ODE TO AMERICAN BLACK PEOPLE

scenes from the movie a screaming man

Saw a beautiful African film today from Chad. It was called A Screaming Man. The film had nothing to do with screaming. It was a screaming inside story, but it's the story of a man who cried because screaming would not matter. Screaming is outward. The man in the story was inward. He lived in a city in Chad, worked as a pool attendant at a foreign hotel that catered to white people vacationing from Europe. The hotel was evidently bought by the Chinese; the new owners changed the staff, firing people who had worked there all their working lives. The man we follow, and I say follow because it's like a camera is watching him go about his daily life, he's a quiet man with a good cook for his wife and a 20 year old son. The hotel fires him and hires his son to be the pool attendant. The government army conscripts the son against his will. The rebels are closing in on the city and people frantic, walking in a hurry to Cameroon. I'm guessing it might have been N'Djamena, Chad, a city on the Cameroon border. A finger of Chad extends to Lake Tchad where the borders of four countries meet, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger. It's another African story of rebels vs government troops, both armies brutal to the civilians in between. No military action is shown. Only the everyday life of a man whose life is changing with uncontrollable circumstances rolling over him. Our man's son is mortally wounded in battle. His dad finds him in the battlefield hospital, takes him away on his moped with a sidecar, the boy dies in transit home. His dad sat with the body beside the river til sunset, then set it afloat down the river and watched it ride the flow. It's a deeply emotional story of minimal action, minimal language. It's people living their lives; the viewer of the film sees them like through a peephole. It's very much like a Harold Pinter screenplay in this way. 

Good, simple people living their lives the best they're able in post-colonial Africa caught between two armies indifferent to the lives of everyone concerned. We look at Africans in refugee camps on the news and it's just another case of black people starving to death in a world of sorrow. This film shows the lives of the people in the camps before they left home to survive. They're people like us reduced to nothing left but prayer. I was a little disappointed when I saw today's mail and the movie was A Screaming Man. I wasn't in the mood for gunfights. I'd forgotten what the blurb said about it several months ago. A flash of Sylvester Stallone with a flame thrower strapped to his back scorching gooks right and left. I'd seen something in the netflix blurb about A Screaming Man that made me think it would be a good one. The title put me off. It sounds like one of those films I wouldn't watch for any reason. The original French title: Un homme qui crie, a screaming man. I feel like the word crying defines the man better than screaming. His entire inner being was indeed screaming, but it manifested crying. His crying was hopeless screaming. His screaming was repressed and wrung into crying. Sure, he was screaming inside, though it seemed to me the story concerned how the screaming was repressed inward into sobbing. The character of the man was brought to the surface in the course of the story. The people around him showed him respect, a man who doesn't make karmic waves that come back on him. Everybody who knew him called him Champ and Champion. He quietly flows along his day's routine with a happy family, good relationship with his son and wife, who reflect his inner stillness in their own characters. They are people living their lives, being unextraordinary, like us.

It appeared at times to be an allegory of living under circumstances way beyond our individual or even collective control. I see it in people I know, two people working full-time to maintain a place barely on the outskirts of poverty to raise their kids. Military takes the only child and returns him a corpse. Just a few months from homeless when the company you had a good job with down-sizes again. Rebels on a killing spree heading toward town to take over the radio and television stations. Get across the border as fast as you can go with whatever you're able to carry on foot. This is continuous everyday news several places in the world. I saw the mothers and fathers of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, and an almost endless list of other black people in America sent home dead without recourse. In town today, I saw by chance a black woman I've known to speak with a little bit. We spoke for a few minutes. She has kids. My heart wept for her. I saw another black woman I did not know and my heart wept for her. The statistics coming forward since the Mike Brown murder are sending a shock wave through my being to the toes and fingertips. I feel such incredible sorrow for the black people of America. I had not realized before that the black people I know and all the others live their lives on alert that the color of the skin they happened to be born with is a target. Champ in A Screaming Man setting his son afloat down the river brought the fathers and mothers to mind of all the young black men killed without recourse dealing with the corpse of their son. They can't scream, because nobody outside the family cares; they can only sob inwardly all the way to the soul. 

