Cobb

Black Lives Denied

Some time ago I wrote My Black Life Doesn't Matter. As the machinations and shenanigans associated with BLM continue to disturb my peace, I think I have come to an appropriate way to describe it. Having come to this realization, I find it entirely consistent with my understanding of coming to grips with an identity one doesn't choose and how the Civil Rights movements of the past are so starkly and fundamentally different from what's going on today.

George Floyd has become a fungible. 

He has been press ganged into a parade of celebrity victims by a crowd of activists and their sympathizers. His actual black life has been hounded into a representational dead end. Or to use more commonly bandied about language, he has been culturally appropriated. George Floyd is not his life, he is only his death. What his life might have meant has succumbed to the public acceptance, almost unanimous, about what his death has symbolized. I too, like the family of Floyd, know what it is like to lose a family member suddenly and tragically. I know what that kind of grief and loss feels like. I have experienced this for myself, twice. What I do not know, is what it feels like to have a family member's entire life be overshadowed by a moment of infamy and then converted into an avalanche of political activism. I have not had a family member erased.

On the other hand, I familiar with the theme. Anyone who has attempted to write, as I have, as a black writer, knows how difficult it is to get your writing recognized as a legitimate and authentic representation of your lived experience. You can call this an economic injustice if that term suits you, because it is clear that the economic power of news organization and political organization and cultural production companies in any medium quite handily overwhelms the truth of any individual writer. Only the writer who is broadly published and becomes famous because of that, is relatively safe from misrepresentation. That safety is under a greater threat than ever in my memory, owing to the cowardice and volume of Cancel Culture and their blue meany alarm-clowns. As much as it is told that diverse voices are being empowered, these are only pigeonholes. They are as common and as generic as rainbow graphics and full [people of] color brochures for liberal arts colleges. Yet it is hard enough to have the actual details of life accurately portrayed in a world where racial stereotypes rule. When I moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn around the corner from Crown Heights, it was assumed that black Americans all had the same negative connotations of Jews. So I was asked to join certain protests. I never had anything but normal relations with Jews my entire life. When I moved from NY to Atlanta's largely white Cobb County suburbs, it was assumed that I would inherit all of the black culture of Fulton County, largely black. Black diversity, that phrase you never hear, is real but it is always smothered for the premises of black cultural and political unity, and by the liberal confirmation bias that assumes it. That's why it's not part of today's narrative. That's why George Floyd's dead body means so much more than his life. It can't defy the narrative. It generated a perfect storm because it was racially predestined.

When I first got on the net in the early 90s, a close friend of mine said something fundamentally profound. It was that black Americans didn't need and weren't looking for a black leader, it was white people. White people needed a black leader to speak for the masses, someone they could accept or reject and then compare the ideas of the leaders to those black Americans with whom they wished to embrace or denounce. Where do you stand on Khalid Muhammad?, we were asked. Where do you stand on Mumia? What is your opinion on Cornel West? It was as if black America lived in an hermetic universe whose bubble could only be pierced by the Fungibles who communicated with the rest of us at the Wednesday Night Meeting. At the same time, we acknowledged it was true that black Americans were looking for symbols to back up their stories of "I told you so." to anyone who doubted the reality of racism. The dynamic remains. There is a hot market for tales from the hood. I cannot tell you how many breathless inquiries I have received in the vein of "What is the most devastating racist thing that ever happened to you?". 

In this inverted world of show and tell, only the bleakest, blackest tragedies are monetized and taken up by the American elites. The short attention span theater of the mainstream media does not have the inclination, time, patience or budget to put more substantive non-fiction into their agendas, certainly nothing that defies the new conventions of multicultural political correctness that floats up from the teaming millions. The common man must be left to his own devices and of consumption, but they are not interested in their reality. If the New York Times survey says X, then the public had better believe it for its own good. All the acceptable alternatives are to be consumed by the first class citizens in the magazines that matter, mostly brought to you by Conde Nast. Perhaps I'm being cynical and shrill. I simply hate drowning in the vanilla fluff of deepest darkest horrors of the 'black lives' that matter.  Once upon a time there were celebrated men like Vernon Jordan who got to represent what America could provide to its citizens. Now the examples are the mistreated, maimed, & murdered. 

In my writing, I have dealt with just about every one of them.  Sean Bell, The Jena Six, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King, Ron Settles, Michael Zinzun, Don Jackson, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin,  Mumia Abu Jamal, Shaquanda Cotton, and many more that I don't currently have the patience to link to an appropriate post in my archives. Nevertheless I have no problem simply listing them:

• Abner Louima
• Genarlow Wilson
• Dunbar Village
• Jonny Gammage
  Tyisha Miller
• Eric Garner
• Tamir Rice
• Freddy Gray
• Philando Castile

What did they do? How did they live? It doesn't matter. They were crushed, now all we have are their ghosts haunting every newsroom, every political mention of race. They have, in the hands of the priests of the death cult of the New Anti Racists, the only blacks that matter - the dead ones. Nobody is able to celebrate black life in this narrative. It's black death that pays the bills. It's black tragedy that keeps the newsrooms buzzing. It's black dysfunction that keeps people talking and editorializing and coming up with some of the most nonsensical political ideas outside of Lilliput. This game is old, tired and wrong. 

Black Film: A Thumbnail Review

So a week ago, Amazon Prime started their "Black Lives Matter" advertising and put up a couple dozen black oriented films, offering a title called "Just Mercy" for free. (Discounted from 2.99). I cast it as a simple-minded commercial ploy but also defended it to a knucklehead who said that anyone or any institution that says "Black Lives Matter" is racist.

Last night we finally got around to watching Harriet, with my favorite young black pop star Janelle Monae, but not after running through the offerings of Prime, Netflix and Apple TV. Prior to going to Apple TV, the only standout films I noticed were Glory and A Soldier's Story.

During this time, my eldest daughter the most conservative and blackified of us, raised up something of a continuing issue for her as not having been raised in the same cultural milieu as some her other black friends. So she began checking off a list of films one of these friends explicitly gave her as representative. The included:

• The Wood
• Higher Learning
• Boyz n the Hood
• Set It Off
• Waiting to Exhale
• Rosewood
• Love & Basketball
• Juice
• Poetic Justice
• Friday
• New Jack City

With the exception of New Jack, I didn't see any of these films as worth the time and started to grumble about her friend's taste in film. But I didn't say anything. You see, the second context of this reading off of film titles was that I was trying to explain to them what a big deal Tyrese Gibson (who? they said) had been back in his day. He recently squared off against Jamie Foxx in some controversy or other on Instagram. I remember taking Gibson's side. But I was trying to explain that he was all the hotness back in the day along with Morris Chestnut, Taye Diggs and the older Denzel Washington. But I couldn't remember what the popular movie was with Chestnut. (It was The Best Man)

With that concession, I recalled a few more that I started to see on a YouTube search. That was a short list of films which is something of a unique category of black film: rom-dram. Romantic Drama, which is what I think best describes Jason's Lyric and Eve's Bayou which were two smoking hot romances I recall.

