"Real" Housewives? And this is the real Atlanta? Check it out at Bravo. Atlanta now calls itself Black Hollywood, Black Mecca. The former's true, if you define it as an artifice, fake, frivilous and plain dumb. Rappers, ballers, rump shaking vixens and posers with 5,000 sq ft homes/gas guzzlers--yet will no furniture but a 72 inch flatscreen, a stripper pole...and foreclosure/repo letter from the bank shoved in the stainless steel LG fridge. The latter would be an insult to Muslims. Mecca implies a holy place...a place to journey for knowledge and spiritual awakening. Ha! Guess that's DC again, eh? My story "Doggy Style," reprinted in Zoetrope about two stray dogs--one a Pit Bull escaped from sports-star financed attck kennel (hey this was two years before Vick--am I Asimov or what?) making their way outta da ATL into "lil Mecca" DeKalb County during a sleet storm was my way of lampooning that notion of ATL as place of Renaissance for blackfolks. And this was before the finacial crisis/Recession, and The Real Housewives of Atlanta.
What a lovely bit of metaphor, indeed allegory, is this friggin' show! It's like the toast to Tyler Perry's jelly! Low class, noveau-riche hoochie wives of NFL and NBA players, "real estate investors" (ha! what's that these days?) and alimony divas. Dentists, doctors, school teachers, engineers? Naw, gurl. Grown-up exemplars of Spelman Women? Huh? A Princeton Tigress like our new First Lady? Please! No, these are the REAL housewives per the white male producers on Bravo who have corrupted the image of women nationwide and figure black folks now need a dose like we need a hole in the head. Conveying the tackiest image of this mythic place called Atlanta. I love it when you fanboys & girls call me a snob, so keep it coming. My time in Charlotte and running back and forth to da ATL was painful, folks. Nothing but traffic and endless burbs, surrounded by malls, rendecks and smiling blond rightwing evangelicals. Like Hip Hop, I was a stank shell of myself when I moved to the Dirrty South...
If I were the mayor, I'd try to put the kabosh on this crap. Having these suburban hookers as ambassadors along with ballers, rappers and rump-shaking club owners is a double-edged sword, as good burghers of te metroplex are discovering. Needless to say, those true working single moms down there--doing checkout at Piggly Wiggly or driving school buses--love the show as entertainment, and then shrug and lament their true lives. Some have teenage sons literally killing themselves emulating the "real" husbands (baby daddies?) of Atlanta: it's not cool being an architect, but if I can show my hoop skills or get a demo to whatever strutting, body-guard/entourage traveling fool I see on the street outside Platinum 21 or Magic City, well my life will be golden! Some have teenage daughters mezmerized by a phony lifetstyle who end up seduced by it, degraded (whether they understand or not) by it, spat out. Now that's real.
Perhaps ...and this is part of the magic of Nove. 4...our young women and men can now look a little farther up I-85, then 95 to the White House for inspiration. Whether it will be a tonic for this tacky sh*t, this gildened ghettofabulousness, who knows. They certainly won't find it on Bravo.
