Kid Pharaoh and Kearney

Usually, I like to write about each person I read about individually, but I noticed some characteristics that I felt would be worth comparing between these two people.

For one, both Kearney and Kid Pharaoh seem to speak about what goes on around them from a distance. Kid Pharaoh talks about society and capitalism, both very broad subjects, as absolutes. Everybody today is a certain way, he says. Nobody is really a tough guy anymore, they're all dead, he says. He talks of everyone's insecurity, and the Japanese as a people always good, the African Americans always bad. Kearney also talks very generally about young people and African Americans. However, they both have very different views on African Americans. Kid Pharaoh seems to have the impression that the 'Negro' is taking over society and that they don't deserve to. He operates on the feeling that certain people deserve wealth and certain people are good for nothing, and he believes that the African American population in its entirety fits into the second category. On the other hand, Kearney believes that African Americans are just people like anybody else who are trying to serve their best interests. As an officer, he had to deal with many different types of people, and so he gained a better understanding of the fact that everyone is a human being. In a much broader sense, Kid Pharaoh seems to be highly judgmental, whereas Kearney does his best not to judge people. Both retain and feel a certain distance between themselves and their surroundings, and both feel this distance for very different reasons. Kid Pharaoh feels that everything in society is wrong and upside-down and thus distances himself from all of the things that are wrong, whereas Kearney distances himself from peoples' feelings in an effort not to claim anyone right or wrong.

I would also like to point  out something that Kid Pharaoh says that bothers me. The very last sentence he says is, "You can be anything in this world you want to be, if you dream hard enough, long enough." It seems to me that this is inconsistent with his dislike for Martin Luther King. If he truly respects that you can be anything if you dream hard and long enough, then he should have utmost respect for Martin Luther King, given his famous "I Have A Dream" speech. Also, much of what he talks about as being corrupt in today's society is actually just what he says: chasing after a dream. Perhaps not everyone has the perfect dream, but people like the "faggot movie star that puts powder on his face" have dreams which deserve just as much respect as those who dream of being rich, of owning high-rise apartments like Kid Pharaoh does.