He died about a month ago–I think it was a month. I’m not so sure. To be brutally honest, he’d never done much of value when he was alive, unless its value was completely in the negative. Earl was simply one of those lumpen-thug assholes who got Black America into the cultural cesspool that it’s in today. He was a poor man’s Tupac who spent his entire career upholding shitty stereotypes of Black men–namely, the drug-addled buffoon and Big, Burly Negro.
So, good riddance. Actually, it is rather sad that Earl died but he had to die in order to destroy DMX. He is not the topic of discussion anyway, but we can segue from DMX’s fraudulent con-art into the subject of “struggling.”
All his life this sad individual had been struggling not only with drugs, but (like Tupac) with the phony images of Black “masculinity,” Black “authenticity” and Black “culture”–images which he himself helped to reinforce. Sadly, Earl Simmons had built his entire self-image on these fake images. Earl Simmons was not a “nigger,” but he thought he was a “nigger”–hence, his wasted life and pathetic death. Too many Black men still see him as representative of an uncompromising Blackness. I’m not going to waste my energy explaining why all of this is absolute garbage. Re-read earlier posts I have made on the subject of this useless monkey culture, or if you feel insulted/triggered by everything I’ve said so far about “rap” and the late and unlamented DMX, listen to Eric Grimes’s take on it.
That is why I don’t give a shit about DMX. His “Blackness” was not organic; it was created by the same racist corporate white “Amerikkka” that you cats keep on shrieking about every hour of the fucking day. The same racist corporate white “Amerikkka” that you “struggle” against every hour of the fucking day (even as you put money in their pockets and seek out posh residences in their spaces–yes, I’m talking to you, Patrisse Cullors of fucking Los Angeles!!).
Baldwin addicts (there are a lot of them these days) please take note when he says that:
My own point of view, speaking out of black America, when I had to try to answer that stigma, that species of social curse, it seemed a great mistake to answer in the language of the oppressor. As long as I react as a “nigger,” as long as I protest my case on evidence of assumptions held by others, I’m simply reinforcing those assumptions. As long as I complain about being oppressed, the oppressor is in consolation of knowing that I know my place, so to speak.
Not only did Earl Simmons know his place in Cackistan, but so does “Black Lives Matter,” Incorporated.
A few nights ago I was listening to “House Hunters,” an episode of Champagne Sharks featuring “Trevor, Vida, Ken and Mario.” Somewhere around the thirty minute mark, Vida dropped a small ideological bomb when she explained why she left a so-called “revolutionary” group. Why? “Because,” she said, “they were rooted in struggle and not in progress.”
Exactly.
Who can improve upon this statement?
Furthermore, why didn’t I think of that? Hell, why didn’t anyone else?
It’s important to keep Vida’s statement in mind when regarding this huge rainbow of colorful, loud, impotent and empty “left” or “woke” movements. They are like weeds sprouting through the cracks of American neoliberalism. The vast majority of these movements are predicated around the same old tired theme of “struggle.” The word has such a powerful ring to it that when one hears that usual phrase “in the struggle,” very often one forgets exactly what a “struggle” really means.
Most importantly people have forgotten the whole purpose of a struggle: to move forward at all costs.Struggling is not an end in itself–not even for Trotskyites!!
I would also like to add that (and I didn’t hear part two of the podcast) “struggle” in and of itself has become a global cottage industry. In the United States, it has been for some time. Also the very term “struggle” has all but lost its original meaning. In Vietnam (as opposed to the USA) the “struggle” was an armed one, for the most part–like in Algeria, in Angola, in Cuba and today in certain parts of the Philippines, certain parts of Mexico, India, Israel-Palestine and other places. In the United States and other first world countries, “struggle” is a byword for hollow slogans, pasting up loud and empty posters (like, for instance, here in Berlin), wearing funky clothes, screaming obscenities at cops, etc.
In fact the First World Corporate Left has all but robbed the word “struggle” of any true meaning. George Soros and other corporate entities (such as Nestle) bankroll Black Lives Matter and in the process, they piss off professional Nazis the world over. This does not mean that Nestle is our friend. We should know damn well that these palm oil titans are not the sons of liberty–not when they are utilizing slave labor and destroying rain forests worldwide. This corporate-sponsored “struggle industry,” this Struggle-Industrial Complex, is simply a way of defusing righteous anger, a way of channeling mass discontent away from neoliberal hypernormalization and into online flippancy (re, the so-called “woke” and cancel cultures). BLM has long since exposed itself as a snob-ridden clique of uppity queens. They have succeeded brilliantly in using their homosexuality to guilt-trip/patronize those they feel are beneath them–and as alibis to maximize their own personal fortunes at the expense of their gullible and (quite possibly) somewhat ignorant followers.
That last has to be said, in order to emphasize how (for some people) being gay, black, transgender, a female, a Jew or a Muslim or Asian can be windows of opportunity for amoral and unprincipled assholes. Certain White supremacists have been doing this since the founding of the State of Israel–as if being Jewish gives one an alibi to be a flaming Breitbart. (Sheriff David Cl(d)ark(i)e pulls this same bullshit on behalf of the reactionary, bourgeois colored.)
But the gullible are equally guilty for falling for the same old political con. There is simply no excuse anymore for certain Black people to continue to be as ignorant of such things (and for the same reasons they patronize stores that treat them like shit). Apparently millions of African Americans have learned absolutely nothing since the end of the Black Power Era. Many never will, because they don’t care to; the will to change is just not there. That’s one major reason why the so-called “struggle-industrial complex” actually exists.
On a side note: why on earth are people still giving “Doctor” Umar (Shoemake) Johnson their fucking money? Ten years and counting and this coked-out walrus has yet to produce this “academy” he has been hyping for that time. He has spent a good deal of his time screaming at other assorted crackpots, ex-pimps, hotep-hustlers and the like, and all the silly drama/shenanigans is (again) lining his…
(On second thought, given his character, he’s probably better off (and we are definitely better off) just selling pipe dreams to gullible believers in pork-chop nationalism. Nobody really needs to have Mr. “Sniffles” Shoemake teaching anybody’s fucking kids–let alone some macho, misguided and reactionary cult-nat* bullshit.)
*
*For millennials who don’t know what a “cult-nat” or a “pork-chop nationalist”** is, it’s the same as a hotep. Gen-Xers like myself (I was born in 1967) used the term in the late eighties to describe “hoteps.” Likewise, “pork-chop nationalist” was used by the Black Panthers in a previous generation to describe the “hoteps” of their era (c.1965-c.1975)
**Interesting side note. After writing these lines, I just realized I had eaten pork-chops for dinner. However, this does not make me a reactionary nationalist.
Why do white liberals love minstrels like Uncle Murda?
It’s a hypothetical question, really–one I already summed up about a decade ago when I wrote “Reactionary Rap and the Black Lumpenproletariat.” The answer to the question is the same answer as to why the record industry has been pushing this slop on the public (especially Black youth) for the past 35 years.
“Drill” Music, in reality, is just revamped and reconstituted Thug Rap for the 21st century. “Drill” music is simply Thug Rap unfiltered, with no ideological, cultural or spiritual pretenses (unlike, say, Tupac or Wu-Tang Clan). All attempts at sounding logical, lyrical or intelligent have been tossed out the window, and now all you have are unapologetically stupid, dirty, ignorant, sexually perverted, violent coloreds (such as the late King Von, to cite one pathetic example) who babble on and on about–well, killing each other. A few of the lyrics listed below should speak for themselves:
Fuckers in school telling me, always in the barber shop “Chief Keef ain’t ’bout this, Chief ain’t ’bout that” My boy a BD on fucking Lamron and them He, he, they say that nigga don’t be putting in no work Shut the fuck up, y’all niggas ain’t know shit All y’all motherfuckers talkin’ about “Chief Keef ain’t no hitter, Chief Keef ain’t this, Chief Keef a fake” Shut the fuck up, y’all don’t live with that nigga Y’all know that nigga got caught with a ratchet Shootin’ at the police and shit Nigga been on probation since fuckin’ I don’t know when Motherfucker, stop fuckin’ playin’ him like that Them niggas savages out there If I catch another motherfucker talking sweet about Chief Keef I’m fucking beatin’ they ass, I’m not fucking playin’ no more Know them niggas roll with Lil Reese and them (Young Chop on the beat)
From “Love Sosa” by Chief Keef
Niggas call me Bloodas just like Tee out here (Let’s get it) Opps be calling Foenem phone, say I don’t be out here (L’s) Catch him, knock his noodles back, just don’t tweak out here (B-r-r-r-ah) Foenem slidin, late night hunting, ain’t no sleep out here (Skrt, skrt, skrt) 2 days back to back, that’s 50 racks to be out here (On God) Can’t have no fefe on yo block as long as Steve out here (B-r-r-r-ah) Can’t try to slide inside a fish bowl, you got beef out here (Psh) Law keep wanting to get Zoo out the way, they say he a Chief out here (Say he a chief out here) Niggas hoes, they tuck they tails ’cause they be scared (They be scared) In that Hellcat, on the e-way, off them meds (Off the meds) Say his name inside this song, my bro said I better not say it (I better not say it) Niggas low key want that smoke, you do, you better not say it (Better not say it) Get yo ass back in that house, we got FN not 9’s (Not 9’s) My credit so A1 with killas, I be payin’ my fines (My fines) Opps be on my dick in songs but I don’t pay them no mind (Pussy) All them hoes that be with the opps, gang done broke they spine All the crackers get robbed for they shit, they buy it back (Buy back) I keep my Glock in her Chanel, that shit cost 5 racks (Shit cost 5 racks) All these hoes be goin’ for real low-key, just buy them X (Just buy ’em X) He got shot up in his shit, I hear he tryna flex (Tryna flex) Never care so much, ran out of woods, just pass the Dutch (Pass the Dutch) Your homies died, you don’t never slide, it ain’t adding up (It ain’t addin’ up) Get caught with a pipe, you out same night, you fed or what? (You fed or what?) New opp pack in the air, this gas or what?
From “No Auto Durk” by Only the Family
Just got some top, from this stripper bitch She from Kankakee Just bought a Glock, with a ruler clip Boy, don’t play with me This bitch a ho, met her at store You know how it goes She wanna smoke, so I bought some dope And took her to the O Just got some top, from this stripper bitch She from Kankakee Just bought a Glock, with a ruler clip Boy, don’t play with me This bitch a ho, met her at the store You know how it goes She wanna smoke, so I bought some dope And took her to the O
From “Took Her to The O” by King Von
By contrast to this mindless, incoherent drivel T.I.–not one of the most enlightened minds in the Black Culture Industrial Complex (something which is not controlled by Black people)–literally reads like Shakespeare:
I’m the opposite of moderate, Immaculately polished with the spirit of a hustler and the swagger of a college kid. Allergic to the counterfeit, impartial to the politics. Articulate but still would grab a nigga by the collar quick. Whoever having problems with their record sales just holla tip. If that don’t work and all else fails, then turn around and follow tip. I got love for the game but ay I’m not in love with all of it. Could do without the fame and the rappers nowadays are comedy. The hootin’ and the hollerin’ back and forth with the arguing. Where you from, who you know, what you make and what kind of car you in. Seems as though you lost sight of what’s important when depositin’. The cheques into your bank account and you up out of poverty. Your values is a disarray, prioritizing horribly. Unhappy with the riches ’cause your piss poor morally. Ignoring all prior advice and fore warning. And we mighty full of ourselves all of a sudden aren’t we?
T.I. (featuring Rihanna), Live Your Life
No explanation needed here, right?
I have noticed that precious few people have actively criticized Drill music. (Since “Thug Rap” is effectively dead, criticizing it doesn’t carry much weight these days.) There are several reasons for this, I suspect–one being that most of these so-called “rappers” are really cold-blooded killers actually boasting of the crimes they have either committed or will commit. They have absolutely no moral compass and no talent whatever (generally speaking) and the vast majority can’t even keep time–not that they actually give a fuck.
Having said that, I definitely do not believe in censoring these “rappers.” They should be allowed to spit out their retarded word salads unimpeded by censorship laws. Why? For the simple reason that the same people who wish to censor Drill also wish to censor Black Writer in Berlin. In fact the neocons are even more keen on censoring people like me because–let’s face it–we have brains. (Chief Keef clearly has none.) However, in the face of this obnoxious “cancel culture” (coming from both wings of the same dirty political bird) we who have brains will have to put up with this dumb darkie for the time being (at least until he winds up in prison).
Drill Rap is extremely popular in the UK for reasons that are more obvious to me than to the writer of this article. Never mind that Irish, Italian, Turkish, Thai, Chinese, Senegalese, Brazilian and Indian drill rappers pop up like dandelions all over the globe (and why not? One doesn’t need any talent at all to become a “drill rapper,” unlike, say, Hopsin or Immortal Technique, let alone Chuck D)–the main impetus behind this mushrooming of Drill is for the same reasons the zoomer’s grandparents wore Afro-wigs and platform shoes in the seventies: everybody loves The Negro, wants to act out The Negro fantasy–yet nobody really wants to be “The Negro.”
WHY WHITE LIBERALS LOVE “DRILL” SWILL
It’s a common saying, thrown about online–mostly by understandably cynical Black people leery of this odd love affair that the non-Black world has with “Black Culture” (which is, sadly, generally what everybody but Black people think of “Black Culture”). Ralph Ellison summed it up best 45 years ago when he wrote that to most non-Blacks (as well as many, many Blacks themselves) “Black Culture” was simply a “projection,” an “identification” of Afro-Americanness with what non-Blacks feel to be “socially unacceptable,” with their own “repressed psychological drives.” That’s why every time I see German cornballs over here in Berlin affecting what they think is “Blackness” my first impulse is to laugh in their fucking faces. This phenomenon isn’t really funny at all, but absurdity (and what else is racism but absurdity carried to its most extreme?) can make one chuckle from time to time.
