There is a terrible birth defect, and it is known as encephalocele, and it denotes a person who is born with their brain entirely outside their head.

This defect was once very rare. But it is now Known and in fact Glaringly Apparent that virtually everyone involved in the current public discourse suffers from this malady. And that the intertubes is a veritable fucking game preserve for encephaloceliacs. No one else, really, need apply.

The most recent film from Spike Lee will officially premiere December 4, and as far as I have been able to determine, it has to date almost wholly been commented on by encephaloceliacs.

These no-brains bellow first and foremost that the title, Chi-Raq, is some sort of foul Spike Lee slur intended to drop shit-bombs on the fair city of Chicago as more or less equivalent to Saddam's once and future Iraqi playground. These people, born with their brains entirely outside their heads, are apparently unaware that Chicago has long been known as Chi-Raq to its denizens, and that the name was coined by those who actually live there.

Lee has always been besieged by Lilliputians. Who I now recognize as encephaloceliacs.

Just off the top of my head—which is where my own brain resides, for I, too, of course, am an encephaloceliac—Lee was slagged for Do The Right Thing both by white people who foamed he was calling for black people to kill whitey, and black people who rended garments that the only black person shown actually "working" in the film was Lee's own pizza-delivery boy (these people apparently missing the fact the film was set on a Saturday).

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAM97wVdmmM]

In Mo' Better Blues Lee was accused of going Himmler on Jews, and for Summer of Sam he was denounced for expressing Extreme Disdain and Hatred for people of Italian extraction . . . except by the black people who wailed that he had therein "wasted" a film in that it concerned only white people.

25th Hour was likewise carpet-bombed as rolling in white people when Lee, he Should have been doing some black thing—also, it was Wrong that the rat bastard DEA stinks were black.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpVSi4lEgaw]

Jungle Fever was heaved in the trash can as both condemning, and supporting, interracial sexual fun-ness, and also it Had To Go because it Too Soon dirtied the memory of Marvin Gaye, and his father, as a crack-addled wackadoodle, and an uptight murdering mutant, respectively.

Malcolm X needed to be smeared off the screen because it wanted black people to stab and shoot white people, though meanwhile Lee and Denzel Washington themselves needed to be stabbed and shot, because the former filmed the latter in Mecca, and the only way to Legitimately get in to Mecca is to be Muslim, and once both men later said they were in fact not Muslim, that meant they were apostates, and so should be immediately and violently Snuffed.

Bamboozled was so brilliant and so right and so outrageous and so searing and so genius and so defying of any and all categories that it so stunned everyone among the encephaloceliacs that they could not even say anything and so they just pretended it had never been born.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHq8Cl4ppmk]

In She Hate Me it was determined that Lee had Proved he hated lesbians, except he also therein Proved he hated men.

He Got Game was Totally Wrong because Lee used the music of Aaron Copeland, instead of some black classical composer, and also because it intimated that sometimes young black sports-men are tempted to take drugs and engage in sexual congress. Also there was magical realism, and Lee had No Right to do that, because he is not Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9cTBTVnkeY]

Miracle at St. Anna needed to die like a dog because it made Saving Private Ryan look like juvenalia, some elementary-school play, and also because when a couple of black soldiers dally amidst war-madness with a white woman, this Contributed to the Wrong Stereotype that all black men care about is Sex.

And for Get On The Bus there had to be deafening screaming that Lee portrayed black men journeying to Washington DC for the Million Man March, which was Wrong and Evil because said march was called for by Louis Farrakhan, and alternatively because the only bus passenger actually affiliated with Farrakhan, said in the film not a word.

What does all this tell us?

That Spike Lee is an artist. Wild and free. And that, in the future, when the histories are written, no serious person will give a whit of attention to all these lilliputian encephaloceliacs who, in Spike's time, screeched—and, yea, verily, deafeningly—but never Saw.

It is amusing to me that while the lilliputian encephaloceliacs are raining down fire and brimstone on Lee for monikering his Chicago-set film Chi-raq they are apparently unaware of the genesis of the name of "Chicago" itself.

The name Chicago comes from the Indian word shikaakwas (white-people badly pronounced as "Chicago"), denoting a plant today most often called "ramps," which grew then, when white people showed up, and in abundance, along Lake Michigan, where Chicago is today. And these plants—ramps—reek to high heaven. They stink. To put it baldly. Chicago "was so named because of the smell of rotting marshland wild leeks (ramps) that used to cover it."

"Chicago," then, means "heaving bad stink," "reek place only dumb white people would live at."

Spike Lee has never made a perfect film. And he never will. He is too rambunctious. There are too many ideas spilling into his head, and he is forever trying to cram them all into the too-few films that he knows will be allowed him. Like Martin Luther King, he has been to the mountaintop. And he has seen over. But he does not have King's serenity, or his patience. As a curious, and for us wonderful, result, there has been no one who expresses more sheer joy, naked spilling exuberance, than Lee, in the art of filmmaking, since at least Orson Welles.

Chi-Raq isn't "about" Chicago. "The No. 1 goal of anybody involved in this film," Lee says, "in front of the camera, behind the camera, was to save lives. Everybody involved knew that going in, and knew it even further while we were making the film. Save lives."

Spike Lee is a brave man. He always has been. As now, in an era when suddenly-ubiquitous video evidence is just now daily documenting irrefutable proof that armed and badged protectors of white power are more or less summarily executing black people on the streets of US cities. When his very city of "Chi-raq" is bracing for the release of a cop-killing snuff video. To, still, impatiently rush ahead, to a next problem, that must needs be addressed:

I've never tried to present myself as a motherfucking spokesperson for 45 million black folks. This is my opinion: We as a people can't talk only about Black Lives Matter, I Can't Breathe, Don't Shoot, and then not talk about this self-inflicted genocide we're doing to ourselves. For me, it goes hand in hand. Only by talking about both and addressing both can we bring change. Cops ain't just killing us. We're killing ourselves, too.

Maybe Chi-Raq will go dud. I, myself, doubt it. Meanwhile, in contrast to my fellow encephaloceliacs, I will endeavor to hold my critical water, until I've actually seen the damn film.

And, in the meantime, sing, with this Public Spike thing:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqYxg2fVtCI]