Cobb

A Rude Review of National Anthems

A few years ago I found myself comparing women singing Christmas songs. I started and I couldn't stop, not even for Celine Dion. Now I find myself listening to national anthems and I have to be judgmental.
 
Brazil
This is actually a marvelous song. I find the lyrics admirable and that music a perfect mix of martial and lyrical. 

Finland
It's smooth and sounds like it should be sung in church. I like it very much. Not bad at all.

Czeck Republic
Kind of sing-songy and romantic. It sounds like it could be the theme for a Judy Garland movie. I just see a woman in a long dress singing on top of a mountain meadow.

Sweden
No. Puts me to sleep. Something's just ineffably wrong with it. 

Portugal
Dignified for sure, in a kind of low key way. Not bad.

Korea
That's immediately sounding like a national anthem. Magnificent, florid lyrics with drama. Still, why do they have to sing the same thing three times?

Ukraine
This is one of my favorites. Just soaring dramatic and lyrics so well comported to the melody. A little weird at the end.

Chile
OK This one sounds like circus music. Ick. Stretching out simple words over long notes. Rep

Cuba
Can you say Oompa? Yuk. It just evokes a parade of strutting teenagers. Sad. Just sad.

Croatia
Romantic and prideful, understated and dignified. Lyrics about oak trees and mountains. Gotta love it. 

Netherlands
It's difficult for me to be cool with songs about blood. War I can deal with, just the word 'blood' doesn't work for me. It's a bit of a dirge this one. Dignified for sure, but a little on the churchy side. 

Brunei
I'm kind of sure I got a bad version of this. Sounds like they had too many 13 year old kids singing in it. Kind of directionless music and phrasing. 

Germany
This is actually one of the greatest anthems out there. Catchy and magnificent at once. Gets to you. I've heard a number of arrangements of this so it's probably not fair to those others I've heard only this time. 

France
Speaking of blood. France has the the most disturbing lyrics of all. It's hard to get over that. But you've got to give them a hat tip for the music. It couldn't be much of anything else but a national anthem.

India
It works. Miraculously this has India all over it. Just a droning kind of drug of a song, puts me into a trance.

Russia
The Russian national anthem is probably the greatest of them all. It just begs to be sung by masses of men and women. Swelling bosoms from left to right. Even in its quiet moments it never loses track of the victorious strains. Poetic throughout and just flat glorious. 

Japan
OK I just don't like this. It is absolutely very Japanese and has a kind of unapproachably haunting beauty, but it's a tone poem, not an anthem. 

China
Scary confidence in that choppy lyricism. Sophisticated for certain but bloody again. Yike. 

Bangladesh
After listening to the marching Chinese, the fragrance of mango groves is a welcome respite. Still, I don't get it. Very villagey sounding. 

Nepal
Wonderful. A perfect mix for a small country. 

Canada
Oh! When done right, this is bloody brilliant. Definitely in the top ten.

Italy
I hate the arrangement I'm listening to. I'm thinking there must be a version that doesn't make it sound like a circus march, but maybe not.
 
South Africa
Hard for me to be objective about this one. Like Germany, England and Russia, I've known this one for a while and hummed it often. Corny. It grows on you.

Turkey
The blood in this one is nicely sculpted. But like the language, it's quirky and unsubtle. 

Greece
Gotta love the lyrics to this one. Hard to beat. Of all the repetitive anthems, I suppose these are the least tedious. 

Azerbaijan
Why does this sound like the overture to an epic black and white movie made in 1925? Yike. Self importantly beautiful.

Spain
The most tortured lyrics ruin a song that.. well, I'd just like to hear the instrumental version. Just too monosyllabic. No flow whatsoever.

Bulgaria
Deliciously dramatic. And oh those minor keys! Mother give us manly strength. What a charmingly magnificent song. This is what a national anthem should be.

Dominican Republic
Of all the Latin nations, these guys have done it right. Booyah. Thank you. I was beginning to think Spanish was a language just incompatible with a properly lyrical anthem. 

UK
Yeah this one works. You kind of get the idea that they might have invented the very idea of a national anthem. Not that I'm biased or anything. Heh. 

US
Often misunderstood, but bloody brilliant when done right. Definitely in the top five.

Egypt
Very simple and elegant. I have a feeling that the lyrics, which I don't have, would make it suck, but the instrumental is pretty good. 