Yes, it is absurd to see British educators resorting to using ignorant Drill music in order to keep Black British kids from killing each other. (Apparently, it works.) RoadWorks may be snatching these kids out of the jaws of the British penal system (or from an early grave) but they (and Kameron Virk) don’t seem to be keen on pushing Black British minds beyond the extremely narrow (and very primitive and childlike) confines of “Drill.” And naturally no one need question why such a thing as “Drill” needs to exist. Black people–contrary to what colored people think–certainly do not need it. It is not expressing their “reality;” Black reality is not defined by Chief Keef and his dumbass “Opps be on my dick in songs but I don’t pay them no mind (Pussy)“. No: Chief Keef defines NEGRO REALITY.
Negro Reality, in a nutshell, is defined by filth, violence, ignorance, ugliness, sin–precisely those components that make up the entirety of “Drill.” The Negro Reality, of course, is the polar opposite of White Reality. As Zia Sardar writes in Fanon and the Epidemiology of Oppression, “Whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of Justice, Truth, Virginity. It defines what it means to be civilised, modern and human. That is why the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom; when he has fought for Liberty and Justice… these were always white liberty and white justice ; that is, values secreted by his masters. Blackness represents the diametrical opposite : in the collective unconsciousness, it stands for ugliness, sin, darkness, immorality. Even the dictionary definition of white means clean and pure.” Drill music, like its addle-brained predecessor Thug Rap, simply reinforces all the old slavery-time/colonial definitions of what means to be African–only this time, as I’ve said, all the intellectual and moral padding that one can find in Tupac, Biggie Smalls or even 50 Cent is sliced out.
They, white leftists and rightists, are in love with The Negro–a creature that most Black people (and not just leftists) have been at war with ever since white racists created him. Very often you will hear a Black person saying “I can’t stand niggers,” or that “niggers” make him/her sick. Actually it isn’t so much self-hate as it is an implicit and often unconscious rejection of that thing called The Negro. “The idealised Negro is equally a construction of the white man,” writes Sardar. “He represents the flip side of the Enlightenment : he is constructed not as a real person with real history but an image. The idealised Negro, the noble savage, is the product of utopian thinkers, such as Sir Thomas Moore, who comes from ‘No place’ and is in the end ‘No person’. This Negro was born out of the need of European humanism to rescue itself from its moral purgatory and project itself, and displace, the original inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean.” So it is only natural that any intelligent Black person looking at a fool like Chief Keef (or King Von) would turn up his or her nose. As I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating The Negro.*
“Here, Fanon is articulating a common feeling,” Zadar continues. “If all you represent – your history, your culture, your very self – is nothing but ugly, naïve and wicked, then it is not surprising that you do not see yourself in a kindly manner. But this neurotic situation is not the route to emancipation. There is only one solution : to raise above the absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”
However, this last bit hasn’t happened–least of all with the African American. In America (as elsewhere) the Black person has remained trapped inside the disgusting image/reality/condition called The Negro–much like the figure in Baraka’s poem “An Agony. As Now,” a being stuck “inside someone who hates me,” endlessly turning round and round from generation to generation on the hamster wheel of an ugly, violent, nauseating fantasy…a fantasy that can only be numbed by intoxication or terminated by death. Hence: the very existence of “Drill” music.
“In case you didn’t notice, we’re being governed by armed thugs, criminals and traitors, who would as readily shoot you as spare you if it serves their purposes. This election is your last chance to save yourself and your family. Trust me, I’m not exaggerating. Not even a bit.” —Lawrence Tribe, Harvard Law Professor and Constitutional Expert
Yes, I know I haven’t been keeping up with all the events that have been taking place since the beginning of this year. It’s 2020, after all. People have been talking about how much of a clusterfuck this year has been. We all want this wretched year to end soon. Unfortunately it seems that 2020 may prove to be nothing more than a prelude to the decade to come. In which case, I might as well wait until the smoke clears from all the protests, “riots,” insurrections and other mayhem to offer any comment on what is happening.
Speaking of “riots” and “mobs”–the Orange Baboon himself is a one man riot. This thing currently occupying the White Bunker (because now it’s not just any old White House) has been increasingly candid about his true feelings towards his colonial subjects. It turned out, after all, that Dump put up only a handful of slabs of his precious “Border Wall”–the same anti-jigaboo Berlin Wall he’d been blabbing off about since his first Presidential campaign back in 2016. All those millions he’d allegedly allocated for building the Wetback Wall ended up in some honkie’s pockets–Steve Bannon, I think, was his name. (Yep, it was. Bannon was recently arrested for sticking a million of the Boogie Wall’s funds into his back pocket. And where did all that money come from? Not Mexico, as Trump insisted it would come from.¹)
Dumpie also knew perfectly well that COVID-19 was extremely dangerous from the outset. Instead of warning his subjects, he deliberately downplayed the dangers of COIVD-19 because he didn’t want to “cause panic”–a flimsy excuse if there ever was one. (You don’t have to take my word for it–listen to the recording. This will bridge a credibility gap in reader’s minds not accustomed to my salty language.)
After this huge gaffe on Trump’s part, it should be relatively easy to connect the dots concerning his overall behavior. What seemed strange and out-of-kilter should now be fairly obvious. It’s not that Trumpy is “unpatriotic” (and at this point in time, quite frankly, there’s nothing to be patriotic about concerning the U.S., seeing just what it’s truly made of, and built upon)–he IS a patriot: towards his Americans, and his concept of what America is.
Trump’s idea of what America is: the old version, c.1913
HIS America does not even include the soldiers who lost their lives defending it. These guys were clowns, losers and suckers who were stupid enough to believe that picking up arms to “defend democracy” was a noble idea. (In reality most of these kids were simply drafted into the wars and had no real say in the matter–not that Trump gives a shit.) In a very sick, twisted way, Trump (ironically) was actually correct when he referred to the fallen soldiers as “suckers.” Why? Because these soldiers were naive enough to believe that they were fighting on behalf of a Democratic society. Even if they were white–and most of them obviously were–they still thought that, being white and male, they had a seat at Uncle Sam’s table. But as it turns out, they didn’t–not really. As rank-and-file white men from the white labor aristocracy (and usually the bottom end) their place at White Daddy’s table was not an honorable one. It only appeared to be so for those of us outside the White Caste.
From within that Caste, White Daddy’s table was set up to serve precisely those it was intended to serve since John Hancock put his fucking signature on the Declaration of Independence–that is, wealthy, white bourgeois men primarily of Northern European stock. The same rule generally applies though a steep decline in Northern European ethnic stock since 1776 has made it necessary for White Daddy to expand his definition of what an Aryan is. Today, rich Italians, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Irish, and some coloreds sit at the table with Uncle Sam (aka White Daddy) and reap the fruits of Mexican, Salvadoran and prison (read: black) labor. For their ilk, the country really is a democracy. It wasn’t always so, but through unspecified “hard work” these non-Aryans were able to take their place at Uncle Sam’s table and eat (while the rest of us starve or drop dead of COVID-19). Those on the dirty end of the table are drunk on the delusion that they are a part of Sammy’s clique. To them, the rank-and-file whites and wannabe whites, this delusion is enough to get them through their pathetic, useless lives. Heaven help them if they ever wake up from their fantasy and discover that Uncle Sam always despised them–as “losers” and “suckers” doing the white kakistocracy’s dirty work.
The New version. Warning: These things are NOT your friends!
These are not your friends.
Wanna Fuck Up a Movement? Here’s How!
It is becoming increasingly clear by the day that this orange-faced freako is dangerous, deranged and narcissistic. “It” is probably much worse than any of us can possibly imagine. We are talking of a creature who has even less culture, less tact and less overall knowledge and education than that one-balled Austrian half-caste who wound up starting a world war and destroying most of Europe. We are talking about a monster who puts his money on Kyle Rottenhaus, a 17-year old SS wannabe who roams city streets killing whom he thinks are “untermenschen.” There is a strong possibility that it will refuse to leave the Bunker when it loses the upcoming election (assuming that he will lose or that there will even be an election) and that the military may have to unseat him. And seeing that its followers are obviousmaniacs (possibly even more maniacal and diabolical than it is) any attempt to toss Dumpy out on its orange ass come January, 2021–once again, assuming Dumpy loses–will be met with fierce resistance from them.
What does this mean? It means, in layman’s terms, that no matter who wins in November we are facing the strong possibility of a violent coup. A revolution, in other words. It may not happen, but sadly it has happened here before, several times over, so there’s no point in losing one’s mind over the prospect of a national–and by logical extension, global–Fourth Reich.
So having come to the conclusion that the current occupant of the White Bunker is essentially a psychopath, a Nazi thug and hardcore criminal–what does one do next?
In order to fight the Enemy (yeah, I said it–do you think that that Orange Blob is your FRIEND??) one has to have a clear head. One has to know exactly what one is up against and exactly what one’s goals are in defeating the Enemy.
I will not waste any space deciding how one is to go about getting rid of the Alt-Right. I already stated three fucking years ago that they needed to be killed, and some readers thought I’d lost my mind. (Today the article seems a lot tamer when you consider that even The Nation, a perfectly respectable liberal-left-wing publication, is calling America a failed state.) But I was right. So what does one do–or, rather, what does one not do?
0. See the kid in the above image? That’s Keedron Bryant. Please, for the love of Christ, do not do what he just did. Don’t sing in front of a bunch of fat, burger-scoffing bigots about how much you want to live. You are not convincing these clowns of your humanity. Their minds were made up centuries ago. Besides–and seeing precisely what you are up against as a black person in the US, it makes you look weak and simple-minded. White supremacy doesn’t give a shit about your pity parties.
But if you insist upon not fighting white supremacy the way one should, then I highly recommend that you belt it out before Dumpy, right on the White House lawn. And also do the following:
By all means, do put together a so-called militia made up of alleged army veterans (who don’t know the first thing about handling assault weapons)–and lead them deep into the jungles of America’s shitholes. Make sure their leader is a failed DJ, psychopath and liar who believes in crackpot Hotep theories and whose every other word is a profanity.
Whenever cops, Trump supporters, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, 3 Percenters, the Ku Klux Klan, Antonio Batista, or Andrzej “Zip-a-dee” Duda show up in your spaces, remain unarmed, unprotected, and always naively ask them why they are there. And always tell them that you love them. If you can’t do that, then argue with them. They like that. And when demonstrating, be sure never to carry first-aid kits, never to carry concealed weapons for self-defense, never wear protective gear such as gas-masks, etc. And always put yourself in harm’s way by NOT dropping immediately to the ground whenever the shooting starts. You’ll look real cool and fly with your head staved in from a rubber bullet.
Waste your energy in Afrocentric idiot’s babble; become a Hotep, the cult-nat version of the white alt-right. Be like “Doctor” Umar Johnson and cry about melanin and all that shit, while at the same time scamming your customer base to pay for your sex-trips to Thailand, Brazil, The Philippines, Hungary and other places. In addition you can also ride the ADOS train. And while on the ADOS train, don’t forget to stop over in Intersectionality-Land. That’s important.
As per the above (aka Intersectionality): Please make careful distinctions between yourself and other oppressed and persecuted peoples; always emphasize the fact that since you are non-binary sexually speaking, you have more of a say in the “rEvoLuTiOn” than those who are not. Always emphasize the fact that because you are more “melanated” (read: darker-complected) than the person standing next to you, you are actually MORE black and thus even MORE qualified to be a true “rEvoLuTiOnArY.” (And please ignore people such as Milo Yiannopoulous, Candace Owens, the late Herman Cain, Doja Cat, and that horse-faced, cross-dressing white racist shitstain with his basketball-dunking colored boyfriend.)
Remember that a “real” “rEvoLuTiOn” is built purely on raw emotion, fantasy, rage and what-not. Don’t ever plan anything. Moan, bitch, argue, split hairs, back-bite. Brag about your fucking background, whether you come from the upper-middle-class or the so-called “streets.” (Especially the latter, because we all know that being a so-called “street person” automatically makes you a revolutionary. And by all means bully anybody who doesn’t belong to your stupid little clique {please pronounce as “CLICK” to sound as stereotypically negroid as possible, because the”rEvoLuTiOn” is a minstrel show, can you dig it??}.)
Forget about discipline. This is especially true for American lefties. Don’t worry about all that shit. Revolutions are supposed to be fun. Revolutions are entirely spontaneous. True revolutionaries do not enforce rules of any kind. Discipline is just, like totally fascist, dude. Get drunk; get in petty fights over dumb shit. Smoke weed, sniff coke, crank, meth, bath salts, etc.; inject all kinds of crazy shit into your veins or stick it up your ass in suppositories (yeah, W.S.B.). And if you feel like it don’t prepare yourself and your group for dealing with future conflicts with violent far-right terrorists, which leads us to
Over intellectualize everything. The revolution is on paper. It’s about talk, about theories, about the academy. See number FIVE. You still have a stake in the system even though it is crumbling before your very eyes. Don’t make any preparations just in case the far-right terrorists totally freak out and try to annihilate you based on your color or sexual preference or religion or nationality. It’s just not that bad. In that case, you should not be reading anything P. Lewis has to say, because he’s just a headcase–a “butt-hurt Negro,” as some old mammy put it a few years ago.
