culture fix

“If we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

- James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time, pp. 119-120

European universities evolved from the guild system. The guild system co-evolved with systems of money and urbanization. As cities evolved and people moved from barter to coin, so did guilds, considered to be the juxtaposed precursor to both labor unions and capitalization. Indeed, universitas itself means corporation.

However, the University of Paris, founded in 1100, was founded by an entirely different guild than the guild of students who formed the cooperative learning institution in Bologna. Teachers at Paris were paid by the Church (followed soon by universities supported by the State), so their customers were not the students, but were instead the Pope. By the end of the twelfth century, there were nearly a hundred universities spread throughout Europe, chartered, funded, and overseen, of course, by higher powers than the students they claimed to serve. Aided by lawyers and kings in the service of the owning class, fearful of the up-and-coming merchant class, these higher institutes of learning became the gatekeepers of professionalism we know today. And of course, this spelled the doom of the guild of students.

we are still ready to forgive our rulers.

necessary atrocities

to keep things the way they are;

the daily violences and indignities

of a system that cannot do otherwise;

we describe, instead, as errors and aberrations.

1977, steve biko dies in custody -

the murder is horrific, terrifying.

we are outraged

and the security police issue apologies, reforms.

“from here forward, we will not commit torture,

we don't believe in it...”

the public is told.

the public – you and i – believes them.

back in the interrogation rooms

the black activists are told,

“in this room we killed biko,

and we'll kill you in the same way...”

and believe what they hear.

our outrage is made impotent

by our naivety

and our desire to exonerate our torturers.

if they could have had apartheid without torture,

they'd have done it.

if we could have toppled apartheid

with requests, apologies and reforms,

we'd have forgone thirty years of war.

2.

2005, piles of US army photographs are publicized.

here we see iraqis humiliated, beaten and raped

by 20-something american 'boys and girls.'

the 'heroes' of every hometown

now displayed as barbaric, perverted beasts

flagrantly displaying a level of racial hatred

that is no longer popular in this country.

what does all this despicable imagery mean?

the iraqis were being asked important questions:

“where is saddam?

where are the weapons of mass destruction?

where are the terrorists?”

oh.

of course.

seeing the impossibility

of these explanations being taken seriously,

the army changes tactics:

1. this is the work of a 'few bad apples.'

2. torture is justified under certain circumstances, in the interests of national security and

3. we never use torture unless we mean to or unless

4. it's the work of a 'few bad apples.'

hiccup.

an unpleasant moment in the 'endless war' campaign.

seize the strategic advantage.

control the conversation about your own horrific deeds.

say it's legal.

say it's necessary.

say it rarely happens.

the public – you and i – believes it.

our outrage is made impotent

by our naivety

and our desire to exonerate our torturers.

the daily violences and indignities

of a system that cannot do otherwise

are taken in stride.

we are still ready to forgive our rulers.

1.

if a person can come to america
and still be "from" somewhere,
they are not - yet - members of a race.

what is happening to the mexicans here
is not so different from the italians a century back:
cultivating the delta and hanging like strange fruit.
there's no reason why today's spics won't end up just as white as yesterday's dagos.

2.

it is popular now to make racial issues
out of matters that are entirely otherwise
while simultaneously proclaiming the 'withering away'
of race as a concept.
race withers like stalin's dictatorship,
not like grapes on a vine.
i am an american;
i cannot imagine my country without race.

3.

the only black people who'll say "let's not discuss race"
have spent a decade or more in 'all-white' environments.
surely i'd try and end the discussion as well,
in their position.
dominating everything else, what's to stop whites
from dominating the discourse around their own domination?
all the same, 'downplaying' the importance of race
is just another way to entrench us in it.

4.

the citizen's council was right:
those damn rednecks in the klan
forced integration
but!
the citizen's council has stayed in power.

5.

the boers and the zionists share a unique place in history.
the honest articulation of their goals,
codified in thousands of laws
and reinforced by american ammunition and the special branch
is a true gift to the rest of us.
in our situation, "we pay so much attention to their faces,
we miss the motion of their hands."
we are heirs to south africa,
but no one has told us yet.

6.

the 'old days' are right around the corner.
meanness, unrepentent arrogance and brutality
are increasingly 'en vogue' amongst the powerful;
the 'zeitgeist' of 1939 is once again feasible.
meanwhile in basra, the blunt antagonisms of this arrangement
are splattering about in the buses, cafes, market stands,
atvs and mosques
of everyday life.
still, the incessant TSA queues are blase;
nothing yet appears as a deterrant, or provocation.

7.

whenever the brazenness of the powerful
outstrips the tenacity of the exploited,
we are living in truly troubling times.
before the fires in the oilfields reach my doorstep,
there will be a long silence:
hands bound.
heads bowed.

8.

fifty years ago, i'd have been a 'race man.'
on whose side?
is a 'nigger-lover' any more courageous or honest
than an 'anti-racist'?
do people only take the stands that appearing threatening
in their age,
or do they occasionally surpass even that benchmark?
is it an accomplishment in-and-of-itself
to proclaim the moral bankruptcy of your times?

