The Implications of Gender Critique In the film, The Matrix (transcript of a lecture delivered at Florida International University in March, 2001)

1.What is Feminism?
Good afternoon. We will begin by defining feminism.
Feminism is humanism. That is, feminism as a political and a social movement is a humanist movement. It is one of the more crucial strands within a collective history of liberation struggle here in America. Along with Unionism, the Amerindian and First Nation struggles, the Black liberation struggle, the anti-war movement, the ethnic rights struggle, the free speech movement, the sexual liberation struggle, the socialist movements, and the public rights movements, feminism in all its guises and ethnic permutations has sought to humanize modern western societies. Its influence has expressed itself by calling for and working toward the goal of liberating women from the domination they suffer at the hands of a western political economy, simply said.

The western political economy is built upon the exploitation of women's work, and upon the surveillance, domination and control of women's bodies--their sexuality and their autonomy--this is how patriarchy functions. Both politics and economics are realms of male dominance. Men seize and maintain power, privilege, and autonomy through their domination of these two realms and by denying women access to these two realms—the political and the economic realms. That denial of access serves to maintain gender segregation and gender slavery (the unstable gains of American, bourgeois feminists not withstanding).

As a project, then, to claim legal, political, social, and economic rights for women, feminism has struggled against this patriarchal arrangement in the west, and its influence has extended, in the past twenty five years, to 'non-western' and 'non-aligned' nations and societies such as those in Asia, Micronesia, Latin America, Afrika, and Eastern Europe.

2.What is Humanism?
Without resorting to a long winded historical analysis of the Hellenic, ancient Greek roots of ‘humanism’ as the rejection of theism-centered and monarchist or militarist social organization, we can say that humanism in the west has arisen, since the founding of America and again since modernism, and most recently since the formation of the United Nations Charter and the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," as a philosophy and a strategy devoted to creating public space, independent thought, individual and human rights, democracy (also a Hellenic construction), freedom of speech and of association, and legal protection from domination.

Under previously empowered theistic, monarchist, and militarist political systems and social powers, gods, kings, popes, and generals ruled human existence with their own arbitrary impunity. What democratically elected Archon, Themistocles (Θεμιστοκλῆς; c. 524–459 BC ) and the other rulers of Athens Greece conceived, and what Socrates had earlier sharpened through his relentless attack upon and critique of Athenian democracy, was a new way of looking at human social structures and human existence in the west: a system of social organization which would value every single individual human being rather than merely valuing religious dogma, power, and conquest.

Implicit in this concept is the invention of the civil society (not the idiotic, 'civil' society spoken of by reactionaries like Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich--as in, 'civility and good behavior,' but the 'civil' written of by Plato in his Republic). The civil society, by definition at least, forces religion, patriarchy and monarchy, and military and policing forces TO THE MARGINS of the culture. As Thomas Jefferson argued, when helping to frame the new national democracy of the American republic, the civil society upholds, protects and defends the citizenry--its rights, its health, its welfare and freedom. This it does, as John Adams argued in Philadelphia during the drafting of the declaration of independence, through public institutions, through public authority, and through the repression of private interests and of capitalist power blocs under the guiding and regulatory powers of democratically elected government. Benjamin Franklin expressed similar ideas claiming that all of this would be ordained, propagated and maintained through public literacy, journalism, and education. As he wrote in one of his satirical rhymes:

Whoever thinks a country can be,
both ignorant and free,
Wants what never was,
and never can be.

3.Feminst "Reading"
Feminism is humanism. It supplies one of the most illuminating and empowering ways (for women, and also for conscious men) of reading texts--one among a multiplicity of ways of reading, to be sure, but one which can be especially enlightening when applied to film-text. Texts are anything we can 'read' and through reading, theorize. Books are texts, films are texts, paintings, songs, symphonies and architectures are texts, this classroom is a text, the cityscape of Miami seen from ten miles overhead, is a text. Your body is a text. All these things can be read, and because all these things can be 'read', they can all be theorized.

Jonathan Culler, professor of literary theory in the English department at Cornell University writes that there are four main attributes of 'theory', and the reading of literature and literary texts:

1.Theory is interdiciplinary.
2.Theory is analytical and speculative.
3.Theory is a critique of 'common sense'--what is assumed to be 'natural.'
4.Theory is reflexive--it makes us think about HOW we think about things, and the categories and methods we employ when we think about things, such as texts.

"As a result," writes Culler, in his book, Literary Theory:

Theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it is endless. It is not something that you could ever master. Not a particular group of texts you could learn so as to "know theory. (Culler, 15)

This implies an idea which is completely counter to what has become the dominant idea of universities in the 21st century--that the point of thinking is to discover 'answers.' That the point of education is to gain 'mastery,' which is reflected in bogus 'certification' of one's authority to say, 'I'm educated' simply because one has a degree; as if one had gone off to see the Wizard and upon confessing one's lack of a brain, were to have the Wizard hand one a 'diploma' and pronounce one to no longer be a scarecrow.

No, in fact (and it is a fact upon which all of democratic, civil and humanist society is built, in fact) THINKING IS ITSELF AN END IN ITSELF--the point of thinking is thinking. Without this simple precept, we would even now be transported back to medievalism; to feudalism. I would be "nigger," there would be no women here on the campus of Florida International University, and there might well be a national guard division stationed on campus to repel public access by the poor and working class citizens of nearby Sweetwater, if those citizens are unable to pay the entrance fee of tuition.

In short, strategies for reading literary and cinematic texts, for reading cinema as text, are part of a long American tradition, since modernism, of democratic thinking. Thinking politically, thinking economically, thinking historically. Feminist reading seeks to give us tools to think about the political, economic and historical experience, roles and possibilities of women as subjects of texts. By implication then, it also gives us tools to think about the place and possibilities of masculinity in all that. It offers a radical gender critique.

4.Reading Ideas of Gender in The Matrix
Feminist strategies for reading texts such as films, suggest that The Matrix is a deeply questioning film. It questions:

(1)Our most fundamental assumptions about our own economic reality through symbolizing capitalism as an endless dream of ignorant and contented slavery;

(2)Our assumptions about and our conception of, the patriarchal social order;

(3)Our uncritical acceptance of the reductive ideology of 'naturalism,' of 'so-called, 'human nature' and of the retro-Newtonian concept of mechanistic, manifest social organization (which is the idea that all human beings 'naturally' organize themselves according to a 'manifest destiny' of inborn compulsions such as the will toward greed, competition, and aggression--the will toward patriarchy and domination of the female body);

(4)Our assumptions about gender (and race) as a category which defines essence, identity and possibility, through the radical reversal of sexist/racist hierarchies (The Oracle and Morpheus are the top of a hierarchy despite the fact that as a Black woman and Black man, characters in an American film narrative, their usual position would be a servile and a dehumanized one. Meanwhile, they both represent an even more radical reversal of our ideas of domination and our assumptions that domination is or ought to be contained within patriarchy and matriarchy as hierarchical modes of human relation;

And finally,

(5)Our assumptions about masculinity and its place in the social order. The relation between masculinity and the social order is exposed as one of slavery. The film achieves this exposure through its exploration and reversal of American assumptions about masculinity in bourgeois human relations such as the middle-class utilitarian family structure, friendship, and love. The film achieves this exposure also through a discreet reversal of role play in the interaction between Trinity and Neo.


For Further Thought:

The Razor's Edge
-demonstrates the deeper levels of meaning and identity in the history of the European working class (the origins of socialism and of unionism).

Marlon Brando’s role as Vito Corleogne
-demonstrates the classical, American Fuedalist/Calvinist/Puritain conception of the function of masculinity.

The Sopranos
-demonstrates the idea (a racist idea) of Italian (ethnic) masculinity, although the Sopranos is doing a very close-to-the-chest CRITIQUE of it as socially constructed by isolationism, and a larger culture of brutality and masculinity (how much of this is 'traditional' and how much of it is constructed by Capitalism and by Catholicism??)

The Thin Red Line
-demonstrates the richness of the world surrounding the social order and the symbolic order, as well as offering the idea of escape from them, transgression of them, and exposes the severe pain and unease that even assimilated men feel outside of it.
-Issues of NATURE, the FEMALE and of CHAOS and CORPORATE CAPITAL as James Jones presented them in his original novel and Terrence Malick explores them in his film adaptation, are crucial to confronting patriarchy and to constructing a feminist analysis of gender.

The Matrix
-Trinity as 'action hero' displaces male aggression and dominance of the social order she struggles against.
-Neo's dissatisfaction with his place in the social order, indeed, with the very reality of the social order, makes it possible for him to escape from that social order once he discovers the world that lies outside of his own simulacrum.
-What lies outside the simulacrum is the real world (‘the desert of the real’, as Morpheus says, after Baudrillard).
-Trinity reverses masculine/feminine assumptions
-The alternative to patriarchy is genuine fatherhood (unconditional love, mentorship, protection of the innocent and guardian of freedom) symbolized by Morpheus
-The scene in “The Thin Red Line” in which Captain Staros is rebuked and threatened by Cornel Tall, is co-relative to the scene in The Matrix in which Neo is interrogated by the LITERAL symbolic order (once he is arrested by Agent Smith)!
-The climactic 'fight scene' in The Matrix displaces race, gender, and power—it replaces patriarchy, aggression and libido with the THINKING and PHILOSOPHY of liberation.