The image of Mike Brown asleep on the street in a puddle of his blood for four hours, yellow and black police tape keeping mother and father and everyone concerned waiting four hours to get an ambulance or something there to take him where they take dead niggers. I've seen these events on the news all the way along, but didn't put them together into an overwhelming question, how can I live without oppressive guilt for being white and male in America? I have felt this before. It's not a legitimate feeling for a white man to have, from either side of the fence. Black people know better than to trust any white man. And white people don't trust a nigger-lover. Lord have mercy, and everybody is calling themselves Christian. It really can't be said simpler than love thy neighbor, the core of the Master's teaching. Thy is old English for your own. Why is not practicing the counsel of the Master, at least to try it out and see what it's about, a part of Christendom? We have black Baptists on one side of the tear gas barricade and white Baptists the other side. The white Baptists see rabid monkeys and the black Baptists see Storm Troopers with themselves in the crosshairs, and no concerns about love thy neighbor inhibiting the fingers on the triggers. The cop that shot down a kid on his knees, hands up saying don't shoot, is a hero among white people of certain political and religious persuasions. I knew this in the white people I grew up among and have lived my entire life among, chose to let it be; I don't have to do it. I left that mind when I left the church I grew up in. I could not live in that mind and believe it had anything to do with the Christ, no matter how it's justified. I feel cornered in that my heart weeps for individuals I have found all my life to be incredible people, true human beings. I don't mean black people as seen on tv and in movies, but person to person as people in my world wherever I am, neighbors. I feel sorrow finding my white skin an automatic authority like a cop uniform to the black people I know and have known. I had not realized it was this bad. I am changed. I don't know how, but it will show down the line.   

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD AT LARGE

wayne white

I believed I could get through this Ferguson (St Louis), Missouri, incident without feeling compelled to flip my two pennies onto the gaming table. At first, it was just another white cop kills a black teenage boy, a regular occurrence like young white guy blows away a classroom of kids someplace. It's never certain where it will happen next, but it is certain it will happen. One of the first images to come to mind about the Ferguson incident is the police overzealous SWAT numbers and equipment. Talking heads are saying it looks like police state. We've never seen this before. Boston marathon bombing? Anybody remember that? I was most struck by the immediate appearance of an army of cops that swept Boston like ants on sugar. Where did they all come from? A big SWAT operation with the assistance of tv, them saying people were happy to oblige them to go through their homes a SWAT team with machine guns and grenades. What do you say to a SWAT team at the door saying let us in by opening the door or we break the door down and kill your dog? Genghis Khan and the Mongol Horde comes to mind. They went to medieval walled cities and told them to give the Mongols whatever wealth they had in gold and other valuable treasures. Give it over peaceably and we let you live. Refuse and we kill all of you, take what we want and burn down your city. I see talking head after talking head saying of Ferguson, we've never seen such a display of police state. Statistics coming to the surface now are alarming of SWAT break-in entry for next to nothing, killing people, even white people now, and saying, "He had a gun." Shooting to kill has become such a pattern, it tells on training. I've seen this coming on since the Nixon law and order fear propaganda, the beginning of white corporate backlash soon after the Civil Rights period. 

