Recently I hear the phrase “hate hides”, and I keep thinking about past occasions when injustice was met with indifference, apathy and resignation, and I keep thinking the forces of hate grew to once again make us soulblind to the story of another black person murdered in the custody of white cops…. and the inevitable, arrogant, evil accommodations made for such misconduct.
Hitler knew he could count on the silent majority’s inhuman, silent compliance, and he gave them a chance to be quiet, play along, or end up like the mentally ill, the disabled, the gays, the Jews, or any other maligned group. In Birth of a Nation, a long, dreary movie, the KKK prey upon the unmanly insecurities of rural whites left out of the headlong rush of industrialization that continued to fracture societies along those lines. It’s a white thing I do NOT understand. Why all the hate? Is it taught? Convince me it is not.
So, when I see cops take a knee, or the governor in a mask marching among protestors for an end to police brutality, risking his life in a pandemic to fight for the right to approach unity, I didn’t hear Trump talking about how beautiful it was to see. He didn’t talk about them. He didn’t talk with them. He scolded and threatened them with weapons, bayonets, dogs. Are you even fucking kidding me? When I hear these voices, I see people’s lives unspooling in their voice, and I feel like I belong with people, regardless of their color or whatever, in the sunshine, united on this earth, which is sacred. You can hear anguish in people who are crying out and fighting back, because shit is old now.
Dumb ass Trump stares at eclipses. He uses his office to further his personal gains. He demands oaths of loyalty while his colleagues, one after another, go to prison. He cheats, he bullies, he lies like he breathes. And we impeached him, but there is, like a deeper stain, deeper than Nixon or Lee. It is infuriating to see people unaccountable in power grinding the life out of wretched communities.
Read Neurotribes to get a look at the insidious way fascism crept into Germany. They found they could get people to turn on one another, and so, like the Thin Blue Line a.k.a. the Divide Blacks flag that flies whenever a cop is merely accused of misconduct. It’s tribalism, and it is encouraging to see cops take a knee for George Floyd. By degree, every day, it comes creeping in, this numbness in this horrible year.
My dad and brother are racists. I unfriended my brother on Facebook, and that hurts real bad, but so does realizing I scrolled past George Floyd’s death last week, too. Numb, like my dad who lives as if I had never lived, erased. It’s hard to love a dad who is erasing you. My dad has these books on his shelf: The Bible, Nixon’s biography, Clive Cussler’s Hunt for Red October, and the ghostwritten Art of the Deal. I guess you could say he drank the Kool-Aid.
Clickity click, scrolled past his mom, like a good racist, too. I had become the inhuman silent majority of hostages Trump’s fascist agenda feeds upon. Without protest, Trump would try to enslave people, to the lenders who made you a slave, scroll click. To the master class. Without protest. That’s his mode because he’s a bully, and he knows he can count on the goons who accept his slide into autocracy. Everyone knows about Mississippi god damn.
This is an old soulblind piece about perseverance that doesn’t get it right. This is the way to relive this shitshow, by sleeping on Lone Watie. This line goes through my head every day, has since I was a child. I was lucky enough to see, in my youth, racism in other countries. It looks sad and frightening. The one thing I worried about was allowing that kind of apathy into my heart, to sleep on Lone Watie like this outlaw does.
The beauty of the trees,
the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass,
speaks to me.
And my heart soars.From My Heart Soars, as read by Chief Dan in the opening of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games by Donald Sutherland.
People can change, but it is hard to do. You have to step outside of your box and let go of your ego. There is emerging evidence all the time of this or that thing bringing us crashing back into the past, on old wounds, triggered by shit our grandfathers endured – unsustainable capitalism, misery, war. People are sort of depressed at this. We need an eddifying paradigm to approach, like we approach other things of value: truth, love, food, culture.
For like a month, I posted a bunch of stuff on Facebook from Run the Jewels that I love. It spun out of a conversation a friend and I were having about Run DMC and our old school rap days with the dual cassettes on boom boxes and stuff. If you put a piece of tape on that tape, you can tape it. Weirdest sentence ever. I posted instrumentals, but what I wanted to post was the full-volume voice that RTJ is. I was trying so hard to keep it PG. I ordered their cassette, but it’s out free.
And then, last Friday, people revolted against a system that has guaranteed people will sleep on Lone Watie. They didn’t lie down under a hat. They went out and spoke up in protest.