Barak Obama is no Dennis Kucinich, or Paul Wellstone, but He'll Do, I Guess

"Everybody is trying to figure out the process, get registered and understand the politics, to get involved, to be a part of all this, and it's happening! It's happening, in our lifetime."
-Ngia Lawrence

"The structural reality of electoral politics vis-a-vis the much broader democratic necessity of mass-based political education and mobilization is precisely the tension between unavoidable contradictions and constraints that are the automatic result of engaging people to organize on behalf of much larger goals than merely getting someone elected."
-Professor Kofi Natambu

"I suppose it's race you're talking about? Imaginary Blackness and imaginary whiteness? Excuse me, but where does that leave me?"
-Dr. Yvonne Singh

“Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”
-Saul Alinski





ONE.
"Change you can trust"? My leftist Black, Jewish, and Italian-American mentors from my Detroit elementary schoolling up through my graduate education at Cornell had always taught me to recognize the bitter truth Saul Alinski preached: 'change' is a terrible thing. It requires bloodshed at the most, and demands the deaths of sacred cows and the discomfiture of power elites at least. So, the psychic disonance of the phrase, "change you can trust" put me off when I first heard the Obama campaign use it.


Yes, I confess that it took me some time to get with the Obama program.




TWO.
Now, on the eve of 'Little Super Tuesday'--the Texas and Ohio primaries, I support Barak H. Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, but like about 20-30% of his supporters, I didn't start out as an Oba-mite. As a supporter of Kucinich (D-Ohio) in the 2004 presidential election, and then a supporter of John Edwards (D-NC) in this one, I had found Obama's progressive-light patter and his John Kennedy redux demeanor a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g. I was annoyed too, by the band wagon jumping I perceived Black friends and fellow Black intellectuals to be engaging in by jumping onto an Obama good feeling express and talking as if a bourgeois social democratic centrist could, by dent of our collective wishful thinking, be taken as a progressive. I mean for Chrissakes, the man said things like this:

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they
sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can
make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that
the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And
they want that choice.
[Barak Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention
Keynote Address]

What exactly did he mean? He was always heavy on the figurative language ("the doors of opportunity") on vague, progressive sounding abstractions ("...with just a change in priorities..."), and meanwhile he liberally peppered his discourse with what sounded alot like conservative codes meant to appeal to what media flaks call his milk-source, the 'independents' presumably, who some of those flaks and even some legitimate analysts say are really just faithless republicans and soft headed 'libertarians'. Perhaps those conservative codes ("No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems") are slipped into his discourse to appease those who probably don't trust talk of 'change' if the talk is not of a libertarian complexion. The twenty-to-thirty percenters, those independents, republicans ("Obamacans"? yuck), and libertarians, are reportedly joined by so-called 'swing voters' of which I guess I am one: people who don't remain loyal to the two corporate political parties at the top of the food chain but who know better than to look to a Green Party gaining a significant foothold in America before the year 2040, and who 'swing' between the two parties from election to election, or who 'swing' from candidate to candidate, at local, state, and national levels. In short, who knows, I wondered, what this man means?




THREE.
Obama's nod to US politics' obligatory crypto rejection of socialism worried me. I'm with Thom Hartmann; I think government can solve my damn problems and should. Democratic electoral, government should, that is. In a democracy I am the government, right? Is Exxon gonna solve my problems? Is Dupont? I think we all know that Haliburton sure won't. These runaway corporate fiefdoms exerting their wills over my government--and therefore over me--are the problem. As Hartmann rationally reminds us on his Air America radio program, socialism is not a dirty word. The government is not some foreign invader, as that old fart, Ronald Reagan used to meander around muttering ("The nine most terrifying words in the English language," Reagan used to demure, "Are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.' "). Government, Hartmann argues, practises a practical socialism every day and does so quite efficiently and much to our approval, by providing fire department, post office, and social security services. If politicians in the traditional mold (mould?) feel that they must renounce socialism, it's a manifest hypocrisy when they do so since they don't renounce the US mail, meat inspection, FAA standards for airlines, their grandmother's social security check, or the neighborhood fire fighters ready to extinguish any blazes that might erupt inside said politicians' homes.

I was not at first for Obama because realpolitik Obama is squarley rooted in centrist position. His voting record in the senate, his speeches, and his books all bespeak this utilitarian fact. He was vague and symbolic a year ago in his Feb 2007 speech in Springfield, Illinois announcing his candidacy:

In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle,
that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching
for what's possible, building that more perfect union. [Obama, 2007]

Meanwhile, John Edwards, in anouncing his own candidacy chose to do it in the still ravaged New Orleans 9th Ward, standing amidst the debris that was still scattered in the devestated streets. Throughout his campaign he promised if elected to enact a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, and promised to spend our wealth not on corporate wars but on domestic social problems. He gave speeches and Q&A's across the country, standing atop steam shovels, bull dozers, farming combines, on makeshift platforms in the yards of factories, and in impoverished communities. More than simply offering another byzantine and numbingly detailed health care plan, he, unlike Obama and Clinton, took the further rhetorical step of denouncing the pharmaceutical campanies making obscene profits off the health care mess in America. His was an insurgent, populist campaign, and he said so: "This campaign will be a grass-roots, ground-up campaign, where we ask people to take action."

In his June, 2006 "Take Back America Conference" remarks in Washington, DC, Obama said,

The world has changed. And as a result, we've seen families work harder for less and our jobs go overseas. We've seen the cost of health care and child care and gasoline skyrocket. We've seen our children leave for Iraq and terrorists threaten to finish the job they started on 9/11. But while the world has changed around us, too often our government has stood still. Our faith has been shaken, but the people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe again. It's the timidity - the smallness - of our politics that's holding us back right now. The idea that some problems are just too big to handle, and if you just ignore them, sooner or later, they'll go away. That if you give a speech where you rattle off statistics about the stock market being up and orders for durable goods being on the rise, no one will notice the single mom whose two jobs won't pay the bills or the student who can't afford his college dreams. That if you say the words "plan for victory" and point to the number of schools painted and roads paved and cell phones used in Iraq, no one will notice the nearly 2,500 flag-draped coffins that have arrived at Dover Air Force base. Well it's time we finally said we notice, and we care, and we're not gonna settle anymore. [Barak Obama, June, 2006]

Just as I feel that Edwards' constant rhetorical attacks on the true enemies of the American people (i.e., corporations) were illustrative of his aborted campaign and of his possible presidency, I felt that Obama's keynote address, his candidacy announcement, and his "Take Back America" remarks were all typical of his fatuous rhetoric. Obama says, "Our faith has been shaken." Not mine, thanks, I'm agnostic. Obama says, "The people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe." Believe in what? I believe in a windfall profits tax, and labor law reforms, and a seat in the cabinet for a secretary of worker rights, and price and dividend control, and rescinding the patriot act, and how about a superfund to clean up radioactive and chemical spills across the U.S., and how about getting rid of the ruinous Taft-Hartley Act, and while we're at it, we need a full employment bill, and we need to finally pass the ERA (neither Obama nor Clinton truly speak up for women's rights if neither will even utter that acronym). We need to enforce the EPA laws, the anti-trust laws, and the authority of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. I believe in legislation to establish a living wage. I believe in reinstituting the Fairnes Doctrine, and I believe in a progressive tax that would eliminate most corporate welfare, corporate shelters, and offshore corporate shells. The first thing I believe a president should do in January, 2009 is to outlaw Haliburton corporation's escape with our stolen tax dollars to Dubai. That, I believe.

Obama, it seemed to me, was too busy drawing on crypto religious-right codes in talking about 'belief', to utter any overtly socialist noises--the noises Kucinich and Edwards regularly voiced on behalf of a mass democracy. Obama's stump speeches had been just as rhetorically suspect to me. "I've got ten point plans all OVER my website," he recently shouted to one of his rockstar stadium sized crowds in response to reports that Hillary Clinton had accused him, spuriously, of having no 'plan' for something or other. Funny; between the two senators, Clinton and Obama, they have taken some 900 votes, and according to Meet The Press analysts (on the Sunday, March 2 2008 Boradcast) they voted exactly alike 90% of those votes. They are in some ways a two-headed wrestling match, each head battling the other while sharing the same body of ideology. They carp at each other over mundane details while both refusing to name names.

Yeah. That's just it. Kucinich named names and announced necessary socialist solutions to the rot that has become of American social and economic reality. Edwards went so far as to define the real class conflicts that define American life, and named the corporations that need to be beheaded. He was downright (gasp!) Marxist at times in his call to lift up the masses in order to save the middle class: trickle up as opposed to trickle down.



FOUR.
On the eve of Little Super Tuesday, I now support Obama, nevertheless.