Most importantly, never study your Enemy. Always moan and groan about how awful they are and how powerful and impregnable they are. (Low morale is important, you know.) Never learn the history of the opposing team. Never learn of their weak points. Always assume that they can beat you and if you are black, always use that as your iron-clad alibi (Because BLACK = WACK).
In reference to number EIGHT, always assume that the Enemy’s views of you and your culture are more valid than your own. Always assume that the Enemy is always right and you are wrong (because he/she is white, powerful, famous and has a lot of, you know, cash and shit). The Enemy is really your friend because he/she lives on the same block or the same apartment building as you do, or might even be a member of your family.
Don’t do a goddamned thing. Continue to believe that a future conflict is not in the making, and that this whole conflict will die down within a year or two, and that COVID-19 will just magically go away. By 2022, everything will be just like it was before 2014 or even 9/11/2001. After all, the Enemy said so.
¹The money came from “losers” and “suckers”–you know, your average American taxpayer.
Toxic masculinity is what folks used to call a “jock mentality.” It is very real; I have the scars to prove it.
It was no fun growing up being called “retarded” and “faggot” in grade school while being called “nigger,” “coon” and “monkey” in my fucking neighborhood. Or having the shit kicked out of you at the age of nine by a dozen young punks while your guidance counselor looked on, smugly. Or getting groped in high school by closeted, allegedly ‘heterosexual’ guys. (As a side note, I know of many women who did not like being bullied by other girls when they were young, but that’s off-topic.)
For decades, I have been hoping–and not so secretly–that these jocks would get their comeuppance. Let these clowns whine. Even if their complaints against Gillette may hold some water (the commercial is somewhat patronizing, to say the least), their reasons for rejecting the ad are highly suspect. Most of the men complaining–people like James Woods or Paul Joseph Watson–are right-wing, all-American Reaganite types, hung up on some Anglo-Teutonic or Latin/Slav reactionary Catholic ideal of (white) manhood–much of which involves suppressing the life of the mind in favor of doing things exclusively with your hands (or your tiny dick).
Having said that, the very fact that Gillette, of all companies, would make an ad concerning “toxic masculinity” (aka WHITE¹ masculinity) is laughable.
The Gillette Ad: Neoliberal hypocrisy at its finest
If Gillette wants to wag its hypocritical little finger at rank-and-file “dudes” who wolf-whistle at women on the street (which is stupid in its own right) let them do that. Nobody cares. But before they do that they should stop and consider just what in the hell goes into making their shaving gels.
If Gillette wants to preach to its audience about young bullies who rough up kids on playgrounds, it should start by preaching to its fucking parent company Proctor and Gamble about how it treats seven-year old Indonesian girls who pick its cotton–or, to be more precise, extract its palm oil.
Palm oil is one of the key ingredients that goes into the production of Gillette’s famous shaving gel. Several articles on the web detail how Wilmar, the world’s biggest palm oil processor, “was sourcing its oil from illegally cleared land and destroying the habitat of critically endangered Sumatran tigers.” Jakarta Globe/Agence France-Presse, October 22, 2013. The article has since been taken down, but a quote from an online cache reads:
“Until Wilmar commits to a no-deforestation policy, their trade of palm oil to big household brands… makes consumers unwitting accomplices in the extinction of Indonesia’s 400 remaining Sumatran tigers,” head of Greenpeace’s Forest Campaign in Indonesia, Bustar Maitar, said.
Wilmar supplies more than a third of the world’s palm oil, according to the company’s website, and its oil can be found in Oreo cookies, Gillette shaving cream and Clearasil face wash, among an array of grocery items in more than 50 countries.
Greenpeace said Wilmar was continuing to source palm fruit from plantations on illegally cleared land within Sumatra island’s protected Tesso Nilo National Park, prime tiger habitat.
The report also said that fire had hit the permit area of another of Wilmar’s suppliers in June, when blazes swept through Sumatra’s forests for weeks, covering Singapore and Malaysia in a blanket of hazardous smog.
Indonesian officials said most were deliberately lit to clear forested land and grow palm oil.
Wilmar denied suggestions its supplier had deliberately lit land-clearing fires, saying in a statement the blaze was on a plantation that was likely ignited by surrounding flames.
“We are currently reviewing our business practices, including our sourcing policy, working with certain international supply chain experts,” Wilmar spokesperson Lim Li Chuen told AFP.
The company said it had issued “a stern reminder to all staff” of its policy to only source palm fruit grown legally and that any supplier trying to sell illegally grown fruit would be “dropped altogether”.
Wilmar is the latest company to be targeted by Greenpeace, which has taken aim at several high-profile firms and campaigned for responsible consumer spending.”
Within three years of this article’s appearance, Proctor and Gamble merely shifted from one palm oil magnate (Wilar, in Indonesia) to another (Felda Global Ventures, in Malaysia). Felda is even worse. According to sumofus.org,
Felda deals in the human trafficking of its plantation workers, confiscating close to 30,000 passports, and still works with labor contractors and recruiters who charge enormous fees to trafficked foreign workers.
Plantation workers are trapped in modern day slavery, all to produce palm oil that ends up in P&G products. The multinational consumer goods company is well aware of the problem, and yet still buys conflict palm oil from its joint venture partner Felda. (Bold in the original.)
What do #MeToo, Paul Joseph Watson or any of these other internet spooks have to say about this stuff? Nothing, of course. None of them gave a single thought about near-extinct tigers or severely-depleted rain-forests somewhere in South-East Asia–let alone a bunch of poor “gooks.”
“Who cares? After all, we don’t live there.”
I think that in due time Gillette (I don’t know about Nike) will be staffed largely by women. Proctor and Gamble, the parent company, will probably be headed by a woman. The CIA, at this very moment, is now staffed by women. But, God forbid, it is still the fucking Central Intelligence Agency. Nothing changes; everything goes on as before, except that white women are now doing the white man’s dirty work.
The same goes for other carefully hand-picked minority groups in the USA. A few American cities these days, for instance, are largely managed by African Americans. Cool, you think. But–which African Americans?
Picture a Black (male) President sending troops (mainly black) to a city with a Black (female) mayor, Black chief of police, black administrators, black accountants, and a majority Black population. To do what? To put down a rebellion of poor Black people furious at rampant police brutality. If this sounds like The Congo, or Liberia, or Nigeria in a bad political phase, you would not be far off. Actually this was Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015. (Maryland is not in Africa.)
When “French West Africa” gained its so-called “independence” from France in 1960, one so-called “African president” said with a straight face, “Gabon may be independent, but between France and Gabon nothing has changed–everything remains as is.” Exactly–and from today’s vantage point, our immediate future will look precisely like Gabon in 1960.
The patriarchy appears to be in transition, as the old white men are dying off and many young white men appear unfit to inherit the mantle of patriarchal domination; they cut a bad image with all that reactionary, alt-right bullshit. Many people worldwide automatically see “Nazi” when they see a white, male face. Indeed the face of cutthroat neoliberal capitalism these days is the face of a smug white man–the very paragon of “toxic masculinity”–in a three-piece suit and shades.
Capitalism will soon replace this guy with a smart, sassy, progressive black male (or white transwoman) who shaves his/her face with–you guessed it–Gillette razor gel.
Hannah Rosin’s prediction of “The End of Men” appears to be coming true–on the surface, anyway. The keys to capitalism are being increasingly handed to white women, who (like Angela Merkel) will be managing the works. Elite white ladies will get their long-awaited comeuppance. White men will still be the advisers, with plenty of time on their hands to fuck around…perhaps on some hidden island somewhere in Booga-booga-land, surrounded by pink cocaine and child prostitutes. The media will not disclose their whereabouts and will pretend they are safely dead. The plantations and human trafficking will continue unabated, and the cries of children forced to work for a pittance in illegally cleared forests will be met with silence.
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¹I insist that this is a white (and, moreover, very American) ideal. Black (and other non-white) men who adhere to this ideal are typically aping their white Anglo or Latin or Arab masters.
In the months since I posted Part One of this article, a long string of infuriating race-related incidents have occurred–all of which merely reinforce everything that I’ve written about this so-called “Caucasian Aristocracy.”
Less than 24 hours ago the New York Supreme Court dropped one of six charges against super-predator Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. While not ostensibly race-related, Weinstein’s acquittal on just this one charge speaks volumes in itself. It comes directly on the heels of the confirmation and beatification of Brett Kavanaugh (misogynist, ex-frat boy and hard rightist, to whom David Duke gushed, “Thank God you are now on the Supreme Court!”), the revelations that Trump helped his parents evade millions of taxes (not to mention his own sex scandals with Stormy Daniels and other shady ladies), and the rehiring of Timothy Loehmann–the cop who killed 12-year old Tamir Rice in 2014–in Bellaire, Ohio. Georgia lawmaker Jason Spencer (no relation to Richard, though one would think otherwise) literally shows his fat white ass to the world on Sacha Baron Cohen’s This is America (indeed!), screaming “nigger!” at the top of his lungs, making “ching-chong” noises and sucking on a dildo. Jason Spencer was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2010 on the Republican ticket; his fat ass is still there, probably still shouting “nigger” and still pulling his eyes back in the presence of Asians. (At least in private.)
And in the meantime, Bill Cosby is serving three to ten years in prison. This is not to gloss over Cosby showing his own ass decades ago, when he hypocritically dismissed Huey Newton as “nothing more than a thug” and a “hoodlum”; when he made a name for himself playing a spy on TV (at the height of the Black Power movement), and later went on to become “America’s Dad” while privately dropping Quaaludes in ugly women’s drinks and lecturing the most exploited class of people in America–the black underclass–about not speaking English, not pulling up their pants and getting shot over ninety-cent slices of stale pound cake.
Bill Cosby’s actions perfectly personified the uselessness and moral bankruptcy of America’s Black Elite. He sat on a fortune close to a billion dollars while millions of blacks nationwide had to steal to pay their rent, or even get their next meal. So it’s not a matter of shedding tears for Billy-Boy being locked up. That’s not the point. The point is that Billy-Boy, far wealthier than Harvey Weinstein could ever hope to be, is sitting in a jail cell while Harvey, Roy Moore, Donald Trump, Tim Loehmann, Roman Polanski and above all that little turd George Zimmerman are not. That’s because Billy-Boy’s billion doesn’t add up to much when his skin ain’t white.
Further down the food chain, the outlook for those outside the Aristocracy looks far bleaker. The Aristocracy feels (perhaps rightly so) that it is under assault from the dirty, unwashed, unwhite masses of the world (especially the black ones), so it is pushing back against them post-Reconstruction style. This Kakistocracy loves playing victim even with an assault rifle in its hands. Down on the very bottom of the American totem pole, the Afro-American has become a veritable moving target. The days of the African Dodger are back; only this time, they don’t need to put your head in a canvas and throw rocks at your head; they simply call the cops. Nekia Jones of Columbus, Ohio, for instance, has been locked up for nonpayment of child support–Ms. Jones is childless. Delta Airlines, a crackerconcern, has shown its collective ass again in several appallingincidents (generally involving black women), one resulting in a passenger’s baggage being damaged in flight by incompetent baggage-handlers. (The passenger had the police called on her by a fascist staff member on the lower rung of the Kakistocratic food chain. The fascist’s excuse–like the one used by the soft Gestapo in Berlin at KFC–was that the unnamed woman was filming her.) A day ago, yet another Southern (Georgia) white woman calls the police on a black man babysitting his white friends’ children; Pool Patty, Permit Patty, Permit Betty, Barbecue Becky, and their male equivalent “Permit Model”–some sexually insecure schmuck who couldn’t bear to see a black model in a photo shoot–have sent a collective message to those on the bottom of the global racial hierarchy: anything you do–even if it is so much as reading a fucking book–is a threat to our well-being.
No–scratch that. To the white Kakistocrat, merely being alive as a black (or brown or red) person is a threat to one’s well-being.
Jennifer Schulte, aka Barbecue Becky: Patriarch with a Pussy
It’s noteworthy that the overwhelming majority of racist calls have come from white women. No one should be surprised that this is so. These same poor white women, who wrung their hands and howled like banshees over the “sexual misconduct” of Harvey, Billy-Boy, Al Franken, Bill O’Riley, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, Kevin Spacey and other men have never been opposed to The Patriarchy (or The Capitalist Kakistocracy, which is what it really is) except in theory. In practice, we clearly see that their hijacking of #MeToo (from a black woman dog-whistling at the Kakistocracy in the vain hope that their system would round up black male perverts) was, and still is, a clumsy power-grab on their part. Grabbing for what? The desks, round-tables, and cushy positions of the same “Patriarchy” they pretended to despise. They don’t hate the male chauvinist white Aristocracy; they simply want to run it for themselves. They are the female equivalent of those slimy, ethically bankrupt Third World elites who moved into the same comfy positions of power left behind by the British, French and Spanish after the colonizers left Africa.
Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian novelist and activist, was perfectly on point when she described Theresa May and Hillary Clinton as being “even more patriarchal than men.” She forgot about Angela Merkel but then again, one gets the point. At the rate everything is going politically in the world today the Kakistocracy will continue for the foreseeable future. Not because this disgusting class is impregnable, but because this class finds it so easy to dangle 95% of humanity on puppet strings. No one outside the Kakistocracy is even thinking of resisting the bullshit. White women, negresses such as Candace Owens, Michelle Malkin and Jannine Piro (a sand Negress), reactionary boy-toys like Paris Dennard and Milo Yiannopoulous and super-spades like Kanye West, David Clarke and Jesse Lee Peterson will be our future gauleiters–reactionary buffoons whose main job is to vainly patch up the cracks in a rapidly disintegrating Western civilization.
