what happens to you when you construct a hero

1. you begin to believe that they are capable of making the changes you want and that you don’t have to do anything. you believe in the “change you can believe in” slogan instead of the hard and less seductive reality…you have to BE the change. you. in your own life.

2. you slowly, without even realizing it, become helpless, until the only role you can have is to ratify decisions and to consume…until pretty soon you are ratifying and consuming a person.

3. world events begin to disinterest you in favor of the cult of the individual; you’ll do just about anything to attend a rally for the individual rather than face the difficulty of the world–you’ll want the hero’s aura to wash you like water. baptismal.

4. the comfort of the illusion anesthetizes critical thinking. and more. it actually treats critical thinking as dangerous.

5. you begin to feel ok about capitalism. capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. capitalism puts democracy in perile. high capitalism buries it. creating a hero to put at the head of a government built on capitalism supports a fiction of democracy that buries it.

6. you turn the public slogan of the hero into your personal dreamspeak. “change we can believe in” and “yes we can” are slogans no one can disagree with. no one knows what they mean, nor does anyone care. the hero’s slogans divert attention away from the more important question: what would radical change mean for you personally in your actual life?

7. you become passive and obedient, not to a scary monster, but to a beautiful hero. in this process what’s going on around you begins to not matter…things like the crumbling of the economy, the war, the desperate cries of your fellow man. “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. that gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” (noam.)

8. you mistake revolution for a bright, shiny, apple that is within your reach.

9. you forget that the risk you must take in life is inside your own skin.

10. your gaze is locked on the center of entertainment–the television, the choreographed event, the hum and whir of publicity surrounding the hero; locking your gaze on the center of entertainment is a form of sleep or blindess.

this is not barack obama or hillary clinton…

it’s trevor dodge, andy mingo, and howard zinn, three men who DO NOT suck monkey balls.

from the prince, or andy mingo:

www.andymingo.wordpress.com

Andy says:  “Ok, I’m a little miffed by all the attention spent defining race and gender in the current presidential primaries. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all very important, but at the same time, isn’t that what us white people do? Debate gender and race so that in the end we can come out at the other end verifying that we are not indeed racist or sexist? Our hearts surge with tolerance and benevolence as the perfect economic storm threatens to hurl the world into a global depression. This, on the other hand, isn’t something we want to say out loud or even hear. What I do see instead are magic incantations where such a catastrophe can be averted if only we hope enough, if only we say that we are coming together for change. Might it be time to break out the puppets and silk scarves for a role playing session to discover our inner child as well?

So let’s just say that we have achieved peak oil. You know what I’m talking about; here we all are locked down in a mighty roller coaster riding that sickening last second before we plunge down the backside of Hubbert’s Peak. It could sound fun if it didn’t carry with it the ramifications that nobody is willing to talk about: diminishing supplies, greater and greater demand from nuclear powers like China and India, an American elite class circling the wagons with their oil profits and private security forces… It’s gotten so bad that none of us really look at the price at the pump anymore. We simply pull up, pay with a credit card, and when the nice man hands you the receipt (granted I live in Oregon), it’s just better to throw it on the floor by the passenger seat than admit that gasoline will only become more and more expensive, prohibitively so. Too expensive to drive to work. Too expensive to transport goods and services.

Indeed, as the mortgage and credit crisis swirl around us, the only ingredient missing for another global Great Depression would be an oil shortage. Even Alan Greenspan is now saying that we are heading into “the worst US financial crisis since World War Two.” This while George W does a soft shoe routine on the steps of the White House, and oil thirsty gangs with Mohawks on stripped down motorcycles scour the roadways for unsuspecting victims to jack while we all could have been driving electric cars for the last decade.

Wait. The motorcycle gang is just a projection, an extension of my own negative illusion that has enveloped a world where anything is possible, like “hope” and “change,” a world that focuses on race and gender when it should be thinking about its own survival.