The alternative, now that Edwards is gone, is what seems to me more and more like a Hillary Clinton continuation of the politics of what I call "Bushido" (like some fuedal Japanese masochistic warrior code, Bush-ism entails the gleeful willingness to slit one's own belly open for the sake of tax cuts, war, ballooning budgets, and of social spending cuts).

Though I now support Obama, I feel much what Alexander Cockburn expressed in his Feb 18 2008 column in The Nation, where he wrote, "I'll forgive Obama a couple of his hot-air speeches just for wiping out the Clintons in South Carolina." And yes, like many other Black intellectuals my age and my political cut (yes, I admit it, I'm a Marxist), part of why I reluctantly clambered up onto the crowded Obama wagon was an abiding low-level disgust I've always felt with the conceits of what I call The Clintonia Stankonia that has, let's face it, Always been there, a sour smell to those of us who've supported the Clintons. I was a columnist and reporter for the Ithaca Times in upstate New York the year that Clinton won the Democratic nomination for his first presidential bid, and I recall publishing in my newspaper one of the hundreds of cautionary 'slick Willie' pieces being published at the time throughout the country. My own piece took Bill Clinton to task for his truculence and rhetorical opportunism, and for his DLC-bred conservatism. I voted for him, but many of us who voted for him didn't trust him, and it turned out there was good reason to hold one's nose that year while pulling the lever for the democrats. As Christopher Hayes wrote in a recent issue of The Nation,

Clinton's fundamentally defensive conception of how to defuse the Republicans on national security (neutralizing their hawkishness with one's own) is an example of a larger problem, rooted in the fact that so many of her circle served in her husband's Administration. Their political identities were formed in the crucible of crisis, from the Gingrich insurgency to the Ken Starr inquisition. The overriding imperative was survival against massive odds, often with a hostile public, press or both. Like an animal caught in a trap that chews off its leg to wriggle away, the Clinton crew by the end of its tenure had hardly any limbs left to propel an agenda. The benefit of this experience, much touted by the Clintons, is that they know how to fight and how to survive. But the cost has been high: those who lived through those years are habituated to playing defense and fighting rear-guard actions. We know how progressives fared under Clintonism: they were the bloodied limbs left in the trap. Clintonism, in other words, is the devil we know. [Christopher Hayes, The Nation, Feb 18, 2008]

And we know, and know, and know, as we watch the incipient paternalism and arrogance that has flowed from the Hillary Clinton campaign, from Hilary's brittle, cold attitude toward t, he voters as she organizes from the right in terms of policy formation, touting the same old Clinton gang from her husband's administration, plus new "Hillaryland" aids brought into The Kindom for Hillary's senate campaign. Some of those personages are of course Mark Penn, Dwight Jewson, the fired Patti Solis Doyle, Mandy Grunwald, Harold Ickes, (and, I strongly suspect, James Carville, on the downlow, shilling for Clinton under the radar), and various other former West Wing advisors and 'Hillaryland' aids. Solis Doyle had coined the term, "Hillaryland" to describe the staff and entourage around Hillary during the Clinton administration and after. These familiar Clinton Kingdom courtiers were and are the ones who carried out the Clinton Way: rhetorical spin, message management, focus groups, polling regimes, media doctoring of image, and message placement. Michael Tomsky's book, "Hillary's Turn," on the senate campaign Hillary mounted in 2000, stresses the continuity of the Clinton Way from the administration to the senate campaign.

FIVE.
There is an abiding arrogance and sense of entitlement displayed by Senator Hillary Clinton in her bid for the democratic nomination. She is disturbingly truculent in her willingness to use the very same attack ads and dirty ad hominem tactics against Obama that were used by the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" against her and her husband during the Clinton administration (including the recent, disorientingly rediculous charge she made that Obama 'plaigerized' Duval Patrick's words, and that Obama is somehow dishonest and reprobate merely for presuming to challenge her policy positions). The Clinton Way obtains, and it carries with it the sour smell of mendacity. Joshua Green, in his recent Atlantic Monthly piece, "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up", addresses that arrogance of the Clinton Way--That Way, which, for me, watching It , smelling It, began my process of moving toward supporting Obama. Green writes of that mendacious attitude of the Clintons being,

An arrogance that I think is the key to understanding all that has gone
wrong for the Clinton campaign....Such arrogance led directly to the idea
that Clinton could simply project an air of inevitability and be assured her
party’s nomination. If she wins—as she very well might—it will be in spite of
her original approach. As one former Clinton staffer put it to me last
spring: “There was an assumption that if you were a major donor and wanted
to be an ambassador, go to state dinners with the queen—unless you were an
outright fool, you were going to go with Hillary, whether you liked her or not.
The attitude was ‘Where else are they going to go?’ ” [Joshua Green, Atlantic
Monthly, Feb 18, 2008]

Where else indeed. Go to their separate websites and read, read, read until your eyes glass over, and you'll discover that, policy-wise at least, there's not a ducat's worth of difference between the finer points of Clinton's numbingly detailed proposals and Obama's just as detailed and just as numbing wonkery. They're both post-DLC democrats, after all. In the debates the two have tended to carp at one another not over macro-theoretical differences in conception and execution (no conflicting methodologies calling up contrasts between the perspectives of exemplars of the American left such as samuel Gompers, Franklin Rooseveldt, Shirley Chisolm, Delores Huerta, Walter Reuther, and Fannie Lou Haimer) but over petty, micro-tonal grace notes which are the only things really that are pass for distinguishing factors in the sing-song sameness of two democrats who basically read from the same score. Obama approaches the center from the left, Clinton from the right, but they both meet in the middle; the middle-America, middling miasma of what democrates are, sans the courage and the vision of a Wellstone (D-MN), a Maxine Waters (D-CA), Edwards (D-NC), Kucinich (D-OH), a Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL), a Bernie Sanders (D-VT), a Shelia Jackson Lee (D-TX), or Barney Frank (D-MA), best of the democratic party, none of whom were given cabinet positions in the Clinton White House.

And so, Bill Clinton's recent, embarassingly patronizing rebuke of Obama turned my eye toward 'where else' we might be able to go. Bill charged that Obama's claim of having a different position on the war than Hillary is 'a fairytale,' saying, "give me a break" when asked about Hillary's voting to give Bush authority to attack Iraq.i "It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates," Clinton complained, "Trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, numerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution?' " Picyunne though this thin difference is, perhaps Bill is correct to point out Obama's seeming contradiction. Perhaps I am being naive in my own assumption that Obama was simply being honest in '04 and is now simply demonstrating that he has grown more alienated from the Bush regime. Perhaps I'm equally naive to wish that Hillary would have found it in within herself to be more alienated from Bush than her voting record suggests. Maybe Bill is right that again, there's not a ducat's worth of difference between his wife and the man from Illinois. Yet, the smirk that hovered on Bill's lips as he spoke those words, his attitude, which I felt conveyed the deep seated Clinton belief that only they can reasonably or legitimately lay claim to political power and that those who support them would be fools to consider anyone else, well, it galled me. Not his defense of his wife, but his arrogance as he did it--that is what made me recoil.

Then, there was the less covered remark made by Hillary that nevertheless spooked me: in a moment of supposed 'vulnerabilty' she weepily spoke of how 'some people think elections are a game,' implying that if one is progressive and does not support her then one is not being serious. "Some of us are ready [for power] and some of us are not," she intoned. It is a familiar Clintonia-Stankonia message. BET Founder and Black media millionaire Bob Johnson carried the Stankonia message in Black face, saying at a rally that Obama can only be taken seriously if the election were a movie. "This is real," Johnson stressed, staying on message for The Stank. The implication was that Clinton is real, Obama is not.

Therein perhaps lies the key to why those of us who, although reluctantly, have clambered up onto the Obama wagon. Clintonia emphasises that same old tired zero sum gaming; the idea that any ally (such as Lani Guiniere), any near-core belief (such as protection of the Fairness Doctrine), can and should be jettisoned in the name of winning and of protecting The Kingdom won. Along the way, the Clintons polarize and bifurcate (left and right, us and them, top and bottom), and the old trickle down theory of power lives with fierce tenacity in them (the Clintons, products of the DLC era are definitely top down politicians who see constituencies, aids, appoitees and the like as their soldiers, their rank and file meant to follow marching orders so that we can benefit from the scraps left from their victory feast). It sours one's desire to support them whole heartedly. Though he won't speak of it, this just might be what soured Al Gore so much, leading to the cold shoulder he gave and got to and from the Clintons through the last of the administration, through Hillary's run for the senate, and through Gore's run for president that seemed to operate outside of the golden glow of The Kingdom. Gore seemed to have lost heart in the end, perhaps even to have been broken hearted. It may have been the Lewinsky scandal, which, reportedly, Gore never got over being disappointed about, or it may have been the gradual betrayel of so many of the social policies Gore held dear. For whatever reason, Gore lost heart.

It is not the heart that Clintonia aims for, but the feet: we must accompany them on their long march, conceived at Yale and begun with the governorship of Arkansas, as foot soldiers in the Stankonia army: from Hope to the governor's mansion in litle rock, to the White House to the Senate and finally now the White House again.











