Monday, May 16, 2005
IS IT ON BULL OR JUST BULL?
Author Harry Frankfurt just wrote a book called "On Bull." From what I’ve gathered the 67-page book is about hypocrisy in the American culture. Although it focused more on American popular culture, I’m sure it applied to both almost equally. With that in mind, I was wondering:
Perhaps someone can clear something up for me. I am seriously confused about the difference between white supremacy and the crying out by "good" white people against U.S. imperialism. My major confusion starts when I look at history. The overwhelming majority of people who did things in the world of note (according to his-story) are all white people, both the "good" ones and the "bad" ones, however I must admit, they were mostly men. For example, the Caesars (except for one), the kings and queens of Europe, the so-called “great” generals, Alexander, Constantine, Hitler, Patton, the inventors, Guggenheim, Di Vince, Galileo, the religious icons, the Popes, (except for two), Martin Luther, Billy Graham, the “explorers” Columbus, Magellan, De Leon, etc. etc., etc. Further, when I look at all the heads of state of the most powerful countries in the world today, they are again white men, (except for their one token).
I wonder why in the last two thousand years or so why hasn't a non-white country produced a great world leader? Why in the last two thousand years or so hasn't anyone but white people (except their token) controlled the world resources, created and presently sit on the so-called, G-7/8 of the world richest nations? Why is it that they control the “world” bank, the "International"Monetary Fund, and the greatest weaponry in the world, while screaming to high heaven if a non-white country wants to build them? Why is it that the great majority of the countries controlled by whites (except their token and in the age of Islam) waged wars/conquest/saviorships and "exploration/exploitation" outside their state boundaries? Why was the focus on most countries that had no history of a relationship with whites, only resources?
Given the history of white skinned peoples, what separates world imperialism/conquest/saviors from world white supremacy? I see nothing, do you? What’s more telling is why don’t they admit the truth as to their goals and intentions? I remember a saying from a movie I once saw, it was “The Usual Suspects.” The one line that resonated with me was, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people he didn’t exist.”
I would appreciate any clarification of the difference between U.S. imperialism and world wide white supremacy under U.S. leadership because maybe this is one major issue of B.S. that On Bull needed to address, if the sincere white people of the world want to have a more just one. See in my "unimportant" non-European mind, you can't really fix a problem until those working on it know the scope of the problem and are able to confront it in its entirety.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
IS THE DOWN LOW REALLY LOW DOWN?
I was talking with my friend on the phone last night. She mentioned how black men were spreading AIDS in the community by being “bi-sexual.” But since she lived in the Bay Area, she more or less whispered it to me over the phone.
This took me back nine years to my Ethnic Studies graduate power point presentation. We had to address a problem in our community and focus on the resultant issues directly affecting the Black Community. My friend Anthony and I chose to do one on how homosexuality affected Black families. Predictably since we attended San Francisco State University, this was also received with a jaundice eye.
The point we were making with this presentation was that the foundation of the Black Community, the family, was under attack. See our idea of family, from an African perspective, which I believe is Nature’s perspective, is the "old fashioned" one of a male and a female procreating. Not some type of “artificial” conception be it in a test tube or insemination. My premise for this being “natural” is that nothing else in nature, except white Europeans, creates "artificial life" and presents this creation as a “universal” trait of man. Frankenstein was not black, yellow or brown.
Of course our presentation caught the attention of our Dean who happened to be “gay.” It appears it also made our African-centered professor upset because the dean was his friend and colleague. Needless to say, I would pay for that later.
The motivation for our choice has historical significance for the Black Community. Briefly, many Africans on the continent believe, in spite of European inspired protest, that homosexuality is NOT an African cultural tradition. However if one studies the history of the Scythians, Greeks, Romans, and other early European cultures, they find Europeans can’t make such claims. Put this in context with the many other cultural ideas that Europeans have presented to the world as “universal” ideas, I tend to believe the Africans.