Down the Totem Pole
The further you go down the American totem pole the darker people get, the vaguer their faces become, until they are all one dark mass on the very bottom. That dark mass supports the weight of the kakistocracy; it functions as a kind of cornerstone-slash-slop jar. We can be cute and call it “Da Hood” but everyone in the society (including other blacks) understand it to be That Other Place–Niggertown†.
Whatever it is, it is not America–not really. Not as the White Aristocrat defines America. I completely reject everything the White Aristocrat defines as America or as American, but that’s not the point. The point is that in his eyes, and in the eyes of everyone who sees the world through his eyes, Niggertown is America’s toilet. Niggertown represents (to him) a negation of all great Western values and morals–even though Niggertown is entirely the creation of white Western culture.
Ironic, yes. This Niggertown, this Black Slopjar is “dirty,” “evil,” “smelly,” “ape-infested,” but at the same time “we,” the White Aristocracy, desperately need this Black Slopjar. In a moral sense, we need “Niggertown” in order to define ourselves in opposition to it; without it, our existence (as White Aristocrats) makes no sense. It’s true that (in our minds) the high moral standards that “we whites” think we are setting for ourselves don’t apply there since Niggertown is (supposedly) the absolute moral opposite of “America.” But that is part of the fun. The society we have constructed for ourselves is simply too “white”; there’s no “passion” in it, no color, no adventure, no sensuality. So what do we do if we can’t go to Thailand? Go to Niggertown. Da Hood is not only America’s Inferno, it’s also America’s whorehouse, the place where “we” go slumming and let down our hair. It’s the place where “we” buy our drugs, our pussy, the joint where we indulge our sense of white privilege to the hilt since in Niggertown, we can’t be held accountable for what we do since we are never really guilty: only the “Niggers” are truly guilty.
Please note that Niggertown is as much a state of mind as it is a place. So if you are too afraid to go to West Baltimore in the flesh, you can blast Tupac or Drake from your car stereo and sag your fucking pants or even slap on blackface if you so wish. You can host a Mandingo party or pick up random “Niggers” in clubs and suck them off (or have them suck you off) in the toilet. What happens in Niggertown stays in Niggertown.
In this regard, talk of “Black Irresponsibility” is not only foolish and idle, but obscene.¹We all know that before “White” there was no “Black,” that the creation of “Negroes” or “Niggers” or “Blacks” required not merely the creation of White but the conditions under which white would flourish and “Black” would languish. As a side note, it’s worth noting that the Brazilian term for “Big Nigger,” negao, also means “negative” in Portuguese. I can’t tell you if that was a deliberate choice of wording but it is obvious that Black “irresponsibility” is but a negative reflection, an “Afro-pantomime” of the White Kakistocracy. All values within that system have their origins with the founders of that system; those in “Da Hood” may make some adjustments to those values in order to adapt those values to their own needs, but in essence they are the same.
A rotten, despicable, worthless society predicated entirely upon the notion that having white skin (and being rich) makes you a blameless saint in the eyes of most, whilst being the opposite makes you the devil. A black man’s worth increases in this society only if he comes closer to what white society deems its ideal…and yet, if this same black man were to truly become “white male” in every sense of the ideal save for his complexion, he would be tossed in jail.
Black women with braids and Afro-styled hair are weird or outre whereas a white woman who thoughtlessly appropriates these same styles (and wrongly, I might add) is “stylish” and “cutting edge.” We routinely see how white women appropriate, use and rip-off black, brown, red and yellow women, and use them as the battering rams to force their way to the top of the American food chain. #MeToo, the anti-Gun march: all sentimental, idiotic pie-eyed displays of the worst American puritan knee-jerk hysteria surrounding sex.
Every white woman who imagines she was felt up by Woody Allen or Woody Woodpecker or Mickey Mouse comes out with some wretched story about how she was abused, and the whole world stands up to applaud it. And when the Native American woman details how she and her sisters were raped or murdered at the hands of the American police or other men (including their own), one hears crickets. Thousands of black women have disappeared in the DC area alone over the past 10 years, and not a single soul has bothered to come forward to ask of their whereabouts. African women are routinely trafficked into sex slavery in Europe, along with Balkan, Romanian and South-East Asian women. Sri Lankan, Filipino and Ethiopian women are routinely raped, beaten and worked to death by Gulf Arab or Lebanese employers. (Many of these employers are other females.) Just recently a Kenyan woman was beaten senseless in the streets of Beirut by two Lebanese hoodlums. There is no fucking hashtag movement to highlight the plight of these particular women, and if there is it definitely gets set on the back-burner behind the outrage over Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein or Al Franken’s cute hijinks.
This is not merely because Thai prostitutes or Ethiopian maids are not “beautiful people” like Lady Gaga or Kylie Jenner or some other played up megastar, but because they are not white.
Their whiteness also blinds them to their own historical demise. In every sense of the word Western culture is nonexistent outside of the Louvre or some National Gallery of Art. Contemporary Western architecture–and this goes for everything being constructed elsewhere in the world–is hideous. Enormous glass cages which stretch for miles and miles around, filled with mindless drones parked behind cubicles or stuck in some hideous plastic condo. In the Italian Renaissance, a major building was generally conceived as a thing of beauty, nobility and grandeur. Today, everything–the architecture included–has an expiration date. Today no architect anywhere in the world (since they are all blindly following the White lead) would even dream of constructing a Sistine Chapel or an Alhambra or a Taj Mahal or a Machu Picchu or anything comparable to the splendors of Luxor or Karnak or Kilwa.
Why? Because White Supremacy–the ideology of the Cacistocracy–is strictly utilitarian, one that only function in opposition to whatever it deems threatening–even if that thing is Beauty itself.
Even their contemporary music is ugly. No more Beethovens, Mahlers or Janaceks can be found among them, unless they are hiding away in some attic in Lisbon or Lviv. Their “white” novels are solipsistic, pretentious masturbation. Academia, especially in the United States, is falling by the wayside. National infrastructures are crumbling, and not merely because everything is put into the American war machine. America’s infrastructures crumble because those responsible for maintaining these infrastructures are far more interested in laying about in Mar-a-lago or some God-forsaken Caribbean island stuffing adolescent girls or boys and basking in–what else?–their insufferable sense of being (once again) white.²
“Five centuries of colonialism, capitalism and nationalism have turned Europeans into the enemy of the human kind,” Franco Berardi fumed last year, in response to reports of mass migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, slave-dealing in Libya and the surge of moronic, right-wing Western populism. “May they (Europeans) be cursed forever! May Europeans be swept away by the storm they have generated, by the weapons they are building, by the fire they have ignited, by the hatred they have cultivated!”
Bifo Berardi’s words ignited, as they say, a “storm of controversy”; some folks considered him a bit mad. But when one sees Europeans–and by extension, white Westerners and their perennial flunkies–within the context of a decaying, bloated, self-satisfied Kakistocracy, then his words make perfect sense. There can be no democracy, let alone Socialism, in a planet dominated by racist white aristocrats and their colored court jesters.
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†Niggertown wasn’t created by “Niggers” but by systematic “red-lining” (translated into English, it means setting up special residential areas for “Niggers” so whites can control their movements, their wallets, their culture, their minds, etc. In other words, a fucking township, or a reservation). There was also mental redlining. American music was once redlined on record labels (known as “race records” or “Sepia Series”). The African American was and is redlined in novels, plays, newspaper articles, and movies: restricted to being portrayed as an idiot, a whore, a mammy, a suck-up, a shiftless ne’er-do-well, a criminal, a thug, a “problem”; playing out the same tired, hackneyed roles that the Euro-American crafted for him, roles that revealed nothing of the Black actor’s true personality but merely those buried instincts (what Freud called the ID) that the good white aristocrat could not act out in polite white society. Hence, the minstrel show, Al Jolson, Elvis Presley, Satchmo (as opposed to Louis Armstrong), Stepinfetchit, Drake, Eminem and all the rest. Hence “Ebonics,” which is what white society has made of Black English–a language that Afro-Americans constructed in order to define the world on their terms and not that of the white aristocrats.
comment from “HaveYouEverDancedWithTheDevilInThePaleMoonLight”
²And what’s the whole point of the war machine, anyway? For the ultimate showdown between Western Whiteness and the Third World (namely, the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Africa and perhaps Russia, if only because Russia and China are the two major stumbling blocks between Uncle Sam and absolute global hegemony).
Generalissimo Trump has been very busy these past few months. If he hasn’t been randomly shutting two-year old Honduran girls up in concentration camps, he’s been sharing his shitpot with everybody’s favorite comic opera buffoon-dictator (Kim Jong Un) and scribbling random, emotionally-charged tweets to any prominent media figure he feels is challenging his “authoritahhh.” He’s been showing his fat, white pimpled ass to the world so often that some of us have even gone blind.
Hardly a day goes by in which this baboon doesn’t fling his feces at us. He does it with such regularity that most folks have already forgotten some of his worst blunderings–for instance, his referral to African and Caribbean nations as “shitholes,” among other things. Another big blunder was his referral to certain “illegal” immigrants from Mexico or El Salvador as “animals.” His alibi? “Mexico and El Salvador are not sending their best and brightest,” on the one hand, and on the other, “most of these guys are MS-13, savage murderers and killers.”
To be fair, some of Dumbo’s wild ravings in Duluth (reminiscent of one of Mussolini’s macho freakouts) had a grain of truth to them. Mexico and El Salvador are, generally speaking, not sending their best and brightest to the US because their “best and brightest” would rather not flip burgers at Arby’s for two decades. Yet that’s about it. Trump doesn’t give a shit about “real” Americans losing their jobs to “illegals,” because it’s been well-documented that he himself has utilized “illegal” labor in the past to build his little towers. Trump’s referencing MS-13 was a flimsy insinuation that all Latinos are “animals,” and that all “beaners,” including his most ardently racist supporters in Miami, are MS-13. (The alt-right doesn’t mind using a few racist Latinos to bolster their numbers and parrot their psychotic ideology. Why not? It makes them look legit; it takes moral ammunition away from so-called Social Justice Warriors and other “leftist” scum such as yours truly. Remember Amin al-Husseini?)
It’s an understatement to say that Mara Salvatrucha is made up of Salvadoran youths who are beyond dehumanized. One need not belabor that point at all. Last July Angel Soler, a 15-year old, was hacked to death in Nassau County, New York by machete-wielding MS-13 hoods. But this begs the question: how in the hell did these kids get to be so thoroughly brutalized? The answer to the question is simple. “To understand the history of the MS-13,” writes Franc Contreras (CGTN America), “we must return to El Salvador’s civil war in in the 1980s. Left-wing rebels battled a U.S.-backed right-wing government blamed for widespread human rights abuses. Salvadorans fled the violence and migrated to the United States, many settling in Los Angeles. There, they confronted attacks from street gangs. That’s when MS-13 was born.”
America’s dealings with the world politically are like an exterminator who, contrary to all logic, uses mice to drive ants out of buildings. The ants may leave but the mice remain. When the mice become too much of a problem, this “exterminator” calls on the rats to drive out the mice but when the mice are gone, the rats remain. The whole process repeats itself until the fucking exterminator stoops to using elephants to drive out the hippos he used to drive out the wildebeests he used to drive out the bobcats he used to drive out the snakes he used to drive out the rats–the end result naturally being total chaos.
Uncle Sam, too proud to admit that he fucked himself, tries to shift the blame to the “niggers” or the “commies” or some other group he despises. Too proud, too narcissistic, too arrogant and above all, too fucking stupid. Uncle Sham wants the rest of the world to think that He alone is right, that it’s either Shammy’s Way or the highway. During the Salvadoran Civil War (which lasted from 1979 to 1992) U.S. officials went so far as to take control of the Salvadoran military in the hopes of beating back left-wing “Marxist” rebels. In other words, America not merely invented MS-13, but created the lion’s share of the social and historical conditions that led to the rise of MS-13. Along with ISIS and Al-Qaeda, Mara Salvatrucha is the end result of America’s misguided Cold War policies of “containing Communism” at whatever cost. Better a radical Islamic government–so Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan assumed–than Arab Socialism or Mossadegh; better a hard-right ultra-conservative Catholic military junta (think Pinochet, Somoza or Trujillo) than Salvador Allende or God forbid, another Fidel.
The end result of such blatant political blundering can be seen everywhere, on every corner, in every street in every city in every single country. The entire planet has become not a replica of American bullshit but its obscene caricature. And as for the state of America itself, no comment. Everything that America is going through politically, socially, culturally and economically is a direct blow-back from “Manifest Destiny,” that old Anglo-Saxon imperialist psychosis–or from America’s tried and true domestic policies of Keep The Niggers Down At All Costs. Neither Trump, nor the GOP, nor even those moderate Republicans such as George Will and the late Charles Krauthammer have any ideological ground to stand on when the facts are stacked against one another. The one cold fact that matters in the end (when all other facts concerning the state of America are considered) is that the country, simply put, is a shithole–a shithole with wings.
For those of us who aren’t white (you know, the Negroes), the country was a shithole from the word GO. Many blacks will disagree vehemently with this statement and argue that they are doing just fine, thank you. There is no shortage of Afro-Americans who will drape themselves in The Flag and talk about how lucky they are to have been born Americans. After 399 years of living in a slop jar you can come to feel rather fond of it. But a shithole is still a shithole, even with a massive barrel full of Popeye’s Chicken Wings set inside of it.