It's all been one long campaign for them, never ending and played as a blood sport, if Joe Klein's 1996 book fictionalizing the Clintons, "Primary Colors" is on the mark. If it isn't, then certainly James B. Stewart's 1997 non fiction book, "Blood sport: The President and his Adversaries," about the Whitewater affair, for all its sensationalizing of the Clintons' war against their legion of enemies, penetrates to a crucial, uncomfortable truth about the Clintons: they fight, succeed, thrive, and perform best when they are wounded, hounded, and beseiged. Meanwhile, those loyal to them often are maimed and bloodied by, even fall beneath the onslaught (whatever else "Blood Sport" isn't, as Michael Isikoff dismisses it in his 1996 National Review rebuke of Stewart, one thing it is, is a glimpse into the grand guigonol sufferings of Clinton loyalists, Jim and Susan McDougal, who by the media and legal abuse they took over Whitewater, paid for their loyalty to the Clintons by Jim's certainly exacerbated illness and his subsequent death, and by Susan's years of incarceration and persecution at the hands of Dark Lord, Ken Starr.














SIX.
And it gets worse. One could get lost venturing down the dark corridoors of Clintonia Stankonia bloodletting. These two have indeed been the target of almost psychotic hatred, and perhaps as psychotically, have adapted to it and learned to channel it, process it, even draw strenght from it. Doubt me on this? Read The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, from 2000, by two of America's better investigative journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. This book adds the tragic Web Hubbell to the list of victims of Clintons' enemies (he lost his career and serves a 21 month prison sentence). Then there is the truly tragic death of Vince Foster, apparently a suicide, possibly driven to such despair over the Stankonia price one payed for proximity to The Kingdom that he took his own life.















It it there I choose to stop. There are some things I really don't want to know or understand about the price the Clintons have paid and still pay, one suspects for their decision to go into public life and public service. Perhaps it is a price that has forever marked them, and perhaps it is a price that makes them hunting hawks to Barak Obama's Bluebird of Happiness. Perhaps I find myself supporting Obama just out of fear for him. Does he know what he has gotten himself into by going up against The Kingdom and perhaps becoming the first politicain to truly, soundly beat them?















I brushed off that one very stanky hint of this Clinton arrogance that has surely then grown out of their great public pain, when Bill made an ass of himself here in Detroit at Rosa Parks' funeral by dressing down the Black audience for what he deemed their attitude of disrespect. I defended him though doing so left a sour taste in my mouth. In retrospect it seems the "First Black President" didn't aprove of how Black folks here chose to mourn. Or, more likely, the first White president to have been thoroughly blackened by abuse, was letting show that capacity of his for a cold rage--it seeps from the edges of Clintonia; and however justified by the price the Clintons have paid, one must ask one's self: is it time, after nearly twenty years of Clintons and Bushes in power, to lay this pain to rest, to move on past the haunted political landscape of these past two decades, to, dare I say it, embrace 'change we can trust'?

Finally, it is Obama's effect on the democratic landscape that convinced me to leave forever the pain haunted land of stank. no more Troopergate, not more 'vast right wing conspiracy' if we go with Obama. Barak Obama's campaign has catalized a large increase in votership, in youth participation in the electoral process, and bi-party (as opposed to 'bipartisan') crossover among primary voters. In short, he energizes people on the left, who, like most sane persons, would rather look forward to something (the Obama populism) than labor under something (the Clinton legacy). African American professor, author, cultural critique, and publisher, Kofi Natambu urged me in correspondence to look to this populist element of the Obama campaign, rather than focusing exclusively on Obama the man. I had written to Kofi:

Kofi;

I am on a personal level very troubled by the Obama campaign not in and of itself but for the deep ideological underdevelopment it exposes in African American popular thought. The uncritical, utopian, and downright parochial attitudes and reactions of the working class and the masses reveals itself in the attitude that voting for Obama is a fullfillment of 'the dream' (whatever that is) and that all Black people ought to be uncritically, unquestionaingly overjoyed about and committed to Obama as a (finally, yes) viable Black presidential candidate.

And when contrasted against any (emphasis--ANY) of the Republican candidates, yes, Obama looks pretty good, and I'd vote for him in a heartbeat. Because he's a sane alternative to them, and because he's Black like me (more or less like me). However, he is not currently a nominee for president, he is running in the democratic primaries leading up to the democratic convention where that party (a party I do not belong to) will choose its candidate for the general election. As a primary candidate, to anyone reading news sources, anyone with a historical sense, and anyone who considers Obama's voting record as a fairly conservative Chicago machine insurgent senator, Obama leaves far too much to be desired. Of course, prominent Blacks in the left union movement, in trade union political organizations and from the old guard Black power movement (sources like Black Commentator, have documented these marginalized Black intellectual and political voices) have been openly voicing criticisms of Obama.

Contrasted to John Edwards, who was also a senator and who has a far more progressive voting record in the senate than does Obama, Obama is revealed to be a fairly empty signifyer. He delivers a rhetorical, empty message of cultural and racial unity and vaguely progressive proposals such as single-payer health care (albeit heavily controlled by top heavy government management rather than transfer payments through heavily taxing the wealthy) and withdrawal from Iraq (without a single word of criticism about the huge, so-called 'embassy' being built there for the purpose of future US hegemony in the region, nor a promise that he will end the CIA activities in the region, end the torture and murder of Arabs by the US military/corporate/intelligence apparatus, or end the illegal incursions across the boarder into Iran, and general counter-democratic manipulation of Arab states in the region. He won't swear against any future or further neo-colonial adventurism there). In short, for someone chanting, "Change you can trust" the Brother ain't talking about changing a damn thing as president.

Edwards, however, has gone on record during his nearly invisible campaign against all of these things, and has thrown in a proposal for a socialist universal health care system, citing Canada by name. Edwards has on top of that, called out by name the corporations he plans to bring to heel should he be elected. Edwards' voting record (pro working class, pro democracy and local power and control, anti-corporate and anti-intelligence regime in terms of foreign policy) begs us to entertain the possibility that he might be telling the truth about what kind or president he'd be.

Thus, we can see, in the disparity between how Edwards and Obama are treated/covered, that class is far more salient than race in this country. While the blatantly racist media cover a clown and fascist like Huckleby with more attention to detail and respect than they do Obama, still the media betrays its deeper raison d’être: to suppress class consciousness. Ironically, the white man, Edwards, has had his possible working class base undercut by the Black man's--Obama'--bourgeois message. Obama cuts right off the top of Edwards' base the Black and Latino and to some surprising extent even the long lost former democratic white working class constituency that would have rallied to a socialist message in terms not of race, but of unions, access to legal process, health care for the poor, full employment, an end to all wars, free education, full literacy, return to anti-trust, fairness doctrine, and NLRB standards.

Meanwhile, Black people, perennially unsophisticated politically, unaware of the
details of history (even recent history ) are as short sighted, no, blind in their support of Obama as they were in their naive embrace of a war criminal who rather than being hailed as a 'role model' for Black women should instead by tried in the World Court in the Hague for crimes against humanity (it is Condi Rice, of course, to whom I refer).

The troubling thing? As a Black man I am expected to take none of this into account and uncritically turn my back on the civil liberties, global freedom, and
unionist/socialist heritage of my people (Paul Robeson, Randal Robinson, Harry
Belafonte, Angela Davis, Iris Young, Fanny Lou Haimer, Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier--our Native American Brother, Denmark Vessy...well, you get me). I am expected to embrace Obama with no thoughts in my head and no fire in my belly.

I'm for a green party candidate, or for the Black female candidate who is currently fourteen years old living in Sandusky Ohio playing with her I-Pod and listening to Hugh Masekela who will some day be at the head of the Peoples' Independence Party with Howard Zinn and Studs Terkel as Emeriti advisors and Lani Guinier as campaign manager, Otherwise, I'll vote defensively for whoever the democratic nominee is, simply because we need to get the left hand of darkness out of the whitehouse before they kill the Earth. It would be nice if that default vote had a black face, but would be even nicer if he/she could be an insurgent humanist rather than a Chicagoan. It would be nicest of all if one could speak openly in public of one's criticisms of that Chicagoan without fear of being called a 'self hating Black man.'

Where is Boo Radley when you really need him?

Ray Waller

Kofi's response was thoughtful, and in fact turned my own thinking around. He responded to my email message and in his message took me to task for my political short sightedness. He reminded me of the reality of electoral politics. Beyond the mundane business of practical and theoretical politics, i.e., getting a particular politician elected, is the question, Kofi reminded me, of mass political organization. Organizing the masses can be enbaled or even inspired by a given political leader, and by necessity in America, it will nearly always be a liberal, bourgeois leader--such as Robert Kennedy, or . In Obama's case, an entire network of youth activists has grown up around the candidate. Even more crucial, his is a candidacy that for whatever reasons inspires a broad range of political constituencies that are coming together in an historically significant movement that can be harnassed for progressive purposes. Obama mobolizes a broad range of progressive coalitions seeking free speech, electoral reform, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, social reform, and corporate reform.

