AFTER SEEING ENDGAME THE MOVIE

Have just now finished seeing a film, Endgame, of South Africa in the time of the transfer of power from Botha to deKlerk. A kind of bio-pic with handheld camera, often with the feeling of seeing the visuals by way of surveillance cameras or somebody wearing a lapel-cam. Very much a feeling of you-are-there. Mandela in prison, Thabo Mbeki negotiates with negotiators from the government. It showed the threats, the near-misses, the valley of the shadow of death that Thabo Mbeki walked through, and everyone concerned in the movement walked through with him. Many didn't make it. It was similar to the American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King walked through the valley of the shadow of death and didn't make it. Lone gunman again, and again.  The film was acted well by good actors, directed five star and photographed the equal. I felt the immediacy of every scene filmed as though we're overhearing private conversations from both sides of the fence. The walls had ears was known everywhere we went. Very little went by unseen. Often it felt like seeing the scene through a surveillance camera in a tree or planted out of sight in a room. It gave a sense of danger from both sides. "If you'll stop your terrorism we can talk peace." "If you'll stop your police brutality we'll stop our terrorism." Negotiations were stuck throughout Botha's administration. He had a stroke and exited the story. DeKlerk came next and agreed to ANC's will, let Nelson Mandela go free to be swept into the president's office of South Africa. He was about as welcome to white South Africans as Obama is to white Americans. The slur-words are taking over. No danger of it there and no danger of it here. The propaganda of fear was thick in the air.

The film gave a sense that it was put together by an investigative reporter who spliced the scenes from surveillance videos into the story told, scene by scene. I was especially interested in its historical value, seeing visuals of what the news was telling and not telling in that time. I've seen several films, both drama and documentary, read of that period in South African history, the end of the apartheid system, freeing Nelson Mandela.. This one tells a serious story, like the others, though in such a visual presentation it gives a subliminal experience of how it feels to know you're being watched everywhere at all times. A spooky film in that way. This one, Endgame, I could watch again for the visuals without sound. I don't recall seeing anything like it. I'm glad I wasn't put here with Nelson Mandela's mission. He was a soul of deep wisdom. In the turn of the century, Time magazine made much of Man of the Century. It seemed to me Mandela did the most powerful deed by surviving 27 years of hard core prison as a political prisoner and a kafir; he ruled afterward a compassionate leader for the whole country. Of course, man of the century went to a white man, whose name is synonymous with knowledge, not a black man discredited by the press as a communist, that convenient word like terrorism, so easy to discredit somebody with. For Time magazine to name Mandela would have brought a heap of criticism from power circles and a change of staff. I was seeing Mandela in terms of democracy and the future of the whole continent of Africa as well as South Africa. From the American Empire's point of view, Africa is for exploitation only, not democracy. I have no argument with Einstein. After all, his mathematical discovery changed everything, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's remarkably significant. Power.

I believe I can say in truth that Nelson Mandela is the only public figure of any country, that I've known of, I have respected in my lifetime. Nobody in Europe. Nobody in Asia, Nobody in the Middle East. Only Nelson Mandela in Africa. I put my finger on Mandela for his true public service as opposed to self-service and service to power and money. People like him are not appreciated in circles of power and money. Alas, they serve the enemy of the power and money set, the rest of us, the pitchfork army. People  in the political world who actually serve the people run the risk of assassination. It often happens. Mandela anticipated every day his last, as did Mbeki. It was PW Botha to die of a stroke first, his death opening the door to democracy in South Africa. I'm recalling a reggae song from the Botha period by Bunny Wailer, President Botha is the mosquito who annihilate Africa...with the deadly bite spreads the disease of apartheid. Mandela became president, though white wealth maintained power. Like Obama the American black president is powerless at the table of white wealth, Mandela was too. In the end, only appearance and propaganda changed. I grew up in a world operated by a belief system that only white is all right, held to as jealously as there's only one way to the pearly gates. From earliest childhood I can recall having empathic feelings toward people of other races, the huge majority of people on earth, because the people of my world looked so far down on them. I was three when I stayed with my young mother not long out of high school in a vast trailer park at Camp Lejeune for the returning troops with wives able to visit them upon return from the Pacific war (an odd oxymoron). Two black women took care of house cleaning in the trailers. They were the first dark skinned people of my experience, including porters on the train who were friendly mysteries. These two women were attentive with the little kid and the kid loved seeing them. One night the shed they kept their cleaning equipment in burned down and I never saw them again.