Former CIA director John O. Brennan brought up a strange word when referencing the Mr. Magoo-like incompetence of the Trump Administration. “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey,” Brennan tweeted to the Orange Orangutan. It was far, far from being the first time the word was brought up; it had been referenced several times over the past three centuries, even in reference to McClownald. So what the hell is a kakistocracy, then?
Me being the guy I am, I’m tempted to conflate “kak-” with “cauc” or “cac.” You can call it “racist” if you feel like it. It is not racist ressentiment on my part, simply calling a spade a spade–or if you want to go there, a honky a honky. So-called “White” people have no reason to whine about it because in actual fact, any thinking “White” person really should not consider themselves “White” in the first place. You are a European or Mediterranean or Asian. Yeah, I know it’s a force of habit, just like calling yourself “Black” when your skin is really golden brown or mahogany. But all of this is beside the point. The real point is: what the hell is a kakistocracy?
A random Googling of the term brings up “a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens”. One can go further and say that a kakistocracy is an entire civilization and culture run by the worst, least qualified, and most unscrupulous, perverted, inept, vulgar, meretricious, ignorant, lazy, uncreative and just plain fucking stupid people.
Sorry to burst your bubbles, but this is exactly what we are living in at this very moment. It is idle to say that the bullshit began with Trump, or Dubya, or even Warren G. Harding. Most of the world has been living under a Caucasian kakistocracy for the past five centuries.
We all know that Europeans and their descendants consider themselves “White,” which is really not the same thing as being Caucasian, since so-called “white” skin (which can range from pale rose to a yellowish-brown olive) in and of itself carries no deep meaning; like other shades of skin tones it’s just a color. So just as rosy skin doesn’t make you some fucking holy man (as if that ubiquitous portrait of Cesare Borgia that we see hanging everywhere was really Jesus Himself), it also doesn’t make you The Devil. It’s not in your genes, in other words–it’s in your head. The rest is solipsism.
In fact the very notion of “Whiteness” itself is profoundly solipsistic–no, scratch that. It is idiotic. We have gone over this road before and so there is no point in wasting too many words about it. Centuries and centuries of racialist fantasies, starting with their Near-Eastern and Mediterranean origins and climaxing with the racist autism of Adolf Hitler, the alt-Right and Jared Taylor, there was and is nothing progressive about being “White,” just as there really isn’t anything progressive about being “Black,” believe it or not. The significance of Blackness makes sense only in opposition to the significance of Whiteness. Black (that is, Africanness) was not considered “sinful” or “ugly” or “evil” or “deformed” until the appearance of White. (This explains why pro-Black, pork-chop cultural nationalism always winds up eating its own tail, for any attempt to find significance in a degraded condition created by the White oppressor himself–since Black is a condition created by the colonizer, not by the African, Aboriginal or Dravidian Indian–ends in total failure.)
“White” (as we all know or should know) came into existence in the West purely as a reactionary and exclusionary identity against the entirety of the non-white, non-Aryan human race. “White” is the ultimate caste system, one that trumps all other social, economic, political and intellectual concerns. If some toothless old redneck showed up to use the bathroom at a Starbucks in Portland or Philadelphia, the barista would not bat an eyelash–there would be no question of him having the honor of using one of their beloved toilets. The same rule naturally does not apply to a black lawyer or perhaps even the black ex-president of the United States. After all, both are Black, with a capital B. So automatically the toothless redneck stinking of piss and unwashed ass trumps the well-scrubbed and well-healed black upper-middle-class gentleman–or Barack Obama.
The real meaning of what happened at Starbucks a few weeks ago, or the meaning of what happened to the Hart Family some months ago, or what happened when Nikolas Cruz strode into a Florida high school some weeks before and shot up 17 students, or when Stephen Paddock butchered over 50 people in Las Vegas, or when some scumbag, Mr. Affluenza himself–Ethan Couch–was spared prison even after having committed murder, flew over the heads of most people–even so-called “Black” people. The real meaning was perfectly clear to me, however. The white race, in America, as a whole functions as a kakistocracy, made up of irresponsible, clueless schmucks who feel that having rosy skin places them above reproach.
So you have a “white” skin, so-called? Great. You’re in safe hands, sort of. “You are rich because you are white,” Fanon has written, “and you are white because you are rich.” Full stop–nothing else really matters. Never mind the old adage that “with great power, comes great responsibility”–the Caucasian Kakistocracy doesn’t give a shit about “responsibility” and never has. The old elite of Europe, before it had fully formulated its notions of racial superiority and inferiority*, showed little responsibility to most members of their own race–this, prior to Portuguese colonialism or even The Crusades. Truthfully, the old European elite viewed themselves as being of a different race than those they held in serfdom throughout the European continent. (Surprisingly, the same holds true today to a limited extent–especially in Italy, and above all in Naples, where the Neapolitan elite views the street-level white Neapolitan as a “mau mau.“)
Worldwide colonialism changed all that. Now the old European peasants are part of a larger global Kakistocracy by virtue of having a precious “white” skin. A “white” man from Romania may be nothing in Italy but that will change the moment he lands in Burkina Faso or South Africa, or even the United States. In a bourgeois society (which of course includes so-called “Communist” and “socialist” societies such as North Korea, Cuba, China and Venezuela) everyone not in the elite bourgie class strives (to some extent) to emulate the values, mores and prejudices of the bourgie class. The bourgie class is “White,” of course. (This naturally explains why every attempt on the part of Western societies to implement “multiculturalism” has resulted not in true racial harmony but some sort of grotesque pecking order where, nationally and globally speaking, the ones on the top are naturally White Americans and Europeans.)
So it should come as no surprise as to why Chinese petty-bourgeois would put such an unnecessary premium on whiteness, virtually to the point where being “white” in many parts of urban China is the closest thing to Godliness. (Or at least, the Chinese petty-bourgeois thinks or puts on that this is so.) It should be no question as to why women in India, Nigeria, Egypt and other “Third World” nations use skin lighteners by the ton. It should be no surprise that in virtually every country in the world (to quote Chester Himes) so-called “Black” people are considered “the shit of the earth.” Likewise, it should not shock anyone that a Nazi scumbag like Andrew Anglin (one of several) would manage to obtain a visa for Cambodia or Nigeria, or that David Duke managed to hold a teaching position in Damascus, Syria. (After all David Duke, like most Arabs and truthfully like most Americans anyway, really doesn’t like Jews.) A Cambodian official is not looking at Anglin’s political rap sheet; he’s looking at Anglin’s passport and above all, his skin. Anglin is a Nazi, but he is WHITE. He is the aristocrat, and as such, he can really do no wrong in the world at large.
God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”
–Ann Coulter, descendant of Irish famine immigrants and right-wing whack job
And aristocrats generally prefer the company of other aristocrats. Wannabe aristocrats prefer the company of aristocrats, naturally. Nothing is worse than a wannabe aristocrat, that poor creature who has all the aspirations of belonging yet does not measure up due to a mere “accident” of birth. So it comes as no surprise that some of the worst nigger-haters on the planet are other “niggers,” or Arabs, or Chinese, or Latinos, etc. or that those most vociferously opposed to “illegal immigration” (an absurd notion when you consider that virtually all European immigration to non-European nations was illegal to begin with) are, in fact, other Latinos. The White American himself does not feel entirely comfortable around any of them, of course; he’d rather interact with some German, Irish, Finnish or French immigrant than he would with his so-called “fellow African American.” This is because the immigrants, though they may not speak a lick of English, are white, and Northern European to boot. The White American may feel slightly less comfortable dealing with a swarthy Sicilian (more so than with an Italian immigrant from Milan) and considerably less comfortable dealing with a Chinese or Japanese immigrant, and still more uncomfortable dealing with somebody from Chile as opposed to somebody from Spain.
So, what then? The White Aristocrat is able to write off three quarters of humanity not because he has any burning desire to do so–not necessarily, anyway–but because his culture (like that of his forefathers) has rendered him incapable of truly seeing nuance in any other people or any other culture save their own. An aristocracy is exclusive, whether it is a Kakistocracy or not. Outside that White Aristocracy everyone else is either a romantic symbol, a stereotype, a cliche, a threat–or, more often than not, a cipher.
It is the ultimate in moral irresponsibility for a group of people that prides itself on running (or rather, ruining) the planet. When the whole of humanity is forced to toe an insane line of thought and action simply because some fat, blonde white sex-maniac insists that it is so, then something must change, and change quick. The needs of the many are far too precious to outweigh the needs of eight or nine white men who control literally half of the world’s wealth. In European text books the old aristocracies of France, Austria-Hungary, the Hapsburgs and others are shown for what they had become by the time they were destroyed–old, creaking monstrosities driven by perversion and greed, completely cut off not merely from the needs and concerns of their people but from their people, period. The very same holds doubly true for this current White Kakistocracy, which is cut off from virtually the entire human race.
Western historians teach us that when the masses of Paris descended upon Versailles and trashed the place, it was a “great moment in history.” It will never occur to these same Westerners that if the masses of people outside the White Kakistocracy descend upon downtown Manhattan or downtown Paris or London and loot it to the hilt, it would be virtually the same thing. We all remember the howls of outrage that rose up throughout the entire White world three years ago when millions of African and Asian refugees descended upon Europe. The Kakistocracy, as it typically does, played dumb and talked endlessly of “Eurabia” and “White Genocide” and all that crap.¹ They still do.²
This white, global aristocracy is so obsessively narcissistic they imagine that some thug from West-Side Chicago is actually oppressing them when he goes on a shooting rampage, rather than the other way around. The white aristocrat does not need to go on a shooting rampage; nothing is oppressing him but his own diseased mind. But he does it anyway: case in point, Stephen Paddock. Another case in point: Dylan Roof. Dylan Roof was not taken out gung-ho style like Tamir Rice or Stephon Clark. It is true that Clark was caught attempting to burglarize several cars before being shot for having a cellphone in his own backyard. Dylan Roof, on the other hand, guns down eight black people in a church in Charleston and while on the way to the police station, he is allowed a meal at McDonalds. Because, you know, killing eight niggers makes a young boy mighty hungry.
Yet another case in point is Nikolas Cruz, the poor, lonely, lost child who shoots 17 kids at a high school in Florida. Since he was not a “fucking Ay-rab” or a “Paki” or some “Black Identity Extremist,” he is not considered a terrorist but simply another misunderstood cat who suffered from extreme bullying. So you know, we, whites and wannabe whites, can empathize with the motherfucker to the point of sending him cash, love letters, nude pics and panties while he languishes in prison. (But Tanishia Covington? Hell, no.)
Slinging mud at far-right loonies like Paddock, Cruz and Roof is extremely easy. But when our liberal and leftist “friends” fuck up along these same lines, what can we say? The Hart family, pictured above, was the exact polar opposite of Jared Taylor and Company. Here we had a white lesbian couple from Seattle that had adopted six black and brown kids and reared them on their own. But on closer inspection we saw that these six kids merely existed as punching bags for these two white liberal lesbians’ self-aggrandizement. In other words, the kids were just there to make these white bitches feel good about themselves and the world.
No matter if these two bitches routinely beat, starved and punished these kids, insulted them with racial slurs or, even more humiliating, forced a couple of them to march out with signs offering hugs to cops (knowing full well it was a bullshit move) while the country was in an uproar over police brutality (not to mention Nazi infiltration of American law enforcement); their sociopathic behavior must have had some justification, however insane, since after all they were not only white but liberal lesbians who had adopted six black and brown children. Naturally the alt-right and their ilk has utilized this incident as an alibi to call out the “privileged” racism of the liberal-left. No comment; one doesn’t need to write any more books about the hyper-privileged racism of wealthy far-right demagogues such as Richard Spencer or the Koch Brothers or, for that matter, Donald Trump. Let them kill each other; they could hardly do worse to themselves what they now do to us. Of course they are still getting away with murder. Of course the level of national outrage at their behavior is nowhere near as high as it is for Bill Cosby³ and certainly not O.J. Simpson, whom the white majority considers to be Satan incarnate.
Harvey Weinstein goes into rehab for his ogreish behavior, while “America’s Dad” gets the can for less
The entire incident reveals a genuine rottenness at the heart of white liberalism; even though it is just one particularly outrageous incident, it is really of a piece with how white liberalism functions in regards to non-whites, especially blacks. In fact, the whole Hart Family incident can be read as white, Western liberalism in a nutshell. “Whites,” whether left or right, Northern or Southern, Eastern or Western, rich or poor, understand “Love” as a one-way street in which the whole of humanity is bowing at its altar, endlessly mimicking their twisted value system, speaking their language in their own particular “white” way. And in turn, these “whites” can only “love” us if we conform to their ridiculous expectations.
This “Love” of theirs is full of exceptions, conditions and caveats which contradict themselves at every single turn. It is so exasperating and demoralizing in the long run that one wonders whether this kakistocratic “Love” is actually more lethal than their well-known “hate.” “White” so-called Christians (as well as Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, agnostics and atheists) speak to the world about “unconditional love” while at the same time drawing up an insane laundry list of expectations and demands that the entire planet (including themselves) must abide by in order to receive the “Love” of a white, Western Kakistocrat. That “Love” manifests itself naturally in government grants, fellowships, aid packages, job hirings, job promotions–every conceivable thing under the sun that the non-white individual either wants or needs, right down to a simple phone number from a white woman or man in a crappy pick-up bar.
