I love these kids, and I am certain they're sincere. Unlike most of my own generally worthless generation, enough of them give a shit not to cancel them out like us generation x-ers have done to ourselves, in our pathetic, jaded narcissism.
But enough about people I used to hang out with in college (not you, Chris!)...
Polls show that most Americans are taking the reactionary route with online activism--groups like LulzSec and Wikileaks. They don't get that--like it or not--there aren't going to be too many secrets in the future among the powerful. Scoundrels of every stripe are running scared right now and doing the predictable overreacting, going so far as to pass laws that enact police state policies. These are the dumbest reactions imaginable since it's not going to work, technology is Pandora's Box, you can't close it.
That's what bullies do. The problem they face is that people are beginning to tire of their bullshit, their lies, and their secrecy (really an excuse to hide criminal activity a good portion of the time) at everyone's expense.
Now, people are beginning to push back, and that scares the crap out of the people with the power, the people who have been abusing it since day one. This is coming to a real watershed moment where people are going to get hurt, but that's how human history works, it never ends, and eventually there will be no sidelines to park one's ass on, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no rationalizations that are going to float anymore.
LulzSec have now hacked the main computers of the Arizona State Police in order to derail that state's obviously racist and unconstitutional anti-immigrant laws that will allow racial profiling. Arizona already has a bad reputation with race going back to its earliest settlement after the Mexican-American War and the law is political pandering and strategy by the Republican Party since most Hispanics (and blacks) don't vote for them historically.
Add to that a moronic segment of the population of the state that has played into their hands and pushed their agenda.
Businesses that employ "illegales" also stand to keep benefiting from a continuation of the status quo (with some ramping-up for show) where they can continue to blackmail illegal immigrants into working for even lower wages for what can only be described as the conditions of peonage. But really, the racist cops also get to take out their bad childhoods on Mexicans, they get a blank-check to profile and target them for legal harassment, no probable cause necessary.
So, today, and I really mean it, a little "fuck you" to Arizona law enforcement who have the same fixation they do in Maricopa County with brown people:
This has been irking me for a very long time: felons, in most states in America, don't ever get to vote again, YET we're constantly electing them into public office. Not only is it wrong to keep people who have paid their debt to society from ever voting again--especially considering that having been incarcerated, they've seen the real face of this nation--it's also anti-democratic and unjust. It doesn't fix anything.
I have a theory, and I'm not alone: for the most part, we're still living in Massachusetts Bay colony. We're still an almost hopelessly puritanical nation and culture, and that means there can never be enough punishment. Even with wave-after-wave of immigration, and we're talking in the tens-of-millions of people of just about every culture, it persists. How is that? Why is that?
I think there's a simple and complicated explanation. While Americans like to think that there's always going to be another "new wave" of wealth in this nation, I think old money and (most importantly) aristocratic privilege still rules this country and will for the foreseeable future. The image of the noose-wielding puritan patriarch haunts the social landscape of America where Old Testament punishment rejects even the New Testament message of forgiveness. Forget about the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, that blew past a lot of people in this country, and especially the quasi-aristocratic wackos who rule over us. The fact is, they hate the everyman and woman and want to make the rest of us suffer, mostly for their own sins.
I don't claim to know what the solution to this is except to never stop fighting it in every way humanly possible. We should insist on everyone having the right to vote, frankly, and even for at least those who have served their sentences in the inhuman dungeons of America where even privatized slavery is making its return with the ever-encroaching war on drugs. The laws regarding prostitution made the outlines of this puritanical hypocrisy patently clear to me in the DC Madam case with a two women dead, and the men, the "Johns" (especially the rich ones), merely walking away from it, and without a scratch. My dislike for these rich men will be with me for the rest of our respective lives. Never mind the "average Joe" ones, they didn't really deserve the attention some of them got.
It's the self-appointed patriarchs that I will always take issue with...
Port-au-Prince, Haiti--Who got there first? The Cubans, many-of-whom were already there in their usual form: as doctors. Why were they already there? Because the developed world is on their neck in Haiti and the place has been mismanaged before the earthquake and since the time of Columbus when the island of Hispaniola was first conquered and settled, primarily for exploitation. Cuba is part of this same legacy of colonialism and understands its effects, say what you will about the regime there. Hispaniola has been a hellhole for centuries, ever since the first white men planted their flags on its shores. The abuse is ongoing.