In the wake of Kofi's reminding me of the unavoidable problematics and contradictions involved in electoral politcs for the sake of mobilizing the masses (across the country, across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and region, such mobilization is taking place not around Clinton, and, to my grief, not around Edwards, and to his own grief, not around Ralph Nader, but around Obama), it began to occur to me that, yes, there has been a progressive vanguard in this country for a long time now--one of its major nodes bing the pacific northwestern states, and one of its major nodes of ideology being the anti-globalist movement. After "The Battle of Seattle" and the "Battle of Miami"; after countless skirmishes in American cities over NAFTA, the IMF, and the attacks on the G-7, where had that activism and counsciousness gone after 9-11 and the media black out of all forms of progressive grass roots poiltics, 911 having provided a pretext for the government-corporate elites to institute a political dark ages in America? They had not gone aywhere. They had not been asleep. They had been waiting for a vehicle through which to reemerge. For now, Obama is that vehicle. As Kofi wrote me, "No matter who is the nominee--Obama or Clinton--since our preferential ideological choice--Edwards--doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of actually gaining the nomination--we must continue to struggle for and actively demand that these politicians own up to the structural and philosophical IMPLICATIONS, if not the ACTUAL CONTENT of what they say. So the real job before is much greater and much more important than merely deciding "who" gets the nomination, and thus the opportunity to "run" for President. As activists, as intellectuals, as workers, as thinkers, as CITIZENS we have much bigger fish to fry. Because no matter "who gets in" from the limited field of what is frankly two rather highly compromised NEOLIBERALS at best (Obama & Hillary) WE STILL HAVE TO MAKE DEMANDS OF THEM AND PUT FORWARD OUR OWN AGENDA(S)."

Kofi reminded me of the words of the great cultural critic and Caribbean revolutionary, C.L.R. James, from his 1960 text, Modern Politics":

"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
-CLR James

Yes, we have our work cut out for us, is what Kofi demands we remember: it is not Obama who matters, but all of us here in this America that has been taken from us by a reactionary coup. It is our responsibility to take back America, as they say on Air America Radio, and to use whatever means necessary to do so. Up to and including taking back the Democratic party and rebuilding it in our own image, the image of the masses, from the inside out. Tom Hartman daily calls for this strategy to be implemented "Democracy begins with you--" Hartmna says, "Tag, you're it!" Obama is a vehicle. It's up to us to take the wheel.

Veteran left activist and theorist Grace Boggs was interviewed by one of America's best and last real journalists, Amy Goodman, on Jan 22, and pointed out the same deeper issues that Kofi argues us to recognize:

GRACE LEE BOGGS: Well, I think that—I think it’s wonderful, by the way, that both Hillary and Obama are running and that they’re frontrunners in this campaign, because I think they help us to see that it’s not a question of race or gender, it’s a question of whether we encourage the movement and unleash the movement of people from below or whether we try to run things from above, from the White House. And though I consider myself a feminist, I have to look at what Hillary stands for in terms of top-down leadership. And I have to understand—have to look at Obama and see that
younger people, a new generation is emerging and looking for the kind of healing that this country needs, that he has unleashed that, though his policies are not that different from Clinton’s. But he has unleashed an energy in the young people particularly, which has great promise. And he has also helped to unfreeze the unity that existed among blacks. He has helped us to see that all blacks are not the same. I think that people have become—that in the
interest of unity, blacks who have not actually been in the same place—some of them are in the White House and some of them are in the Supreme Court and some of them are in the Congress, and others are groping with very fundamental questions of daily life. And that that split actually exists in the country, that it actually exists in the community, but this campaign has helped us to see, to begin to grapple with that difference.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Grace Lee Boggs. She is in Detroit, Michigan. You are not usually deeply involved in electoral politics, yet here you are deeply believing in the significance of what’s happening this year. What has changed? And did you ever have hope in other electoral years, in other presidential—times of presidential elections?

GRACE LEE BOGGS: I’ve never had this much hope. I’ve never had—because I think this one is unique. You know, policy-wise, I think Dennis Kucinich is much more on the right track. In fact, I support him. But he does not have that particular combination of a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother that can help unleash different energies. You know, sometimes—he can’t help it, of course, but sometimes it takes a certain person to do that. And I don’t think it’s not—to me, it’s not so important, the electoral politics. How they will develop, I don’t know. But when I felt that energy of young people, and I feel it around here, and I think of what Fanon said about each generation emerging out of obscurity must define its mission and fulfill or betray it. We’re living at one of those tide times....Barack Obama used a phrase in his speech at Ebenezer,
which I think we have to sort of embrace. He said we have to lead “by example.” That’s what we have to do. He can do it—maybe he can. I don’t know. But we had charismatic leaders in the ’60s, and they almost all got gunned down. And if we depend so much on charismatic leaders, not only are they in danger, but we do
not exercise our capacities in relationship to our situations to create the world anew. And that’s where we are...What I’m trying to do
is encourage the capacities, the energy, the creativity, the imagination, that exists in people at the grassroots to redefine and rebuild our society. If we want to live in freedom from terror, we have to begin looking at ourselves, redefining who we are, redefining who this country is and reassessing what it is within our capacity to do.
[Democracy Now, NPR Radio, Broadcast Jan 22, 2008]

Let's give Christopher Hayes and Patricia Williams some final words. In his aforementioned Nation column he writes,

Obama's rhetoric tells a story of politics that is distinct from both the
one told by Beltway devotees of bipartisanship and comity and from the
progressive activists' story of a ceaseless battle between the forces of
progress and those of reaction. If it differs from what I like to hear, it
is also unfailingly targeted at building the coalition that is the raison
d'être of Obama's candidacy. Consider this passage from Obama's stump
speech:

"I've learned in my life that you can stand firm in your principles while still
reaching out to those who might not always agree with you. And although the
Republican operatives in Washington might not be interested in hearing what we have to say, I think Republican and independent voters outside of Washington
are. That's the once-in-a-generation opportunity we have in this election."

Obama makes a distinction between bad-faith, implacable enemies
(lobbyists, entrenched interests, "operatives") and good-faith ideological
opponents (Republicans, independents and conservatives of good conscience).
He wants to court the latter and use their support to vanquish the former.
This may be improbable, but it crucially allows former Republicans (Obama
Republicans?) to cross over without guilt or self-loathing. They are not asked to renounce, only to join. Obama's diagnosis of the obstacles to progress is twofold. First, that the division of the electorate into the categories created by the right's
culture warriors is the primary means by which the forces of reaction resist
change. Progress will be made only by rejecting or transcending those
categories. In 1971 a young Pat Buchanan urged Richard Nixon to wield race
as what would come to be known as a wedge issue. "This is a potential throw
of the dice," he wrote, "that could...cut the Democratic Party and country
in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half." Obama seeks to
stitch those halves back together.

Second, that the reason progressives have failed to achieve our goals over
the past several decades is not that we didn't fight hard enough but that we
didn't have a popular mandate. In other words, the fundamental obstacle is a
basic political one: never having the public squarely on our side and never
having the votes on the Hill. [Christopher Hayes, The Nation, Feb 18, 2008]

Williams writes, also in The Nation, about several 'dreams' that might hypothetically arise in our fitful sleep now that we are so near the morning after the long night of Bushido. It is her oronic "Dream Number Two" that I'll share here:

Dream No. 2: Barack Obama is extolling the love, fortitude and courage of
the woman who raised him "as a single mother." At first, the crowd imagines
he's said "black single mother." There is a pause, then a quick reconfiguration. Oh, yeah, his single mother was white. It startles. As the throngs look at one
another in wonder, they begin to see Lebanese-American single mothers and
Taiwanese-American single mothers and Irish-American single mothers. They see that black single mothers--even the ones on welfare!--have a lot in common with all kinds of other mothers. Working mothers of all stripes are magically gilded with halos around their heads, illuminated as those who perform the hardest juggling acts, whose devotion is tested every minute of every day and who still don't earn but seventy cents for every dollar a man earns. Close-up of
awe-struck faces as this realization hits a broad swath of the population.
Voters decide not enough is trickling down from Enron and the oil companies.
They join to revise the distribution of tax benefits; they join unions; they
lobby for quality daycare. Eyes spill tears of appreciation and contrition. All
boats start to rise. [Patricia Williams, The Nation, Feb 25, 2008]

Boats might rise. And not to mix metaphors, this sort of Audacity of Hope is the promise of a chastening and purifying fire that seems to burn in the center of the Obama movement even if not the Obama campaign. The man is a movement, yes, because of the motion of all our feet and our hearts. I'm on. I'm aboard.

My dear friend and fellow sufferer from our grad school days at Cornell, Regina Rodriguez of Obama's home turf--Chicago, is Mexican American, and I think of her and of her fierce progressivism (she too, supported Kucinich in 2004, and supports Obama now) when I read hastily thought out editorials about how Mexican Americans are racist, and may not want to support a Black man. Those same editorialists were arguing the exact opposite when Hillary fired her Latina campaign manager recently, saying Latinos were 'up in arms' over Hillary's appearing to be insensitive to Latinos, and that Obama would surely benefit from that. The vagaries of racial discourse and its subtly brutal offensiveness toward all "Others" in the Black/White dramaturgy, are what Patricia Williams is satirizing.