Yeah, we already know that fact–or at least, we know it, but we don’t want to think about it too much because too many of us who are not of the Kakistocracy actually need to jump through these goddamned hoops merely to survive–much less pick up some chick (or dude) in a singles bar. This won’t happen to our member of the Caucasian Kakistocracy. Slob or no slob, punk or no punk, beta or no beta, he is–in the eyes of too many willfully blind folk–the ultimate Alpha Male. Sexual attractiveness and financial status have little to do with it, of course, for even the most pathetic white “incel” (involuntary celibate, for those not familiar with this kind of talk) is still “Alpha” socially, politically, and economically. All he needs to do is stop feeling sorry for himself. For at the end of the day, this self-emasculated “incel” is still white.
He can walk the streets of his own neighborhood without fear of being pulled over by cops. He sit down inside a goddamned Cracker Barrel–this, assuming that it’s actually worth the time to even go to a Cracker Barrel–and not be forced out. He can use the esteemed crappers of Starbucks or Denny’s and not face the prospect of arrest. What–him worry? Worry about what? Even when everybody puts him down, even when non-white males insult and ridicule him, call him “honky,” etc., the “honky” laughs inside because he knows that his social “inferiors” are simply letting off steam before returning to their proper place, to pick his cotton, shine his shoes and suck his wiener.
Being called a “honky” won’t lead to him losing his position at the top of the totem pole. His throne is safe for now. He is still worshiped–or has the illusion of being worshiped–in China, India and South America, even if he is a fat, toothless old git. She is still worshiped (or thinks she is) in Kenya, Morocco, Jamaica even if she is a fat, stinky pile of rotting flesh. After all they’re white and white means money. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of the world’s people like them–on the contrary, most of the world hates them, but since they have money, power, prestige, all the trappings of the Great White (Western) Aristocracy they are far more inclined to get a pass for their honkyshines.°
*
So, now we know. The truth of it all is unbearable, insupportable. That is: in a white kakistocracy there simply is no Equality, no Liberty and Justice for All; it’s just idle talk. But there are hierarchies within hierarchies, and the Kakistocracy is no exception. It has never been enough within White Society merely to just be white: this is only true in opposition to those who aren’t white! Left to their own devices, the Europeans simply revert back to their age-old feudal/ethnic hatreds of each other. (The entire history of Germany is a perfect case in point.)
The lower end of the settler’s aristocracy shoulders the upper end. This lower end is still somewhat bourgeois, right down to the lowliest hick in an Appalachian trailer park. But the hick is pissed off because he finds that the weight he carries is simply too much for him to handle. The hick’s ancestors came to America hoping that they, too would one day be Great White Aristocrats. It didn’t happen–not the way he had hoped.
In America, the affluent white Anglo-Saxon can afford to play at being a liberal or even a leftist. When we see this man, all smiles, cotton-candy and hamburgers, we can’t help but feel that as a member of the White Class, he is but the flip side of the resentful white ethnic with her Madonna on the front porch and Polish/Italian/Erin-go-bragh flag flapping in the breeze. One can’t help but feel that if this same Anglo-Saxon were living in some Kentucky shithole, he’d be just as bigoted as Billy Ray, or a little shit like Harley Barber (Barbera). Miss Barbera is pissed off because Big Whitey (Anglo-Saxon) never handed her ass a proper crown yet. She is all of a piece with Bubba and Billy Ray next door with their Jack Daniels and rebel flag. The white crown they wear is a tarnished, hand-me-down one–one reserved for the wops, shanty micks, white spics, polacks and redneck trailer trash.
There’s never enough room at the top in any caste system. The rank-and-file, lower-middle-classwhite man increasingly finds himself in an economically precarious situation through relentless downsizing; having to shelve his master’s degree while he hunts for a shit job at Walmart; and failing that, he faces homelessness, decades of sexual frustration and settling for the mere luxury of being white in a neoliberal Western culture that is increasingly thinning its high class ranks. And being white but somewhat disgraced (for ethnic or class reasons) the “hick” is at least given the “Liberty” of punching down on the totem pole–as New York City police officers or the Hell’s Angels. Or Dylan Roof. Or even–God forbid–a disgruntled, antisocial millionaire white supremacist like the late Stephen Paddock.
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*Re: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. We witness the birth of hardcore Western racism not in Abbasid Baghdad, or Aryan India, but the Late Roman Empire, when the Romans’ fear and hatred of outsiders reached the point of homicidal and genocidal mania. Just before the sacking of Rome by Alaric in 410 AD, the Romans had already had an obsessively inflated view of themselves as “Romans” being superior to non-Romans, but Germanic incursions into Roman borders had erased the Romans’ sense of security and well-being and threw them into panic mode. Much like today, where the descendants of both Romans and Goths cower together on Cape Europe, in horror of the “niggers” and “towelheads” below and beside them.
¹The European right loves to sling arrows at Angela Merkel, whom they imagine has gotten in bed with the fucking Ayatollah of Iran. Mind you this is the same Angela Merkel who proclaimed the multicultural experiment to be a “failure.” No shit, Sherlock. A society predicated upon upholding exclusively “White” standards as The Only Way is incapable of becoming genuinely multiracial or even socially equal. By default, anything “Black” is going to wind up in the social shitter.
²The Swedish Far Right imagines that Sweden is “dead.” No: only their idea of Sweden appears to be dead, when in fact it is quite alive. The Arabs and Africans on the bottom of Swedish society, leery of mimicking the stilted, stolid and pedantic mannerisms of the Swedish people (themselves a massive white Global Elite), instead turned inward and against each other, and ultimately against a society that judged them as trash from the start. The hegemony of Islamic extremism was simply a ready-made alternative to the antiseptic nightmare of bourgeois Swedishness. It is not, never has been and never will be representative of anything progressive or humane. But the Islamic far-right (like the Nation of Islam in the USA) was on hand for these alienated black and brown youth when the so-called “Left” was not.
³As I write this, Bill Cosby, America’s Dad, PhD and all, is on his way to prison. He will most likely die there. Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, Donald Trump and innumerable cops and old Klansmen who beat, tortured and killed “niggers” during and after the Civil Rights movement are still free.
°Sometimes the honkyshines are welcomed. There is actually a group of American Negroes who have sexualized their own self-contempt and white-worship, and have allowed white Nazis to beat them up, put them in cages and force them to eat dog food or dog-shit, holding up signs with racial slurs or swastikas on them, etc. Some of these revolting pics can be seen online. (Of course one can also see the reverse in guilt-ridden white male “cucks” who allow themselves to be raped in the ass by big black thugs, but these are really two flip sides of the same coin. Scratch a sadist and you will find a masochist, and vice versa. At bottom neither the white sex-sadists nor the white sex-masochists think they are dealing with their social equals, but with their social and biological inferiors.)
Note: I have noted the deathly silence on this blog’s activities after posting a picture and a quote from the late Romain Rolland, author of the massive roman-flevue “Jean-Christophe.” The quote was taken from the novel.
I placed the quote there for an obvious reason. Yeah, Monsieur Rolland was a white Frenchman, a good friend of Gandhi (well-known racist and flip-flopper) and Rabindrath Tagore (who wasn’t). That’s not the point. The author does not indulge in white worship either on this blog or elsewhere nor does he do it in his private life. The reason why I posted the quote is because it is entirely relevant to what people, especially black people, need to do now.
Rolland writes: “There is an age in life when we must dare to be unjust, when we must make a clean sweep of all admiration and respect got at second-hand, and deny everything truth and untruth everything which we have not of ourselves known for truth. Through education, and through everything that he sees and hears about him, a child absorbs so many lies and blind follies mixed with the essential verities of life, that the first duty of the adolescent who wishes to grow into a healthy man is to sacrifice everything.”
The point is perfectly clear. Writing from a contemporary perspective, it’s obvious that there are too many people, including far far too many black people, who get all their values, their knowledge about the world and themselves second-hand. With Afro-Americans in particular, we are still so deeply infested with this idiotic colonial mentality that some of us are even willing to pretend to our white masters that our oppression doesn’t really exist, that it’s just an illusion. Which explains why the late Stephon Clark went to his death thinking that his children (from some Vietnamese woman, whom I’m not going to talk about) were “not black,” that he himself wanted nothing whatever to do with “black.” Or why his brother Stevante was willing to put on a ridiculous coon act in front of the entire nation, to the point of landing himself in jail. It also explains why Melissa DePino, a white woman who captured the entire Starbucks flap on video, was far more willing to call the incident for what it was–blatantly racist–than the very victims themselves.
Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson sit on ABC News with their attorney, their blank faces staring back at us, carefully censoring their true feelings before the white majority audience–as if mouthing bland platitudes about “standing up” and “this is a people issue” will take the national heat off them. The heat is on them because they are black, of course. It does not matter if they have been victimized or not. Like the ridiculous Stevante Clark, both Mr. Nelson and Mr. Robinson were perfectly willing to settle for a wad of cash in exchange for their dignity. Now if either of these three were willing to take the cash and leave Trumpland, it would make perfect sense. I do not know what either Nelson or Robinson intend to do with their cash and it’s none of my business. But we all know what Stevante Clark intended to do with his because he made himself plain with his goofy-ass behavior.
Unfortunately, Stevante Clark was not the only victim of fascist police thuggery to trade in his dignity for a few pieces of tarnished gold.
Every single stupid thing that we do when it comes to dealing with the white world stems from the fact that we still see white people (and to a lesser extent other non-blacks) as our superiors. We think that no matter how horribly the planet treats us, we still must make believe that our ill-treatment really isn’t so bad. So some white guy kicked you in the ass on the metro, spat on you and called you a nigger? Well, okay. Not a big deal. In fact, maybe the white guy was just angry over something else, and was just taking it out on me. Don’t even bother to ask yourself why he chose YOU, of all people, to vent his disgust on. Don’t bother to ask yourself why much of the world thinks you’re a walking spittoon simply because you’re an African. Laugh. Smile. And above all, love.
Love is the key, isn’t it? Why, sure it is. We’ve heard that old line before. The only goddamned problem is that you never bothered to ask yourself where you got those words from. Who? Your mother? Your father? Some random book, or some friend of yours? And did you bother to ask yourself precisely what “Love” is? Is it a one-way or a two-way street? Is it conditional?
From what any damn fool can see, the “Love” we share with our white overlords clearly comes with a huge laundry list of strange clauses. The most notable clause is from the Bible. Do Unto Others As They Would Do Unto You. Well, then. How do “Others” do unto us, anyway? Ever thought about that? You read the fucking Bible and the damn thing tells you “Love Thy Neighbor.” Okay, then. Your white, Asian, Hispanic, Arab, African or self-hating American colored neighbor hates your damn guts for no good reason. This is how shit happens in the real, everyday world, sir. So what do you do, then? Do you come to this hate-filled neighbor with a love he refuses to show you, preferably with a Bible or Koran in hand? Or do you return the favor, since–as that clause itself would amply illustrate–you should Do Unto Others As They Would Do Unto You?
The other clause (and far more sinister and unspoken) is: you, negro, must love me no matter what, even if I don’t love you. Therefore your honky neighbor has a right to scrawl racist shit all over your car and you must forgive him (or her). The honky will probably get probation, but if you curse at him you might get shot on a technicality, either by the honky or by the cops (who are probably the honky’s friend). The real point I am trying to make is that everything you think you know about love, about forgiveness, about respect, about being an American or being (for that matter) “Black,” you learned it second-hand. You show America a begrudging respect (and your own folk a routine and calculated disrespect) not merely because you are afraid, but because it has been drummed into your head from birth that you belong at the tail end of the bread line because of your ethnicity and color, democracy be damned. Yet at the same token it’s also been drummed into your head that this is your country and that this is a democracy and that you are an integral part of it. So, then–why the fuck do you think belong at the end of the national bread line? And if you are at the end of the fucking bread line, getting everybody’s leftovers every passing decade, why do you still call it a “democracy?” Something is clearly wrong here, but what do you think of all that?
Deep down, you (Afro-American) think you are at fault for all the bad things that are happening in the world. Never mind that you don’t have a goddamned stake in running things, and NO, it’s not because you’re “inferior”–whatever the fuck that means. After all there is a thin line between a man who thinks himself to be inferior (and acts the part out of some sick Pavlovian syndrome) and a man who actually is inferior and thinks himself to be superior–not because the inferior man is genetically deficient or lacks the necessary melanin to build a Great Pyramid, but because this inferior man’s inflated sense of white self makes him feel that his color alone is enough to make him feel superior. Had this superior white man walked in your shoes for a single month (much less a lifetime) you can rest assured his high IQ score would plummet by several dozen points after the first week.
The whole country right now is screeching like drunken magpies about arch-rapist Bill Cosby, while forgetting that their President Sideswipe is pushing humanity towards World War Three. If you ask me, I’d rather have Quaaludes in my coffee and fingers in my crotch than global radiation poisoning. (We only have one planet, after all.) That’s not to say that Cosby is a saint. Bill Cosby is simply the by-product of the same decadent, money-grubbing, hypocritical, neoliberal, capitalist, bourgeois culture that spawned Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Roy Moore and the rest of them. That culture is completely antithetical to all true moral values, all sense of right and wrong, everything beautiful, everything positive, and anything even remotely natural and healthy.