Finally we got around to checking out the collection on Apple TV. Damn, it was impressive. They had about 10 different categories of black film and there had to be at least a dozen in each category. So now just this moment I'm going to give 50, 4 and 5 star films that I think are worth anybody's time and a couple others worth seeing as canonical pop, like Coming to America and Sprung.

Fine	Black	Films
Glory	Daughters of the Dust	To Sleep With Anger
She's Gotta Have It	Malcolm X	A Soldier's Story
Killer of Sheep	Carmen Jones	Bird
Training Day	Man on Fire	Cry Freedom
Sankofa	Hustle & Flow	Akeelah & the Bee
Hoop Dreams	The Color Purple	Paris is Burning
Do The Right Thing	The Green Book	Amistad
Us	Get Out	Thelonius Monk

 

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Fun	Black	Films
Friday	Strictly Business	Drumline
Boomerang	Coming to America	A Rage in Harlem
Django Unchained	Purple Rain	Stand By Me
School Daze	Set It Off	Tales from the Hood
New Jack City	Sorry to Bother You	Crooklyn
Just Another Girl on the IRT	The Defiant Ones	Jackie Brown

While I'm at it, here are some ripe old stinkers.

• Three Brothers
• Dead Presidents
• Rosewood

I have no opinion on the following, either because I haven't seen them or I basically have no judgment

• Love & Basketball
• Love Jones
• Precious
• 12 Years a Slave
• Claudine
• Hidden Figures
• The Best Man
• The Wood
• 1 Angry Black Man
• Moonlight
• I Am Not Your Negro
• Mahogany

It also goes without saying that there are a lot of standout films starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Sam Jackson and Sidney Poitier that ought to be considered, but you already know that. Also I would also say that my favorite younger contemporary black film dudes are Harold Perrineau & Jeffrey Wright. Either of them could do my biopic. 

My Father's Superpower

My father's superpower is his ability to illuminate the inner path. Illumination of the inner path means the ability to recognize that you have a mind, a mind that is something of a garden which needs tending. You could not grow up in his house without knowing that everything 'out there' in the world is not everything there is. There were not so many things 'out there' to get as a mission in life as there were 'in here' that were rewarding.

As a child, his favorite pastime was to take a book into the woods behind his house, make himself invisible and read. As an adult he became a writer, a man of letters and corresponded with fellows in the intellectual tumult of the 1960s. He was a photographer and would spend much of his spare time going 'out there' to capture something appealing on film, and then bringing it home to appreciate 'in here'. As an older man he has gone progressively deeper into faith, with his own interpretations of how God moves in the world. Yes well, anything not inside the mind is God's business. The foolishness of God's creatures, those described in Mark 12:24, was not his concern. 

He is not interested in the affairs of mankind. Not in business. Not in politics. Not in anything on television, or anything on the radio unless it is a particular style of jazz whose practitioners are mostly deceased. He lives on his inner path. The internet? He couldn't care less. The stock market? Whatever. He cares about his family, because all of them were his idea in the first place. And he reveres his own departed parents because he was their idea. He doesn't even invite people into his own inner path, but only demands they respect him. All of his books? The seeds he planted in his own garden? He sits among them as a reminder that he actually doesn't remember. But he will only give them to his own family, because we were his idea in the first place. University libraries? Art museums? These things out there are unworthy of his inner possessions. Their demands and needs are meaningless to him.

It would seem that his one stable passion over the past two decades would be the women's shelter he regularly visits and gives flowers from the alter of St. John's Church. Few remember that this long journey began as a literacy project. Yes, and even the last time his own dear father came out to stay in Los Angeles, Bob Bowen wanted only to have him write. To share his inner world. This, alas did not happen. Raymond C Bowen was a bon vivant and wanted to enjoy the delights of a Rob Roy cocktail. He was not interested in writing memoirs. But the homeless women of the downtown Women's Centers had stories to tell. He coaxed that creativity out of them, reminded them that their inner lives were gardens to be tended. And so he helped them by illuminating their inner paths.

There was never a moment when my father did not recognize the value of thoughts. He would never fail to ask what you were reading, what you were thinking, what did the world look like from your point of view. He was full of praise for the sacraments of talent and creative expression that showed an inward commitment to the life of the mind. It was how he revered the soul of anyone.

That is where he lives. He lives there inside of us and inside of himself. And yet he is there again trapped inside of his superpower's desire to make the external subject to the internal. He is ever unable to resist herding us all together for the picture he is about to take. He is ever unable to resist hushing us for the moment of prayer. He is ever unable to resist sharing of the most simple pun. He even talks to his dogs. He never physically sits with them or pets them or teaches them tricks. But he always talks to their doggy minds.

Someday in the future when we are all dead and gone, there will be someone among our descendants who will wonder how they discovered their own inner paths. How did that light and satisfaction in their lives persist despite their crumbling surroundings? When the world has gone to shit, how do they keep a sense of humor? What is that spark that keeps them holding on. Well once upon a time, people believed no such spark existed in certain men, and they were enslaved for that. But this man, my father, had a superpower. He used it well.

Sister Night: Forgotten

The other day I heard that Trump was planning to make a speech and rally in Tulsa OK, aimed at black Americans. People were aghast, as they tend to be whenever Trump does anything. His awfulness never gets dull. My response was, Let It Be. It's not as if nobody is capable of making a redeeming statement about the race riots of 1921. HBO's recent miniseries 'Watchmen' began with that very story, and Watchmen was in my estimation, the finest story ever about a black female superhero. If my kids were still into Trick or Treating, I'm sure one of them would have chosen Sister Night.

As my father would say, "But y'all forget." People are running around the streets pretending that the harshness of their lives is a cosmic injustice deserving of dramatic acts of outrage, chaos and destruction. Of course all of the smartphones are catching this symbolism. The grafitti, the flag burning, the toppling of statues, the rants, slogans and middle fingers of disrespect. Bret Weinstein called the most coherent of the madness the unbuilding of America, but his metaphor went even one better. He spoke of zombies fighting the boogieman. Nailed it. We are witnessing an anarchist skirmish, a leaderless revolt aimed at every possible symbol of institutional racism, income inequality, police misconduct, political corruption, amoral capitalism and media misrepresentation. For most, that level of detail, less than 50 words worth is best reduced to America. They don't want to be Americans. They want to be something else, here in America that is not America. Aside from the fact that it is an unwinnable war, it is the reheating up of the Culture War that was never resolved. 

On my end of things, I see this as an undoing that has been a long time coming. My associates in the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web, or Ineffectual Dork Web if you must) see it as a crisis of rationality in which the business of sense-making is limping along like a three legged dog in a race against time. For me, I saw the Closing of the American Mind as soon as I read that book. I also saw the appeal of Multicultural Literacy. I have also witnessed its perversion and the zero sum game that it has played against the Enlightenment and Western Civilization itself. It is perfectly understandable why people in the streets feel as if they cannot breathe in America. They've been living inside hermetic caves of identity and complaint. They've been stewing in their own juices of self-regard and projection and now that stew is boiling over. 