My dear friend and fellow sufferer from our grad school days at Cornell, Professor and working actor in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Yvonne Singh, who must daily negotiate an American culture rigidly polarized between what she calls 'imaginary Blackness and imaginary whiteness,' would and did laugh a lusty, victorious laugh at Patricia Williams' satire. Behind the humor lies the promise: a new world, or at least a new United States of Hegemony; one that finally slips the surly bonds of our fitful nightmare of (contructed) racial identity to emerge into a dawn of egalitarian struggle. Finally.

The fire this time.

My "Audition"

Hey, just some silly, shallow fun for those who read my blog: my "audition" for an animated Taco Bell commercial. How do I look?

Create your Gizmoz and audition to star in a Taco Bell TV commercial!

Without You (Days Go By)

This is a post about the video for the Dirty Vegas song, "Days Go By" . Below, at the end of this post, is a link to the Youtube version of the video.



It was released years ago, and I was living and teaching in Florida at the time, at Florida International University.

I was walking through a department store in West Miami, and walked by a bank of TV sets on sale, electronic doodads, cell phones, video games, whatnot, and this video, "Days Go By" was playing on one of the wide screen TVs.



Very cinematic piece: a Black man in a business suit, yet, oddly, also wearing beat up old sneakers (high top 'Chucks'?) with duct tape wrapped around one sneaker, arrives out front of a diner somewhere in what looks like West Los Angeles, California. Palm trees ubiquitous and somewhat cadaverous in the back ground, traffic, sun beating down. It's a lightweight suit. Tie. Suspenders underneath. He's carrying a boom box and a folded up section of cardboard. He lays the cardboard down on the ground. The music from his boombox is a very mournful sort of corrido--a Mexican song of lament and grief. It has a very African beat, driving beat, but not mindless thumping--a heartbeat. Organic. Soulful. He starts to dance on the cardboard--break dancing, the robot, the electric slide, Arabic pirouette. Passersby stop, and watch him, wondering what is going on here, and engaged, made curious by the beauty of it.


A woman says to a man standing there "There he goes again." The looks at her. A sub titular text flashes over the images--"He shows up same day every year, and dances from sunrise to sunset." It is the woman whispering to the man about the dancer. "I heard," the woman and the subtitle (in the longer version of the video) continues as the dancer dances, "It's some kind of ritual. He used to dance here back in the day." Another man walks up, watching. He contributes to the discussion, saying, "They were in love. But he couldn't stop. So one day she left. No one knows where she went. I heard she got struck by lightening." The woman says, "I thought she got hit by a truck." The man says, "Yeah, well, whatever, she just didn't show up." The subtitle then intrudes again, over the image of the dancer: "Now he dances to bring her back. End of story."

All the while the Black dancer is dancing gracefully, with a striking kind of dignity; a ritualized, stylized dancing with elements of break dance, locking, street dance, and Arabic dance. In one startling passage of the video (a wonderfully done transition shot rather than a more conventional cut) he transforms into his younger self in sweat clothes, achieved by the older man jumping backward out of the frame and the younger dancer jumping back in: old, red sneakers with tape repair and the pant legs of a suit are replaced by brand new sneakers, and the legs of sweatpants. Thence, there comes a short flashback sequence of him as a boy with the lost lover.

The lyrics of the song are also being sung throughout all of this (very multi-media):

You are still a whisper on my lips/A feeling at my fingertips/That's pulling at my skin/
You leave me when I'm at my worst/Feeling as if I've been cursed/Bitter cold within/
Days go by and still I think of you/Days when I couldn't live my life without you/Days go by and still I think of you/Days when I couldn't live my life without you/Without you/Without you
(DIRTY VEGAS VIDEO, "Days Go By":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M51rijkxa_4&list=RDM51rijkxa_4)

A subtext of the video narrative is the intermittent cut to the members of the group, Dirty Vegas themselves, who are sitting in shadow, under the awning of a bodega, across the street from the dancer, watching. The quality of their gaze is in fact quite intense; it is as if they are seeking an essence, but not in the usual, racist, exoticizing of Black culture that White pop groups indulge. Rather, they seem to be moved by what they see, and are very much watching, and unlike the other watchers who are much closer to the dancer, Vegas seems to also be SEEING. The distinction between WATCHING and SEEING permeates the spiritus of this video, making a profound point about the nature and culture of multiculturalism-- the reality, not the bullshit product of mass media babble. The sense of insight and of compassion that is the gaze of the video itself is the next frame outward from the gave that is the gaze of Dirty Vegas. The gaze of the sidewalk audience is a third level of the gaze, while there is even an intimation that the dancer himself exerts a gaze, and has a POV (his gaze fixes momentarily, upon people in the sidewalk audience as one of them makes a more overtly dumb comment) but he never breaks his reflexivity; he dances and maintains his primary concentration upon that dance, while offering a mask of detachment to the outside world. One other moment of his breaking through that frame of spectation focused upon him, from which he is seemingly detached, is when he suddenly shoots his gaze across the street at the members of Dirty Vegas who are watching him. This is ambiguous, however, for a sudden cut shows him now looking at the younger version of his lost love, whose ghost stands before him. The denouement of the narrative then has him transforming again into his younger self, creating the impression that they two are reunited, but, no. He walks away, as the younger self, carrying the boom box with him, but alone. She is gone.

I remember that I was frozen by the spectacle of this video. I saw it as performance art. It was galvanizing. Everybody in the store around me near enough to see and hear this video stopped like me, watching. This achieved an eerie sort of performance art effect reminiscent of the kind of existential effects of the works of Warhol, Duchamp, or of Judy Chicago: dig, there was a supraliminal frame added to the several frames of spectatorship INSIDE the video, and that was this last frame OUTSIDE the video--the frame constituted by myself and the people in the department store who were stopping to look at the video. I noticed how we were mirroring the sidewalk audience INSIDE the spacetime of the video (Life imitating art?). Like the people inside the video watching the dancer, people in the store watching the video, looked wistful, even touched by the video's spectacle and narrative. Mostly Cuban Americans and Haitians, of course, because this was West Miami.

I felt sort of pierced by it this video. I was in love with and living with an Italian-American girlfriend (Peri Giovannucci) at the time; a very stable long-term relationship, but this image of the dancing Black man made me feel a hollow place in me where I missed Black women I had loved in the past.

Anyway, I recently saw this video again when it became widely available for download on the Internet--it's a cult video apparently.

It still creates in me a surprisingly strong feeling of ennui. Dirty Vegas is as much a performance art group as a pop group, a very interesting group of people. Their presence in the video, in the shadow of a street bodega, is fascinating. Are there intimations of the omniscient POV of the gaze of the ancient dramatist, Euripides, who often appeared as a character in his own dramas, bearing symbolically the gaze of the author?


DIRTY VEGAS VIDEO, "Days Go By":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M51rijkxa_4&list=RDM51rijkxa_4

Perri Approves

In these dark times of proto/neo/crypto fascism, I often feel that no one can read anymore, that there is no more multi-vocality, that the master tropes and the master languages have all drowned out the vox populi, that subaltern voice that says, "hey, the emperor ain't got no clothes on!" (or, as Austin Powers says, stripping away the veneer of our so-cherished self deception, "It's a man, Baby!"). In these dark times of Fox TV induced mass hypnosis and Opra Winfrey induced crass non-gnosis, it seems that no one appreciates a good Miles Davis solo, that nobody gives a shit that Marlon Brando elevated himself from the level of nefesh to that of chaya in his brilliant furioso terce rima performance in "The Missouri Breaks" (say whaaat?--yeah, I know, sounds like I'm talking crazy, don't it? Only those familiar with Kabbalic text will get that 'levels of soul' thing with nefesh and chaya? I'm talking out of my head again, right? I'm being difficult, huh?).

But, guess what? Dr. Perri Giovannucci has given me the seal of approval on my "response to Coach". She wrote to me, saying:

"The mere fact that I use language to communicate ideas does not make me language's bitch." Oh my God, [Ray,] these must be the most brilliant words in the English language today! How Foucauvian! How Barthesian! I LOVE IT!!! I would place it in the footer of my email template so that it would go out on every email I send -- except that I'm looking for a job and have to communicate in a properly bourgeois manner with all the proper bourgeois out there!! But I warn you now, I will steal this and use it every chance I get! Way to go, Waller! You go, boyfriend! Love, P.

So, the rest of the pharisees out there can all go jump, you feel me? I can speak in as many voices as I want to, so there. Somebody approves, so screw you if you don't. Language is a glove, and if it fits, you must acquit. I am free to try on voices, flex my fingers, try on another one, make a fist, put on yet another, and wave goodbye. I done got some props from my ex breezy up in here, and I intend to continue to represent! As St. JErome said, Amor ordinem nescit and as Santa Clause's Old Lady said to the elves to keep up their spirits in hard times like these, adeste fidelis. So, adeste fidelis to those of yawl who know what I'm talking about, and the rest can eat shiznit.