Yet you abide by the fake values of this culture and even pledge love for the promoters of this shitty culture without even thinking about it. You go to a Starbucks or a Denny’s or a Cracker Barrel with the intent of eating or drinking their shitty, chemically saturated food. Okay, you dig this funky “food.” You have every right in the world to eat there and to challenge to any degree those who would insist that you have no right to eat at Cracker Barrel, or Denny’s, or Starbucks–the police included. But your eating there puts money back into the pockets of the same schmucks who are kicking your ass, while at the same time, very slowly ruining your health.
There is something very childish about this kind of behavior. It’s typically American, and black Americans are definitely no exception. The average American spends his entire life in some painfully protracted adolescence, blindly believing everything he has been taught and living what James Baldwin has called “the unexamined life”–a life which, he hastened to add, was not worth living. I’m assuming that your average Afro-American is equally adolescent, if in his head if not in his body. You have millions of black men who have prioritized a cheap piece of ass over everything in the world because they imagine that some oozing vagina (or asshole) will make up for their basic lack of manhood–and millions of black women who imagine a blonde weave will give them the womanhood they never had. And why?
Virtually none of them can think for themselves. Very, very few of them will stand back from the chaos that is their society and say, “I won’t accept it.” It’s not enough for an individual rejection of the American insanity; there must be a collective effort to reject the insanity. But whether this rejection will actually take place within Black America is another question entirely.
The following is neither a screed against nor a puff-piece for the movie. In fact, I haven’t seen it yet. I guess I am obliged to eventually go see and find out what the hoopla is all about. But the trailers I’ve seen so far on YouTube leave me somewhat disconcerted. The whole feudalistic jungle shtick, with grass skirts, spears, plate lips and all, was something to be expected from Disney/Marvel. I can’t really say at this point if Black Panther is simply a far more sophisticated and nuanced take on Jungle Jitters (a notorious Warner Brothers cartoon from 1938 full of grass-skirted and plate-lipped jungle-bunnies), or an Afro-futurist signifying on the racist “Noble Savage” trope. Whatever the case, Black viewers flocking in droves to the theaters are anything but offended.
Director Ryan Coogler has hit pay dirt. Another Official Black First. Chalk it up on the board. Black Panther has confounded all the negative expectations of naysayers (mostly non-black, and generally white) who assumed that “the first big-budget superhero movie with a black lead, predominantly black cast and a black director” would be a box-office flop. It has been just the opposite. So far this film has earned close to a billion dollars at the box-office worldwide, trumping Wonder Woman (in North America), X-Men, Suicide Squad and Star Trek.
To be entirely fair to the Black moviegoer, he or she would rather see a film in which they are in control of their lives, solidly in their own spaces, technologically advanced rather than the usual cliches of poverty, mud-huts, ghettos, drugs, prostitution or the flip side of the same stereotyped coin, ill-gained wealth manifesting itself in flashy cars, McMansions, diamonds and silk, pearls, oversized jackets and gold chains and gold grills. Wakanda is wealthy and technologically far in advance of any other civilization in the world, and even though it’s a total fantasy, provided by Marvel through a hired Black token director, at least the fantasy feels good–if only for 90 minutes.
In the make-believe world of Wakanda, the Afro-American can momentarily picture himself in a world where he or she can be strong, black, beautiful and undiluted with whiteness, with all the futuristic trappings and advanced technology that European civilization never heard of. In this CGI fantasy Black can be Black without Whitey dictating the terms.¹However, there seems to be a problem. The sensibility of Black Panther appears to derive much from Afro-futurism, a concept that (according to Patrick Gathara of the Washington Post) “cannot engage with (Africans) as human beings but, like the white and Chinese worlds, only as props for its own struggles and self-aggrandizement.” Afro-futurism is an engaging school of thought, but the very suggestion that Africans cut out for the stars–rather than engage our enemies down here on Earth–sounds like an ideological cop-out, another way of refusing to deal with an uncompromisingly ugly reality. Wakanda is an Afro-futurist’s wet dream, but it is also a feudalistic nation of greedy elites living in isolation from the rest of “Shithole Africa,” a nation “with the most advanced tech and weapons in the world” that, nonetheless, “has no thinkers to develop systems of transitioning rulership that do not involve lethal combat or coup d’etat.”² Not that Black audiences give a damn, however: they are dancing in the aisles in dashikis as I write this.
Naturally this last fact alone got the alt-Reich hopping mad. Ben Shapiro, the alt-right’s Uncle Tomsky, spluttered in his squeaky cartoon voice that “nobody’s ever gone to see a Captain America movie and said, ‘wow, look, a movie with a white hero! I’m so excited! He’s white!’ Nobody does that in America.” Well, Ben, that’s because white Americans don’t have to do that–it’s taken for granted that their screen heroes are going to be white by default. It’s taken for granted that when some scruffy “negro” appears on screen in saggy pants and with grills in his dirty mouth, he becomes the standard by which every “negro” the world over should be judged by. This does not happen with white Americans, Benny–not even Jews. Over 80% of American movies are entirely white-oriented. That should be a fucking no-brainer. But you know there’s no point in discussing anything intelligently with the American far right. They are so anti-African that they are uneasy with the very idea that an African can actually dream of a better world, much less fight for one in real time.
But that’s just the problem I have with this whole Black Panther phenomenon: it’s yet another instance of Afro-Americans opting for Escapist politics over substantive change.
“It won’t be too long before the director cuts the scene”
When I see this latest box-office smash I can’t help but be reminded that once again, Black American history–to use that old cliche–is repeating itself. It repeats itself for the simple fact that those doing the repeating of history clearly never learned a damn thing from it. We went through this cinematic escapist foolishness before on at least two occasions: once in the early Seventies (Sweetback and Shaft) and again in the late Eighties to early Nineties (Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X). What I’m saying has nothing whatever to do with the quality of either of these films. Like I said, we are not learning from history because we simply don’t like to stand back and analyze anything–let alone ourselves and our situation in the world.
Culturally, we are living in a very sad time. It has become expected of Afro-Americans to pantomime the most idiotic and puerile stereotypes that non-blacks have of us–as if our very identity as Afro-Americans is predicated upon being, in a nutshell, primitive, bestial and inferior. This collective neurosis is not new, of course–there’s simply far more of it than there ever has been in the past. Outside of Wakanda many of us can barely relate to each other as human beings. It should be no secret why this is so. When one is constantly tapering his personality to dimensions acceptable to his persecutors, you can barely look your own brother in the eye because deep down, you know that you have failed morally–you have failed to confront your own persecutor, you have failed to challenge his twisted system of reality; you have repeatedly failed to achieve what you set out to do and what you know, in your heart of hearts, is the right thing to do. As Afro-Americans, we have not only continued to fail in challenging white reality, but worse still we persistently–by our own confused, emotional, childish blundering–reinforce the very racist juggernaut we set out to destroy. How else can one explain the absurdity of the Umar Johnson debacle, the Tariq Nasheed-Boyce Watkins fracas, or the sudden emergence of this new Hotep minstrel show?
There may actually be thousands of unknown, struggling black filmmakers toiling away with enough power of expression to turn the entire cinematic world upside down. But who would be willing to represent such artists, where would they obtain the money to make their films and, assuming they got these films distributed and in theaters, who in the United States–least of all in Afro-America–would be willing to watch such films?
One would have to wonder if Black Panther really represents a step forward for Afro-American cinema, in which case (naturally) we would not need to wonder too much about the matter. In fact, the thing that has escaped most observers about the Black Panther phenomenon is that, in reality–and this especially concerns independent Black film makers–it is a step down. And not because of White Hollywood–after all, White Hollywood is what it is, and generally has made it perfectly clear as to what it thinks about Afro-Americans up till now. No. Black Panther’s success sent a clear message to Afro-American indie film-makers that if you want a smash hit, you’d better create something else other than a realistic, thought-provoking and nuanced film about Africans and Afro-American life; you’d better stick to escapism and fantasy. Forget about Art, forget about Truth, forget about Knowledge. Forget about Reality. Black audiences aren’t fucking interested in seeing these things.
Just ask Charles Burnett, or Haile Gerima, or even Nate Parker. Killer of Sheep, Bush Mama, Birth of a Nation and other such films barely raised eyebrows because those same Black eyes were too busy grooving on Shaft, Pam Grier’s panties, or lost in the CGI jungles of Wakanda. Black Americans put their money into Marvel and other capitalist ventures because frankly, this is where their hearts lay. They certainly think American, contrary to what they might feel about their position in American society. Their hearts do not lay in building their own things; they want what Uncle Sam has, even if what Sammy has may not be worth a damn. They are not interested in cultural or any other revolution; they were not interested in it 80 years ago, 50 years ago, nor 25 years ago and definitely not now. It’s not because Blacks have any particular love for it, or even so much because they are afraid of the ultimate showdown between themselves and White Supremacy. Black Americans are disinterested in confronting White Supremacy because–up till now–it has been extremely difficult for them to imagine living under a system in which they aren’t having their every breath monitored. And why would they? They have hardly known anything else!!
All this talk about “liberation,” “revolution,” “independence” and all this crap is really just abstract bullshit to the average Afro-American. He may agree with it, but how do you really picture all this in concrete terms? What does “liberation” really look like, anyway? What does a truly independent Black nation look like–one that is not dependent, in any way, shape or form, on either Europe, America, the so-called “Middle East” or China?Eight generations of living (for better or for worse) under the iron heel of a European-settler regime has virtually wiped out any idea of what that might be like for the Afro-American. This fact alone explains the smashing success that Black Panther has had with Black audiences in the United States.
In the average African American mind group therapy, or an individual desire to blow off steam to survive the grueling and humiliating grind of living under a white-dominated society gets confused for revolutionary thought. Those of us who ARE serious about revolution wind up in prison, the insane asylum, six feet under or worse. Or, they go into exile in China, Algeria or Cuba. Black Americans are so happy merely to be recognized, merely to be seen by a society that pretends they only exist as a cheap stereotype, that when crumbs in the form of a Disney film (Disney, another corporation that pretended for decades that Black people didn’t exist) are tossed their way, Black Americans savor each crumb as if they were individual pearls.
Yeah, it’s true: Black Panther ain’t really your life. It ain’t nothin’ but another movie. It’s a great movie–so I’ve heard. And if you want to see this film then damn it, just see the film. There’s nothing wrong with 90 minutes of good, clean fun. But for Christ’s sake, do you have to boogaloo in the fucking aisles or wear dashikis to see it, in the meantime?
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NOTES
¹“(T)he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,” DuBois wrote in 1897–“A world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
²Patrick Gathara, “Black Panther Offers a Regressive, Neocolonial Vision of Africa,” Washington Post, February 26, 2018
Concerning Ragtime, composer William Bolcom has said that “the classic music style of any given culture is the one that defines its basic language in a form that that culture can naturally accept as its own.” This is not only true for ragtime, but also the blues, the shouts and the spirituals and, of course, Native American music. Everything else is essentially from outside the country; however this does not mean that “everything else” is to be disregarded and rejected.
Of course, expressing a full range of emotions in music–having access to a complete palate of music colors and tonal shadings–is what makes a music great. It’s what makes it human. The music can be mystical and ethereal, or light and airy and in pastel shadings. Or in deep, dark, heavy oil colors, or somewhere in between.
The term “Funk” is just like “jazz,” like “ragtime” itself, or like “swing,” a cheap name slapped on a form of expression in order to sell it. Before the early sixties “Funky” meant filthy, low-down, smelly, degenerate. The word was rehabilitated by “funky soul” jazz musicians ca. 1960 (mostly from middle-class backgrounds) and by James Brown, whose music, coincidentally, drew heavily not only on gospel and postwar urban blues but also on swing and early jazz. James Brown’s music was multilayered and multifaceted, though certainly not on the same level as Thelonious Monk or Duke Ellington.
Many who were touched by his music only heard the funk element and nothing else. In fact most popular black music after 1970 (and certainly after 1980) had become increasingly narrow in its range of emotional expression. It became increasingly slick, sterile, superficial and repetitious, frequently even mindless. Today “funk” (besides homicidal rage) has become the only element in “black music” that one generally picks up on when one listens to it, and it is not even good “funk”–it’s worse than the corny pseudo-funk of vintage porn clips of Seka and Long Dong Silver.
Why the obsession with just this one (watered-down) ingredient? Because it’s easy, number one. It’s easy to fake. Of course, you can’t fake the funk, but untold millions of listeners these days can’t tell the difference between Hersal Thomas, George Clinton and rapper DMX. Millions of listeners these days would prefer DMX because in their minds (regardless of their racial, ethnic, or national background) he represents “authentic black music.” DMX could not even play his own skin-flute but such is the power of multinational corporate persuasion, most listeners don’t give two shits; their minds have already been made up concerning “authentic black music.”
To pop-culture squares, both DMX, Tupac and their ilk are “acceptably” black. To the Afro-Futurists and Afro-Surrealists Sun Ra is acceptably black because the Dionysian element in his music appeals to their rococo sensibilities, forgetting that Sun Ra himself scoffed at the very idea of people needing more freedom. “People need more discipline,” he said.
In reality, Sun Ra was a bit of a reactionary. He was lukewarm (to say the least) about Black Power and even about the Civil Rights struggle that preceded it. There is evidence that he was in fact a Republican or that his political sympathies lay in that region. (He was from Birmingham, after all.) As an anti-authoritarian leftist I realize that discipline is important but truthfully, people need to learn how to walk that tightrope between freedom and discipline, and not just in art.