I have to spill that in March, a company called Cemsites approached me to do software integration for them. I enjoy computation. I thought they wanted drone stuff. I made this ghastly video and realized why they didn’t like it. They never called me back.
I grew up in the Boys Club and worked in 99% black nursing homes. I get shit on by racists. I get shit on by privileged fucks who never endured seeing what we do the dead, to each other. Slaves to the lenders, grease stains, nuisances.
But hey, the system, without checks and balances, is a criminal syndicate. Technically okay. Murdered black man. Technically okay. Stole your shit. Technically okay. Stealing your future because you popped off on someone’s shiny cousin who aint never been right when that someone is a rich vampire loser.
But hey man, in 1997 when I had to endure a fucking bomb threat because my hotel owner decided to host a historical revisionist. I stayed at my post, and you know what? I thought I had about five minutes to clear the building. I was the only one there, at 8 pm, and I curled up next to safe and called…who? 911. Then immediately, the black Army vet who worked for Greyhound who stayed at the hotel on his interstate route. He was up, clearing the top floor. He got the other greyhound driver. A black man saving strangers from a Holocaust revisionist Nazi scumbag, and the caller was Irish.
I dialed with the occupancy sheet on my lap. I was tucked up against something that could take a blast from the motor lobby. I heard a squad pull up, lots of people yelling, hustling out the doors. There was a bomb squad with dudes in heavy lead suits, dogs, room to rooms, big shit. When the deadline hit, I was curled up in a ball on the floor with the safe between me and the motor lobby. A nazi revisionist is thwarted from giving a book signing and lecture by a fake bomb threat, but it gets weirder.
I saw an Australian film crew interviewing an agitated man who was threatening violence against Jews. The cops went to his house, found a bus with grenades in it. The bus belonged to his brother, an Arayan gang member in prison. That was twenty-five years ago, when Bill Clinton established the private prison system that robbed so many people of fair representation, futures. White collar crime, cough cough. What victims? Can you fall and get back up? Wanna find out? Maybe you should? Maybe if you have empathy you can?
Control needs control in order to control – WSB.
Right now, our control needs control. Ask Mattis. Ask people tear-gassed in DC. I love DC, but DC is fucked up. The way the homeless are treated is inhuman and cruel. It is really hard to walk the streets and see people’s lives reduced to enduring scorn from under a pile of newspaper that reeks of compliance.
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And then Trump stood with an upside down, backwards holy book, a Bible in front of an Episcopalian church, which I left when I was a kid because the parishoners voted my nerdy priest out because “he is boring” . Are you entertained? This is an image of Trump’s drive to work, as taken by someone from his motorcade after he hid in the bunker, then unleashed federal troops on people.
I wanted to talk about RZA, too, to continue the positive exploration of our existence. I really did, but damn. George Floyd got murdered by four apathetic cops on TV and we waited for leadership. You know people can’t wait for anything, so privileged and unique they be.
And that’s the last bit: all of these people are protesting, risking getting Covid-19, in the midst of a pandemic under the rule of a narcissistic con-man. He is gong to get more violent. Dipping a toe in war probably gave him a grandpa boner, so watch out.
Watch out. Covid-19 is killing people. Washington can’t do anything, it seems, except to tear gas its neighbors to use religion as a prop. Thoughts and prayers. When people tell me ‘thoughts and prayers’, I wonder if they’re praying for my life, or for me to go away, because thoughts and prayers is like a long goodbye. It’s cold.
I grew up listening to rap with black people in my neighborhood, but I lost touch. That’s what racism does. It took me away from existence, from my soul, and gave me indifference, some likes, a couple of degrees, lots of tears and skin. But you get up. Fall down six, get up seven.
You get up and fight for what? For equal justice under the law. Balance. The more people around you who strike balance, the harder it is to change. That is why the inertial force is such a formidable one.
The racism is baked into the system, from its inception. It seems like for every advance forward, you have to pay the vig. Pay the price for our inequity? With what? My skin? I can’t even buy the tools and shit I need to make the things you need to survive. It’s worth liberation from this debt slavery – white. It’s worth liberation from slavery, period – black. You have to stop sleeping on Lone Waite. You need to end police brutality and neutralize racism. It’s like the dance of Tandava on the slime of the earth that turns the hands of the clock. Do it again. Do it again! Make police brutality unacceptable! Seriously, we don’t have a racism problem, we have a racist cop problem, that rich clay of violence, ignorance, and egotism.
Fifty State Banana 