East Germany
You're not likely to hear this one anytime soon, but if you get the chance, it's gorgeous. Just wow. 

Cote D'Ivoire
A proper anthem. Straightforward, crisp and clean.

Ethiopia
Sounds just like music from a great John Ford movie. Sleepy in the middle and gets lost a bit, but recovers nicely. 

Iran
A stately march, but it doesn't go anywhere musically. Like they wanted to keep it down to the fewest notes possible. 

Iraq
Very Soviet. Holy smokes. Am I listening to the right version? I can see the warheads on parade. 

Australia
A sweet combination of modesty and pomposity. Starts off meek then punches you in the jaw. It works.

 OK that's enough. 

Say No and Walk Away

Watch the whole thing. Let the idiots fail.

Ferguson Burning

Ferguson burning is a good thing. 

They say that good fences make good neighbors. I say that anger and frustration are just like farts in the wind. Nothing political really matters until people are ready to burn things down. It makes for good dividing lines. The Ferguson mob is a lynch mob, there's no question about that. If they could get their hands on The Man, they would stone him. That's good news. It has clarity. It shows that people actually have the courage of their convictions, they are putting their money where their mouths are. We, at long last, have a proper mob.

When this shitstorm began, I wrote the following:

If the death of one man, by accident, or on purpose causes a neighborhood, community, suburb, town, ghetto or general residential district to break down civility, well I suppose you can call that person a hero by definition. His life is valued higher than law and order. Pinker has words to say on such honor codes. Essentially, they are tribal and inferior to the rule of law. But I've been saying this for years, tribal hierarchies are what people use when democratic institutions fail. Nothing at all surprising at that. What is surprising is the extent to which activists and political plotters and strategists try to co-opt the energy of tribalism and convert it back into democratic institutional power. It's really just swapping one alien committee for another. And of course the big problem is that it doesn't help the honor code or the tribe. 

A real pitchfork and torches tribe working the hierarchy is ready, and I mean defiantly, militantly ready, to stare down and shoot down the System. That's what 'by any means necessary' implies, but it always turns out in America that the means of choice is sublimation to the New Committee (which seems always ready to grant permanent seats to Jackson or Sharpton). It almost makes you miss Khalid Muhammad. But the bottom line is, misappropriation of James Baldwin's Fire Next Time notwithstanding, the tribe is going to lose.

I went on to speculate about how the protest train would rumble on in infinite circles. I was wrong. It actually got militant, and so I am pleasantly surprised for the militants. We can look forward to seeing t-shirts that say "I rioted in Ferguson and all I got was this bullet in the shoulder." Non-trivial stuff. But that badge of courage will go to a precious few in the Ferguson tribe, while the complimentary abstracted blather of the rest of the Activist Nation continues. Some props have to go to those who dug into their pockets and made this their Million Man March, went to Ferguson, picked up a torch and burned something down. 

I haven't heard of any cops getting shot yet, but I did hear a story of somebody who, brandishing a pistol, got into a car wreck and shot herself in the head. Her video said of the gun 'We're ready for Ferguson'. She gets an E for effort, and a big fat fail for effectiveness. Then again, that can be said for most tribal mobs no matter how many strip malls and car dealerships they manage to burn to ashes. 

What we need, right about now, is somebody with a rifle and a can of gasoline to stand up and heroically say "Yeah I did it, and I'd do it again" But we are not yet to that moment. Right now it's all just Anonymous black mobs of rioters and looters and cockeyed shooters and their attending media circus of armchair wannabe vanguardians. I say it should have been Michael Brown's mother, but apparently she would rather be a media star than a soldier. Understandable, but not heroic. 

When buildings are burning is the moment for true heroes to be born. We have arrived at that moment. Will it become heroic or just more mindless destruction?

Now it also must be said that a lot of people are asking if the violence is worth it. The answer is yes. But it wasn't until buildings were burning that a sufficient amount of violence has been applied to the standard bullshit rhetoric of the Hate America First contingent. What makes the haters pathetic is their pacifism which undermines the legitimacy of their wordsmithing. What makes the Ferguson mob serious is its willingness to do damage. It doesn't matter that the owner of the bakery was a black woman. What's at stake here is not race so much as justice, and more particularly the failure of democracy to serve the very human ends of the Ferguson mob. 

This is what happens when democratic institutions fail. 

