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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DRESSED LIKE ONE, WALKS LIKE ONE

     the eye in the sky

I can't help but think about the Florida man, Zimmerman, what must be going through his head. Not so much the content of his thought, but the never-ending obsession with one moment in his life he would happily erase, undo, be done with, hit reset. Finally charged with second-degree, a charge that has a pretty good chance to stick considering no visual witnesses, no "beyond a shadow of a doubt" pre-meditation. The whole thing is a shame all the way around. I've an idea nobody knows this better than Zimmerman since the moment he pulled the trigger. I see it as one of those moments we regret that can never be taken back, apologized for, forgiven; just have to carry it around the neck like a dead chicken, the dead chicken of fear and uncertainty. Oh God, what have I done? Some people then shoot themselves, unable to live with what they've done. Some try to cover it up and get out of it. Trayvon couldn't be covered up, buried with lime, nothing. There it was, before he could think about it, Zimmerman looking at a corpse and it was his doing, no undoing.

I see him with that law in his mind, wanting to kill somebody and justify it with a law claiming self-defense. Please don't think I'm attempting to read his mind, rather am looking at possibilities my mind comes up with as if it were me or various men I know. It's like when you pay monthly for insurance for years and years, there comes a time you start wanting a return on that investment. Some people become hypochondriacs, wanting something back for all that money they're using to build skyscrapers with and putting swimming pools in the back yards of executives. Won't it be interesting when all the swimming pools in the country are full of rainwater and have become living eco systems, watering holes for the dog packs and herds of roaming cattle in the time of Mad Max and the Road Warriors. We've come into such a hair-raising time for all of us, when the heat is turned up that high for everybody, the weakest links in the chain will break, and they do, over and over.


Gore Vidal came to mind, his book of essays about Tim McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Couldn't remember the title. Went to amazon to run through Vidal titles, couldn't find it. Don't know if it's just not there--after 10 pages of Vidal books I got a good education in the obvious fact that he writes every minute of every day. Looking for the title I couldn't remember, I came upon his essays on the American Empire, the United States of Amnesia. Ordered a copy. He says it so well, is direct, lives in the ruling class and has a heart for the peasantry. That's cool with me. There's nobody in the peasantry with Vidal's knowledge and quick-minded intelligence. Like during the Bush Junta, Michael Moore was the only public dissident we had; like him or don't, he's all we had. Gore Vidal has been our Michael Moore of the essay form and his close readings of American history with the blinders of American denial stripped away.


His book of essays on Tim McVeigh show different views from what corporate.gov allows us access to via media. He got it articulately from McVeigh that he was intending to start the revolution. His bombing act was revenge for the ordeal of the FBI killing a small village of white people outside Waco, Texas, a little too close to the Bush ranch, the white people crazies, of course. Ruby Ridge in Idaho or Montana where FBI killed a man's wife with a sniper shot through the kitchen screen door. At home. Vidal tells McVeigh's beliefs and reasons. Evidently, McVeigh misread the timing in the sequence of events. The revolution was not ready to be sparked by a lone dog act. He had help, but it was his baby. All I'm attempting to get at is he misread the times. He thought he was starting the revolution that he perceived to be more pervasive among white men than it turned out to be. No telling what heroic role he saw for himself. Does loser apply here? Seems to me it's the natural next word. Another weak link in the chain that's been popping all over the country in surprise places for a large number of years. It's a curious kind of Surrealist rage. In the time of the French Surrealists, one of them maintained that the ultimate Surrealist act is to stand in a crowd of people with a revolver and shoot anyone at random. The idea was never embraced by the other Surrealists. Whichever one it was who thought it up, he forgot that love was the only theme of Surrealism. 


I didn't mean to digress away from Zimmerman as much as to give him context. I doubt the trial will allow the defense to ask some of the men he worked with if he listened to Limbaugh and how he talked about Limbaugh subjects. There, again, all that's popping is a weak link. I'd venture half the white men in US of Amnesia listen to Limbaugh, and they're not all doing these things, only the weak links. Maybe turning down the heat will help, but that's not going to happen before the whole chain shatters to smithereens. Let's hope the armed white male population doesn't go collectively berzerk in the wake of some incendiary news event, as McVeigh believed he foresaw happening. After half a century and more of throwing off decency generally, throwing off regard for others but as targets to influence; narcissis self cut loose to fall into the mirror and drown in self-indulgence. It's going to be hell to pay when a huge part of the population is urban and everybody has guns and everything goes to shit one day as a result of something on the news. I prefer to think God loves us and wants to give us the easy way through this torrent of the time called the Tribulation. It's a hang on with all your might kind of time. Like centrifugal force that makes things fly off of something that's spinning.


One thing I'm having a hard time with in this Trayvon issue is that it is making Al Sharpton look good, even sound like he has something to say worth hearing. Even though Zimmerman wasn't pure "white," he did a white man thing, a profile killing. Looks like one, walks like one, dresses like one, talks on a cell phone like one, must be one. Pit bull watch dog. Down boy. Down boy. Zimmerman will surely do some time, now that he's been charged. This trial may or may not be an examination of the self-defense law unto its withdrawal, but I really wouldn't put my money on withdrawal. It's a republican law and republican laws never get repealed. Maybe the trial could set a precedent for taking the thrill out of the "stand yer ground" law. The publicity around Zimmerman and his necessary isolation, for self-defense, surely makes him want to be in jail, prison, whatever, for protection. At least in prison, he'll have the Latin gangs at his back, which he won't have outside prison. I am glad I don't have his head right now. Peace of mind he does not have and will not have for a very long time, no matter which way the trial goes.