Count Basie, Anthony Braxton, Duke Ellington is “stuff white people like.” And if white people like it, it isn’t “black” anymore. “The brothers ain’t into it,” people (mostly black themselves) will say. And the dutifully cowed black listener will listen to Florence Price or James Scott or Julius Eastman in private, lest his black peers label him a “coon” or a “honky.”
“Authentic black music,” “real” black music (in the minds of most listeners) must always be limited in its range of expression, always stuck in the night club, no matter where it finds itself. Even in Carnegie Hall or the Berlin Philharmonie, “real black music” must always carry the stink of the fucking night club, the cathouse, the strip joint, across the railroad tracks in Funky Butt Hall or the Bucket of Blood. “Funk,” even the good stuff (to be perfectly honest) impresses in the minds of those people (who wish to sell, listen to, jack off to, screw to or appropriate black music) that our music is just cheap, tawdry shit to jack off to, made by a bunch of black-faced, comic opera buffoons who are naturally happy or naturally enraged or naturally sad–all just one emotion, incapable of expressing a entire range of human emotions.
In Tha Funk, all we are left with is shit-brown, or as some ignorant coolie fuck somewhere in China called it, NIGGER-brown. People love Tha Funk because not only does it make us want to fuck, or eat, or shit, or gouge out some asshole’s nipples with a gimlet but also because it subconsciously reinforces in our minds that the niggers who made this Funk are just that–niggers.
Today’s American musician would have you think that The Funk is everything. It isn’t. The Funk always was and always will be what it is–an ingredient. When you make a fucking stew, you don’t just add hot sauce and nothing else. Who wants to eat a bowlful of hot sauce?∗
Better yet, let’s just ask the basic question: what is “funk,” anyway?
Duke Ellington described it when he placed his fingers down on a few keys and produced a dissonant chord. “That’s us,” he said. A funky chord is produced on piano by playing an F-major over a B-major note, for instance. But the trick is not to overuse it, or be so obvious with it. The Funk is something that should emerge organically.
Here in Berlin, I receive several invitations to jazz concerts and ignore the bulk of them. Usually it’s because these days, I simply don’t have the time. And when I do have the time I’m selective with whom and where I’m going to spend it. Hint: it may be at Speichers, but it won’t be at Edelweiss or the Yorckschlossen, because all I’m going to hear is the same old tired “funk.”
Very, very few musicians here are doing anything ground-breaking. It’s “nice” to see that young kids in their twenties and thirties are back into “jazz”¹ but virtually none of them have brought any new energy to the table. Whether they are mindlessly trudging their way through post-bop cliches or chug-chugging away on their banjos at various night-spots in Berlin (or Paris, New York, Amsterdam, for that matter) it all sounds the same, and it is extremely painful in the end to hear yet another tired-ass rendition of “Indiana” or “As Time Goes By.” Do we really need to hear “Indiana” again? Or, at the very least, do we need to hear it just the way Eddie Condon played it back in 1940?
The various Shout bands of the United House of Prayer have already given these so-called “jazz” musicians ample clues as to where they can take the music next–and typically, the “jazz” world has all but ignored them. When they do listen to the UHOP bands it is merely to ape their instrumental lineup (and honestly, I strongly doubt if the jazzers ever did that: the various street jazz bands one sees in urban America are just bland imitations of the worst of the New Orleans brass bands, most of which sound nasty). Very well, then: it is the jazz world’s loss.
Out of all the musicians playing today bands such as The Lively Stones have developed (over a period of four or more decades) a uniquely successful synthesis of early big-band territory jazz (think Luis Russell, Alphonso Trent, Zach Whyte, Cecil Scott’s Bright Boys, etc.) and modern gospel, neo-soul and funk harmonies. The result is some of the most emotionally powerful music currently being played in the United States. Occasionally these bands do get raggedy and repetitious, but they are rarely bad unless they go into the studio and cut commercial CDs (the shout bands have cut extremely few and nearly all of them are quite bad, compared to the almost overwhelming power they are capable of when playing on street corners.) They can roar like a herd of lions or they can be soft, sweet and gentle as lambs. At their best, their music has an almost defiant, earthy dignity, coupled with an impeccable swing that has been absent from “jazz” for untold decades. They are using a far broader palette of emotive expressions than these “jazz” circle-jerkers, who are content to run their fingers up and down their instruments as if they were masturbating rather than making music.
So-called “jazz” musicians are not obliged to keep their heads in their asses and ape Coltrane or Miles Davis for the next two thousand years. Nor are they condemned to some European-infected avant-garde oblivion by reducing the music to a series of deafening shrieks which not even dead people can tolerate. The whole postmodernist shtick of pushing the music forward to incomprehension is an obsession of French intellectuals with no ideas and even less feeling. But of course, feeling isn’t everything.
Some idiots would have us believe that so-called “black music” is all about feeling and rhythm and soul. We have been over this ground a billion times and Anthony Braxton has said it better than I can. To sum it up, the obsession with “black feeling” is implicitly reactionary, even in a revolutionary posture a la Amiri Baraka. Baraka is a writer who I greatly admire (and count as a major influence on my own writing). Yet in his many writings on this subject posited that black music was all about the soul and feeling. Yeah, fine, but what about the intellect? Sun Ra himself would have thought otherwise. Is head music only for Apollonian Europeans (who never existed, when you think about it) and the “soul music” only for Dionysiac (read: emotional and primitive) Africans? Really?
Alain Locke, writing in the 1920s, saw the matter somewhat differently:
The characteristic African art expressions are rigid, controlled, disciplined, abstract, heavily conventionalized; those of the Aframerican—free, exuberant, emotional, sentimental and human. Only by the misinterpretation of the African spirit, can one claim any emotional kinship between them—for the spirit of African expression, by and large, is disciplined, sophisticated, laconic and fatalistic. The emotional temper of the American Negro is exactly opposite. What we have thought primitive in the American Negro—his naiveté, his sentimentalism, his exuberance and his improvising spontaneity are then neither characteristically African nor to be explained as an ancestral heritage. They are the result of his peculiar experience in America and the emotional upheaval of its trials and ordeals. True, these are now very characteristic traits, and they have their artistic, and perhaps even their moral compensations; but they represent essentially the working of environmental forces rather than the outcroppingof a race psychology; they are really the acquired and not the original artistic temperament.
The whole “black soul” trope sounds suspiciously like the same crap regurgitated endlessly throughout the 20s, 30s and 40s by slumming whites who thought that Cab Calloway, Fats Waller or the Mills Blue Rhythm Band (in performance mode, that is) were perfect expressions of everything inside the Negro Soul. And we all know that the Black Man’s Soul was and is a White man’s artifact. One can’t create a revolution in the culture while adhering to self-concepts that were fashioned by people who still think that we’re monkeys.
But perhaps at a very basic level the essence of African diaspora music globally is “the same,” and the difference is in the details. Taking Locke at his word (and it seems fair that we should do so) African musical concepts are generally far more rigid than our own. So-called “African music”–to cite one example out of thousands, the music of the Wolof, or that of the Ashanti–has fixed rules. In Ashanti musical ensembles you play your part and if you must deviate you must do it within the context allotted you–otherwise, the musical spell is interrupted. You can’t just play any old goddamned thing that pops into your head and then try and blend it in with the rest.
Of course, such a thing might be entirely possible in New Afrikan music providing one has an intuitive understanding of what is being played. Freedom–but within discipline. Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison said as much concerning real Swing music, which, ironically (because many critics, including Baraka, condemned it as whitified, commercialized and bourgeois–and much of it was, truthfully), comes far closer to the African musical aesthetic than free jazz. So does the music of King Oliver, as well as James Brown. Both were known to be iron-fisted disciplinarians in rehearsals.
The African music is a classical one, like the European, the Asian, the Middle Eastern, or South American. The African American music has a classical side, too, but it is persistently overlooked, largely because it doesn’t really sell. Nobody is really going to buy Leon Bates, Orbert Davis, Reginald Robinson, John Reed-Torres or the Fisk University Jubilee Singers to the degree in which they’ll gleefully gobble up Jay Z’s simple-minded “Story of O.J.” Because the sad truth is that your average African American’s tastes in music are generally just as vulgar, just as tawdry and frivolous as your average white Yank. And that’s because your average African American is just that–a Yank.
Naturally, all of this has to change. Our new music can no longer confine itself mentally to dingy nightclubs and to The Street. We can’t keep on putting out frivolity and trashy, tasteless, corny shit because “everyone is into it,” or because it pays well. Today’s pop music is even worse than the cheesiest disco, worse than 80s synth-driven, obnoxious coked-up New Wave trash. To create the New Music, one has to find the aesthetic strains that bind together the low (so-called “pop”) and the high. Whatever has value in pop music, one can use it and throw the rest in the trash can. Whatever has value in neo-soul, one can use it; whatever sounds that can blend in harmoniously with the new musical stew, it can go in. Otherwise, keep it out.
No audience for the New Music? Find the fucking audience. Forty years ago very very few people wanted to hear Hip Hop. One hundred and thirty years ago ragtime was unknown outside of cheap saloons and bordellos. Today ragtime is our basic musical language and one can’t find a patch of earth on the planet in which hip-hop, the retarded great-great-grandbaby of ragtime, isn’t being blasted from an iPhone.
Yes, that’s right. Hip-hop is essentially ragtime syncopation with words and not notes. John Legend’s “Where Did My Baby Go,” which was enormously popular, is essentially a ragtime song with the rhythm shifted to a “Latin” beat. In fact, it sounds almost as if it had been written partly by Louis Chauvin, Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. You can’t hear this unless you play it stride style on a piano.
The New Music has to be somewhat nationalistic. I hate to say “nationalistic,” but at this point in time we need nationalism in our culture to beat back the fog of a fake neoliberal “multiculturalism,” as well as the fog of pseudo-nationalist “identitarian” racism. We need African American nationalism in the New Music in the same way that Chopin put Polish nationalism (by way of mazurkas and polonaises) in his “New Music.” The aim of Chopin and other European musical nationalists was to break the stifling mold of an increasingly bland, characterless pan-European Classicism in music, in which the folk melodies of oppressed nations such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc., etc. were almost completely absent. The “Classical” music of Europe reflected the bloated faces and rococo sensibilities of the Hapsburgs, not those of the various peoples under the Hapsburg heel. One anonymous listener made an interesting comment concerning Chopin’s Grand Polonaise: he said that the piece was a conscious expression of the Polish people’s struggle for freedom. I agree.
Our New Music must reflect our own folk sounds and anything else we can incorporate into the Music that gels with the basic folk sounds. The Music must reflect the struggle to liberate ourselves under the dead weight of a fake corporate “international” sound designed to put people to sleep under a fucking ecstasy haze. This pseudo-music we should seek to destroy is the soundtrack of hipsters and the bullshit neoliberal/neofascist/alt-right pseudo-democracy they thrive in like weeds.
And when we make our music, we do it right. Not in a stupid, heavy-handed Commie way, or in a brutalist fascist manner, but in our new classical manner. Classical doesn’t mean wearing a tuxedo and picking up a fucking violin. That is not our classical form. If you don’t like the old “classical” forms then create new ones. You can even utilize Rap, too, but be prepared to shatter every single definition and rule as to what Rap is supposed to sound like. Rap is a painfully limited art form; it doesn’t express much more than junior high school machismo. It’s like a squirt of jism–once it’s out there, that’s that. Even their politics are suspect because of their lousy self-presentation: when Snoop Dogg shits on Donald Dumb-ass, he does it in the same old tired way–as a clownish, comic-opera negro. When Eminem shits on the Orange Honky he is no different: a hip, violent Al Jolson sans blackface.
Snoop Dogg wants to Make America Crip Again. I say: a curse on both your houses–the White House and the Hip Hop House. The Hip Hop House is obsessed with cocaine, money and fat white women. The White House is obsessed with power. Both are dead set upon keeping Black American Music in the lowest and most obscene state imaginable. In their empty heads the minstrel stage is the end-goal for our music; after that, the gas chambers and firing squads will be activated. Even when their “rap” is allegedly radical it still makes the Afro-American look like an ignorant savage. We don’t need this. Get Afro-classical; get back to the roots.
*
∗It is not enough to simply sit around talking about how much Rap stinks, or that The Funk is just simple-minded, repetitive droning on one fucking chord, with no real feeling (one can’t fake real funk, you either get it or you don’t. If you don’t get it, don’t play it: play Chopin instead.
(On second thought, don’t play him, either. Or Beethoven. Because in both of these players there is a discernible “proto-funk” or better yet, borderline-funk sensibility: listen to Grosse Fuge by Beethoven or Nocturne in F-Sharp by Chopin. And definitely leave Scriabin’s Vers La Flamme alone.)
¹It was fascinating for awhile to see millennials getting back into jazz, even traditional jazz. Anthony Braxton might see it otherwise, as concomitant with political reaction. The truth is a bit trickier than that. Yes, the return of swing music in the 1990s heralded the disasters of the Bush Regime and worse things to come, and to be honest, not a single one of these goofy bands was playing anything close to what real swing music was; none of them possessed the true musical sensibilities that made the best so-called “big band” music, such as that charted by Don Redman, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Eddie Sauter, Jimmy Mundy, Melvin “Sy” Oliver, Patrick “Spike” Hughes, Eddie Durham and many others. None of them possessed the musical skills necessary to tackle a difficult piece like “Chant of the Weed” or Coleman Hawkins’ atonal “Queer Notions.” “Stop Kidding,” a notoriously intricate John Nesbit arrangement written in 1928, would be completely beyond the powers of the overwhelming majority of today’s so-called “big bands.”
A Black Writer in Berlin 