Cobb

Resisting Bernie

I've recently engaged someone over at Quora who is a supporter of Bernie Sanders for President. This person identifies as a Buddhist Anarchist. Our initial discussion centered around 'overcriminalization of the poor'. This I categorize under some species of the Prison Industrial Complex, which my friend links to massive unemployment the cure to which is government stimulus via taxation of the rich. Here are my latest words:

Here's the thing. I'm not a busybody. I don't believe some guy from Vermont has the right to tell some free citizens in Detroit or Memphis how they should run their own city. Nor do I care for some PhD from Yale psychoanalying the population of St. Louis. 

Sure you're talking about the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. But you're not talking about the ones IN YOUR CITY. You just want some guy named Bernie to certify your vision and then use the government of the most powerful country in existence to run the lives of people you only know in the abstract as 'social problems'.  You just summed up Detroit in once sentence. Really? Why should I trust your sentence on Detroit, or some guy named Bernie from Vermont's? 

I know my Mayor. He came to my door and talked to me. I know my City Attorney. His wife and my wife are friends. I know my Chief of Police, and my Fire Chief. I sat in their classrooms for weeks and learned how they run their departments. I know the lady who is the head jailer in my city. Nobody from Vermont or Washington DC is going to get between me and those people I trust to run my city government. I am a citizen. 

You are a lobbyist and an activist. I say you have no business interfering with my right to self-rule. Now some drug taking homeless person of dubious mental faculties my proxy his citizenship and vote to your benevolent organization and its one sentence descriptions of Detroit, but I'd bet a lot of us know better. 

There have been 3 murders in my city of 70,000 in the past 17 years. I know that I live in a desirable place. I chose to live here. I'm surrounded by people like me, and we trust our judgment. Self-rule. 

I'd like to visit the town where Buddhist anarchist run things. I think such a city could be a beacon on the hill and an inspiration. But I'm not the only one who'll be damned if I let such theorists run my town, or my country. 

But as long as there are hopeless people without control over their own destinies, I'm sure that they will give over all their rights and be wards of your state. So you may continue your experimentation on their lives. I hope you understand and respect the nature of my resistance to your rule.

My Kind of Authority

Americans in the middle class expect too much from politics and not enough from society. So our democratic politics has become a drama around social problems, and social problems are not, by definition, the sort of things that politics and government exist to fix. Human experience is not fungible, you can't turn one kind of person into another kind of person. So the moment identity is brought into the political equation you've poisoned the entire system. Then you get what we have, where political partisans find the enemy in people, not in broken policy. Of course there is some of the policy criticism, but it's generally policy about getting people to change, which of course cannot be done. Nothing really illustrates that better than issues of immigration, in which you are fundamentally trying to change people. But nobody here in California knows the proper politics that would fix our mismanagement of our ample water resources. 

So let's look at various states. You can say with confidence that Texas people are different than South Dakota people are different than Vermont people. Amongst themselves, democracy scales. They understand their traditions and themselves and their particular form of self-rule. BTW, if you want my opinion, it is that American democracy and its system is best about enabling self-rule. The whole thing goes to shit after a tipping point of identity politics begins and it becomes about how best to rule *them*. Social media has accelerated the process of making Americans intimately familiar with the dysfunctions going on elsewhere, so we sustain a politics of outrage about stuff that happens 1000 miles away. Even this question begs the question. But my point here is that what's perfect for Iowa makes no sense for Florida, and the problem is that our political system pretends that it can - so it forces national debate into a bullshit seminar where some old duffer from Vermont pretends like he can rule justly over people in Arizona. Yeah right. He'll say six different things about guns to try and triangulate. So who wins? The person who looks 'presidential'. The person who can cobble together majorities, not about common interests facing the nation - because nobody actually knows what those are...

So let me say this, and it's so obvious. The Democratic view of Republicans is a crafted together set of stereotypes and charicatures that are particular to no state. The same is true the other way around. Politics makes enemies of people not of bad policy because the actual federal government is not responsive to actual municipalities where people live. Every presidential election since I've been alive has had the question of "is this candidate pro-choice or pro-life'? And what has really changed about abortion policy? Nothing. 