I can remember mother and grandmother talking down about them like they were about the same as children and I was disappointed they didn't understand these were wonderful people. 1945 was a long time before civil rights consciousness. My parents' racism was polite, not vehement. A lot of white Southern kids and white kids all over America in that time were questioning the black people being kept down when they were good people. Pushed down into poverty, street crime pops up, a good public relations excuse to push them down further and round them up into prisons, the American version of concentration camps. Racism never made sense to me in any phase of my lifetime. In childhood I was taught to fall in line with the belief that black people were the bottom class of people, American untouchables. I didn't know any black kids until 1954, the seventh grade, when black kids were made to leave their schools and go to the white schools of the district they lived in. Black kids were scared and white kids were scared. Jocks and toughguy white kids threatened the black kids causing them to stay together in gangs for self-defense. Then, as gangs, they became aggressive and back and forth it went. The white nerds without jock protection would be bullied by the black gangs as well as the white jocks. The black kids not inclined to gangs had to go with them anyway for their own self-defense. All the parents were scared for their girls. Martin Luther King and forced integration did not end racism in America. Nelson Mandela could not end racism in South Africa. As things are going now, it looks like it will be a long time in centuries before racism is over. Things have a way of changing unpredictably like the wind.      

 

 

 

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THINGS FALL APART

Going by reports I've seen, the march on Washington, the 50th anniversary gathering, amounted to not much but another reason we did not want police state. I found a video of Al Sharpton talking there, but turned it off after half a minute. He grates my nerves. At least he followed some sound counsel on changing his hairdo. He's impossible for me to take seriously after the Tawana Brawley non-incident that occurred several years ago. Young black girl had shit smeared on her and claimed she'd been raped. Sharpton was in on the ruse. Sharpton and his zealots made it up, set the whole thing up and made a big racial issue of it, accusing and ranting. A preacher. I'm surprised to see he evidently has enough credibility for a tv network to pay him to be a news commentator, and he was given a slot to talk at the Washington civil rights march 2013. The police presence was all the way up to military, taking hand-held signs from people handing them out, threatening them with arrest. The first civil rights march in 1963 made a great wave in the ocean of collective human consciousness. This memorial half a century after was not even a ripple in a virtual pond. The reports I read indicated that the speakers only had two or three minutes apiece. Then I saw Al Sharpton had 20 minutes. Whatever.

In Raleigh this weekend, some people who had been feeding the homeless on weekends were told to stop it or be arrested by police. No citing the law or statute or reason. Stop it or you're arrested. Another reason we did not want police state. Our national government is telling third world countries to allow peaceful demonstrations if they want to go on receiving billions in aid from USA. Occupy has been shut down. The people peacefully protesting in North Carolina and Wisconsin are arrested routinely for peaceable protesting. It's on international tv and no one seems to get it. Enforcing democracy on destitute countries while arresting demonstrators in USA acting out democracy makes the same kind of sense as locking up "whistleblowers" while calling this a free society. All I know of that's free about it is the polluted air to breathe. Next we'll be sold oxygen like in Tokyo. We've become like a literal herd of sheep controlled by television, believing uncritically whatever we're told, because we're supposed to. In every herd is one that stays off to itself. It is with the herd, a member of the herd, stays with the herd, but stays apart from the herd to itself. I've been the one to stay off to itself in every herd I've been associated with. I'm with the herd, but like a little space around me.