Sister Night wears a badge. She takes on the authority and responsibility required for justice. She fights on the side of the law and assumes those powers necessary to combat evil and chaos. That such action is heroic and courageous goes without saying, but it also requires deep contemplation of the world to come. The world that would be brought into being by the work of the righteous might exist only in imaginations, nevertheless the work of the righteous must continue. Fulfillment of such ethics must be their own reward. It requires more than mere obsession, dedication and dogged determination. It must reckon with what business of ordinary life is sacrificed to the duties of keeping the peace and taking the fight to the enemy. Nobody brings their babies to the front lines. 

In those caves, it is impossible to associate justice with the wearing of the badge of American law. They cannot believe that Bass Reeves could possibly exist. They cannot conceive of a black life that raises America to justice in any formal manner in large work or small. The black in such black lives must always be associated with loss, victimization, hopelessness and thus ultimately defiant justifiable rage. The black mind, according to this trope of complaint is psychologically incapable of dealing constructively or triumphing over all of the evil white minds have created. It's a tragedy all swept under white suburban rugs according to this theory, until it's too late. It's difficult to imagine, in this view of America that the legacy of slavery has ever been, or will ever be overcome. Forget the lyrics to that old Negro spiritual. What people really mean is "We are overcome", and this false premise justifies everything.

Injustice justifies a great deal, and remedies and solutions come with requirements, budgets, schedules and sponsorships. We might hope that our political parties, indeed our government and everyone in America would make that so, but we haven't. Part of the reason is sheer blunt stupidity. Part of the reason is droopy drunk indifference. Part of the reason is deliberate enemy action. Part of it is confusion and frustration. Right now that confused and frustrated part is running around hand-waving with its hair on fire. It is overwhelmed by the suddenness and the enormity of the crises we are facing, unable to determine cause and effect, trying to do something that will get a million likes, or at the very least a sober and determined Amen. Such things are not forthcoming primarily because the adults have left the room and let the kids run the streets. This used to be the thing we could turn to someone like Warren Christopher or Thurgood Marshall with questions and expect calm well-reasoned answers. Nobody has time for that except for the writers who time forgot. Such writers wrote books like 'Another Country'. Such writers wrote poems like 'Revolutionary Dreams'. Such writers wrote plays like "Dutchman". The closest I've seen to anything like that in a medium time has not forgotten is the HBO Dramatic Series of Watchmen. From that we have such women as Angela Abar the masked police officer Sister Night. From that we have such men as Will Reeves, the masked vigilante Hooded Justice. From that we have the intergenerational connection, the continuation of a call to action, to deliberate thought, to heroic sacrifice, to the complications in the weave of life. 

Everyone who thinks they have an answer that comes in the form of a protest march has had their say. All the marching is done, and all the doing a march can do is done. There's nothing left to do once the parade has left the avenue but clean up, or on the other hand, make more of a mess. Whose Streets? Our Streets. Yeah so long as the cameras are rolling and you have someone fetching you fresh water and trail mix. So long as law enforcement and crowd control are in abeyance. Then what? 

It's somewhat surprising to see how the lessons of my generation have been lost to the lost children out there, but not if you consider how many of us are on the bench, waiting for the arthritic grip of the Boomers to finally relent. It's going to take some doing to move the central institutions of our nation into the future, and it is quite a shame that we in my generation have had to bypass it through digital means. It wasn't what we intended. My father has always expected me to write books like Baldwin, Giovanni and Baraka, but here I am out on the internet having written thousands of essays for not one newspaper or publishing company. I am the independent outsider and possessed of a peace that appears to passeth all understanding. Why? Because all we seem to recall are the politicians and their promises. We forget those with the sound minds, competent skills, patriotic demeanor and worker's ethic capable of righteous work. We forget that there are millions of such Americans stuck in the traffic behind chaotic and stagnant self-serving leadership. We forget that people actually sit down and think, go out and test their thoughts and then recycle to refine their thoughts. We forget. Or maybe we never knew.

Juneteenth is the day when people try to remember that other people long ago didn't know. They say that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. Yes it's always the case. Progress is always at hand, and so is devolution. There might be progress in Texas and devolution in Minnesota. There might be righteous work being done in California, and chaotic destruction being carried out in Washington. Those who dwell in caves who have concocted their racial theories are totalizers. Such totalizers have but one solution and seek to be of one mind, a mind that will not see what is not projected on their cave walls. A mind prepared to punish apostates. A mind prepared to create martyrs. A mind that demands compliance. Today we face the fact that such minds want nothing to do with what America was, what America is, but only what stands in the way of the America they demand. I have heard it said that there are no hardcore racists on the arbitrary left. I know their future is already here, and they are trying to distribute it by any means necessary. My job is to make sense of that and to remind you that politics is only a fraction of the story of America. It doesn't surprise me that these, the enemies of American ideals have no poetry, only slogans. They have no music, only chants. They have no art, only graffitti. Their desire is to tear down whatever isn't their own. No police is what they are demanding now. 

It's strange to sit on this side of Afrocentrism. 30 years ago, Molefi Asante's book convinced many young people that they could not be Americans. I watched my old organization, the National Society of Black Engineers stop inviting people like astronauts Mae Jemison and Guy Bluford to their campuses. Instead they invited afrocentrics like Legrand Clegg and Jawanza Kinjufu. I know such people still exist and I'm sure they would be happy to get Juneteenth to remind us of American slavery.  I know there are plenty of racial theories that require black lives to be totalized into categories under their control. Afrocentrism is never cited as a solution, although I do recall seeing Nancy Pelosi take a knee in a freshly ironed Kinte scarf just last week. Afrocentric thought took over Temple University and moved academia that much closer to a butchery of intellectuality and reason that we old engineers crave and practice. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on in the Humanities, and boy did I wake up when Claremont and Evergreen whacked out. We knew that future, and now more Americans are coming to see it in their towns. That future wants Whitey on the hook forever, and they have '400 years' of revised history to make their Jenga tower case. 

A lot of Americans want a reckoning. They want a racial reckoning. They're mad as hell and they're looking to hunt down The Man. A lot of these people are Americans in name only because they equate what America is with what its worst elements used to be. Have you ever seen it spelled Amerikkka? Of course you have. Similarly, they equate black Americans with the most pathetic and helpless people they ever were. That is the sum total of their moral ammunition. For them, there are only a dozen dots to connect it all, the latest one being a man named George. Last week there was a statue of a man named George that stood in Seattle. It is now toppled and covered in shit, if it is still in one piece. I'm doing the work, what work I can, if I might dare to call it righteous in the expectation that the American future I see will be distributed, even as others forget that any black hero ever existed to work toward that patriotic end. I can only write so much, but I do recommend that you take the time to watch the new Watchmen. Try not to forget. 

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This is my society. It is a society of mind, of philosophy, of science and engineering, of cuisine, of music and poetry. It is of criticism and sensemaking and it is about resolving the crisis of rationality we face. It is dedicated to the long term. It is observant of history and tradition. It is aimed at the management of risk, the decentralization of power and the establishment of global standards. It is open source and not coercive, and it's not particularly evangelical. It has no room for racial theories, in case you missed it. It aims to be responsive to the needs of the common man. You are welcome.

