Here in Sub City life is hard.
We can't receive any government relief.
Give Mr. President my honest regards
For disregarding me.
-- Tracy Chapman
It has been a long time since I hung out with my friend Art McGee. Like a lot of the oldtimers, black homesteaders of the digital frontier, he has moved on to other pastures. He has always had a real concrete connection to the infrastructure of the domestic left agenda, think tankery and liberal concerns. It has been many years since I last saw him at the African Marketplace over at Rancho Cienega here in LA. So such distance has been placed between myself and the black grass roots, or at least what I interpret them to be having once been intimate. Now it's all vague signals from a dispersed and confused confederation of tribes - like Chuck D on Air America, somehow it doesn't fit quite right as it used to.
This morning as part of my return to a more steady diet cultural reflections I couldn't help but notice as I was writing my impressions of Tracy Chapman's Crossroads, one of the great albums of my life, that I still know all of the lyrics to Sub City, directed as they were against all things un-Left. So I wonder what portion of that sentiment remains clear in the rhetoric of those people I casually refer to as whiners, and alternately know as Obama's most passionate xxx's? How can I say so without contempt I wonder? My political passion doesn't apologize very well, it's a product of being brought up black nationalist. We didn't apologize for shit, it was part of our problem and equal part of our appeal.
For the first time in life, I watched the film Cabaret. Silly Americans. It's a good thing I didn't see it when it first came out when I was young and impressionable. I can't imagine that I could have interpreted it correctly, and yet I have the unfortunate blessing of having reworked my intellectual plumbing to feel the disgust poor Brian must have had to find himself suddenly ready to smack Sally Bowles for her abortion. Those were the romantic icons of the 70s, including what I now see as incredibly stupid women who destroyed the fragile manhood of incredibly gullible men as if reckless abandon is something from which one can easily be extracted by the sudden responsibility of family. At least they were honest, but criminy the idea that she could just sleep it off and return to work. I guess finally the the ending song didn't resonate or maybe I'll get it next week. So I'm thinking perhaps that the way they got run over, steamrolled by the Nazis was predictable those confused decadent people in their underground clubs and palatial estates. They didn't have the moral backbone to stand up.
So perhaps it has come down to CSM Mellinger and Christopher Hitchens as the final two great symbols of spine. If I would be so bold as to call Hitchens an 'American' because my adjusted sense of nationalism doesn't quite understand the proper term for men and women of Continental birth who nonetheless are wed indelibly to the cause of liberty, than these two Americans possess what so many do not. A proper contempt for the enemies of freedom and civil liberty, ready to resist - as Hitchens through Totten's telling eschewed throwing a right cross for presumably sophisticated reasons.
You see it's all about foresight. Could we see it coming? When the average Negro, in whatever state she found herself became determined to need what the loudmouth nationalists were offering, could she see it coming? When Sally Bowles danced and shocked and tried to be brave without the affection of her father, could she see it coming? When we all wished we could play unplugged and complained about working in the factory like Tracy Chapman actually never did, could we see it coming? The real threats I mean. It's easy to see in retrospect that George W. Bush never laid a finger on anybody's civil liberties though clearly through the derangement of the opposition that was all they could ever 'see'. But they couldn't see it coming, that multi-trillion dollar cave under our feet we are now freefalling through.
Nah. People only see their own bleeding fingers and not quite the futility of the wall scratching that got them that way. We ask for bandaids and gloves when we need to be doing squats, the better to leap you with my bete noir brick wall. But leaping requires spine and all we ever seem to talk about is taking to the wind and working our fingers to the bone, hearing things that shock and looking about and finding nothing worth respecting. Leaping requires faith. All we ever seem to talk about is semiotics and regimes of truth and who knew what when. Few tropes of wisdom in that pseudo-intellectual 'debate'.
There is no real subsidy for Sub City. That's because by definition, life is hard. One shouldn't expect any government relief, and the less one is noticed by those 5,000 times as powerful, loud, beautiful and willful, the better. Tracy Chapman was right about one thing, all that you have is your soul. Sally Bowles experienced the greatest tragedy imaginable, being unsure about who is the father of the baby inside her, one possibility that he is the man she seduced, one possibility that he is the man who seduced her and the other man too. Those without backbones are easily seduced. Those out looking for a subsidy are the easiest of all. That was Fritz' problem. He was so seduced by wealth that he fell into the trap of selling a self he made up in its entirety - a self in jeopardy. It takes great courage to be oneself and to grow with integrity. There is no subsidy for that.
There is a subsidy for suckers. In fact there is a Nazi party waiting in the wings of human desire, always just offstage ready to sing songs. Out of the pieholes of wholesome boys are the great stirrings of childish dreams. Give them enough votes and they'll clean up all the spineless, confused fakery that attaches itself to people looking to be seduced - to be swept up and overtaken in a rush of emotional redemption. Emotional rescue is always for sale from the proper Party. All you have to do is salute the right color flag, which is a lot easier to do, even en passant on some Lebanese street, then to remember that the mind is attached to the spine.
Sometimes you're out there alone with a real sense of what you've done right in your life. There really isn't much to it despite the fact that it's very difficult to sell that amidst the noise and media power of people selling dreams and escape.
At the bottom of this cave whose pitch black atmosphere we're currently falling through is a rebirth of freedom. When you reset your own broken legs, you'll remember what's real.
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