were going to reap the benefits of education and become as American as the Germans, Italians, Irish, Scots and others who came to these shores under difficult circumstances, too -- though, it must be said, not in chains.

Of course, very little of this wonderful progress actually took place, and one of the most important reasons is that black culture became more, not less, alien to the world of educated, working citizens. Today, the black underclass speaks a primitive language with a tiny but coded vocabulary. Even educated, working blacks insist on distinguishing themselves from "whitey" by the way they speak. What happened to "we're all equal, we're all Americans, we're brothers and sisters?" My brothers and sisters don't speak like ignorant share-croppers, they don't turn up their noses at opportunity because it is tainted by association with another culture.

The black community has in large part shot itself in the foot; in the 60's, we (at least those of us on the coasts) were ready to welcome them to the party. It wasn't magic, it wasn't a done deal, but it was a start. It never got off the ground and today black culture is separate and NOT equal because of choices made in that culture. The only prominent black I hear saying anything along these lines is Bill Cosby, who gets nothing but shit for his trouble.

Everyone's hard hit by gas prices. We're paying the piper for not having developed alternatives back in the 70's when OPEC first jerked our chain. The way people drive here in L.A., jetting off the line (only to pull up and wait at the next red light) beneath billboards that advertise 300-horsepower imports and zero-to-sixty times in the single digits, there's obviously still a lot to be learned about living with high gas prices.

We put a man on the moon in ten years. We can devise a transportation system that frees us from foreign oil in that amount of time, or less.

Maybe I'm just financially unsophisticated, but I don't see how this is important. If people are being downgraded to "unsuitable" for taking out a loan at the most favorable terms available -- and, as I suspect, if it turns out that Mr. Johnson was a good risk and thus the loan was reasonable -- then we really are lost. Who will ever pass muster? Whose c.v., delved into with computers, will fail to reveal some tiny anomaly that can be spun into a "misdeed" that removes them from public service?

You really are a genius. I hope those around you recognize your superiority and treat you accordingly, for you truly are special.

As to Los Angeles drinking water, yes, it's free. But it also contains a very large number of dissolved solids -- many of which I would prefer not to ingest. So, stupid me, I filter my water or buy it in bottles. But only because I'm not smart, like you.

For a couple hundred bucks you can buy a reverse osmosis filter and install it under your kitchen sink. Doing so, you just saved all the diesel and plastic it takes to get virgin bottles delivered to you wherever you buy them. It takes about three gallons of water to make one gallon of purified R.O. water -- this is true whether Pepsi does it for you or you do it yourself and refill bottles at home. The icing on the cake: if you replace prefilters annually and the main R.O. filter every two or three years as needed, you're paying literally a pittance for your clean, fresh, pure drinking water. Oh, and now you can cook with it, too.

Talk about a no-brainer.