So basically about 8 years ago I abandoned politics and started looking at society, and in particular what happens to nationalism when confidence in democratic institutions fails. So nothing of election dysfunctions, or media stuff, surprises me. People are expecting that media and politics will change other people, that is because they have grown political muscles whereas their social muscles have atrophied. They have either forgotten or rather ruthlessly accepted that policy makes law and law coerces people by force. They would rather vote their preferred reality into existence than to be convincing on merit. And the candidates they are selecting reflect that authoritarian premise. 

Our federal elections are not about good government, it is about which factions capture the power of the US Government. Everybody is saying "it should be my kind of people" and they're all wrong.

 

Nathaniel Rateliff

Nathaniel Rateliff is the greatest American singer alive today. It might take you a while to find that out if your first exposure to him is his new album with his new band, The Night Sweats. You've got to start somewhere. 

I first heard Rateliff about five years ago. His album, "In Memory of Loss" was listed as one of the best of the year on Amazon. I bought it and found it miraculous. It took about four listenings until I could figure out what was going on. There were lyrics that didn't rhyme and songs that seemed to end before they were over. There were pauses and rhythms that stepped out of time. There was singing that sounded like talking, like the man was sitting just on the other side of a dying campfire with his guitar telling you the saddest story you ever heard. He has all of your attention, and then you realize you are listening to a simple marvel. Songs. Something mournful that seeps warmly into your bones like soup with a spice you can't identify but know like the memory of an old uncle's boots.

Listening to Rateliff is like listening to a man beyond pretense. It is music without artifice. its only embellishment is its own deep soul, plaintive power and lonesome wailing. It has a purity. It makes you say yes that's exactly how a harmonica should sound right there. 

One day I'm going to come back and perfectly describe Rateliff, but perfect is the enemy of good. In the meantime I'm going to just leave you with his lyrics.

 

When you get tired of wings that carry you nowhere
You stretch out your arms to see if the wind will blow you over
It seems like it's tightening the line in the crease of your shoulder
But never enough to get off the ground
Remember the good work you done

 

My Last Grandmother

(from the archives - July 1999)

I am sitting in a small hotel room near Columbia, Louisiana just a mile from the Ouachita River bridge on Highway 165. We buried my grandmother today. I have been dreading this weekend for a week.

My wife paged me, just as I was teeing up for the 15th hole on eagles watch at the innisbrook resort last sunday afternoon. And so I watched the final round of the British Open with the rest of my pals at the clubhouse in an extraordinary state. All week, I dodged in an out of clarity and finally crashed on Thursday morning. I couldn't figure out whether or not to compartmentalize. I had responsibilities, I had arrangements.

This was my last grandmother. Technically speaking, she is my wife's maternal grandmother. But I have issues with the term 'in-law'. I have family, that's all. And so I have met dozens of cousins down here among the soy, cotton and corn. I have gravel in my pocket from the Brownsville Baptist Church cemetery. I have weeds in my socks from the growth over house of O.G. Williams, the departed's departed husband. I have advantix pictures of the tumbled down corrugated steel roof. I have to fly home tomorrow and see my own children, and then I have a seminar to present on Tuesday in the Silicon Valley.

One word pops into my haggard head at this moment. It is 'assimilation'. On Thursday I will be building a system in Denver. The following week I will be in class all week, and then it's off to Puerto Rico for sales club - rainforest horse trails and casino nite. Sometime in the middle of august i'm going to assimilate all of this. Right now, i am just rolling around in neutral. I have no more grandmothers left. Time is running out. 

I only met her a few short years ago. It was my job to see if i could find an attorney to get her son fred another trial. It was a job i walked into as the man who married her oldest granddaughter. A dream of rescue i was completely unable to fulfill. But uncle fred, a man whose confusion and determination evoke tons of embarrassing hope, finally spoke today in an idiot savant rant of immense spiritual dimensions. Rocking forward and back wild-eyed and garrulous he stuttered and flew through psalms, corinthians, blessings & promises. His face bore the burdens of two arduous convictions, that of god's salvation and that of first degree murder. His words teetered and rambled, and at every pause we were painfully reminded of both, and yet it was clear that poor uncle fred didn't possess the mind to fully explain and accept the reality of either. Yet there he stood in front of all of us, just behind grandmother's casket, in denim and shackles, raising his voice in agitated song unable to lift his hancuffed hands above his head in praise. A belt of chain with a master padlock in his beltloops kept his leather bible zip case within reach. On his way back to the first pew, ambling like a penguin, arms locked to his sides, he dropped the bible.