Dig?

A Response to 'Coach' Regarding My 'Worldview'

Coach wrote:

Professor Waller, I enjoyed your interview on the Atheist Hour. You showed your ability to reason under fire, which is a very tough thing to do. I was quite surprised to hear that you do not have a worldview. A worldview is a collection of beliefs that one holds as one's presuppositions. A person interprets all the evidence gathered through her senses in the light of her worldview. I would say that it is impossible, as a sentient being, to not have a worldview: "The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group." (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=worldview) How can someone not have a worldview.

My Reply:

Coach;

Now, would you say this claim of yours (that it is not possible to not have a worldview) is a self-evident claim? Is it an a priori claim? Or, is it a predicament of language (I tend to think that the illusion language gives us that we are actually organizing the universe into definable catagories often misleads us into thinking we are making sense of things when in reality we are not making sense because there is no sense to be made)? I assume that you are too intelligent (I like your use of the indefinite pronoun, 'she' which implies that you are either a woman and thus a superior intellect, or a man who is sensitive to language) to say that your claim is biological (that way lay Hitler).

I'll tell you why I refuse to accept the idea that I must have a 'worldview', which I had hoped I'd implied strongly enough on the pastor's show, but of course, again, language often double crosses or at least fails us. I am PROFOUNDLY suspicious of this claim, in English, mind you, that I must have what you called "a collection of beliefs that one holds as one's presuppositions". First of all, why should I assume that they are MY presuppositions? Aren't they the presuppositions of the society and social sub group(s) to which I belong and which have conditioned my ideas, thoughts, values, and the like? In a sense, really, one cannot EVER have a worldview of one's own, since one's worldview is always that of some arbitrary social milieu.

Please don't imagine that I am just playing with language here, either, because I am quite serious. Logically, you will claim that having just said all I've said, I have in fact declared a worldview. Aha! See the slippery nature of language? How it defeats us? Linguistically, I cannot in fact claim to not have a worldview because the way in which grammar works will conspire to make me affirm the negative claim I make in the very act of making it. I will undo my own claim in uttering it. That's only a linguistic reality, however, I'd argue. And I'll take this idea even further: why should I not demand to be unmolested by the typically unsubtle English of "worldview"? What about the french, "approche globale", which translates as 'worldview' but notice how the French term eliminates the English-implied imperious gaze from above or without, in recline, and how the French language turns the phrase into an active rather than passive description--a 'global approach' not a 'view' as if from a rise or a remove. Then there is the wonderful Italian, "visione del mondo", which means something like 'vision of this world'. As is always the case with Italian, there is far more of a sense of poetry, imagination, and what Spanish speakers call "mente" (reflection, reflexivity) in this phrase.

You see, like so much else that happened between the pastor and me in our discussion, he compulsively tried to force, to superimpose his beliefs, his assumptions, his language, and HIS 'worldview' (concretized, fixed, and handed down from on high) onto me without my permission or even my own input. This is typical of contemporary American Christians of the Protestant type, I have found in my interactions with a wide range of people, including all sorts of Christians. Indeed, every religious group seems to have elements of this sort of force and domination at least at its edges or enscounced in its fundamentalists.

I don't have a worldview. I reject that idea, as is my right--I reject it's Anglophilic mentation and point of view, as well as the cultural smallness of its usage. Such is my right. The mere fact that I use language to communicate ideas does not make me language's bitch.

Warmly,

Professor Ray Waller

Max Castro’s Definition of 'Multiculturalism' is Dead Wrong

"Miami is where neon goes to die"
-Lenny Bruce

As someone who has done time in Miami (City of the padded shoulders, I call her--I lived there for nearly a decade), I still feel tied to the place, try as I might to clear my head of the art deco faces and poolside souls that float along Bird Road, sit stark still in sweaty exile in the stalled traffic of Highway One in South Miami, and hurtle down the Dolphin Expressway inside the freezer-cooled, sealed consciousness of Mercedes.

Even the supermarket parking lots are done in pink motif.

But Elian Gonzales be damned, it's in my blood for the rest of my life, that place, and I'll always miss Hialeah, and the Japanese dive I hung out at with Tony and Perri on Douglas Rd., and the blue skies like the face of Prozac, and so it is for any of us who ever lived there in paradise for a time. I am dying a slow death from three years now of missing real cafe cubano, my beloved media noches, and Little Havana's garish ethnic arrogance that spills West from the shadows of downtown skyscrapers along Eighth Street to crash right through the pretentious charms of Coral Gables with its nerve to exist right in the middle of Miami and yet have streets with names like Galeano and Phoenetia and Ponce DeLeon in sharp contrast to the rest of Miami whose streets are numbers not names (Coral Gables is my former 'hood', a place where GM executives, former Guatemala CIA-backed torturers and airline executives retire to) and on and on westward until it is no longer Little Havana in body but only in spirit, past the "Pasta Factory", past a hundred dollar stores and outdoor laundromats run by plaid wearing older gentlemen named Ignacio, past Florida International University (where I used to teach--greetings, Don Watson, I miss you, Jefe!) before hurtling in spirit into the maw of the everglades to die in the open jaws of an alligator.

Elian be damned, I miss that place, for all its corruption, hideous cruelty, and shameless insanity. Imagine LA without the restraint (yeah. it's that insane).

So when things happen there, I have an opinion about it. A while back, a Black Miami politician named Arthur Teele committed suicide in the lobby of the Miami Herald by putting a gun to his head and shooting himself after telling the security guard there to tell a Herald reporter named Jim Defede to tell his (Teele's) wife that he loved her.

No. I' am not making this up. It's better than both the screenplay and the novel I wrote about Miami while I was there, so I wish I HAD made it up.

Max Castro wrote about this incident, and the political corruption that infected Teele and led him astray and toward this uniquely Mimai (neon) method of self annihilation. But Miami is MY city too. Part of me sees it as my home, Pastor Cook help me. When I read the piece in Progreso Weekly by Castro, once-and-future columnist for the Miami Herald, I had an opinion of my own. I take exception to one small aspect of what he writes, though I agree with his general attack on Miami corruption. Below is a response I wrote and sent to Progreso editors. Don't know if they will publish my response to Castro or not.

But you get to read it here. Ain't you lucky.



1-15-06
To the Editors of Progreso Weekly:

I disagree with Miami journalist Max Castro that Arthur Teele's death is proof of the 'multicultural' nature of corruption in Miami. Castro claims that,

The Teele tragedy is not a story about “Another Black Man Done in by Media and
the Establishment,” as some would like to portray it. It is a tale about the
equal opportunity, gloriously multicultural and immensely seductive nature of
our corruption. It’s the one area in which we in Miami have achieved absolute
parity. Arrogance and greed, your name is Humberto Hernández, Demetrio Pérez,
Howard Gary, Cesar Odio, Alex Daoud, Miriam Alonso, Alberto Gutman, Miller
Dawkins, Jimmy Burke, Donald Warshaw, Dan Paul and…Arthur Teele, may he rest in peace. Black and white, Anglo and Latino, Jew and Gentile, there are no barriers
to misfeasance and malfeasance here, no need for affirmative action or
set-asides where graft is concerned. (Castro, Progreso Weekly, Aug, 2005)

Is Castro serious? I lived several wonderful, frightening, incredible, horrific, beautiful, and insane years in Miami and every year I lived there as an undervalued, underpaid, and powerless university professor in a racist and anti-intellectual city, only served to strengthen my conviction, from my Black perspective, that three things are inescapably true about Miami:

1. That there are few places on Earth more astonishingly beautiful than Miami—from the weather, the endless sky, and the dreamlike blue ocean, to the quality of the light that I woke up to every morning and the clarity of the stars in that tropical celestial sphere every night.

2. That the utter cruelty, brutality, venality and corruption, the materialism, and self aggrandizement not only of politicians and the wealthy, but infecting all levels of social life in Miami all the way down to the working class and the poor, is breath taking and disheartening enough to kill the optimism of even the most devoted of Samaritans.

3. That my own people, Black people, are virtually invisible in the echelons of every single institution of power in Miami, from civil to economic to intellectual, other than the roles they play there as in every other modern American city, as the inevitable gladiators of the sports industry, the singers and dancers of the entertainment industry, as a handful of corrupt politicians, and as a small portion of the Black clergy that is comfortably connected to mass media influence.

‘Multicultural’ is not a word I would ever apply to the Black experience in Miami, not even in terms of crime. Arthur Teele’s horrific death is but another nail for the box I’ve buried my Miami experience in; his death does exemplify exactly the “story about “another Black Man Done in by Media and the Establishment, as some would like to portray it” that Castro says it isn’t.

Teele, a Black Miami city councilperson indicted on ethics charges, accused the Miami police of stalking him, was despairing of the negative publicity he was receiving in the Miami local media due to rumors that he had been involved in extra-marital homosexual activities. After the apparently sympathetic writings of Miami Herald reporter, Jim Defede, who questioned the actions of Miami police in his Herald column, Teele apparently felt that Defede was someone he could appeal to and trust. On the last day of his life, Teele called Defede to talk about his despair, and ultimately ended up going to the Miami Herald’s offices where he shot himself to death in the newspaper’s lobby.