It happens all the time, all around the world. There is nothing special in that, but here in America it is especially necessary to pay attention when cities are set aflame. That's when the mob gets to play from a position of power. It is the human impulse, as revered and as sacred as the mastery of fire itself. It is a Second Amendment kind of fundamental right, and it is an order of magnitude more important than the talk. It establishes the serious skin in the game for all talk to come and it erases the nonsense of the talk already farted into the wind. Here is the dividing line; the acts that pledge and risk one's life to the cause.

I doubt there will be any hero to emerge from this who can stand on principle and unite the pen and sword. Many who weren't there will try to abstract this into #BlackLivesMatter or #HandsUpDontShoot. Anybody can play the Twitter game - Catching Fire like a holiday movie meme.  In the end, it matters mostly to Ferguson and those who live thereabouts. Democracy has failed that little part of the world and they've literally burned a tattoo there. We have a genuine scorched earth reminde. Any headstones will testify permanently. I am reminded, as should we all, that when men are sufficiently provoked, they will demand justice with fire. What will they get? What have they asked for? Who can provide?

Schrödinger's Black Panther

The night that Los Angeles burned, I walked the streets of Brooklyn alone. The next day was what I called White Flight Friday. I was a young man on the way to all the answers I now possess holding but a third, and yet I had a clue. The reporter asked how long, and I said the fires will all be out next week. She gaped incredulously, I continued to march, peacefully. That was 22 years ago. I wasn't even married yet.

That Thursday night near midnight when the streets were quiet, my mind was raging. I expected to be greeted with radical handshakes on every corner but the world in my immediate proximity was silent and calm. Of everything it was possible to know, the facts conspired to leave my neighbors at peace. I knew in that moment that disruption was the exception, and normalcy was the norm. I realized that I alone in Prospect Heights chose to arrange the facts to incite me to a certain active mindset. It was perplexing and frustrating. I was angry in my raging solitude; because they didn't get it. 

They never do.

The night that Brooklyn burned, about somebody named Yankel, or was it Howard Beach, I'm sure that I was somewhere oblivious in Los Angeles. So when I got to New York and asked where the upper middle class black neighborhood was, I got stared down. I was supposed to hate Crown Heights as a black man, but I didn't share the context. When I came to rap in the local throwdowns, they saw my tie and expected me to croon. I refused the 8 Ball jacket and quickly learned how I could not have been expected to be taken seriously. 

Black orthodoxy is an echo of the blues, and I have come to believe it is stuck in a key that hasn't been transposed much in 30 years. The orchestra is maintained by a conspiracy of facts purposefully arranged to incite. I have, over the years, become adept at recognizing the signature tones of its moaning chorus. Anybody black can solo, if you hit the right notes, but there are certain soloists who are sought out over others. These days, the sounds of the imprisoned and the dead round out the top 40. We've been here before, these blues are old standards now.

I'm talking about some place in Missouri. But I wasn't there and neither were you. Nor were you in Cosby's boudoir or OJ's driveway. You weren't in Clarence's office and you weren't in Rice's elevator. You weren't in Rodney's car and you weren't on Diallo's street. You weren't in Tupac's crew or R. Kelly's video. But you wanted to be. You wouldn't want to if you had your questions answered, how to think about America from the eyes of its darker brothers. You had to have a black man question settled once and for all, sorta. You gather facts that conspire to incite, because questions demand answers and answers demand action. Such curiosity cannot kill enough cats. You have to keep asking. The cats of racial theorems are in a superposition of states. You open the Pandora's box of race and either the black cat scratches your eyes out or it's just dead. It will always be that way, so long as you keep opening the box. And you do. 

Brentwood. Rosewood. Jena. Howard Beach. Ferguson. Your eyes got scratched and you're singing the blues. What did Flip Wilson say? He loved the blues because when the record wears out, it still sounds the same. 

You know the names of the 27 victims. It's an arbitrary number, but you could figure them out because you're an American. You could write a history of Black America in 27 Victims. It's what you're supposed to know. You are supposed to get it whether you live in Los Angeles or Brooklyn. You are supposed to know there's not just a black cat in the box, but a raging black panther. And if we just left the race box open and let it out, it could bring a righteous fright to all the quiet neighborhoods, and everyone would know what it feels like to get their eyes scratched out. We could all be equally blinded and in pain. We could all know the facts that incite us to action.