At least we have another season of American Idol.

and from the MALE HIPSTER LEERING, trevor dodge:

www.trevordodge.wordpress.com

Trevor says:  “If there remains any doubt that the US is in the full throes of a new golden (or, more appropriate yet, platinum) age for the megarich and the megaricher, consider some tidbits from the business community today:

1) JPMorgan Chase acquires Bear Stearns for a paltry $2/share–barely one-tenth of its trading value just last Friday–backed with the full faith of the Federal Reserve and the obvious blessing of even the European media. (Because I’ve often lamented that JP needs to have an even stronger influence on the US economy than it already does…)

2) Former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio’s 19 convictions on insider trading were overturned today by the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. (Nacchio was charged with 42 counts and convicted on less than half of them. Oh, sweet sweet justice…)

3) Oil hit an all-time trading high today at nearly $112 a barrel. (I fielded two frantic emails and phone calls from students just this morning who are having difficulty affording the drive out to the commuter campus where I teach in order to turn in their final projects, and essentially being forced to choose between their educations and their gas tanks…)”

and from HOWARD the man ZINN:

Howard says:  “The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.

Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.

No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.

I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.

The unprecedented policies of the New Deal-Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing-were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army-thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit , Chicago , Boston , New York , Seattle .

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis , a general strike in San Francisco , hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.

Without a national crisis-economic destitution and rebellion-it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.

Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes-they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.

The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”

…some white men are worth it.

fear of a black planet

what exactly does it mean when we silence or disappear the angry black male voice? Is it dangerous threat to peaceful change, or is it the REST of the definiton of change as a revolution? are we THAT hoodwinked and bamboozled? It’s all the voices or none of them.

don’t misunderstand me–i’m not naive. i KNOW why obama has to put his uncle in the closet. i KNOW why hillary has to put her madwoman in the attic (g. ferraro). they’re running for president in america 2008.

but calling it your job doesn’t make it right.

i’ve just seen this before. MLK was NOT the opposite of MALCOM X. both of their voices moved a nation, as well as some whitey voices, some angry, some peaceful.

what Rev. Jerimiah Wright said:

“Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home. Barack was,” Wright says in a video of the sermon posted on YouTube. “Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary! Hillary ain’t never been called a ‘nigger!’ Hillary has never had her people defined as a non-person.”

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” he said. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas has now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

it’s ok with me, what he said.

and there are monks getting beaten and burned up right now in Tibet while capitalist superpowers and television junkies hope hope hope the Olympics won’t be fucked up.

i’m just saying….oh and ART does not apologize….

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

Gil Scott Heron

Fight the Power

1989 the number another summer (get down)
Sound of the funky drummer
Music hittin’ your heart cause I know you got sould
(Brothers and sisters hey)
Listen if you’re missin’ y’all
Swingin’ while I’m singin’
Givin’ whatcha gettin’
Knowin’ what I know
While the Black bands sweatin’
And the rhythm rhymes rollin’
Got to give us what we want
Gotta give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We got to fight the powers that be
Lemme hear you say
Fight the power

Chorus

As the rhythm designed to bounce
What counts is that the rhymes
Designed to fill your mind
Now that you’ve realized the prides arrived
We got to pump the stuff to make us tough
from the heart
It’s a start, a work of art
To revolutionize make a change nothin’s strange
People, people we are the same
No we’re not the same
Cause we don’t know the game
What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless
You say what is this?
My beloved lets get down to business
Mental self defensive fitness
(Yo) bum rush the show
You gotta go for what you know
Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be
Lemme hear you say…
Fight the Power

Chorus

Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant —- to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Mother—- him and John Wayne
Cause I’m Black and I’m proud
I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped
Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps
Sample a look back you look and find
Nothing but rednecks for 400 years if you check
Don’t worry be happy
Was a number one jam
Damn if I say it you can slap me right here
(Get it) lets get this party started right
Right on, c’mon
What we got to say
Power to the people no delay
To make everybody see
In order to fight the powers that be