Max Castro’s article, published in Progreso (Progreso Weekly, Aug 4-10, 2005) claims that this tragedy exposes the paradisiacal image of Miami as being no more than a veneer over a ‘darker’ Miami; a Miami of deep corruption, a Miami of ‘multicultural’ vice:

magical realism had given way to noir, and the paper’s front page featured a
photo of Arthur Teele sprawled on the floor of the Herald building, his head in
a pool of blood. Wednesday morning’s festive, folkloric take on Miami was
overtaken by the night’s events, which lay bare another side of the city, an
ugly and brutal one, and the reality of real power versus the purported power of
the pen. The real city (Castro, Progreso Weekly)

True, so true. The long list of multicultural names of the corrupt that Castro mentions in his article, however, includes people who definitely did not end up dead in a pool of blood on the floor of the lobby of the Herald.

And there's the rub. Yes, Black men participate in America's corruption, and among Black Miamians are Blacks who are venal, selfish, racist, and materialist, and it seems that even in Miami, some Black leaders manage to rise to the top of the corruption heap; and in fact that is exactly when American corruption stops being a trough and becomes, in Max Castro's words, a VISE--that crushes the heads of Black men, I might add.

It's the oldest sub-plot in the American epic: just when Blacks (or browns, or yellows, or women) begin to successfully play the corrupt but lucrative American political and economic 'game' the rules change, or, in the case of Teele, the allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. In the American lexicon, it's not 'corruption' until Black, brown and yellow hands begin to do it.

Lest we forget, the weapon of alleged sexual scandal was wielded even against our most (seemingly) upstanding Black leaders, such as M. L. King, who, shortly before his assassination was threatened by the FBI with the release of photographs of himself allegedly having sex with women other than his wife. According to declassified COINTELPRO files, we know that such photographs were reportedly sent to King's wife by J. Edgar Hoover. As I sit in Detroit writing this, on the anniversary of MLK's birth, It is not difficult at all to imagine, regardless of evidence of Teele's corrupt activities such as money laundering (in fact perhaps because of them), that he too, may have been victimized by law enforcement officials seeking to destroy his legitimacy within the Black community.

Teele's claims of being followed by police officers, seemingly accepted as true by Jim Defede, and Teele's abrupt disintegration into dementia and then into suicidal despair seem all too familiar from where I sit, in Detroit, as a Black man in America. Right here in Detroit not long ago a prominent member of the Black community, a political leader in the state democratic party, Melvin Hollowell, was publicly disgraced by charges of sexual misconduct. As Detroit’s local independent weekly, the Metro Times reported:

Two weeks ago, the Detroit Free Press published two long,
front-page stories that graphically destroyed the career of — and probably
immensely damaged the life of — Melvin Butch Hollowell, a man who is not an
elected official or on the public payroll, and who has been convicted of
nothing.
He has, in fact, been charged with only a low-grade
misdemeanor. But they ran these stories, with large headlines (“Hollowell
accused of picking up hooker” and “Police report: Woman says Hollowell paid her
$60 for sex”) because they involved a prominent person and gave them an excuse
to write what amounted to soft porn disguised as journalism.
The newspaper described the supposed sex act in especially graphic detail in its
earlier outstate editions, basing the account on what the “known prostitute,”
also identified as a heroin addict, told police. (Hollowell denied doing
anything except stopping to help a woman he thought was in trouble.) (Jack
Lessenberry, Metro Times, 9/1/2004)

Mister Hollowell had to resign his position as a leader in the state democratic party as a result of his public humiliation.

Am I defending corruption? No. I'm simply pointing out the second oldest sub-plot in the American epic: when the Negro ends up dead his death itself becomes proof of how 'equal' we all supposedly are if not in any other way (and indeed, the "State of Black America Report," the Bureau of Statistics, FBI crime reports, national morbidity and mortality rates, and all other objective measures of Black life in this hell of urban America shows that we are not equal in any other way), then at least we are equal in terms of corruption.

Bull. As a former resident of Miami for eight years, living there as a Black professor, writer, journalist, and intellectual, I had long maintained that the hypocritical double standard that former Miami Mayor Joe Suarez was held to (they went so far as to question his manhood in the pages of the Miami weekly, New Times, which I publicly denounced the Times for doing--my letter of protest was printed in the Times) was a double standard that demonstrated that Whites in Miami saw no contradiction in 100 years of white corruption being rewarded (i.e. the elevation of corrupt oligarchs like Henry Flagler to the status of gods) while Latino corruption (or even the appearance of it, as was often the case with Suarez) is bitterly denounced. Must Max Castro be reminded that the St. Augustine Record, in 2002 reported these fateful words:

Flagler worth $100 million at death

On May 27, 1913, just a week after his death, the will of Henry M. Flagler - who was said to be worth $100 million - was made public.
The document created a trust designed to keep his businesses running and to ensure the continuance of Flagler's policy in Northeast Florida.

while this is a headline at Mr. Teele's death:

Arthur Teele Dies After Self-Inflicted Gunshot
POSTED: 6:32 pm EDT July 27,
2005
UPDATED: 12:07 pm EDT July 28, 2005
MIAMI -- Former City Commissioner
Arthur E. Teele Jr., recently indicted on corruption charges, died after
shooting himself in the lobby of The Miami Herald building Wednesday,
authorities said.
Teele shot himself in the head shortly after 6
p.m., police said. The Herald said it happened just after he asked a security
guard if he could see columnist Jim DeFede.
"He said to tell
DeFede to tell his wife he loves her," the security guard, Feliz Nazco, told the
Herald.
Delrish Moss, the Miami police spokesman, said Teele
died at 7:50 p.m. at Ryder Trauma Center. (NBC6, South Floria---NBC6.net)

Would Max seriously claim that these two Miami big shots, Flagler and Teele, are comparable as examples of the multicultural nature of American corruption (and of its spoils)?

I doubt it.

Pastor Gene Cook's Show, "The Atheist's Hour"

Well, here I am back after so long an absence--I don't look after this blog like I should, sort of like I am about my Marxism. It's always there, in the back of my heart and mind, but sometimes I go long periods of time not examining it. My beloved ex, Perri, points out to me that I'm really an anarchist, in other words, I like freedom so much I even yearn for freedom from my own thoughts, beliefs, and words. I yearn even to be free of my self. So, I often ignore me. Leads to lack of sleep, ill health, fatigue, not enough time spent with friends, and neglect of one's own blog.

Ah, well.

Another thing I ultimately am, and I'm more sure of it than ever, is agnostic. Not atheist, which I can't help but regard as the other side of the same coin as theism, but agnostic. I don't believe we puny humans (as Klatu would call us) can or will ever know the nature of the existence of God or Gods, and we cannot either confirm or refute the existence of God or gods. We just simply don't know enough of anything to even begin to test, seek out, or verify/repudiate such a thing as a creator of the universe. By the way, I doubt we are even correct in our assumption that there IS a "universe". That word is a conceptualization, a name, that we affix to the pitifully limited portion of the spacetime continua we think we can percieve. Electro-magnatism, gravity, the strong and weak forces, poor little Einstein, the smartest of all we puny hairless monkeys trying to create a 'unified field theory' to account for these ideas (ideas that probably are laughably far from the 'real', the actual '(T)truth' of existence, anyway) and Stephen Hawking gliding around in his steel auto-didacto chair, his spooky, synthesized voice mocking even the assumption that we CAN ever 'know' anything.

I was interviewed a couple nights ago by Pastor Gene Cook, a Man-of-God whom I must confess (pun unentended) I like, and whose radio show, "The Aetheist's Hour" plays on 'Unchained Radio' out of California--San Diego. Quite an experience to be grilled by a 'believer' and by the various 'believers' who called in during my segment with the pastor. You can dowload my interview at the Unchained website:

http://unchainedradio.com/nuke/index.php

but be warned, you'll have to register with the website first. Registration to become a user is free. Callers called up and challenged me about my a-theism, and about my uses of languguage, and it was no walk in the park. I had to defend myself. It was a good experience. Made me have to think consciously and by the seat of my pants about what I think and what I wish to defend. I gather I must come off to some people as uncertain WHAT I think. People kept telling me I have a certain 'world-view', which I feel a visceral repugnace about: what is a 'world-view' and which 'world' were they accusing me of viewing? If I hold one view at this instant does that preclude me from holding some entirely other view the next? Is that in fact, a view in itself? Does that question even make sense?? As Heisenberg wrote:

The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.
--Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927

The right to think anything and everything at once. That's what I stand for, that's what I defend. Not meaning to sound like Marcel Duchamp, but I'm afraid that's what it really boils down to for me: I'm a marxist, an agnostic, a Duchampian radical Incompleteness Theorum/Uncertainty Principle supporter (viva Kurt Godel and Werner Heisenberg!), and most of all, I suppose, an anarchsit.

Perri knows me.