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For two reasons I’ve never been able to keep a straight face and say “keep it real.” First, the phrase isn’t mine; I don’t own it. Hip-hop rightfully owns it. However, once a dedication to staying true to hip-hop in its original street form, the phrase has been touted by the likes of Puffy, Eminem, corporations, laymen and my cat as a selling phrase, not as something that actually contains any real meaning.
Second, I’m not a G from the Bronx or anywhere applicable to justify living my life as a ghetto star and using the phrase as it originally was intended. But, then again, neither are 95% of the gangstas on campus who attempt to portray a G but suffer the reality of growing up in the “not hood” of Upper Manhattan, Buffalo, NY, Lexington, MA or Bangor, ME. But, to my point: in the same ironic way it is used in popular culture, Bush appears to have “kept it real” in dealing with the economy while investment conservatives used it as a cover to criticize Clinton.
A strong economy is good; a frail economy is bad. Bush both understands this and knows how to spell economy. But has he “kept it real” in dealing with the economy? (G-sieved translation with an ironic twist: does Bush have a role in the building of what appears to be a recession?). It’s debatable but theories in self-prophesized recessions do exist. Word of a slowdown never really appeared until the past eight months when Bush’s verbal orifice started slinging ghostly forewarnings that the economy is faltering. If a monetary policy-biased President probes the economy enough, using -ism’s to declare how strapping it is one minute and fragile and smelly the next, of course our consumer confidence may become less energized as well as highly confused.
De-stabilizing, entering a self-prophesized downward business cycle and an increase in the consumption of Oprah and whisky should be expected after a recent breakup with your partner or believing in what Bush says. Even two half-point interest rate cuts by Uncle Greenspan, one of which occurred as an emergency meeting, may suggest Greenspan was trying to prevent Bush from gaining justification for his tax plan. Alas, however, Americans have gradually stopped buying things they don’t need, providing Bush with an opportunity to play with numbers.
And even conservative investment firms are using the dandy phrase to pick away at Bill Clinton’s reputation. The moral customers of Morgan Stanely got all “up in it” when they discovered Bill “Harlem” Clinton, the ex-president made of lubrication and who has a tattoo of himself giving the Republican elephant a trunk-tug, was scheduled to shake his thing at their dinner.
“We should have been far more sensitive to the strong feelings of our clients over Mr. Clinton’s personal behavior as president,” the company’s chairman said. Luckily, the almost-immoral decision did not result in the loss of business for the firm as it continued to hold all of the clients’ stock in IBM, Nike and Texaco.
Sadly, “keeping it real,” like most things political or fashionable, has become another overused image trait that sounds really neat but only carries irony with it. The masses get their hands on an idiom and as long as it sounds cool, nobody is letting it go. Eventually, I hope, like Bush’s presidency, we’ll all just stop pretending to treat the phrase so seriously.
Jason Moor is a senior English major.
Bangor Daily News