Because I don't have a head full of commercials and sitcom canned laughter, I don't believe it is necessary to make my life a pipeline between Walmart and the landfill. It's actually kinda creepy being the only one, but for less than a handful of the people of my world who does not partake of the daily propaganda ingestion. I don't mean just political propaganda, though there's plenty of that too. In my lifetime I have seen it shorten the American attention span down to nothing. I remember years ago being alarmed when I saw the people around me had an attention span of a cat. By now, it's not even that. It's nonexistent. Zombies, the living dead, are popular entertainment. In my case, it doesn't matter that I don't watch tv, because the entire culture I live in, the larger American culture, our way of thinking is created by television. I don't mean this show or that commercial. I mean the steady flow of flash, both visual and auditory, vey little of it, if any, anything more than flash, devoid of content except to sell something subliminally. It seems like the people who watch television the most have become televisions. I've known a few people that I think of as televisions.

 

The US Navy took me outside my life for two years. I resented that about the draft. I am not soldier or sailor anything but fodder. The first six months living in barracks broke my television habit cold turkey. My head would clear of television images when the ship was at sea, and then I'd have another extended spell on land with television. At sea, the television images would gradually drift out of my head. On the ship I read as much as I could to use the time for something beneficial to myself since I was bound by involuntary servitude for being born a boy in a militarist society, a militarist civilization, a universal militarist mind set. In childhood I wanted to escape to Tibet where they lived in peace. Then Chinese militarism put an end to that. Who gave a shit? Some did. Some gave a great deal of shit, but not enough to stop the oppression of a people unable to defend themselves militarily. It's like what happened in USA, Australia and Latin America; when the outsiders move in by military or economic force, the local people become the outsiders in their own land. The Tibetans staying behind are regarded by the Chinese like the Indians are regarded on Turtle Island in this time. What's to be done? Go to India, the last place where peaceable people have a chance. India has nukes, and India has military. And India is engaged in perpetual terrorist war with Pakistan like Israel with the entire Arab world.

In the late 1980s, Independence attorney Lorne Campbell would comment on the news from time to time, "It's time to move higher up the mountain." Hearing the news in this time, yesterday, today, tomorrow, gives one a visual and a story that brings to mind a working out of the WB Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, the center does not hold. We don't seem to have a center in this time.

     Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
     the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
     Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, at the end of WW1. Here it is again. The center is not holding any longer and things are falling apart. It's a cycle we're going through again. America had it's center in being white dominant middle class in the Fifties, Ozzie and Harriet, whose rock star son died in a plane crash free-basing cocaine. We have on the one hand a television fantasy, and on the other hand the in-person version steps out into our world in a plane crash. The Yeats poem is a  beautifully composed vision of the time around the Second Coming. It tells a cycle so well it reads like prophecy. You can find it googling yeats second coming.  I go about thinking much of the time the center does not hold. Like Campbell, I say to myself, Time to move higher up the mountain. I'm already as high up the mountain as I can go, so that's kinda redundant. My center seems to be holding. Every day I look at the green world outside in gratitude to God that I am not caught up in television mind manipulated unconsciously. I pay attention to current events not by tv news, but by newspaper and magazine articles. I'm not Noam Chomsky. I couldn't read it all, due to not being that interested. I like to follow threads of the unwinding of the world as we knew it and see / witness / observe the new world coming on. It's a head game, totally a head game.   

 

 

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RACISM BUBBLES OVER

new york subway

Every day when I look at internet news sites, racism seems to be the key word. Since the Zimmerman shooting, and especially since the trial, the racism in every aspect of it; from the shooting to the trial, to the law, to the courtroom, the explicit racism was front and center. Concern about the enword is even more ridiculous than before. I saw a clip from the tv show The View with some black women and some white women. Everybody was on edge. They all knew they could be fired on the spot if they said the enword. They spent their verbiage dancing around the word they were attempting to talk about. Whoopie Goldberg pointed out that it is a generational matter. Her generation freaks out over the enword, but the younger black people have no problem with it. I saw something else where Oprah remarked that her sensitivity to the enword tells her age. Evidently the hip-hop generation is not so sensitive to the word. Oprah said her problem with the enword is that it's the last word a man heard hanging from a tree. I took that for a showbiz sounds-good rationalization. Hippie times liberated the F-word from the mountain of taboo that went with it. Possibly hip-hop times have liberated the word nigger for their generation, again, by over use. Run it into the ground using it and the power it carries diminishes. Refusal by the white middle class to use the word, as well as the insistence of the black middle class that white people not use the word, have made it into a most ridiculous taboo. The taboo gives the word more power than it ever had on its own.