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HIS MAMA SAYS IT'S RACISM

by alexander liberman

All I hear on the news of interest these days is Trayvon Martin, over and over, everywhere I go for news. I have to say it is with good reason this subject is repeated every hour. From what I've heard, which amounts to what is purported to be the collection of police recordings of phone calls from neighbors, sounds like a guy wanting to kill somebody and provoked it. It is possible. I know a lot of white men and I know that a lot of the white men I know would love a chance to kill a nigger. I know a few guys who would wait for the chance to kill anybody. Going by faces, the guy pulling the trigger is somebody I would never trust for any reason on sight. Again, going by faces, I would be inclined to trust Trayvon. I heard several people on a call-in NPR talk show, On Point, I think, and nobody said anything about people who carry a secret desire to kill somebody. That's a no-no to talk about, because so many people in America kill people, it's kind of shameful to talk about it. Reasons? Everybody can, individually, think of valid reasons until there are so many it becomes unmanageable, which is where we are, socially in America. So much hate swirling on AM radio it's like a whirlpool in a wastewater treatment plant.

This is the America we live in. White man threatened by the statistics of people of color outnumbering colorless people. White man is in process of alienating white woman in this present madness for police state, making themselves one quarter of the population; hence, hardly a political voice at all. White men in power will not let power go without a fight. White man is not afraid to nuke a gook, a geek, a towel-head; makes no never-mind. I like seeing all the attention given to the case of Trayvon's murder, which I can't help but see is murder, even if I didn't see the killer's face. Like Trayvon's mama said, if a black man had shot a white boy for walking, he'd have been arrested without bail. Everybody in America knows that. Even the ones living in denial. The cops in the Florida town, and Florida is, indeed, the South, until you get to FtLauderdale, from there on down it's the North. I don't have any respect for Al (bad wig) Sharpton or Jesse (I was there when Martin was killed) Jackson, but I'm glad to hear they're getting their names nobody respects in the mix. Just for the annoyance of it. Seems to me, every person of color and every colorless person with a conscience has an interest.

I recall an incident in this county several years ago, a decade, thereabouts, a small motel owner, who happened to be a retired X-sheriff, blew a Mexican's head off with a shotgun and was never charged. "Self-defence." I wonder if it had been the other way around, the Mexican blew his head of and said, "Self-defence," when law-enforcement arrived. These stories are not rare, which is why suddenly they're getting attention now. It has become a social issue, white men getting away with killing people of color and saying, "Self-defence." Some black men on the radio program were talking about the understanding in black families, knowledge passed from parent to child about giving no cause to be accused of resistance to arrest, don't talk back, go with it, because if you don't, you might not come out of it alive. I understood, hearing that, why the black attitude toward all white people, no exceptions, that we do not understand their situation, no matter how much we think we do. I've known black people have known that for certain all through my lifetime, but nobody ever told me what it was. Of course, I can empathize, one human being to another, but I don't have the brotherhood of the experience, don't have the experience available even to imagination, meaning I can't understand a black individual's experience. Well. They can't understand my experience, either, being of the privileged race.


Given the obvious, that we can't understand each other, why not look at some of the ways we do understand each other and see if we can work out some understanding both ways. Yeah, right. This is obviously a time for hate, with all the hate whipped up among white men by AM radio third grade drop-outs, by the republican party in the Reagan era, which looks like it is soon passing due to absence of substance. These "front-runners" all trying to out-Reagan each other are showing that that the Reagan influence is now a flat tire. The republicans did so much damage over the last 30+ years, I don't see American History ever getting over it. Their intent, of course, is for it not to. It's hard to get over a hole in the bottom of a boat. They may have sunk us yet. It's a big boat, will take awhile to fill to sinking. We don't have far to go. Don't believe white man is going to give up political dominance without an Xhibition of Power. That's just conjecture. It could go like the Ottoman Empire, not with a bang, but a whimper. White men are presently giving over power to women. Today's statistic is that
in 40% of American marriages, the woman makes more than the man. That percentage is rising as there are more women in college now than men. Evidently, it won't be long before it is on the other side of 50%.

It is even looking like men, collectively, are tired of the burden of power, the burden of having to be the family breadwinner, tired of working all the time at shit jobs for next to nothing. I have suspected for several years that men are collectively growing weary of all that is expected of us from the time we're called "little man." Over and over we see local law enforcement all over the country to be people without any education in the law. They arrest on what they think oughta be the law, then it gets thrown out in court, because it's not the law. Then it's liberal judges and liberal lawyers, where, as usual, liberal means educated. The republican contempt for liberals is an extreme form of American anti-intellectualism. An expression of the general American disdain for eduction, which goes all the way back to the cowboys and the pilgrims, to the Plymouth Rock of  our mythology. Antintellectualism devolved to anti-intelligence, to anti-paying attention, to comatose, which is where we are now thanks to so many ignorant decisions in the past by people who hold anti-intelligence high up like a winner's trophy. We'll be a long time coming up out of the educational slump since the introduction of television. By now, the people making decisions with their heads full of television cannot make a rational decision, or so experience unveils it. 

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