Professor Kim recounts with some excruciatingly painful detail bombing of MOVE and the birth by fire of crusader Mumia Abu Jamal. What she doesn't do is give me a reason to let my heart bleed. Maybe I'm just not charitable, or maybe I am authentically pride of my blackness for orthogonal reasons.
I happen to be one of those individuals who, pretty much from day one, thought Mumia was a dumbass. There are some people who think that to be truly free as the white man, you have to be as free as the white man has been to take life. And so their appreciation of Western culture has something to do with the awesome power of demolition - they are fascinated by Hitler's genocide, for example. So for anyone who picks up a little red book and is ready to quote Mao against the evils of the West, why should the life of a miserable pig matter? I have always marvelled at the balls of hardheads who felt like they were proving something by pontificating the idea of shooting back at cops. Invariably, 99% of these guys are nutjobs. What's worse is that they are intellectually incapable of pulling off anything spectacular. I mean, when it comes to anarchic sociopaths, you've got to hand it to Colin Ferguson. He killed what 6? And the Beltway Sniper, man he had the whole country on alert. But unfortunately these guys were a little bit too transparently loony for any crusading journalists like Mumia to pick up their cause as symbolic of Black Liberation Struggle. The kings of this sort of madness were, of course, David Koresh and Tim McVeigh. Honorable mention goes to Randy Weaver (Ruby Ridge), Ted Kaczinsky (the Unabomber) and Eric Rudolph (Centennial Park). Yes we hear them go boom, but are they really saying something?
Now I know that there's a Radio Raheem out there who feels put out by the idea that blackfolks don't have our own extremely dangerous killah. And certainly there have got to be some passive aggressive radical black vegans out there who desparately need to hear some news of a revolutionary vanguard based on some Afrikan values. (Please don't forget the use of the 'k', as in AmeriKKKa). So I offer MOVE as a combination of the two, even though, they apparently couldn't shoot straight. Add to the domestic discontents Hall of Fame, the showdown at Osage Avenue.
Anyone who has done any little bit of traveling in this nation understands one thing. This place is big, and there are a hell of a lot of awfully remote places. It's a bit odd that Chappelle had to go clear over to Durban, he could have gone to the Olympic Peninsula and been more isolated from the types of people that cause headaches. And so I ask the rhetorical question why is it that these fake revolutionaries who complain so much about their desire to be truly free of the Man don't head straight out to the boondocks. Because they are codependent asshats. The person who complains loudest about the amount of MSG in their diet is the same person who can't cook and always spends their last 3 dollars at the cheap Chinese joint. In otherwords, MOVE should have moved it's lame ass to the the woods and survived on their own. Perhaps they didn't have bus fare or strong enough legs to walk the distance. So like the rest of the subculture of complaint, they squatted. How refreshingly original.
The American Dream dies hard. I don't know exactly how we started the concept of 'community' as in the cliche 'give back to the community', but it sure as hell is established. We may not be glued together in the beloved community, but we sure as hell don't like the bum who doesn't mow his lawn. So it comes as no surprise that characters like John Africa ended up on his neighbor's most wanted list.
There's a place for misfits, anarchists and cults here in this country. It's somewhere between way out in left field, the sticks, the boonies and the hinterlands. So long as they stay far away from the reach of the System, then they can minimize their beef with the System. I don't quite understand why anyone should believe that people who are incapable of learning this basic lesson have anything to teach us at all. Except perhaps what it looks like to be stupid and in jail and less free than when they started making all their idiotic noise.
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