It brings to mind the time NC senator Jesse Helms made an issue of bumper stickers that said Shit Happens. Children might see them. So it's on the news for over a month every day that Jesse Helms wanted to make shit happens on bumper stickers illegal for the safety of children's delicate minds, like kids don't have experience with shit. Such a big deal made of it, at least a hundred thousand times more kids heard about it on tv than would ever see it on a bumper sticker. For example, I have never seen one. However, one day in that time I was driving on I-77, I think somewhere between Charlotte and Statesville, and came upon a little red Yugo with a wiggling exhaust pipe, a red bumper sticker with white letters: HELMS HAPPENS. Passing it, I saw a young Asian guy, looked Chinese, I took for a college student. The only problem with the S-word is the people of the working class use it freely. Not using the word distinguishes someone of the middle class as not working class, the same way as clothing styles. We don't use that word. It's not nice. Nice is another middle class word that distinguishes the user from the working class. Somebody from the middle class might define somebody as nice when somebody from the working class might say he's a silver-tongued rattlesnake.

One of the women on the View tv show brought up "the B-word." I started imagining a forbidden word for each letter of the alphabet. The A-word for asshole. One day a few months ago I was talking with a white middle class woman I know, who was coming out of the store as I was going in. For some odd reason she went off on the enword and how it ought to be banned from the language. Then, while we're banning words, she added the C-word. Bewildered by another letter with a bad word attached, I said, "Cool?" (The only C-word I could think of that's overused.) She said, "NO! CUNT!" I take them for people who are partially educated, but not enough to get it that making something into a taboo turns up its power potential immeasurably, the opposite of what they want. This is one example of how do-gooding often creates the opposite of the do-gooder's intent. Fixing somebody else's issues comes from ego, and ego can't see somebody else's flow. Fixing somebody else seldom works; by its very nature it is egoic. It's saying, I know more than you do about yourself. The white backlash the republican party has whipped-up over civil rights matters has brought American racism to the surface again. The Reagan revolution kept the black people down while television pretended there was no more racism. We got a black president and the racism in the republican party bubbled to the surface and over the side. The irony about having a black president is that Obama does nothing to help black people, and he, himself, is whiteness itself. He certainly brought republican racism out into the open.

Now preparations are being made for the 50th anniversary civil rights march in Washington DC. Over the last thirty-plus years the black people have watched what rights they'd fought for in the 1950s stripped away systematically by the corporate (white man) takeover of our government. All the way to openly racist supreme court shutting down the voting rights act. I wonder how many black people have used the enword in private conversation regarding Clarence Thomas. I wouldn't want to meet one who has not. Racism never went away, but racism is back with a vengeance at the present moment. It is locked in by corporate decree, by legislation, by court rulings setting precedents. This is the Reformation after the years of the FDR influence in government of helping the poor, government for the good of the people, like standards for education, republicans taking us systematically into a society of a ruling class and a peasant class that will work for as little as in Asian sweat shops. Back in the civil rights days, racism was never really addressed. It addressed wrongs done by racism, but not the matter itself. Half a century later, after a few years of illusion of progress, then 30+ years of regress, racism is alive after years of being whipped up among white men by way of republican hate media. In this time when all manner of stored hatred is bubbling to the surface, racism is one of them that needs examining out in the open. At the same time these hatreds are popping to the surface, they are being examined, talked about, brought out into the open.