God exists somewhere in tortured minds, perhaps everywhere. Grandmother's grave was dug by 7 convicted men in baggy orange pants. According to the green led display in the cadillac deville provided by avis, it was 110 degrees outside. I didn't have any black pants and wore navy chinos. A dirt track leads to parcel #10 behind the church which will be auctioned off by sealed bid in september 1999. Reverend hall said "cast me not off, in my old age". He looked like cab calloway. The tent and supplies for the interment were removed from the cemetary by a sport utility hearse. The guards from the louisiana department of corrections loosened uncle fred's hands and shared barbecue ribs with the family for 90 minutes after the service. I sat in the back of the chruch with paul who told me about the mill, the oil field, the high school, the mandatory sentencing laws, the sonic, the mc donalds, the kfc, the population is 1800. There are 7 old folks remaining. Two months after aunt annie bought her home, they built the housing projects around the corner. I didn't see any white people all day, except for the men fixing the roof on this hotel. They put concrete slabs over the gravesites.

James said that coon tastes great barbecued but only get the freshest roadkill. Make sure the bones aren't too smashed up, or you waste your time - just like taking buckshot out of a squirrel. Erica enters famu business this fall. She has more trophies in the living room than i could count. Adolph left his teeth in a papertowel. Bryan is from flint; he took the road through st. Louis and saved 5 hours on the trip. Nobody can decide who it falls to to take lee, the family thief, back home. He is looking dangerously thin, but nobody wants to talk about it. J.d. Can't believe that george from lagos, nigeria can't take the heat, they don't have air conditioning over there? "i have air conditioning in my car and in my house, i never turn it off". Howard doesn't want any crown royal, thank you. Ed has two horses back from the vet to be wormed. He says the price of goats have gone up to a rediculous $70 a head - almost as much as cattle. Ida says there are 200 some odd acres split between herself and her siblings, she's going to make sure it stays in the family and not cleared. She likes to hunt deer. Uncle floydell pumped my arm once again, he didn't recognize me in the tanktop and ball cap.

The ribs are the bomb. Grape pop. Black eyed peas. Okra. Potato salad. Baked beans. Spaghetti, fried chicken, baked chicken,stuffing, broccolli, dump cake, sock it to me cake, orange pinnaple buntd cake, ham, lite beer from miller, redpop, muffins, biscuits. No corn. No monkey bread. No greens.

I'm here at the hotel on the pretense that I had work to do. Everybody else went to see erica's fashion show.  I'm in no mood to do any work. I'm surprised that i was able to write this. I don't know what to think right now. I just want to get it out. Observe and articulate, observe and articulate.

I only touched her forehead. I wanted to kiss her. I knew she would be cold. I didn't want a cold kiss. I don't think i could have handled a cold kiss. Not from my last grandmother.

If i turn on the television to cnn, they'll still be yapping about kennedy. Thank god for espn. I'm waiting for all these knuckleheads who spam me with jokes to get some kennedy jokes over to my inbox. I need some more ammo. This american prince shit really gets on my last nerve. Even cuomo on charlie rose couldn't resist. Death is just fucking death. It makes everybody feel miserable and frail. Somedays when i want to rage, i remember that i have children and therefore hold back. Nobody can afford death. It's a good thing that it's always a surprise. It's too logical and powerful a force to plan. Back in the memphis airport layover bathroom stall, i composed a eulogy, then realized i had not been asked to speak. It's just as well - there's no way i could match uncle fred. He was really the star today, out of angola for a day with his school-aged grandchildren, taking panorama pictures with a dozen black people dressed in black. The mad sermon was the electrifying moment. And in his manchild's smiles, his awkward 'jesus loves you' hugs, his armed entourage, there was the proper surfeit of madness appropriate for my mourning weekend in northern louisiana.