With that said, we look at the contemporary events in the Black Community. We see that our prisons are crammed with young black men. We see that they are sexually assaulted as a sort of rights of passage by other black men who have been programmed to destroy things black. You see that economically, young black men are coerced into homosexuality because they have no idea of their ancestral spirit which could allow them to repeal this economic-psychological onslaught. You also see young black men in corporate white America accepting homosexuality as showing they are no threat to the white system. Finally, you see young black men going through an educational/social system that strips them of their Black cultural manhood, which in turn opens the door for all kinds of concepts.
As mentioned before, the above “pressures” on the Black man reaches into the very core of our cultural survival, the black family. For me, many of our cultural interactions with European culture are a form of imposed consensual cultural genocide, one that this society chooses to see as benign or non- threatening. Another reason is that the white community can take the homosexuality hit. They don’t need as many “male” bodies to protect their supremacy or foster their cultural legitimacy. They have their technology holding the hordes at bay. However Blacks are faced, on a global level, with high levels of imprisonment, economic depravation, disease, proportional drug addiction, historical ignorance, fear, and mistrust. Now we have an AIDS attack on our entire weakened community mobilized by one of our greatest drives, sex, supposedly the black man’s salvation.
So I ask, Is the Down Low really Low Down? I would say emphatically yes. I’ve never experienced sex with a man, but there must be something to it since it is so popular. But in my mind, that’s not what makes it “low down.” What makes it low down is that it has the potential to spreads AIDS to innocent people, wrecking havoc in our community. Even more realistically, it gives our women the disease, possibly passing it on to our children. Another mention is that the “down low” further exacerbates our communal problem because in many instances because of lack, it forces our women into homosexuality.
My final analysis is that if our young men want to lay with other men, leave our women alone. (Given the circumstances, I am sorry to say if our women can’t find a black man, try a man from another culture.) Gay black men don’t need to prove their lost “manhood” to anyone, if by consent, it’s gone. Finally, I wish our young men would stop raping other young men in prison. These are sicknesses that must be stopped if we are to get back to sanity. In fact, I wish my professors weren’t so hard on us nine years ago when the down low was further down.
This took me back nine years to my Ethnic Studies graduate power point presentation. We had to address a problem in our community and focus on the resultant issues directly affecting the Black Community. My friend Anthony and I chose to do one on how homosexuality affected Black families. Predictably since we attended San Francisco State University, this was also received with a jaundice eye.
The point we were making with this presentation was that the foundation of the Black Community, the family, was under attack. See our idea of family, from an African perspective, which I believe is Nature’s perspective, is the "old fashioned" one of a male and a female procreating. Not some type of “artificial” conception be it in a test tube or insemination. My premise for this being “natural” is that nothing else in nature, except white Europeans, creates "artificial life" and presents this creation as a “universal” trait of man. Frankenstein was not black, yellow or brown.
Of course our presentation caught the attention of our Dean who happened to be “gay.” It appears it also made our African-centered professor upset because the dean was his friend and colleague. Needless to say, I would pay for that later.
The motivation for our choice has historical significance for the Black Community. Briefly, many Africans on the continent believe, in spite of European inspired protest, that homosexuality is NOT an African cultural tradition. However if one studies the history of the Scythians, Greeks, Romans, and other early European cultures, they find Europeans can’t make such claims. Put this in context with the many other cultural ideas that Europeans have presented to the world as “universal” ideas, I tend to believe the Africans.
With that said, we look at the contemporary events in the Black Community. We see that our prisons are crammed with young black men. We see that they are sexually assaulted as a sort of rights of passage by other black men who have been programmed to destroy things black. You see that economically, young black men are coerced into homosexuality because they have no idea of their ancestral spirit which could allow them to repeal this economic-psychological onslaught. You also see young black men in corporate white America accepting homosexuality as showing they are no threat to the white system. Finally, you see young black men going through an educational/social system that strips them of their Black cultural manhood, which in turn opens the door for all kinds of concepts.