 

 

That new over-used T-word, transparency, will ultimately have to be the case. Racism sank into the well of the D-word, denial. It needs bringing up out of denial and examined collectively. Racism's roots run so deep in the white belief system, it will require attitude change and belief change. I don't mean religion belief, but the belief black people are innately inferior to white. Those changes are hard to enforce on others. It's individual and can only be changed by the will of the believer. If a society truly wants to eradicate racism, education is the answer. We've had black studies courses for black students since the Sixties. What about teaching black studies to white kids? The black kids have to study white history. How about letting American history include black history and what Howard Zinn called the people's history, the history of American movements for basic rights. All the way through school, it bored me out of my mind that history amounted to names of generals and dates of wars. Graduated from high school, I wondered why history did not include the invention of the the flush toilet, the discovery of plumbing, changes electricity brought, the changes in music along the way. That such directly relevant looks at American history were missing, the chant through the Sixties was for relevance in education. Nobody quite knew what that meant. Everything schools tried toward being relevant failed. The attempts were cosmetic. The relevant was in front of our faces, too obvious to be seen. My feeling about racism is it is too obvious to be seen. Easy to deny. I respect the people who are openly racist on both sides of the coin, because they're not in denial, at least about the R-word. 

subways of new york

 

 

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MARTIN LUTHER KING MARTYR

I've been seeing news about the new Martin Luther King memorial statue in DC. I don't relish being another one to complain about it, but haven't found it satisfying according to my own particular taste and integrity. First, it's in white marble. Strikes me as denial---"he wasn't really what you'd call a nigger." That part can be somewhat overlooked, but there is also black marble, and he was a black Alabama man wearing a black suit in a racist nation that thinks very much in white and black. The worst is that he looks more like J Edgar Hoover than Martin Lucifer Coon (as he was known by the Reagan administration). That bullish stance with arms folded in front, body language for I'm not listening to you, strikes me not Martin Luther King at all. It's actually the stance of a white man, even if it's not Hoover.



Seems like the statue of Gandhi in Union Square, NYC, might have been a better model go by for MLK. Gandhi's statue is not much larger than life, if larger. It's been so many years since I've seen it, I don't recall exactly. I do recall being stopped for a moment noting that it was life-sized instead of monumentally larger than life. The designers of this memorial for MLK were thinking monumentally. Kantital B Patel, the sculptor of the Gandhi statue, was thinking in terms of Gandhi as just a man, not a big abstraction of the mind. I feel like the idea of making MLK so much larger than life is to make the viewer "look up to him." Martin Luther King was just a man. I believe Coretta would be the first to affirm this. There's nothing wrong with being just a man. Any more than that is symbolism. It's to identify him with THE ROCK, a firm, solid stance, a forbidding presence, even a face without feeling, standing up to the white oppressor, I will not be moved. This looks to me like using symbolism the way the Catholic Church used symbolism of the spirit to dress men in golden slippers and gowns trimmed in gold, much gold. Metal gold is no more the spirit than a cast iron fire hydrant is.



Maya Angelou got her face in the press again having an issue with the words, a paraphrase of something he said that in her words made him sound arrogant. It broke the major rule of making a simile, don't use it to diminish. Calling his role a drum major diminishes his place in the hearts of the black people of America. Seems like there are plenty of more representative quotations in his I Have A Dream speech he's most loved for. He was a visionary, not a baton twirler. To call him anything less than a visionary diminishes his reason for having a public statue in DC. To make a Baptist preacher from the Deep South, who happens to be black, big and threatening is like gold representing the spirit of God. It's not what it is. They're opposite ends of the spectrum spirit-gas-liquid-solid. King preached the word of God, had his life threatened all day and night every day, lived among suffering people as one of them, cared about the least of them. I believe he was a man whose voice God heard.