Fame Inversion Theory

A while back, after some controversy involving the rap artist 50Cent, ideas of accountability shot through my head. His album was 'Get Rich or Die Trying' and somehow, despite his huge success with that album, he had somehow disappointed millions of fans with his next album. Well, he already got rich. It reminded me about my own preferences. The theory started like this. I would rather make 1million dollars each from 17 people, than make 1 dollar each from 17 million people. At the time, a CD cost about $17 and an artist could be fairly sure to get at least a buck from every one sold. 

So if you piss off a million people, you've got to be some colossal-sized arse, but in the end you can ignore them. They're only out $17 bucks most of which you didn't even collect. But if you piss off a million dollar investor, you're in trouble. These are relative extremes of responsibility. When you're chilling in you mansion, and some sobbing waif shows up at the gates begging for an autograph, you don't interrupt your Cheerios breakfast. When Mr. Shadow calls, you sweat blood. Having watched Julie Taymor's film 'Titus', I reckoned that making a deal with a king is a very, very dangerous thing to do. One should hope never to owe their life to anyone, the cost of abandoning those responsibilities might very well be fatal. 

So maybe I don't want 17 million dollar investors in me after all, and certainly not one 17 million dollar investor. Which is better? The irresponsibility of having cadged the masses, or the enormous debt incurred by the sponsorship of a few powerful benefactors? In the former case, you are famous forever. You are ultimately accountable to the masses who must ultimately be disappointed in you by the millions. When you owe allegiance to a cabal, your fame is inverted. They will say as did the man in the Godfather: "A man in my position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous!" It's a deadly game when at some point you are made an offer you cannot refuse, but everybody saves face and the accountability is brutal.

This morning I was stunned by what I'm calling the Secular Northstar. More about that later, but part of its brilliance, this manifesto of world historic dimensions, is that it seems to understand perfectly how it is that the web of obligations can corrupt our most important institutions. And those corruptions are manifest in their inability to be responsible to the public. It is because of Mr. Shadow. He has dirt on you. You have dirt on him. You must be sharks. 

It suddenly occurs to me why motivational speakers and con artists prey on the public. "I'm a successful real-estate developer who has made millions. I can show you how, just buy my book!" Maybe he's the guy who just realized that to make tens of millions, he gets in over his head with people he never wants to piss off. Better to just stay in the 7 digit category trying to sell books, than in the 8 digit category looking over your shoulder.

Integrity dies in the confidential, accountable service of masters you cannot escape. Of course you were just following orders. You were protected. Only make sure that when you die, the secret letter gets published. Then you may smile at gunpoint, like Aaron the Moor. Then you may be a martyr. 

On The Edge of the 60s

Today is my birthday. I was born in 1961, on the edge of the 60s that dramatic moment in American history. They say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Can you hear it? 

When I remember being a kid and my father told me that they shot black people I told him that we should go to the white people and show them who we are and then they wouldn't have to be afraid. "Speeches, Poetry" was my collection of child talk recorded on my dad's old Webcor in 1965. I've been doing a bit of recording myself. The other day I decided to write about the riots but I went back to restating what to me is obvious, that people want not to transcend but to transform, not themselves but others. This morning one of the heads I follow said that although some people want to end oppression, others seek to reverse oppression. He said in the Middle East it is well understood that in order to make peace you have to have blood on your hands. I believe that the Culture Wars are not over and they underly what goes on. So there will be blood. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but underneath all of this tumult is a high degree of conviction that will not relent until it has blood on its hands. Or as the little hoodrat in my head says, 'some motherfuckers need to be pacified'. Right now most Americans have a very good idea who those motherfuckers are. As for me, I can't remember ever using the word on this blog. I think most people are lazy and foolish. They're much more likely to shoot themselves in the foot. That, my friend, is a religious profundity. 

Yesterday, after the third declaration of curfew, I decided to dust off my pistols. My shooting buddies and I used to joke that Barbara Boxer, our wealthy California Senator was behind the purchase of our favorite shooting range at which our club sublet. The lessee could no longer afford the hiked rent and so the club closed forcing us into more ghetto accommodations, or the waitlist for more ritzy accommodations. Our reasonable gun club became the excluded middle the result being I'm pretty rusty from two years of not shooting twice a month. It took me 20 minutes to recall my muscle memory, but not before having loaded a magazine with the rounds in backwards to my horror and dismay. Mario Puzo laughs in his grave. Everything is unevenly distributed. Everything is unevenly distributed.

So my health is better than it has been in probably 17 years. I can still put my socks on standing up. I saw a set of stunning before and after pictures of Mike Tyson last week. He coming back. The before was from 2009. In 2009 I looked pretty good, so I couldn't make a similar comparison. I only know that in 2003 when I was so broke I literally couldn't afford a Big Mac, that I did some cardio-kickboxing and got down to 185. This past Christmas I was at 217 and now I'm at a very stable 195 or thereabouts. My driver's license from '08 says 210. I never consistently weighed myself so I was really just guessing back then. I always assumed that I could get my breath back, but it has proven fairly difficult. My VO2 max is pegged at 29.6, down from 34 a year ago February. On the other hand, my bloodwork is improving steadily. Specifically, my blood pressure is good, my cholesterol is better but still not good. My A1C is down 2 points so I am almost not diabetic something I had no clue about before January of this year. Once again, I had not been measuring. All of us are pretty sure we're OK, but OK is not a number. When it comes down to it, if you like your face in the mirror, that's quite enough. That has got to be the easiest 'like' given on the planet. I think most people are lazy and foolish. I'm working against that in myself.  

In my company, the oldest startup in the world, we remain something of a Porsche garage. We are full of very smart people trying very advanced competence on very expensive hardware. Trying to be known for service by word of mouth is a marketing nightmare. So we have finally built a product we will be branding and shouting about. Other than that, we are limping and stumbling forward, massively crippled by the destruction of the airline business and trying to pivot over to healthcare data integration. The family and the extended family is all squared and sorted. I could use a few more cans of soup in the larder, but we're all surviving these various apocalypses on a better than average basis. We are in constant pain, but not suffering. It's a tough workout. 

I have been thinking in a way I haven't for quite some time what it is like to look like I do. When I don't bother to affect any persona, more and more on these inside-only days, I look like an old black man. I'm stepping into a few paradigms that are different. While I'm comfortable on the inside, part of me is a bit conflicted, during this crisis of rationality, on 'the optics'. I am not Morgan Freeman and I'm worried about the reason that Denzel Washington hasn't stopped making action films. Nobody in America has a good idea what an old black man is supposed to be other than a 'respected civil rights leader'. I'm the same age as Obama and he remains his own unicorn, all the rest have big fat round pumpkin heads like Colin Powell, John Lewis and James Earl Jones. I'm definitely getting rid of my t-shirt collection I have acquired over these 10 years of working the home office, and I'm finally comfortable with Orvis. But on any weekday afternoon run to Home Depot, I look like just another gardener - so long as you don't look at my hands. Oh well, this could have its advantages. Esse quam videri. 