I say leave the box alone. The cat is just as dead as it is dangerous. It is only the obsession with observation that endangers our vision. It is only our desire for perpetually asking painful questions that brings the pain. Do you doubt me? Then why Ferguson? Why Ferguson for more than a year? Why this moment, on this day? Because drama requires a ticking clock, a pregnant pause, a single symbol above all others to confirm one way or another, what you already know the facts conspire to incite. The soloist may or may not sing on key but the chorus continues.

It's sad that so many people in the land of the free choose to stick their noses in the racial box. I understand that questions must be answered; it's a part of growing up. Once upon a time, people got killed for a reason and we talked about the racism that was the cause. I could name names, but you already know them. Now people get killed for no reason and somehow folks decide the reason should be racial. You know, because some people are white and some people are black and sides have to be taken. That's the devolution of thought required to incite lights, camera, action!

It's quiet here in Los Angeles. I've been thinking about Lewis Hamilton today, because that's what matters in my world. No I wasn't in Abu Dhabi over the weekend, but I wanted to be. I recognize that a lot of folks are going to think of America today in terms of cat scratch blues. That's their choice. That's what they want to know. That's the box they want to stick their nose in. Of all the things it's possible to know today my curiosity leaves me calm. The facts I persue conspire to leave me at peace, because peace and quiet is what I desire.  I'm not even interested in rhetorical conflict. 

There's always somebody who argues that a black man should not desire peace, but righteous anger until.. there's a black clerk at Woolworths, a black NFL quarterback, a black cheif of police, a black Supreme Court Justice, President, two-term President, King of the Universe Until forever. A black man should always be angry, right? Never give up the Struggle. Let 'em know.  

Meh. 

A Rude Conversation About Gays & Guns

So you asked me: 

"Why would a civilian living peacefully need a semi automatic gun?"

So we're going to play a game of reason. You first need to ask me a question and then I will answer. Then we will switch. Ready? OK.

M: Ask me if I've ever been ass raped by a booty busting faggot.

Y: What?!

M: Go ahead, ask me.

Y: Have you ever been ass raped by a booty busting faggot?

M: No, my ass is just fine. Now it's my turn to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you if you have ever been shot in the ass by a maniacal gun toting vigilante. Just so. Have you ever been shot in the ass by a maniacal gun toting vigilante?

Y: No.

M: How's your ass?

Y: None of your business. 

M: Come on, say the words.

Y: My ass is just fine, asshole.

M: Now I make a statement. I say all American citizens have the Constitutional right to do what they like with their dicks, so long as my ass is just fine. 

Y: I know what you're trying to do here. There's really no parallel. Guns are designed to kill people.

M: Do you really want to get into a discussion about what the penis is designed for?

Y: I'm not going to say it.

M: Yeah well that's why I don't respect your opinions. 

Y: I'm unfriending you.

M: Please, don't let me stand in the way of your contradictions.

Y: Asshole!

 

 

 

The American Individual, Incorporated

America is an aggregated society. The American exists as an individual, but the nation has become rather indifferent to the individual and the common man. America may be too large for it to be any other way.

Earlier this week I wrote about why America works for stupid people. It may have been interpreted as Darwinist, but it is not. It identifies the inorganic, the incorporated nature of what we build in our consumer economy. We act as markets and our actions are interpreted by business enterprises which exert inordinate influence on our social lives. But our non-market actions, our political, moral and social actions, even those have been monetized and marketized.  This doesn't exactly dehumanize us, it actually distributes a great deal of arts and crafts through our society. But this marketization and corporatization of our social forces does do a bit of damage.

I view this situation primarily through the lens of what I call Aggregation. Aggregation is 'farming a greater portion of the long tail'. We are putting more people and things onto a market grid of understanding for the purposes of business. As the man in '12 Angry Men' said, we throw things up the flagpole and see who salutes. We throw things out onto the front porch to see if the cat licks it up. We build clickholes and honey pots. We bait the consumer with bright lights and big cities and convert the meaningless into markets going after disposable income. We feed him food in a box. This is an inflationary process whose key symptoms are 'bullshit jobs' and 'edutainment'. We pay people to do things that are optional in order that they might buy things that are optional, and in all that thrash we exacerbate the inequality of market-makers and market participants. 