As mentioned before, the above “pressures” on the Black man reaches into the very core of our cultural survival, the black family. For me, many of our cultural interactions with European culture are a form of imposed consensual cultural genocide, one that this society chooses to see as benign or non- threatening. Another reason is that the white community can take the homosexuality hit. They don’t need as many “male” bodies to protect their supremacy or foster their cultural legitimacy. They have their technology holding the hordes at bay. However Blacks are faced, on a global level, with high levels of imprisonment, economic depravation, disease, proportional drug addiction, historical ignorance, fear, and mistrust. Now we have an AIDS attack on our entire weakened community mobilized by one of our greatest drives, sex, supposedly the black man’s salvation.
So I ask, Is the Down Low really Low Down? I would say emphatically yes. I’ve never experienced sex with a man, but there must be something to it since it is so popular. But in my mind, that’s not what makes it “low down.” What makes it low down is that it has the potential to spreads AIDS to innocent people, wrecking havoc in our community. Even more realistically, it gives our women the disease, possibly passing it on to our children. Another mention is that the “down low” further exacerbates our communal problem because in many instances because of lack, it forces our women into homosexuality.
My final analysis is that if our young men want to lay with other men, leave our women alone. (Given the circumstances, I am sorry to say if our women can’t find a black man, try a man from another culture.) Gay black men don’t need to prove their lost “manhood” to anyone, if by consent, it’s gone. Finally, I wish our young men would stop raping other young men in prison. These are sicknesses that must be stopped if we are to get back to sanity. In fact, I wish my professors weren’t so hard on us nine years ago when the down low was further down.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
LET'S DANCE.
Just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon issued a sweeping defense strategy detailing a new vision for winning swift wars against global terrorist networks and outlaw regimes. One year later, the White House unveiled its "National Security Strategy," which discussed using the U.S. military to launch preemptive wars and snuff out threats before they materialized - a strategy that would later be known as "The Bush Doctrine."
Now, with nearly 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq two years after the fall of Baghdad, along with commitments in Afghanistan and for the global war on terrorism, many Pentagon officials admit that the bloody insurgency in Iraq has tempered that vision of what the U.S. military can and cannot do."-from Truthout..
This is insanity but accepted as a "sane" rationale. I remember when I was teenager and would go to house parties. We'd all be in the basement fast and slow dancing. The rhythms would emanate from every young body in the room and it looked like a universal communion based in natural rhythms. Later, I would go home and watch TV. I would tune into "American Bandstand" to look at the white kids dance. I saw uncoordinated bodies that begged to find some continuity with nature and the universe. I would see little white feet hopping around and bodies doing something I just didn't understand instead of sliding and gliding like those basement dancers to the sounds of ancestral memories.
Today I watch the grandsons and granddaughters of those basement dancers. To me they look like mechanical windmills in some bizarre dance with some phantom impulses coming from who knows where. They sometimes hop around and contort their bodies in jerks and synchronous motions like some spastic child crying for attention. And they enjoy it thinking they have pushed dancing to another level.
By now I'm sure you are probably asking what in the hell does this have to do with war plans, global terrorist and the "Bush Doctrine." It has a great deal to do with them. Just like the Bush Doctrine is in place to bring "western continuity" to the world, so were the dancers on American Bandstand with regard to dancing. They knew that they looked and probably felt strange as well as out of place when watching the basement dancers, so they began to change the idea of what is rhythm. The Bush Doctrine attempts to do the same thing, change the idea of cultural sovereignty.
The ideas of capitalism, western democracy, religions, laws and political systems don't/didn't fit most cultures whose history was steeped in some form of cultural socialism (dance). That would make the Bush Doctrine's dancers "hoppers" on the world stage instead of sliders and gliders in tune with the majority of the world's cultural rhythms. Those European cultural ideologist, like the ones on the Bush Doctrine's "American Bandstand," throughout history couldn't learn to synchronize with nature, so they changed the essence of human rhythm and natural synchronization. It took them centuries as witnessed by the invasions of Scythia, Greece, Rome, Crusaders, England, France, Germany, etc., etc., etc.,. on the "rhythmic" dancers of the world.