I always used to wonder, since I've always expected to live quite some time, what the hell to do for 20 years after you are 60. My parents remain stubbornly clear and present and sometimes dangerous halfway through their 80s. My grandparents, except for the polio survivor with the 2 pack a day smoking habit, all outdid the statistics. Outside of the optics, I'm very confident about what I expect to be doing. There will be plenty to keep me busy. Two of my greatest time sucks have been gaming and reading. A good 1100 books and probably ten times that many hours in virtual worlds. I'm giving all that a sharp haircut and am going back to school in software engineering. I will be taking all of my accumulated skill and wisdom in the digital arts, for what that is worth, and reinventing it from top to bottom in the language of Go. Having written thousands of essays here over the past 17 years, I will do the same in code over the next 17. I expect it all to hold together. Outside of that, I'll probably get my knee fixed and do a half marathon, get some sort of Porsche or another, preferably the kind I can beat on, and do some interesting driving, and if retirement is in the cards, I think I'll be pretty good at studio mechanics if not some more advanced bass guitar and keyboard proficiency. I have already cut 5 albums of my own material. I can easily see getting back into mixing tracks again. If I ever decide to go for it, I'll also purchase a serious 750 mm telephoto lens for my Nikon and get cranking out more digital photography. 

As you can see by my t-shirt in the photo above, I retain my humblest admiration for both religion and science, the two greatest open source inventions of mankind. While both have failed spectacularly in their organizational hierarchies and relationship to power, they are the primary avenues of disciplined discovery of the self and of the universe. They form the perfect circle of human endeavor whose programming language is philosophy but whose operating system remains mysterious. I am happiest when exploring their realms and their history. Well, that and enjoying my wife's cooking. That woman is a treasure. Oh yeah I have kids too. Well, at least I'm not paying for them any longer. Speaking briefly of money, I am also rekindling my interest in cryptocurrency and all distributed, secured methodologies that will survive the current world destruction. So much to do, so much to do. 

Anyway, I've got to go get in some steps this morning. I expect to be eating a bunch of cake and excellent home cooking today. Cheers. 

The Books That Made Me

What I discovered as soon as I thought about this subject was that these are not the best books I've ever read. They are also not the most enjoyable books. They are simply the books that changed the way I look at myself and the way I look at books. They changed me in ways that last to this day. So let us begin.

The Juvenile Years

The first important book that I read, like many on this list, was something I didn't want to read at all but ended up very glad that I did. And I specifically remember that to be true of Tom Sawyer because, not only had I not heard of it before, I read the first page several times and was bored by it. As a youngster, I was very wary of books that involved outcasts, the impoverished, or broken people. I had no room in my head for tales of woe and I refused to listen to them or read about them. That Tom Sawyer didn't live with his parents was my first clue that I wouldn't like it. I pressed on beside myself and came to very much enjoy the first book I realized could not be judged by its first pages. As I recall the book, images of Injun Joe and Becky Thatcher are fresh, though I get mixup all of my graveyard memories with those of Frankenstein. What was and what wasn't in Huckleberry Finn also is dim in my memory, but I certainly felt more ambivalence over reading White Fang than I did about Nigger Jim. Though it did come back as I learned to speak Progressive. I made something of a squawk about it in the abstract during my 1990s Boohabian Period. As a kid, I loved the book because it was such a big surprise.

I cannot remember which was the first book of Mssrs Williams and Abrashkin I read, but my favorites were Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor and Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine. Into this series of books I have to throw in a couple more. That would be The Secret Language by Usrsula Nordstrom and Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry. The last in that category of kids books before middle school would be The Lemonade Trick by Scott Corbett. These rounded out my juvenile period.

 

First Sci-Fi
After those, and especially after reading practically all of the Danny Dunn, I read 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke and The Martian Chronicles. And while my brother and I digested every one of the Hardy Boys mysteries, I went on to read as much science-fiction as I could get my grubbies on, specifically that of Heinlein. Of all of his, the one that convinced me that I was destined for space was Starman Jones. Although I and other people made a bigger deal out of the fact that I read Clarke when I was 10 years old, it was Heinlein that got to me. The Martian Chronicles were depressing and if I had known that it was permissible not to finish a book, I would have left it alone. But it was a big book, and I was proving that I was a big boy. Before I was a teen, there was nothing that got so deeply under my skin as the pathos and drive of Max Jones. He was me. My imagination was captured the moment I began reading and I saw the crashing train missing the loop in the early part of the book. The wistfulness of wanting to be elsewhere is what I recalled. It defined my youth. I understood the inevitable fact that my mind and my courage would take me far from home and the homeboys of my pre-teen neighborhood. I strove to understand nuclear energy. And suddenly, I did.

Growing Up Fast
In middle school, there were eight or so books that stuck fast in my head. Four because I read them and four because I refused to. The first I refused but read anyway was The Contender by Robert Lipsyte. Anybody who wants to know my biography and state of mind as an adolescent living in Crenshaw ought to read Stop Time by Frank Conroy. As I think about it and my desire to grow up and out, it probably ought to be paired with the song Zoom by The Commodores. So there was never any part of me that felt trapped by circumstances and place, and any suggestion that I had to adjust my way out of that with the kind of YA fiction that existed then, notably The Cross and the Switchblade was simply anathema to me. So while the Contender was good enough on its own, the other titles by Lipsyte left me cold. So too were fantastic and escapist stories, which I took to be the likes of A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, and Two Years Before the Mast. Finally they pointed me to Steinbeck. I read Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. I was sick of all that depressing shit. I must have been something of a piece of work to deal with. Fortunately for all concerned, I read Jaws by Peter Benchley. Suddenly all was right with the world. Here was an excellent, real life portrayal of life in America. Ahh but that was just the beginning. For there was Fail Safe, the book that made me. As I ponder this moment, science and courage were the two signal themes in my life at this point. I might have read Silent Spring, but I was set. I read Red Alert instead. Nuclear was everything. The Cold War was everything. I was in it. And so I read the classic Hiroshima by John Hersey.

 

High School
My English classes put me in touch with some rather standard fare. Billy Budd. Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. Red Badge of Courage. The Man Who Lived Underground. Taming of the Shrew. But the entire period seemed devoid with the exception of one monumental book, again something bigger than I was expected to read: Roots by Alex Haley. And while I found that I favored the work of Flannery O'Conner (not Harper Lee) and was stunned by Kate Chopin's The Storm, Ellison's Battle Royale and Yukio Mishima's Patriotism, in the end it was Roots that absorbed me completely. I must have also gone through my father's substantial library but found nothing more interesting than M and J's Sensuous Man and Sensuous Woman, both quite practical in theory if not practice. In the end, there was no place in books worthy of disappearing into as with my prior younger life. Filling this period during my lonely moments were music, pinball, Star Wars and chess openings.