At this point in our country's history, we have done so much of this that our private enterprise is no longer self-sustaining. The direction of private enterprise has gotten so far afield of providing the necessary ingredients for the common man into the realm of accoutrements and fashions that we collectively have become incompetent at the basics. These are outsourced industries. We graduate millions of high school kids who want to play video games and drive automobiles but have actually never seen computer source code or a drill press. The result is that the common sense of providing the basics has also fallen to the government which is compelled to tax private enterprise even more. 

The problem is the inflation which is inherent in the desire to provide a high standard of living and leisure for everyone. We cannot afford it. 

 But I see the greater damage in the rendering of the individual into a receiver of commodities, the quality and nature of which are dubious. Certainly it stands to reason that the woman who spends too much money on makeup only finds the lesser man. Surely the man who buys trophies is only fooling himself. But can we really stand to watch millions adopt such false identities as human beings? This is the dilemma of the Humanities and I'm beginning to blame them for not being up to the task of creating enough compelling materials and concepts to break through this identity crisis. 

We must find a way to rebel against the dehumanizing aspects of Aggregation firstly by leaving people be. We need to squelch crusading zealots for marginal causes while realizing champions are necessary. You cannot cure hunger in some developing nation by sending the profits of trendy shoe sales. You cannot cure debilitating diseases by solititing donations via viral videos. People have to do work. We must leverage the actual work of millions of the common man in order to accomplish that which benefits the common man. In other words, we must leave him to his own interests and not distract him with inflationary trinkets and make-work. 

The implications are that we will not have some lofty 'attainables' in society, but that which we do have will work reliably for the common man. He will benefit by being able to understand the overwhelming majority of issues that attend his own life, rather than being befuddled on an endless treadmill of university studies, or news videos about things of peripheral concern.  Americans may know how to 'change the channel', but there are literally 1000 channels of garbage. 

I am invested in survival. I expect things to crumble slowly then crash unexpectedly. My hedge is a skillset based not on paranoia or a SHTF scenario, but in the social graces required of chivalry; the human grace of noblesse amid the squallor of what befalls the common man in a system designed to fleece him. 

This covers a lot. It's where I am today. 

Because Winston Churchill

Not because Colonel Blimp. But as my father used to love to say "y'all forget".

I am in receipt of a missive from somejoint called 'CodeSwitch' which is a quite 1991 term, but y'all forget. It occurred to me that we have gone 20 years beyond the point at which there was actually something new to learn from the vanguard of multiculturalism in the Identity Wars which were really best exemplified in the very first movie I bought on DVD - Strange Days. In case you forget, which I know you do, Strange Days can be summarized like this...

A washed up ex- something or other white dude stumbles across a tape of the murder-by-cop of the world's greatest political rap star on the verge of Y2K. Except the tape is no ordinary tape, but a Vulcan mind-meld tape so that you can experience exactly what other people experience. It features pre-apocalyptic Los Angeles, complete with sleazy dangerous night club owners, plucky prostitutes, poker-face middle aged powerbroker suits, douchebag Japanese millionaires, a Gibsonian tech geek selling hot warez, a double crossing psychopathic murderer / best friend, the most fatal femme torch singer on the planet and her perky tits, and a strong black mother keeping shit real in the middle of the overflow of decadence who ultimately saves the day.

As you can imagine it was one of the greatest movies of all time. That's not the point, so much as the point is that it was done in 1995, and people are still trying to make all that vanguard identity narrative work its way like so many ear-boring beetles at the hands of Khan, into the psyche of the next generation. To wit: CodeSwitch:

NPR this mornin': 

"The straight white men of Straight White Men aren't what you might expect. Near the beginning of the new off-Broadway play, two adult brothers play a homemade, family board game, refashioned out of an old Monopoly set. Because the family is liberal and progressive, it's called "Privilege." It makes fun of their own straight-white-male privilege.

"Ah, 'excuses' card!" one of the brothers exclaims. The other reads it aloud. "What I just said wasn't racist/sexist/homophobic because I was joking," he deadpans. "Pay $50 to an LGBT organization."

The playwright, 40-year-old Young Jean Lee, is arguably one of the hottest playwrights in America right now. Her work revels in subverting stereotypes. With Straight White Men, Lee was interested in exploring a problem: What do you do when you've got privilege — and you don't want to abuse it? Lee, who is Korean-American, wanted to create straight white men on stage who think about these things.

"I know they're out there," she says. "I mean, I know them personally. Men are changing."