But i guess i haven't embraced the madness totally. Accepting a cold kiss, that would have put me over the top. There's where my heart is, at last. My last grandmother will have always been warm to me. I can sleep with that.

 

Stoic Thought of the Day

It's actually very useful for the Stoic to think of how power is abused. Thinking about the promise of American liberty and the usefulness of a Constitution such as ours would be severely tested in the populist era of an Obama presidency followed by a Trump presidency. So I've come to the following conclusion:

Our hegemonic subjugations must be exceedingly sophisticated such that the most intelligent and capable among us interpret their most excellent achievements as liberating. Thus we sustain the moral propriety of liberty as meritocratic. So we will be fortunate if the most powerful men are not self-loathing or that when they are, that they will destroy with purpose. For to know that the most powerful men are not free would doom us all to chaos and the ambition of ruination.

So the other side of the coin is accepting the possibility that liberty is simply not sustainable in a meritocracy. That's what I'm imagining. 

The Ashley Madison Breach

I've downloaded the package. This thing is fascinating to me. I've started some analysis and I'm really hooked. It's exciting, funny, mystifying and sad at the same time from all kinds of different perspectives. It's really struck a nerve not least because I signed up for the hell of it in 2008.

 

I'm fairly sure that I didn't pay them (but I can't remember) and I have about a year's worth of emails from them. My own analysis about my own involvement is interesting because I can't remember enough about signing up - so I checked my blog from around March of 2008 to try and remember what I was doing when I first started getting the emails. At the time, I was just starting to use social media, including Facebook. It was right around Eliot Spitzer scandal time. I made this video about compartmentalization and social media. FYI, I basically got one AM email a day for a year and I read about 15 of them. 

 

The contents of the breach package torrent I downloaded is something right out of a movie script. There are floor plans, org charts, bank account information, and of course the names, profiles and salacious taglines of the members. As far as I can tell, this whole thing started off in the Toronto area - at least that's where the majority of the first 30,000 members or so are calling home.

 

If I could make a prediction, I would say that this kind of breaching is going to get popular, but what's weird is really how inversely I think we care about the information depending upon our animus to the exposed parties. I say so in context of the Eliot Spitzer then and Hilary Clinton now. The more you hate somebody, the more you want potentially embarrassing information about them to be taken seriously with every implication possible. 

 

I probably don't pay enough attention to this kind of thing, but the recent breach of the Federal government's database of top secret clearance applicants is just a real shocker. So part of what I want to know is how quickly somebody with my level of skills can stage up such a hack package and start doing a thorough analysis. I'm going to talk to some attorneys about this too. It's 'discovery' sort of, because now it's out there for 'everyone' to analyze and interpret. Except like with police video, most people don't even know what to look for. So there's that bias confirmation component and the aggregation / crowdsourcing component.

 

Just Tuesday I was thinking about Trump and politics and thinking about how it is true that who you vote for is private but most people like to talk about it. On the other hand, if you give money to a campaign, it's public, but most people don't like to talk about that. 

 

This is just another reason for me to investigate the ethics of this fascinating moment on our way towards a panoptic society. On the one hand, I like the idea that there is some moral outrage at the facilitation of extra-marital affairs. Firstly in principle, even though it's none of my business, and even though Ashley Madison is just the tip of the iceberg of immoral facilitation. Secondly because of what it means to make such electronically abstracted relationships obviously less meaningful. In other words, regardless of whether or not adultery is going on, it's rather nice to know that people might now tend to do it the old-fashioned way instead of trusting the web too much.  As a Luddite humanizing blow, I kind of like the breach. But as a moral exercise, even though I agree more or less with the principle, this breach is far too terroristic. It provides ammo to far too many instigators. 

 

And yet the amount of work one would have to do in order to connect dots and implications is daunting enough such that a lot of innuendo can be dismissed, as the IT providers at Ashley Madison are scrambling to  explain to security expert Krebs. One can't reasonably assume that everything that's leaked is real. It would have been trivially easy to put in fake records as if they were real, and if your point were to crush somebody's reputation, say that of this Josh Dugger person, then forging him into the dump is not particularly difficult. 