A Marginal Need
I had worked and earned money, got girlfriends and vehicles. It wasn't until my new job at a bank and the attempted assassination of President Reagan that I thought that perhaps I wasn't as intelligent as I should be. So with only that slim motivation I started reading. I picked three authors who seemed appropriate to the time. When I think about it, I reflected then as I often have since about the lesson I was taught in my private prep school that literature was spoken in the important world. This was the answer to the inevitable question, why Shakespeare? The answer was that someday in a job interview the boss might begin "There is a tide in the affairs of men.." to which we are obliged to reply "Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." and thereby demonstrate our worthiness. Now 40 years later I have yet to hear it, but the bell hath tolled for me. But at the beginning of the 80s it had to be about Woody Allen, Stephen King and Robert Ludlum. I also read the plays of Neil Simon and began some fantastic daydreams about New York City. But Los Angeles nourished no greater literary desires beyond the banter of Regis Philbin and Kathy Lee Gifford. So I figured I was up to speed, so long as I watched art films.

Science!
After 4 gap years, I returned to collegiate life. As an old frosh I jumped in with both feet. Metamagical Themas, Goedel Escher Bach, and The Soul of a New Machine were stuffed into my brain like buns in a hotdog eating contest. They were poorly digested, especially the second one, of which I only recall the Incompleteness Theorem. Maybe I should read it again one day. But the most significant books I read and appreciated were The Mind's I and Turing's Man. These were my blueprint. I also later read the biography of Mishima and long considered his phrase 'the unity of pen and sword'. By my fourth year, I was disenchanted with the dearth of higher though in my environment. So I struggled for a clue among my contemporaries and professors I didn't respect, especially my drama teacher who idolized Terri Garr. I found a toehold of solace in music, and the bold strokes of Ayn Rand, Henry Miller and Malcolm X. That was pretty much it. On the whole it left me nothing but the desire to remake the world digitally. Of course I still have some of my textbooks, still remember the boredom of Abcarian & Klotz. still repsect Springer-Verlag and still look wistfully at the old volume of Salas & Hille on my shelf. But outside of academics I learned a great deal by reading Thomas Sowell. While his bigger books were very informative, it was Ethnic America that I took as my personal blueprint.

Shock and Awe
So there is no black unity, the world needs to be taken over digitally and The Rise of Managerial Computing is inevitable. Shoshanna Zuboff kicked off my career with here informative book which reminded me of the terrors of Taylorism. My bets were that machines like the Xerox Workstation, distributed, graphic, object-oriented would change the world and I could ride that wave. By the time I got my American Express card and people from Dean Witter and Amnesty International were calling me at work asking for money, I guessed that I had the whole thing figured out. But something in me was disturbed. So I felt that I could take a ride on the wild side. So I started listening to Pacifica Radio and reading Ishmael Reed. As I got deeper into jazz and reggae and soca and finally dub, I recognized that I was not as cookie cutter buppie as I might have been. There was yet that conversation I could never find. But I tried seriously to see what the deal was in black literature. I kept swinging and missing. Gloria Naylor didn't nail it for me. I was highly disappointed. Terry McMillan was operatic, but soap operatic. I was highly insulted. Ah but then I found Jean Toomer's Cane and Kabnis became my alter ego. But it wasn't until I read Toni Morrison's Beloved was I swept away. During the time that I entered my professional career and began reading not to learn so much as to not insult my intelligence with the blather of conventional wisdom, I discovered many interesting books to read. Along with Beloved were the roots of the Afrocentric and multicultural era. You see, given my education, I was prone to believing that there weren't so many civilized Americans as I once believed. So my shock and discovery of a certain amount of critical work was in order. One of the first was Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life by Cornel West and bell hooks. West's The American Evasion of Philosophy was a great milestone. For while I took a shine to H.L. Menken in his Fifty Years of the New Republic, and was somewhat radicalized by Theodore Cross' Black Power Immerative, it was West's description of Ralph Waldo Emerson, C. Wright Mills and Reinhold Neibhur, that convinced me once and for all that everything I ever wanted in life was philosophically consistent with American thought. No need to go to Europe or Asia or Africa or South America for that.

The Mythopoetic.
But I did go. First stop Jose Luis Borges. I can't remember how it was that I got caught up in Borges, but I'd have to guess that it came from the direction of reading Ishmael Reed. There has been a streak of attraction in me for the cryptic and complex meaning that I believe cannot be expressed through pedestrian language, at least not efficiently. The first time I saw rambling classified ads in the back pages of the LA Reader. There was a bizarre set of conversations going on that were deliciously weird, rambling and sometimes poetic. It was like nothing I'd seen before. So I might have been thinking about that when somebody suggested Mumbo Jumbo.  I blazed through a half dozen of Reed's books, but all of that changed when I finally read Japanese By Spring, as far as I'm concerned, his best work. Yet of course I'm hanging out with nobody particularly interested in such literature. It's a wonder I found Borges at all. I did. And so Dreamtigers. Somewhere deep in my psyche are the echoes and implications of the Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

During this time I was floating and flying through different worlds of mind. The sense of play was elaborate. I read Moliere, and especially loved Tartuffe. I listened to Thelonius Monk. I finally read Candide by Voltaire. This thread of reading foreign authors took me to Carlos Fuentes, to Paolo Friere's seminal work The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then around to Sun Tzu. But also I found myself deeply attracted to the work of  T. Coraghessan Boyle. Little did I know that I was heading towards an interesting sort of intellectual dead-end. But in the moment, I declared myself a champion of reason and of logic, abandoning faith and filling myself with the kind of eclecticism that is at once edifying, exotic and self-congratulatory. Like everyone my age, I knew exactly what was wrong with America, and I was finding all of the proper expressions of my own humanity in the retinue of art films and the like. So I found my way to Tarkovsky's austere visions. I dug the quirky sensibilities of Eating Raoul and Repo Man. I was drawn to the films of Henry Jaglom (and Woody Allen) and the wordy narratives of Joe Frank and especially Spaulding Gray's' Swimming to Cambodia. I was digging the discovery of Kurasawa in his latest works. 

At some point I've got to stop this post. I suppose this point is just about right. I'm almost up to my late twenties when I started really taking my journaling seriously, and evolving myself to stand up and speak in public from my own poetry and thoughts. Here I was in the depths of trying to get international in my head. Sun Tsu's Art of War and the Otomo's Akira were two of the gateways. 

Insolubilous

"The problem is the racism of your people"

"Yes, the problem is the racism of my people"

The above statements, largely accepted without question in America today, are racial accusations requiring a racial solution. That solution will never come. The sooner people understand this, the sooner a true solution will appear. As long as these sentiments are expressed, it is a formula for constant drama and the occasional disaster. Try as I might, I was unable to turn my head away for the drama as it played out on my four screens and police radio yesterday afternoon. I watched and waited as the hour of curfew approached. 

Like the pandemic, there was nothing but moral panic being broadcast and tweeted yesterday wall to wall and station to station. For me, watching it was like watching a nature documentary where the cheetas and wildebeast, alligators and gazelles, lions, vultures, hyenas and zebra all interacted in their predictable ways. I was the giraffe casually munching and observing the circle of life and death. Like a giraffe, I wasn't making any noise. Today as a human, I suppose I'll stick my neck out. 