Lee writes about everybody. Straight white men. Native Americans. Asians. She even wrote a play actually called The Untitled Feminist Show. And in a play from 2008 called The Shipment, she did something that's hard for a nonblack writer to do. It's partly an absurdist sendup of African-American stereotypes seen over and over in movies and on TV. The first half of the play is an over-the-top compendium of cliches. Lee's process is to write plays using her cast to improvise scenes and ideas, and she developed this one with a group of five black actors.

There's also a twist in The Shipment that it would be unfair to reveal, and that captivatedNew Yorker theater critic Hilton Als.

"Black and white people were confused," he observes. "It was amazing. She was doing something very profound in terms of the ways in which we listen to 'ethnic speech' and 'regular speech.' "

Young Jean Lee writes by listening. When she started working on Straight White Men, she took advantage of being a playwright in residence at Brown University.

"I asked a roomful of women, queer people and minorities, 'What do you want straight men to do? And what do you want them to be like?' " she recalls.

Lee wrote down all of the answers. It boiled down to this: They wanted the straight white male character to sit down and shut up.

"When you hear that around the table, you just feel yourself sinking slowly into the chair," remembers James Stanley, who plays the character created from the list. The character, named Matt, is a sort of idealized straight white male. He works for a not-for-profit and is guided by a sense of trying not to — in his words — "make things worse." Lee and Stanley workshopped the character in front of the students. Who hated him.

"Hated him," Lee said, clearly still surprised. "And I realized that the reason why they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser. [Matt] is exhibiting behavior that gets attributed to people of color: not being assertive, not standing up for himself, always being in a service position."

It's an existential dilemma, Lee says. She had one of her own while working on Straight White Men in the largely white-run world of American theater.

"I can always say, 'Oh, well I'm just pursuing my own ambition, but I'm making the world a better place,' " she says. "Because now there's this Asian female playwright who can be a role model for other artists of color, and I'm helping with diversity. And so I can do whatever I want and sort of get on the good-person list. And it occurred to me as I was doing the show, and listening to people talk about straight white men — straight white men don't really have that option."

Which is not to say that playwright Young Jean Lee thinks straight white men are categorically oppressed. But she likes using theater as a tool to reveal and dismantle our perceptions — of each other and of ourselves. For her, it's a place to check complacency at the door."

I know people keep having 'existential dilemmas', especially so-called 'white males'. It's rather sad that so many people think of themselves that way, but you know we black Americans made you into that. Didn't you know or did you forget? Here let me remind you as I did in Quora recently. 

America's most powerfully dangerous minority made it race and ethnicity because we said so. But it wasn't about race and ethnicity, it was about us and what we wanted. Because the NAACP is not about 'people of color' it's about black Americans. And we won. And we dictated the terms of how people talk about race and ethnicity in America. And it's going to continue to be that way until nobody (meaning black Americans) cares any longer, about halfway through the next black President's term. 

Now there happens to be a movie called 'Fury' that's around these days and you ought to watch it because ideals are peaceful but history is violent. A lot of people stuck in their identity crises remain there because they never face danger. They don't face the do or die moment which is the only real existential crisis there is. But we managed to redefine 'existential' somewhere along the way and so inflate the idiot problem explored within the semantic and semiotic swamp that is the stuff of CodeSwitch and that there ilk. 

What am I saying? I'm saying that dudes with Node.js and VC money don't make the world a better place, fighting men do. They make it a worse place too, but the point is that they make it and there are no big fat unanswered questions about that which require a seat in a theater on Broadway where some person with an interesting identity has done the thinking for you as you are entertained during your night on the town in fashionable shoes. 

Winston Churchill. Douglas MacArthur. 

We have a couple examples of the sort of men we could aspire to, who were not merely war makers, but impressive in multiple dimensions. They were none of the characters you might meet in a Broadway play or Hollywood film, and perhaps that's why young American men these days plop so easily into the 'white male' bucket. That's all they know. Too bad.

Black Mind Control

Why diversity?

The simple fact of the matter is that during the 1950s and 60s, angry black Americans, especially those men who served in WW2, were just about fed up with foot-dragging on the Civil Rights front. And even though things were better outside the South, a lot of us had family there and we weren't going to put up with it. The threat of violent revolt in America's cities were a clear and present danger. So when black Americans negotiated Affirmative Action with Nixon, it was the kind of politics that nobody wanted to rehash. 

