Last week I purchased a self-defense instructional video, and more often than not whenever I think about buying a new car, I think about buying a new gun instead. There's something inside of me that wants to purchase a half ton safe, anchor bolt it to my garage floor and fill it with gold from my cashed out IRA. The last time I felt something like this it was in 1993. Let me explain.
I was in Boston at the time and my company was trying to get shipshape. One of the things we had to do was go ISO 9000, so I was responsible for getting my department (client server tech support) in line for certification. As part of this process, we wanted to make sure everybody loved their job and could undergo the stresses of change. So we hired a psychologist to administer a skills assessment test - a kind of Meyers-Briggs for work.
The psychologist told me confidentially that he had done profiles on black youth from post-riot Los Angeles and the kinds of things he heard scared him to death. I lent a sympathetic ear because at the time I was inclined to be one of those guys who considered Ice Cube and Chuck D to be modern prophets of doom. After all, a nation of millions of CD buyers with bad attitudes can't be all wrong. America might not be doomed, but we did have an enraged cohort who were ready to burn the mother down. Or so it seemed. I had already bought into the line that the Fire Next Time would be put out by next week, but that didn't change my view that millions were inwardly seething and they weren't all wrong.
I had done a bunch of writing about black rage in the not too distant past and so I was sensitive to those kinds of vapors in the air. I recognized how much black rage helped to define and sustain black politics. And I knew like many people of my ilk that behind much of the fist pumping on one side and the hand wringing on the other side there has always been a threat of a long hot summer of violence in the streets. It's a phrase that had not yet lost its edge back when Spike Lee was collaborating with Public Enemy and Khalid Muhammad was trying to get his Million Youth March roving the streets.
So these days when the anti-birthers gnash their teeth in fear and loathing of what might be going on in the minds of the 'baggers in these days of our first black President, well I know the feeling. But I also know better. The Fire Next Time will be put out by next week.
Ever since Living Colour and actually long before, people have looked out at America on TV and said that's not my America. And they wanted to know how to get to that land of milk and honey and Neil Simon romantic comedies. I see interesting parallels as the various parts of America consider and project their own anger and frustration across lines. The natural political reaction is paranoia. That can only be cured by crossing lines, to stop making a lot of rock and roll noise about 'their' America vs 'our' America and go out there and find it.
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The second part of this observation has to do with the nature of the expression of political paranoia in Americans. To be brief, I find that it brings one to their own roots. In my consideration of picking up self-defense and (finally) enrolling in a local Aikido dojo, I am reminded of the efforts of the Meiji Restoration to rid their country of samurai. Great reforms coming down from the capitol often disarm the citizenry. Does chaos make you want to go buy a gun? Maybe you've intuited something from history.
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