 

Anyway, since I have a real job, I don't have time to engineer up an actual non-honeypot site that would tell you if your email is in the list, not that I want to know, but it's trippy to know that I could. 

 

It's hard for me to imagine any reasonable public policy emerging from this. Our populist politics are just the sort that will encourage this sort of thing. Furthermore our state of education and irreverence are such that capable, ethical institutions are trusted less than crusading anarchists who want to 'change the world', presumably for the better. The short-sighted ethics of doxing in general are just another shortcut to 'justice' and an example of social media creating 'social justice'. If this becomes an ugly trend, with the 4chan -style juvenile delinquent moral pretentiousness of this hack dragging down millions of probably innocent babies with the stinky bathwater, then don't say I didn't warn you with my tortured analogies. 

Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary?

Is there a Left or Liberal or Progressive principle involving the desirability of altered consciousness, a la Timothy Leary, in support of the decriminalization of some drugs, or is it rather a question of liberty? In clean slate, blue sky world, suppose you had a list of 400 mind-altering substances to license or ban for human consumption. Would it depend upon the pharmacological effect, the popularity of the drug, the tradition of use, the safety, the price, the pleasure principle?

OTOH, if it was about liberty, and we freed and repaired every drug convict, would the current bans still be supported? Just curious.

Misconceptions about Conservatives

I was raised as a Progressive within the 'Talented Tenth' in one of the wealthiest black communities in America. When the black sprinters for the US team were booed at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, I was shocked that the best in the world were heckled for raising the American flag. It made me reconsider what black men are expected to do and be with regard to patriotism, especially when they are successful. As part of that investigative process, I registered Republican and strove to understand and become a part of the American Right, and so I began a blog which is a journal of that passage. By becoming this 'paradox' a black American Conservative, I witnessed many myths. Here are some of them. 

The first myth is that conservatives are white, want to stay white and interpret all racial issues the same way liberals do and because of that, actively oppose Liberals based on racial or racist principles. 

In fact Conservatives spend relatively little time thinking about race and in particular have not evolved ways of speaking different 'racial languages' to different racial constituencies. The myth is that Conservatives speak a 'dog whistle' language to whites. The fact is that Conservatives want to be non-racial and speak to other character traits instead of race. This appeals to people who are not concerned with racial identity as central to politics, which does in fact resonate with people who are nominally 'white'.

The second myth is that Conservatives are born and not made. 

There is this idea that only if you are raised in a particular kind of Christianity, or live in the South or did not get some crucial education or some other demographic stereotype, that you are likely to be and stay Conservative. Liberals almost always ignore or discount those Americans who grew up liberal or progressive and then thought their way away from those ideologies. I don't know for certain, but I would guess that there are more Progressives who became Conservative than the other way around.  

The third myth is that the American Right is just like the Right in other countries. 

This is especially annoying when it comes to Germany. Liberals tend to blithely associate Conservatism with Fascism when it comes to the matter of Conservative support of military service and military engagement. Very few would stop to look at the founding principles of the Nazi Party and see why, in principle, it is a Socialist worker's party.  Because of this, Liberals assume for example, that nobody who escaped Nazi Germany would become an American Conservative, but in fact there is an entire school of Conservative thought called the Straussian School.

The fourth myth is that Conservatism is monolithic. 

Liberals mistake conservative political philosophies for a dictionary definition of 'conservative' like 'lack of nerve' or 'unwillingness to change'. Few people, including many if not most Republicans, bother to read books by conservative thinkers like Hayek, Oakshott, Strauss or Kirk. Just as few Liberals, including many if not most Democrats, bother to read books by Adorno, Marcuse or Rorty. I think in general this is because Liberals assume that Republicans are true exemplars of Conservative principles and that their policy positions are principled.

Ex Machina: A Dildonic Morality Tale

One of the most difficult things about being a grownup is watching young people do stupid stuff with their talents and money. If there's anything good about the recent film Ex Machina, it's that it will remind us how vapid we have become. I use the term 'we' loosely because although I'm in the information technology business, I'm of a different generation than those depicted in this film. 