Believe it or not, I can understand the need for the hoppers of the world to change the dance, to bring another idea of rhythm to the world. What I don't understand is why does the world allow it to happen? What is it that prevents the world from understand that "hopping" is not in tune with nature's rhythm, but with some dance from someplace even I don't understand? Why does the world keep trying to understand this spastic drummer and adopt their style? Why doesn't the world just ignore their paternalistic desire to mechanize nature and let them keep trying to learn the glide and slide?
The answers are complex, but the primary reason is the world doesn't understand why they only learned to hop instead of slide and glide. The world just can't understand that the hopper's drummer never fully developed the depth or ability to drum, however he did understand how to hit the damm thing and make "big" noises.
The kids today have no idea the importance of dancing to universal rhythms. The world has no idea of how important it is to evolve their culture from their ancestral memory. The world has no idea how important it is to learn to dance with different styles, but the same rhythms?
Now, with nearly 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq two years after the fall of Baghdad, along with commitments in Afghanistan and for the global war on terrorism, many Pentagon officials admit that the bloody insurgency in Iraq has tempered that vision of what the U.S. military can and cannot do."-from Truthout..
This is insanity but accepted as a "sane" rationale. I remember when I was teenager and would go to house parties. We'd all be in the basement fast and slow dancing. The rhythms would emanate from every young body in the room and it looked like a universal communion based in natural rhythms. Later, I would go home and watch TV. I would tune into "American Bandstand" to look at the white kids dance. I saw uncoordinated bodies that begged to find some continuity with nature and the universe. I would see little white feet hopping around and bodies doing something I just didn't understand instead of sliding and gliding like those basement dancers to the sounds of ancestral memories.
Today I watch the grandsons and granddaughters of those basement dancers. To me they look like mechanical windmills in some bizarre dance with some phantom impulses coming from who knows where. They sometimes hop around and contort their bodies in jerks and synchronous motions like some spastic child crying for attention. And they enjoy it thinking they have pushed dancing to another level.
By now I'm sure you are probably asking what in the hell does this have to do with war plans, global terrorist and the "Bush Doctrine." It has a great deal to do with them. Just like the Bush Doctrine is in place to bring "western continuity" to the world, so were the dancers on American Bandstand with regard to dancing. They knew that they looked and probably felt strange as well as out of place when watching the basement dancers, so they began to change the idea of what is rhythm. The Bush Doctrine attempts to do the same thing, change the idea of cultural sovereignty.
The ideas of capitalism, western democracy, religions, laws and political systems don't/didn't fit most cultures whose history was steeped in some form of cultural socialism (dance). That would make the Bush Doctrine's dancers "hoppers" on the world stage instead of sliders and gliders in tune with the majority of the world's cultural rhythms. Those European cultural ideologist, like the ones on the Bush Doctrine's "American Bandstand," throughout history couldn't learn to synchronize with nature, so they changed the essence of human rhythm and natural synchronization. It took them centuries as witnessed by the invasions of Scythia, Greece, Rome, Crusaders, England, France, Germany, etc., etc., etc.,. on the "rhythmic" dancers of the world.
Believe it or not, I can understand the need for the hoppers of the world to change the dance, to bring another idea of rhythm to the world. What I don't understand is why does the world allow it to happen? What is it that prevents the world from understand that "hopping" is not in tune with nature's rhythm, but with some dance from someplace even I don't understand? Why does the world keep trying to understand this spastic drummer and adopt their style? Why doesn't the world just ignore their paternalistic desire to mechanize nature and let them keep trying to learn the glide and slide?
The answers are complex, but the primary reason is the world doesn't understand why they only learned to hop instead of slide and glide. The world just can't understand that the hopper's drummer never fully developed the depth or ability to drum, however he did understand how to hit the damm thing and make "big" noises.
The kids today have no idea the importance of dancing to universal rhythms. The world has no idea of how important it is to evolve their culture from their ancestral memory. The world has no idea how important it is to learn to dance with different styles, but the same rhythms?
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