It doesn't do, however, for me to assess a work of public art, because I can't help but see it with an artist eye, and what I think of as art and what the general public thinks of as art often don't correspond. But, given this is public art and the best thing for me to do is pay it no mind, I can't help but think of Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial. Symbolically, I find this MLK statue so weighted down with lofty symbolism it has no lightness of being. It's a big solid white rock. He's standing in the rock like he's part of the rock. Very good for symbolism, but it's a little too 19th century, neo-classical. Even too much expecting a glossy new Ford pickup with big tires to climb that mountain of stone. Of course, we have committees making decisions. A camel is a horse created by a committee. My thought when I saw the image this morning on Yahoo news was a horse created by a committee. Maya Lin made that sculpture to the Civil Rights period in Montgomery, Alabama, and they don't get much better than what she did there. Of course, committees don't much go for art. So I have to remind myself I have no business judging it. It's outside my realm of interest. It suggests to me Soviet art, like Lenin or Stalin. I think it was called Soviet Realism. I know it's not right to say such a thing, but it's what I see. Nonetheless, I have to confess, the more I look at pictures of it, allowing it to be itself without the projection of my ego onto it, my aesthetic sense, I find it quite beautiful. I imagine standing before it would be a powerful feeling. Perhaps that feeling is what it's about.



It was amusing this morning to read Maya Angelou pronouncing disapproval upon the quotation they used. I happened to agree. She had a perfectly valid point. Read a little further along in the article and it turns out she was on the board for planning the thing and never attended a meeting. Oops. Sounds like something I'd do. I went to the website to see if I could find what they had to say about it. Everything was written in such governmentese I stopped reading after a short while. Watched the video, which was quite beautiful. Seeing the statue from a distance down the corridor between rows of trees, it's quite striking. Brought to mind the statue of Crazy Horse a Polish sculptor started working on in a mountain in the Black Hills. It had that larger than life majesty about it that is altogether unreal. I believe I'd rather see MLK lifesize squatting down to eye level with a throng of little kids around him, the kids being the future in the quotation the video opened with, which really should have been the quotation on the monument, but it's probably used so many places it isn't rare enough.

I may not get there with ya,
but I want you to know tonight
that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. 



These words say it for me what King was about---I may not get there with ya---because his vision goes beyond his own life to the lives of all American black people. I do hope they take that present quotation off the memorial and put something real that's from his soul. That's what he was about. Also, there is the biggest reason of all why this is none of my business and I'd best leave it alone. I'm not black. It's not color of skin. It's experience. I don't have black experience. In the civil rights years, I felt a longing to be a part of helping the black people get out from under the dark cloud of whiteness. Walked in a few marches. I knew some black kids growing up, was friendly with them, saw first-hand they were people just like me. There was so much racial tension after 1954, I began right away to realize that all the friendly black people I'd known before were not really feeling friendly. They were puttin on the jive for the white boy. That was the first thing to change in 1954.



Black kids were forced to go to school with white kids and they liked it even less than the white kids. First thing, they collected themselves into gangs for protection and became another menace to nerdy white kids without any tough guy backup. What I've seen since then is the black people taking an interest in the benefit of all black people, not just the first ones to start making big money. I don't mean I see a lot of helping the down and out, but I see the recognition that this is part of the black experience and these people must be represented too. A momentum I've seen over the last half century is headed in a direction where the black people in future some time will greet each other as brother and sister, not allowing anyone to be down and out by taking care of them that can't help it. After this time of tribulation and into the coming thousand years of peace those old wrinkles of racism will surely be ironed out of the American character. They will have to be ironed out for there to be peace.



Only difference I ever saw between the races was a little bit of pigment and culture, theirs a humble minority culture, mine an arrogant majority culture, and the same bigger culture. I heard I believe it was Stokeley Carmichael telling white people to stay out of the black movement. White people move in and take over. And we don't know anything about the black experience. I heard it. I saw at the moment I heard him saying it on the news around 1964 the truth in what he was saying. Even though I think I wouldn't be like that, I would. I saw the best I can do to help is stay out of the way, allow the liberation to have a character particularly of the black experience. There is much they have to go through together as a people to reach their promised land. Racism is all over the world, even inside races, an expression of the human ego, one of many millions or billions of expressions of Self above all. My suspicion is the black people of America are working out racism for all of humanity. It's a heavy load. It's monumental. It's worth dying for.



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