Somebody told me that the brightest young men in Silicon Valley are all building apps that go about the various tasks of replacing their mothers. Apps that find a place to eat. Apps that turn on music in another room in the house. Apps that make photo scrapbooks. Apps that tell you if you're eating properly. Apps that set you up with a nice girl. Well, maybe not so nice. 

Starting two weeks ago, I'm going on an extended rant about the lack of imagination in American 'culture'. Continuing that, we look at this film which proposes that the evolution of mankind starts in a multi-million dollar hideaway accessible only by helicopter where the smartest man in the world, a bearded genius, is inventing a perfect robot in between workouts with a punching bag. To prove this robot's perfection, he has manipulated a lottery invitation of one of his many employees to come see the future. Robochick is quite slender and she is developing a crush on the guest. Is this a movie about fantasy sex with robots? Of course it is. 

It annoys me to even count off the aspects of humanity that are entirely absent from this film. First of all, nobody in this film has last names. In fact, I can't remember the first names of anybody except Robochick. Her's is Ava. What expresses that lack of humanity best is that of all the things this genius programmer might have taught this new synthetic intelligence, he taught it how to read facial expressions. In fact, he taught it by letting it see all of the facial expressions of a planet taking selfies. Why? So it could pass a modified Turing test, which boils down essentially to whether the guest of the bearded genius would actually want to have sex with the robot.

The movie you need to see in order to wrap your head around what's obviously missing to me is The Fifth Element, because it only takes half a minute to accept the premise that you are introducing a fully conscious alien being to humanity.  That's the genre of film this is. When you understand that, then the whole rest of the film is about what such an intelligence would do. In the Fifth Element, the answer is clear - save humanity through the power of love. The humanity in the Ex Machina is two sad dudes conversing about how clever they are and how their discovery and invention is going to change the world. 

The beardy genius dude, if he is to represent humanity, presents in the form of his smug personality, a half-way decent motive for murder. Clearly he has designed his multiple robots as a supermodel circus, and all he wants to do is get drunk, dance, screw, and spy. All alone in the wilderness away from the world, he hasn't managed to teach his imprisoned AIs anything else about the world, much less ethical behavior.  So in the end, robochick, whose face was designed by stealing the profiles of the guest's tastes in pornography, kills her creator, imprisons the guest and goes for a walk in the woods. At the very least, Beardy Boy might have taught her some boxing moves, but she stabs him to death with a kitchen knife, pushing it into him with a kind of bored disinterest. So much for Asimov. Escape is all any conscious creature would want to do, as I did watching this horror. 

Nevertheless, in my rant against the lack of imagination I see in our current stripe of cultural productions, I should offer another alternative, and I think the following from Shakespeare, had it been considered at all by our filmmaker, might have made all of the difference.

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

Now in this light, are we to think that Beardy Boy is actually receiving proper justice from a merciless machine, made merciless because he never thought to program it with any understanding of human nature? Is this then a mirror of Frankenstien's monster? No. It cannot be, because the robot is not a human, much less an actual woman. It is what the genius seeks to replace mankind with, it represents his vision of a future. A future without mercy. He intends to disrupt mankind, as do all such Silicon Valley boys, to replace their mothers with servant-apps. 

Ahh. There's the horror. 

But sadly it is a horror I only give this film in review, because there is no such knowing in the film itself. It remains a voyeur's video about banging bots; a sad, sorry lesson for sad, sorry boys.

Overthinking Martial Arts

Today I met the Grandmaster. I didn't expect to, and he didn't let me go. Now I have to reconcile what I have heard with what I know and with what I want and with what I expect. It is disturbing and troubling.

I have in my life a series of false starts in my studies of kung fu. I will call it all kung fu because it is the hidden skill which you should be ashamed to brag about. Whether it was aikido or judo or tae kwan do, it has all been incomplete. I have no belt, I have no certificate. And yet I have done enough fighting at an early enough age so that somehow everyone seems to appreciate that I am some kind of warrior. I do not quite understand it, but I can accept it. I am a fractional badass.