The announcer lamented, on channel five, in a typically unprofessional way. "What should be different this time, what have we not done in 25 years?" He was asking the mayor of West Hollywood who replied. "I would ask anybody who wasn't moved by that film of George Floyd's death, what is wrong with them?" I didn't watch it. I still haven't and I probably won't. As much as I like watching MMA fights, and even the fightporn subreddit, I don't watch snuff films. I don't watch Isis beheadings. I didn't read Cho's poetry. Such things are poisonous to the spirit. It might be funny to watch a child cursing and demanding the rent, but I do not like crime or true crime. The reason is because I understand violence and I understand justice, in fact I am compelled to respond. I know that law enforcement is inevitably violent. I know that people inevitably conflict. Like John Dunne, I feel myself a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Every man's death diminishes me. And yet I recognize my limits, my capacity to heal, my ability to defend, my willingness to go the distance, the limits of my mind, body and spirit. I too know my strengths, advantages and talents. I have tools. What can I fix? 

I think this is a question that few people ask of themselves. At least that's the impression one gets piling on images of sadness, defensiveness and pity , hour after Eyewitness News Live hour, and minute by GoPro minute. There were no scenes but three that were of the type I was encouraged by during my six hour vigil. The first took only 20 seconds as a man with a pistol, rifle and beard rapidly disarmed a man who had taken a rifle from a burning police car. The second was a multicultural set of a dozen suspects cuffed and seated on the curb, black suspects to the left, white suspects to the right. One obese black man in an orangeish getup was allowed to remain standing, hands ziptied behind his back. He stood over with the white suspects. The third was a discussion between several protesting citizens and two officers. A couple dozen onlookers stood behind the citizens. The discussion went on for several minutes, silent to me with my view from the circling helicopter camera. The citizens and the onlookers walked peaceably away. Something was resolved. The rest of the day was filled with salacious filming of young masked men, bounding as they do, in the delirious excitement of being naughty in the streets. They got shoes. They got tracksuits. They got backpacks. They rarely got busted. They got recorded. And their cars and their license plates got recorded. The panoptics were in play.

A couple of cars burned. But here in Los Angeles County nothing was particularly vicious. For every gleeful, looting fast mover, there were an equal number of uniformed shooters, but they were minding the larger, more static crowds and their signs, seated in Santa Monica just east of the pier. The peaceful protesters faced the peaceful cops in a boring standoff. When that got too boring, the TV station replayed conflicts and looting on a continuous loop, with the small qualification "Earlier" on the screen. Shortly, other contingents of troops were pushing Santa Monica crowds south out of the shopping district towards the park and pier and peaceful protest. They didn't seem to need more than a half dozen canisters of loud banging tear gas, and that bum's rush only lasted 10 minutes. None of the police even broke into a run. I watched a recording made in downtown Philadelphia. I recognized the shops on Chestnut Street. The view there was of casual disintegration. The Apple Store was desecrated, the Forever 21 demonstrated its vulnerability. There were turned over dumpsters that had clearly been on fire. You can hear the mumbling and the crunch of glass shards underfoot. It took me 3 minutes to realize there was not a policeman in sight. No squad cars, no sirens, no helmets. Only the occasional fireman amongst the shambling crowds. Everybody was on their own, wandering the streets in a kind of slack oblivion. This is what happens when shit gets real, I can imagine them thinking. No. It's hardly real. It's merely dramatic.

I do not believe in American exceptionalism, not in the people. Americans themselves are not exceptional, and they have the capability of destroying anything, including their inheritance. America has a handsome set of institutions and organizations that are world class, and many of them are capable of monetizing anything. Somebody said "Soon, the rioters will have corporate sponsors." They already do. Our economy has provided everything that anyone would ever want to loot for, or protest for including the masks, hoodies, smartphones and iconography of revolution. But that's exactly the distinction that people get wrong. They think the tools to fix what ails us are to be found in retail outlets, including retail media. No such transactions are for sale. So when people say "I can't believe this is happening in America." I always think them naive. They haven't been paying enough attention to human nature to understand what humans do. They don't quite understand cause and effect in the course of human events. They think that we all have these static roles in a stable nation that does not change. From that incorrect reasoning comes a broad number of platitudes like the first two in this essay. "It's subtle, pervasive white supremacy that is the cause of this." It has been 40 years since people have been talking about "400 years of oppression"; even that benchmark is static. White = White and Black = Black. Your people and my people are no more and no less than that, and America supports the White at the expense of the Black. Or perhaps your version is that the Democrats, Liberals, Commies and Socialists protect the Black at the expense of the White. All that static remains static in the settled minds of the unexceptional American. It is self-fulfilling foolishness. 

I am not Morpheus and I have not been searching for a messiah, but I do have a red pill to offer. It's the same one I've possessed for many years and although its flavor is difficult to describe, its effect remains potent. My red pill enables transcendence. People of conventional wisdom hate the idea of racial transcendence. They have been disabused of the notion of a post-racial America that was nurtured during the candidacy and Presidency of Barack Obama. Despite the fact that he personified everything they hoped for in a president, despite the fact that he handed out bucketfuls of hopeful rhetoric and delivered some actual change, Americans who suspended their disbelief in a hidebound crooked-ass racist America for eight years snapped back to their old fear and anger in 2016. I was there, witness to the happily offended parade at the Women's March here in Los Angeles. I recall the launching of the Trump baby balloon that heralded the return of the same derangement visited upon Obama, and Bush before him. Kanye West blamed the man as being The Man when Katrina hit. Obama claimed to be The Victim when Trayvon Martin's name was on everyone's lips. The duality remained static. Only a few of us have decided that our race does not, cannot and will not define us or 'our people'. Everybody has an archetype for which they intend to represent. The armed citizens pretending to be a Genuine Patriotic Militia did so recently at the statehouse in Michigan. Everyone with a BLM t-shirt pretends to be a moral crusader for the most righteous of causes of human dignity they imagine other Americans simply cannot see. So many have these ingrained dualities firmly planted, as well as the Hallmark Card exceptions that make everyone say 'Awww'. None of that is transcendent. 

So here's how it works. You recognize that everyone has a racial identity. In America it is impossible to escape that racial identity. You may not want it, but you have it. The question is, whether or not you take it seriously. How much of your life is defined and determined by your racial identity is entirely within your control. It is as much of your self as you decide it to be. Racial identity is sticky; it likes to eat other identities you possess. Racial identity is easy and popular; everybody in America knows what it's supposed to mean. We get a racial identity education and we understand it just like we understand Facebook, or watching TV, or eating at McDonalds. I tell people to think their way out of their racial world. It's the only thing that works. If they call you 'nigger' do you respond? Only if you think they have correctly identified you. Only if you admit to yourself that you are playing that role in their heads. Only if you are statically just that. Maybe it's just 30% of who you decide to be. And maybe it's just this kind of media panic that pushes you over the edge and suddenly you have to represent. You represent in solidarity. Well the lines are so clear and obvious that anybody can do that. "Yes, it's white supremacy and I am part of the problem, because I am white." That simple admission is all it takes. One sentence. Just like this sentence "I call upon Jesus into my heart to be my personal savior." It doesn't take much to claim your identity. You don't have to be an active 24/7 Christian, or an active black revolutionary. You merely have to recognize the moment, and answer the call in proper form. 