Pubic Enemy

BULLS ON PARADE

This microphone explode, shattering
The molds
Ya eighter drop tha hits like de la o or get tha
Fuck off tha commode
Wit tha sure shot, sure ta make tha
Bodies drop
Drop an dont copy yo, dont call this
A co-opt
Terror rains drenchin, quenchin tha thirst of
Tha power dons
That five sided fist-a-gon
Tha rotten sore on the face of mother earth gets
Bigger
Tha triggers cold empty ya purse
They rally round tha family
With pockets full of shells
Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes
Not need, just feed tha war canibal animal
I walk tha corner to tha rubble that used to be a
Library
Line up to tha mind cemetery
What we dont know keeps tha contracts alive an
Movin
They dont gotta burn tha books they just remove em
While arms warehouses fill as quick as tha cells
Rally round tha family, pockets full of shells
Rally round tha family
With pockets full of shells
Bulls on parade

Rage Against the Machine

Rock n Roll Nigger

Baby was a black sheep. Baby was a whore.
Baby got big and baby get bigger.
Baby get something. Baby get more.
Baby, baby, baby was a rock-and-roll nigger.
Oh, look around you, all around you,
riding on a copper wave.
Do you like the world around you?
Are you ready to behave?

Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.

(Lenny!)

Baby was a black sheep. Baby was a whore.
You know she got big. Well, she’s gonna get bigger.
Baby got a hand; got a finger on the trigger.
Baby, baby, baby is a rock-and-roll nigger.

Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.

(those who have suffered, understand suffering,
and thereby extend their hand
the storm that brings harm
also makes fertile
blessed is the grass
and herb and the true thorn and light)

I was lost in a valley of pleasure.
I was lost in the infinite sea.
I was lost, and measure for measure,
love spewed from the heart of me.
I was lost, and the cost,
and the cost didn’t matter to me.
I was lost, and the cost
was to be outside society.

Jimi Hendrix was a nigger.
Jesus Christ and Grandma, too.
Jackson Pollock was a nigger.
Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger,
nigger, nigger, nigger.

Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society, if you’re looking,
that’s where you’ll find me.
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me.
Outside of society. (Repeat)

Patti (the man) Smith

fighting the real fight

before i start my rant i have a question…so, um, how “united” are you people who believe in barack’s power to unite willing to go? my hunch is, not far enough to “unite” with hillary, right? some of you have even said to me that if she wins, you wouldn’t vote for her. s’up with that? where’s all the good lovin’ if you can’t handle them as a team?

i guess i think all this weird hostility against hillary–and i’m sure a new round is coming because she stomped the yard in ohio/texas/rhode island–which we can’t celebrate of course because she’s pissing on obama’s party–i guess i think the hill hostility is getting truly misguided.

it’s NOT barack against hillary. he’s probably going to win, and i for one will be happy as a clam if EITHER of them win.

save your energy for the real fight, which is looming on the horizon–the ancient guy who can’t lift his arms all the way up, the guy who keeps calling us “my friends,” the guy my son dubbed “bulby” when he saw him on tv one day, the guy my husband dubbed “caliban” — which made me laugh so hard i peed. as dumb a choice as i think he is, half the nation is scared to death of liberals taking over the country.

or if you are walking around thinking it’s no contest, that barack will smear him, then at least pause for a moment and consider the OTHER fights–republicans, evangelicals, CEO’s of major corporations and oil companies, world leaders who are DYING for obama to win because they think he’s a softy, bigots, racists, xenophobes , extra righteous christian mothers and white rich guys…i assure you, they have not gone away even though their party is fucking up. and they most definately have no interest in “uniting.” i mean, c’mon.

try to remember that there is an UP SIDE to a party getting crushed and going down–they REGROUP with a VENGEANCE. not even the black jesus is going to be able to inspire away that noise. you can bet the farm that whatever they reinvent themselves as, it’s gonna be a whopper. look what they came up with last round.

so my hope is that we save our energy for the REAL fight and enjoy the contest between two astonishingly talented candidates as it plays out. i’m 45, and i remember what “negative campaigning” looks like. this may be a lively contest, with rough and tumble moments, but it’s god damned artful compared to what real negative campaigning looks like. did everyone just get collective amnesia?

oh, and even though i’ve been “for” hillary all these months (i know, what a deluded twat, huh?), i’m perfectly content with the idea of them sharing a ticket. doesn’t scare me or bum me out a bit. and talk about unstoppable…or are we still spookied by inter-racial marriages?