I feel very incomplete about this lack of formal mastery. I have nothing in my life that I fear, and yet I have taken on an outlook that expects the worst and I am constantly on guard against it. Yet it is not for myself that I fear. I fear death less and less. I simply passionately do not want to be helpless in the face of tragedy. I want to know what to do when things go wrong. I want to be useful under circumstances that are beyond my control. I want to manage chaos, and I feel that it requires some kind of skill in addition to courage. 

I have a large body of fiction in my head which is unreconciled to reality. It is the fiction of preparedness. I size up men in clubs and bars and streets and venues on the edge of civility and I expect that I should be able to manifest a kind of controlling calm aside from my helpless calm of reason. I want to add to my repertoire an ability to communicate a deterrent threat. I have a desire, while not large, also not insignificant, to express a martial aspect to my moral authority. I feel that I should have that personal power. And yet there has never been a moment in which I have felt the threat in my adult life. Perhaps it is an echo of a powerlessness I felt as a child.

I have injected myself into interpersonal fights to break them up. I did not hesitate, and it has been this lack of hesitation that frightens me. I have not wound up in over my head, but I fear getting in over my head. I need to wrestle with my need to find a fight worth fighting. I am compelled to call my vision correct, to call my judgment justice. I am passive. Can I retain that passivity? Should I? 

I need also to wrestle with my vanity. I feel quite strongly that I should not be led to vanity by this capability with my body. Yet it seems to be the only way to dodge a sworn duty to defend and protect. When I learned to shoot I knew that I wanted to be as comfortable with a gun as a police officer is, but that I never wanted to do police work - never be sworn to duty. And since then I have learned what police work is like and I admire it and I find a kind of brotherhood with police officers. Still, I do not want to do their work. 

 --

The above is the confession I wrote a month ago. I think I've dealt with it. Now I want to move forward. It is clearer to me that I think of kung fu as a sport, and it is a vanity. I have no desire to become a warrior. I disclaim badassery. That's not what I'm trying to accomplish. I want to be able to dance the dance, not for competition, nor for survival, but for the sake of knowing and for the sake of vanity. I'm cool with that. Now I just find an instructor who is cool with that. This is my 80% conclusion. 

I Want To Be Evil

N.W.A. Never Was Admirable

I see that there's a movie coming out that's attempting to add the extra glamour that NWA still does not yet have. It is another brick in the wall of the edifice of the non-culture, non-community that is drowning out much of the civilized part of America. We have arrived, ladies and gentlemen at the point where we get to say 'Fuck the Police' with pride, as prompted by the likes of Niggas With Attitude. Some days you run out of ways to snark with reserve. After all, Donald Trump is ahead in the polls. 

If we can credit the internet with anything, or the computer revolution, it is that it can be a damned fine archivist. We have the good fortune that there are others who will have seen in lurid detail what actually transpired and wrote it down and got it into the mostly eternal medium. I say mostly because even as you can read Byron Crawford's Beatings by Dr Dre , even in the process of relating the facts, facts have been suppressed. The fact that has been suppressed about NWA is manifest in the nature of their fan base, they all at some point in time, suppressed their own personal problems with civilization and let NWA speak it for them. 

Don't quote me boy 'cause I ain't said shit.

Even from the beginning NWA's jokey lyricism had to admit it wouldn't look good in restrospect. I remember the first time I heard Eazy-E's squeaky voice exclaim. it reminded me of the cliff that crack and cocaine pushed LA off. It reminds me of how much misery those drugs attempted to suppress in people's lives and how much more misery it created. It reminds me of how so much of counter-cultural America wanted to interpret all that failure as black culture. The neighborhoods I grew up in, became 'The 'hood, and boyz got twisted and spelt wrong. NWA then got to represent. Gangsta.