That's the part that never changes in poor Haiti, that first black republic, something they've been punished for ever since. Don't let anyone fool you on this central point: Haiti was a disaster before the earthquakes, a prototypical example of where the rest of us might be headed, including the centuries of ecological devastation spurred-on by the desire to exploit, to profit, from the misery of enslaved others. What the world should be doing is pledging to rebuild Haiti and its economy and to leave the place alone. We know that's not going to happen anytime soon.
But make no mistake: The Cubans made it to the Haitian-side of Hispaniola first, and not simply thanks to proximity. Will we have a rerun of Katrina? We already have, and under a black president. It took American forces three days to reach Haiti in significant numbers, just more abuse and negligence, the depriving of people of basic human rights.
Michiana--Of course it did, and it was more widespread than bigots and racists here in Northern Indiana would care to admit.
Whether the local Klaverns around here or foaming-at-the-mouth racists like attorney Tony Zirkle want to admit it or not, a lot of people around here were involved in the hiding and ferrying of runaway slaves into Canada and other "free" states that wouldn't cooperate with slave hunters in returning the "property" of slaverholders in the American South and the border states.
My own father--not exactly someone I'd ever refer to as racially progressive in any sense--even had to admit this to me. During the 1970s, he did a lot of work on construction sites throughout Michiana as a civil engineer (the area I live in was once part of Michigan, and the borders might be contested again soon, another story for another time...) and he and his coworkers found several sites that were part of it, even tunnels that weren't on any map, completely unknown until their discovery by the construction crews.
But besides being a nexus for the Underground Railroad, Michiana has also been yet another place where local folklore once flourished. In 2005, folklorist Carl Lindahl visited the Suggs house and Underground Railroad museum, still run by the family of the same name up in Vandalia, Michigan, right outside of the city of Niles.
Lindahl's article is about a collection that was released at the time, but his observations about the Suggs patriarch J.D. Suggs and the legacy of certain folklore collectors from the last century are interesting ones:
Much more commonly, however, I emerged from the listening experience with enhanced respect for the collectors and for the positive bonds they had forged with the storytellers. Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of this sort was Richard Dorson. Dorson has been roundly (and rightly) taken to task for many of his statements about the nature of African American narrative, especially his contention that it was a “borrowed” tradition —adapted from European sources rather than being “truly” African American. Such theoretical positions have long been discredited, but they have influenced many folklorists, including myself, to belittle Dorson’s work with African American narrators and narratives. So I was astonished to find that the children of Dorson’s favorite African American storyteller, J.D. Suggs, not only remembered Dorson, but cherished their memories of him. Their father had had a vision of “black and white coming together”—and the Suggs children have interpreted that vision in terms of Suggs “coming together” with Dorson. When I drove up to the J.D. Suggs Underground Railroad Museum and Historical Site in Vandalia, Michigan, I was stunned to find two metal silhouettes —one of Dorson, painted white, and one of Suggs, painted black—facing each other. The silhouettes were fashioned on the model of a photo of Dorson and Suggs that Suggs had carried with him until the day he died. In August 2004, shortly after American Folktales had been released, I attended the J.D. Suggs Freedom Festival at the museum and emerged from my car to find the Suggs family gathered in a circle around the metal cutouts of Suggs and Dorson.
The recordings of Suggs and Dorson reveal a strong mutual affection based on the two men’s common love of story. These and similar recordings from other storyteller- collector teams underline the importance and redeeming quality of fieldwork. We may get it wrong theoretically, our scholarship may sometimes seriously misrepresent our “informants,” but as long as we can record their remarkable performances and deal with them personally, in an atmosphere of mutual respect, we have done something remarkably right. The recorded performances will survive our misperceptions and, through such archives as the AFC, be available for their grandchildren and ours. We justify our existence by prolonging that of the storytellers.
The Archive of Folk Culture is in many ways America’s folkloric memory. There is no substitute for the wealth of oral art and wisdom to be found there. (Lindahl, Carl. "The Making of American Folktales," Folklife Center News, Winter/Spring 2005, Volume XXVII, Numbers 1-2)
God love the common man, the only conscience America's ever had or ever will have, because it's not going to come from above. The Suggs House Freedom Festival is being held today and tomorrow in Vandalia, Michigan. Its main-thrust is racial unity between African-Americans and Euro-Americans and a reminder that the nation most of us has always wanted has always been there, right under our eyes all along, if only we heed the call. Most of us already have in our hearts and minds, the real battleground.