In other words, America's most powerfully dangerous minority made it race and ethnicity because we said so. But it wasn't about race and ethnicity, it was about us and what we wanted. Because the NAACP is not about 'people of color' it's about black Americans. And we won. And we dictated the terms of how people talk about race and ethnicity in America. And it's going to continue to be that way until nobody (meaning black Americans) cares any longer, about halfway through the next black President's term. 

Somewhere around the mid 80s, 'the Black Community' began to disintegrate as a singly focused political force. Black America itself became too large and diverse to sustain the myth of unified leadership. I would say the very end came with the deaths of the Congressional Black Caucus and of Ron Brown. But that doesn't change the fact that a new generation has tried to use the same tactics with 'multiculturalism' as blacks did with Black Power. Except, really who's going to burn down Detroit for 'diversity', the cast of Glee?

So basically we are living in the mediocre shadow of the political dynamic of a once unified black America that was so powerful that it redrew Congressional districts in every state. That power is gone, but some of the half-baked ideas and rhetoric about race and ethnicity remain. Some people worry about backlash, but just like with the actual end of Black Power, a significant enough number of black Americans really rose in competence and genuine social power, picking up the mantle of the best America we all want. And so (as we say) just like other ethnics, our struggles into the mainstream has strengthened and changed America for the better. But, you know... how the sausage was made ain't all MLK speeches, peaches and cream.

Don't expect that you can reinvent the blues or the Baptist Church or race relations just because it has been explained. We did that. It's done.

Why America is the World's Stupidest Country

It's because we make life easy and convenient. For stupid people. And we do a good job. And we have more people. So we get better at it.

Imagine a country where you don't get a chance to drive a car until you are 21 years old. And in that country there are no cars with automatic transmissions, air bags, seat belts or safety glass. There is also no collision insurance. So basically there are barriers to entry into the market for driving. Driving is a lot more risky, and failures of drivers are more catastrophic. In such a country of let's say 30 million there are only 5 million drivers. None of them are teenagers, and the fatality rate for drunk drivers is 30%

Now in America we have had automatic transmissions, airbags, seat belts and safety glass for 20 years. We license millions of teenagers. We have comprehensive auto insurance, and we crack down harder on drunk drivers. In other words, we make it easier to be a driver. You need to know less. The costs of failure are not so high. The need for skills are relatively low. It's built into the market and the culture of building cars. And the direction we are going in is to make cars even safer to the point at which they drive themselves. In doing so we drive the intelligence and skill base needed for driving even lower and lower. 

In driving, in working, in everything we have improved, we have made it easier for people to be whomever they want to be. Not conforming to high standards of skills, but towards smart consumption. That's why we have more stupid people than anywhere else - because we engineer our society's consumer economy to leverage smarter products, lower barriers to entry, greater amounts of insurance and risk mitigations. 

Now you get it. 

Do you want America to continue in this direction or not? If you do not, then you are arguing for inequality. 

The Whole Planet Is A Hostile Workplace: Get Over It

Somebody passed me an article about women in STEM.  I've been thinking about this, just a little bit, recently. But only from having been provoked by a lot of the squishy soundbites about 'women in politics' in the just-ending campaign season. Whenever somebody *looks backward* and says something to the effect that 'women should be 50% of X by now' and then they *look forward* and say X should be more women-friendly or whatever prescription they have - this is a problem. The problem is that if men and women are different, and women are historically not in X, maybe that difference is completely reasonable, and the woman-friendly prescription is bad advice. I say that is something completely different from gender discrimination.

I'm going to give an egregious example but I think it applies broadly.  If you are an engineer and you love science, then you will be called a geek. If you cannot handle being called a geek, then you are not passing the existential bar. Dealing with everything that can go wrong in X activity is what makes those people Xers. If you don't want to get beat into the gang, then you can't get into the gang. It doesn't matter that the peripheral activity is not a material requirement. There are no material requirements, there just is what is. I'm also thinking with the film 'Fury' in mind. It doesn't matter how you feel about killing Germans. When you're an allied soldier, that's your job. Do the work.

'STEM' is a neologism - a marketing effort to attract people into something good. That marketing and all the diversity balancing is not what makes an Engineer an Engineer. It is, as DeGrasse-Tyson put it, the unwavering desire to do the work above all. *Above all*. If doing the work is not worth getting called names, if the output of the hostile workplace is not worth doing the work, then you're not a worker.