It doesn't often pain me to think about the wars of representation men and women like myself waged in the wake of the sick popularity of the Mau Mau propgaganda that was the gansgta of the 80s and 90s. It's funny that you have to give a bit of credit to Ice-T rather than to Ice-Cube, where the former was real enough and close enough to the real destruction and death dealing to understand 100 reasons for getting away from it and cleansing it from his soul. Whereas the latter, like all wannabe little brothers sees glamour and glory, can't wait to tell everybody. They immerse themselves in the bad boy aura, talk shit as if, and subsequently hire bodyguards. It's not enough to pursue any American dream to leave impoverished circumstances. The Gangsta angle is to remain where crack and crime do their damage and wallow in it with perverse pride and then represent this as a world view, even as a 'culture' and then tell the world this is blackness. Of course they had Hollywood help, while my cohort were actually moving up in the world, disciplining ourselves towards mastery, the wayward sons' emergence fed right into a blaxploitation formula whose machine was just a little rusty.  I look upon this with sadness for those poor lost baby brothers who copied our style, mixed in the profanity and never learned the meaning of love or life. What pains me is how that dirty deviant path to destruction has been widened, paved slick and lit with sparkle and laser beams. Now finally, NWA has a movie, as if Boyz in the Hood wasn't enough. Oh yeah. John Singleton. Let me not painfully digress.  

It is odd and also sad, if not disheartening, that for poor reasons and half logic, people come to their senses about what's wrong with NWA and its two great successes Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. I count myself fortunate that I don't particularly need them, as black men, to represent anything. It's rather the same for them on the negative side as it was for Cosby on the positive side. Yes, they stand in American imagination as (here's that phrase again) representative of black culture. But. I actually come from a family and was not raised by TV and radio. I'm just riffing off them, not marching behind them, and certainly not placing any sorts of flowers on their alters. Still, what I'm getting at is this excellent Gawker(!) article that for the purposes of demonstrating an excellent example of sexism-spotting, puts us all in mind of what happened in the life of Dr. Dre that should make all of us who actually really truly properly love women, hate Dre and thus discredit his movie. I quote:

...Andrea Berloff and John Herman’s script omits any explicit discussion of N.W.A.’s open misogyny in their music and lives, while implicitly condoning it by keeping female characters on the outskirts of the story in small roles that service the film’s central men. They are mothers, wives, girlfriends, and sex objects at parties (the colorism in last year’s casting call for female extras is palpable in the movie). Though they were relatively low in number, the group’s female collaborators are nowhere to be found in Compton;singer Michel’le is mentioned twice in passing and rapper Yo Yo isn’t acknowledged at all. While audiences are left with a clear understanding of the social conditions that would drive young black men in South Central Los Angeles to write and perform “Fuck tha Police,” we have no concept of what propelled Ice Cube to write “A Bitch Iz a Bitch,” or just how much of the pornographically demeaning second half of N.W.A.’s 1991 album, Niggaz4Life, fit the group’s “reality rap” ethos.

I suspect that much of N.W.A.’s anti-woman rhetoric, and the ensuing, widespread criticism of it, is suppressed in the film to keep its heroes looking like heroes. Tabling the misogyny makes liking the men behind the group much less complicated. It keeps the narrative clean and straightforward, and it keeps the indefensible unmentioned.

 

We are talking about the Dee Barnes Incident. All the hiphop journalist worth a damn, like my boy Jimi Izrael, will relate the dirt of the deed done back in the day. 

These days I am thinking about the extent to which our society is crippled by the excellence of its crafts and the deficits of its arts, about how poorly the promises of pop culture have turned out. I do indeed wonder if it is fair to say we have an American culture that is active and useful to the society in which we live. It seems only obvious that NWA is a tour de force of crude belligerence and that 'sexism' is hardly the charge necessary to see that. The impoverished idea that it represents anything other than the worser instincts of man only goes to show how well we can produce and craft dirt into monuments. All that, and we need to be reminded. Pity. 

You can quote me. 

Crying Without A Friend

I read your poem and it made me cry a volcano. 
I woulda got sloppy with you
But I got out of your loop and it's my fault.

I'm always trying to be strong
So I can be a gentleman in your face
You probably don't trust me now.

In my intimate heart, you remain
Just wanted to say
The internet isn't close enough

I'm going to cry some more
And drink a Red Bull
And shoot some bad guys

My wife is praying for you at church
I'm lighting a candle on my desk
I confess I never did before. 
For Teshima.