That's what I've been listening to for the past few days. I've been listening to people singing their symbols, joining the dissonant chorus and trying to keep everyone in harmony. They keep singing "We shall overcome, someday." as if nobody ever overcame before. As if someday can never come. And so the panto continues. Everybody plays roles of contrition, roles of anger, roles all dictated by the simple and seemingly all-encompassing definitions of race. The shoe fits, and nobody is going barefoot into the struggle. Well, except us giraffes. I'm happy to accept my vulnerability in this regard. I have had my glory road, I have been to the top of the mountain I was supposed to climb. I've played the role I was destined to play some 28 years ago. I led the marchers in NYC alongside William Kunstler. Still I was accustomed to not having my homeboy suit fit perfectly. I knew to put it on and to take it off. I've looked at clouds from both sides now, and found a third and fourth way. But I have grown old enough to have worked my way through it. Not around it, but through it. And so I know how to pray for the monsters Americans become when triggered. I know how to hear what they say - how they say the same things in a racially dissonant way - how they fall back to their archetypes and behave typically, think typically and expect typical things. When you transcend, you work your way through it. What is the black part of me? What is the white part of me? They were things I wrestled with when I was young, dumb and full of insecurities. I did my race man thing, and I learned that I was not destined to be that. Now you say it. "I am not destined to be that."

It's probably the hardest for those who have tatooed a progressive atheist mark on their mind. Tied to an ideology that has no god but progress puts one in a position to calculate your value and worth according to statistics from social science. You cannot leverage your identity with God's grace. You cannot say so much that you have felt the love of God for you and have been liberated from the troubles of the world. Sam Harris says he has meditated himself into such a graceful state, but I think he doth protest too much against those who have found another path. Reason has its limits, but the mystery of grace is infinite. I hear such men and women volunteer up their racial selves and take responsibility with a certain set of recognizable caveats. "It's not my purpose. I know those who do it. I know it might be me unconsciously." That is certainly not the exhaustive list but I know a White Liberal as instantly as I know a Black Conservative. Everyone volunteers to be called into account someway, someday. My country. My race. My problem. No exit. That is an eternally frustrating place to be, especially when one is so easily aroused by a dramatic murder.

A dramatic murder. Hmm. I have to say that in the game of "unarmed black man" vs "white racist cop" the scenario surrounding the drama surrounding the particular homicide of George Floyd couldn't have been staged better by George Lucas. The media coverage and meta-narrative have set up a powerfully irresistible magnetic field that have polarized the iron filings of racial identity into exactly the right patterns. Having been through my Iron Age, I have those memories.  Today I'm really not drawn in. I'm iron deficient according to some. I have some skin in the game, but not my bones. My bones are made of something else, nothing so brittle as iron. Something not easily melted and cast into an archetypical mold. So I can't ask for what the sides are asking for. I can't weep for this kind of dramatic tragedy. I'm on the margin, a minority of one today. Until somebody else reads this and becomes halfway convinced.  I'm telling you I ate the red pill a long time ago. You don't have to believe me. After all, if you really feel that bones are racial iron, then I can't convince you anyhow. Somebody needs to remind me, somebody with an excellent memory for those crazy old black movies of the 70s. This one had a scene in which the word 'insolubilous' was used. It meant to describe an unsolvable problem. I loved that scene. I named one of my jazz tapes after the word. A jazz tape with Mingus, Brubeck and Monk. People who have been marching in 4/4 time their entire lives can't see a solution in all of their rhythms. They need to take five. They need to accept not everything rhymes. They need some odd chords and phrasings, all this racial shit is tired. Who wants to say it's 400 years of the same old shit? 

I used to say, that if you dig around a toilet long enough, you are bound to find some shit. That metaphor, like all metaphors cracks under pressure, but people are looking up the ass of America and trying to predict its future. I happen to think that nationalism is appropriate and that America has outgrown its best form of nationalism. There's something inherently slippery and dynamic about the interaction of 350 million people that cannot fit into what we currently need nationalism to be. I think there are plenty enough people who are more certain than ever before that globalization has ruined a lot of things we ought to be able to take for granted. I'm one such person. My favorite company is American Giant. They understand the value of a domestic supply chain. So there are excellent models of American individuals who have grown their institutions out of an optimism that the bottom up view is not always a sky full of buttcrack and worse. Yet people want to be mad. People want retribution. That's human nature. Until we remaster more institutions and come up with something more coherent than populist identitarianism, we will easily regress to days when America actually wasn't so great. As I said before, it's never so static. The dynamism is always present; there is always discovery. 

I can't tell you who to be. It's something you have to discover on your own. You need to see that the static game of race is a broken record, and if race is in your bones, you may have to break them open and then heal up again. You need to respect most of all, the process of discovery. You have to step out on that limb. You have to get your hyena ass off that savanna, open the fourth wall and realize you are not destined to be that. You already know that the investment of millions of Americans in racial identity easily sets them up for a bunch of stupid games, some of which are very profitable. Believe me all that live coverage is being sponsored by some corporations. When is the last time you ever heard of a company refusing to advertise on a news channel that displays racial conflict? When is the last time you've heard a pundit not leap for the opportunity to lecture the masses on the significance of race relations? When is the last time people have avoided telling "you people" how to think about X Y and Z? As I like to say, nobody owns black people, including black people. Who dares to be something else? Who has bothered to discover a personal way out? I have, and the water is fine. From my perspective, I have the luxury of telling every American the exact same thing no matter what race they claim. It's just that simple. It hurts when you do that. Stop doing that. Stop identifying with the archetype, stereotype, typical type, all types of racial identity. Can't you discover something else to be? It this what your god requires of you? Is this what your philosophy demands? Obeisance to the totem of race? Are you satisfied with that? Truly?

If you want to be mad, go burn some shit down. I said as much when it came to Ferguson, MO. There are plenty of examples where American institutions fail. They fail their direct stakeholders and everybody flies journalists in from every major city to get the footage of how it fails the ideals of peace, justice and security. You don't get those things by being 'white' or being 'black' or being 'yellow'. You get those things by being busy working. Calling out racial slogans in the streets is some people's idea of working. What's the quote? "A riot is the voice of the oppressed." It actually doesn't take very long to burn down your neighbor's house, to loot the luxury store, to write 3000 words in an essay from your home office or a Birmingham jail. Half a day maybe. It takes longer to build and reform institutions and rid yourself of pre-determined reactionary patterns of behavior. Everything you feel ain't democracy. Everything you fight for isn't moral politics. That takes practice and work. Work you should be able to point to any day of the week. Work you try and correct along the way. Work and discovery, because nothing stays the same except a mind that refuses to grow. 

What tools do you have? What's your fix? I say start with yourself. Put your head above the savanna of drama. Shutup and take in the view. Eyeball the circle of life, the inevitability of death, the chaos of mindless emotional behavior. Don't be. Do.