Everything in life conspires towards your death. Fire never stops burning flesh. People are never not envious and slippery. The smallest sub-atomic particle works to avoid detection and control. Every chess game is zero-sum with all the pieces in plain view. These are conditions which cannot be negotiated into submission, and some not even into temporary abeyance. 

• F=MA
• W=FD
• Effort > Explanation

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Tim Scott

I don't know much about Tim Scott, but I'm not surprised that he exists. I'm glad he won. Yay. Then again, I told you so at least ten years ago.

Breaking Bad Men Black Style

Somewhere in my garage, I swear to God, is a part of an original manuscript written by Sanyika Shakur, aka Monster Kody. I got this from his wife some 20 years ago. It may or may not have been part of his jailhouse writing. Anyway, he has a very intensely held belief that the very lack of men on a straight path develops in young black men a special need to prove themselves. He cites his own experience in 'breaking' young men into gang life by giving them often their first opportunity to prove themselves to older black men. His theory, which I believe firmly, is that this is a universal constant and it is how armies have always been formed, and why gang loyalties transcend social boundaries. I cannot recall what he called this idea, but it got my attention because it was not specifically racial and he made the martial parallel.

In his context, Shakur was clear that neighborhoods became artificial constructs because no particular 'set' or gang often developed leadership long enough to establish dominion over more than several blocks. Nothing that would extend, for example, as far as the jurisdiction of a high school. Gang activity, while it might range far and wide in the city, only had loyalties of short turf distances, aggravated by the fact of civilians in the mix. That made a home set even more intensely loyal. Shakur of course attempted himself to establish his own fame to span kingdoms, but that was done through murder and intimidation rather than by diplomacy and extending loyalty. In the end, he couldn't navigate it. As I recall, the isolation of the Spanish language aided Mexican gangs in this longitude and latitude whereas black gang members only had one dimension, intense stunting criminality, to establish larger influence.

The result of the crime was, of course, an antipathy to authorities and a feeling of responsibility towards other gang members, but the community itself was split by matters of loyalty and it is this loyalty that defines what black communities become when there are gangs in it.

Anyway, I've thought about this a great deal and cannot separate my sources in my head. Much of this dynamic, I have applied to my thinking about black fraternities and football as well as my own family life (I am the oldest of four brothers and was a neighborhood 'king'). I've always carried a fair bit of skepticism about calls to black unity and matters of 'the black community' through a very clear understanding of my own family's geographical dispersion and loyalties vis a vis those sacrifices my father and uncles made specifically away from their families and towards Movement activism.

It has come as a great relief to me to be rid of my own feelings of dire responsibility for the fate of 'Black America' which has come from years of thinking my way in and out and around the sorts of relationships politics, education, culture and proximity collude among dark skinned folks in this country. Blackness is a kind of Facebook, a persistent and ubiquitous yet very weak link between millions. A Facebook community is just as real, and just as fake, as a black community. And yet it is not until one suffers greatly that the loyalty to it is established. 

I think of this actress who was recently in the news on a charge of public indecency and how her 'blackness' was deeply woven into her reaction to her detention / arrest. This particular moment had to be the most intensely felt part of her 'Struggle' experience but she had anticipated it all of her life through such weak links to 'the black community'. And it was clear that by her part in the critically acclaimed movie 'Django Unchained' that she felt politically and/or culturally aligned with black Americans is this mutual fog of 'The Struggle'. Yet it was obvious that in all of her life she never suffered any such 'breaking' as would be acceptable for the smallest black neighborhood gang. 

As I watch from a curious distance as the vacuum of the post-Civil Rights era, it becomes more transparent to me that calls for Black Unity are more desperate than ever. And yet nobody would go to the lengths that Monster Scott Kody did for the 'shorties' on his block. That basic ritual of violent 'breaking-in' and the establishment by transgressive deeds of a death-defying loyalty is missing. People in our society don't want that, and they don't need that. And yet they desire something more intimate and powerfully bonding than Facebook. That desire will go unfulfilled as will dreams of Black Nationalism. That a particular town in Missouri is not already burned to the ground shows the scope. Nobody black in America belongs that much. And after Barack Obama and his entourage leave the White House, this will become even more stunningly obvious.