wayne white

I see "pundits" asking how we can turn this progression into police state around. I can't help but laugh when I hear that. I know they see it. I also know they are subject to corporate restraints by way of producer. MSNBC is as much a business as Faux tv. They just appeal to different markets, the presentation guided by fear. Even Democracy Now and Truthout, that seem to get it, use fear of police state to rally attention around their side of the divide. Our Ferguson protests and police show of force make fabulous tv for white shareholders: keepin the enwords down. Bright lights, smoke, rolling teargas cannisters, reporters muscled and arrested, a SWAT army keeping America safe for the whites. At the risk of blowing your white middle class mind, I've been seeing for some years that the white working class men of USA, coast to coast, border to border, believe "the nigger war" is imminent, the same as the "Christians" believe "the rapture" is near. The black people know this. White working class people know it too. It's what they are arming themselves toward, not to shoot each other. Black people all over the country are in alarm. The decisions made by white public officials have gone toward escalating the police action in Ferguson day by day so consistently the pattern exposes purpose. Even George Wallace did not provoke black people to this degree. Another young black unarmed guy will be shot by a cop with intent to kill, knowing he will get away with it and be a hero among the white brethren in racism. The cops of that community will come out a SWAT army to put down demonstrations, the protests will grow, the SWAT presence will grow. The talking heads will say incredulously, We've never seen anything like this. Black people say, yes we have, yes we have, yes we have, and the interviewer changes the subject. More blame the victim talk from white male authoritarians. 

wayne white

The black people are saying we want to be treated like people instead of zoo animals running loose. The absence of white authorities addressing the issue tells me what they see is a bunch of monkeys down from the trees hooting and screeching in their faces. If one bites you, you might get rabies. Something else I'm seeing, or so I interpret from what I see, the cops are scared shitless. No accidents in their underpants. The hacker collective called Anonymous has struck the Ferguson police hard, and the arch-enemy of white supremacism, the ACLU, is in town. Al Jazeera reporters and cameras. Ay-Rabs. The members of the SWAT force have been listening to Limbaugh for most of their lives and Faux news. My sense is that they feel cornered, not by a bunch of monkeys, but a threat to their own belief system, which is sacred to them all the way to church. Their zeal tells me this is what they believe they are standing guard for. They may be seen in shame on tv, but being on tv is their pride. They do not see human beings. They see the enemy. Their face shields, their bullet proof vests, their machine guns aimed at you, identify themselves the enemy, not people either. This isn't about people, human beings or whatever we're called. It's about belief systems. The police side doesn't seem able to see they are creating a tremendous resistance throughout the tv audience. It's like they're acting as a circle of wagons around the Bank. They're the cavalry in Indian Country. They're acting on orders from Headquarters. They're doing their job. Another wedge in the systematic divide-and-conquer phase of control. Can this be turned around? Not until Headquarters OKs it. It is too obvious a step in a systematic progression. Every day I see this a public relations police action to rally the well-armed white racists behind the police state for holding back a stampede of criminals and white liberals--same differ'nce. I feel like this ongoing standoff is a PR stunt rallying white racists, announcing to us by way of evening "news" we have police state similar to the Supreme Court announcing the end of Democracy overriding the popular vote. 

wayne white 

The step by step divide-and-conquer progression looks awfully much like intent to provoke more such protests in other cities where it is inevitable a cop will kill another unarmed black kid with his hands up saying don't shoot. It's like your girlfriend saying don't shoot and doing it anyway. She provoked it by saying don't. Put down after put down of black protest assures the white people the police have the black people under control. Good press. Good support. The press about the black kid is the same as the press about Trayvon Martin and others; discredit the victim, make him look on tv like white society is better off without him. Job well done, fellers. The indifference to the feelings and concerns of the black people who have lived in police state all their lives is as epidemic now as cops shooting with intent to kill. Six years of a black man in the White House has been enough time for the propagandists to generate so much racial hatred it's become explosive. I was thinking yesterday that if a hole the size of a quarter were to open in the president's security, he's dead as soon as the hole appears. And I remember one of Indira Gandhi's most trusted bodyguards sacrificed his own life to assassinate her in front of the other bodyguards, who immediately shot him down. A black president has been used for the focus of hate by the propagandists of white racism long enough to brew some serious mass hate. Being white rednecks, the cops in St Louis are as aware of the coming "nigger war" as every white working class man I know. A sensible person does not want to see this happen. The people passing orders down the chain of command to the white cops to provoke the black people of Ferguson are visibly not sensible people. They're functioning from a belief system. What color is the problem? Black. What color is the solution? Red. Black people have seen this coming, yet they appear to me to be in collective shock seeing white racism take such a militant stance so quickly, so blatantly, and so without meaningful censure from higher up.

wayne white

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