Even though in the US, most people don't have to worry about what to do with the extra food in the fall, and almost no one cans anymore, most still celebrate this festival. However, despite the attempts of government schooling, it's not about pilgrims and Indians for most people either. In a mobile society that brings their work home, it's a convenient time to visit family and celebrate each other and life on the planet. And that's what most people do, I believe.

So boycott? I'm not going to give that power to the pilgrims. I thumb my nose at them. A blood-thirsty, pig-headed lot. But I'll keep celebrating food and family and love. And keep on working to overthrow the system, or at least go native myself.

The most common criteria for a liberal democracy are as follows:

• Right to life and security of person
• Freedom from slavery
• Freedom of movement
• Equality before the law and due process under the rule of law
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of information
• Freedom of the press and access to alternative information sources
• Freedom of association and assembly
• Freedom of education
• Freedom of religion
• An independent judiciary

Certainly, most people in the United States would agree that all these criteria are met, or at least promised by the government. After all, by the sixth grade, nearly everyone learns the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and that freedom is as American as apple pie. What is not talked much about is that we generally give only lip service to these freedoms, that most of us live quite different lives, and that our society certainly is far from these ideals.

People are afraid to give their children liberties that they themselves do not experience in life. When a person has spent, in some cases, a majority of their lives in institutionalized education, where the regimen is anything but freedom, and followed this up with the aptly named wage slavery, it is difficult to even imagine an alternative. Of course, they would want the same for their children -- what else is there?

Schools like Sudbury Valley take the basic tenets of liberal democracy and apply them to their culture. Rather than trying to instill a basic set of ideal societal beliefs on their students (by rote memorization in fifty-minute classroom chunks), they create an environment where the people are implementing these ideals. This concept is far ahead of the times -- most adults in our society work in environments barely progressed beyond medieval serfdom. In the transition from an industrial society to a service economy, many American factories have been outsourced to the global south and China, or staffed by undocumented workers. These factories have been happily replaced with cubicles, which (forced by further outsourcing) many workers are replicating in the home office. The factory clock, the first casualty of the French revolution, has been usurped by the wristwatch, and cell phones keep us in touch with our employers even during our vacations.

If we can't make the choice to emancipate ourselves, what do we have planned for our children? Should we lock them up in our prison schools, and perpetuate the emptiness we feel in our adult lives? Or should we work with them to create a new society? Where people have been raised as equals, and expect no less from each other?

When faced with the choice of freedom, which entails facing and rejecting the dark void in our society, it's no wonder that so many turn back to their government, hoping that our school systems can simply be fixed with a few more tax dollars, better educated teachers, or more standardized testing.

On the other hand, maybe more people would make a different choice if they were even aware the choice was theirs to make. In that case, it's no wonder that a government still bound to its medieval roots would keep its citizens deaf, dumb, and blind. And how better to do that then keep them chained to a desk for twelve or more years and make them repeat, until the words hold no meaning, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

- Aaron Winborn

Revolting

If you're going to turn on the spotlight, why don't you get a closer look?
For years I've felt like I must bleed blue,
because people always dissect, vivisect and infect me with their ways
And then it turns out most times that they just want to turn away
after all....

Now, they say that Shakespeare was a mirror to society,
and when the English went to see him, they threw fruit and vegetables at the stage,
now amerika "oohs," and "ahhh"s at what we really can't understand
Looking back, most of Shakespeare's time was rather unintelligible-
patriarchy, war, Christianity, royalty, the whole deal was pretty messy...

Not so different from today, I suppose
But instead of being disgusted by what you see, you pretend it isn't there.
nope, not a single thing going wrong here, no sir...

If you're going to turn on the spotlight, why don't you get a closer look?
personally, i'd rather be a virus than a mirror-
I'd like to spit back the illness of the amerikan way,
So you all come crawling back to me, begging for a cure
The scars : the frustration, the aggression, the despair, the hatred,
the alienation, the sorrow, the nihilism, all of the scars,
I want you to feel them rush into your body and overcome you,
With every action, every single day,

I want you to be absolutely sick of living in this society
I want you to be revoltingly ill, so that the revolting can begin...

If you're going to turn on the spotlight, why don't you get a closer look?
The problem is not that I bleed blue, but that I bleed red...

I am one hundred percent a living, breathing human animal,
I aspire to live and be free, to love, to share my enjoyment with others,
to create, struggle, laugh, learn, cry and everything else that makes me human
I want a family, a community, a home,
I want to enjoy the world in which I live, the streams, the forests,
the animals, the oceans, the mountains, grass, sand, rock, plant, air...

I want to soak in my time on earth, then fade into the ground
and pass on my energy to generations yet to come...

Because I am so human,
I'll never fit in with the amerikan way
school-work-tv-programmed sleepwalking automatons
Hatred-filled violent protectors of the status quo-

Living, dying

and killing seven billion animals every year,

and killing thousands and thousands of acres of rainforests, farm land, oceans raped, expanding from the heat, coming down through the decaying sky, burning gray, amerikan prairies, dustbowl, slaughterhouse run-off, don't swim in those waters, don't drink that, step inside, you'll burn soon

and killing the majority of the world's people, "free trade" sweat-shops, military dictatorship, u.s. forces stationed in over one hundred nations, poor brown nations, starving while Columbus-style-corporations expand, flourishing off white supremacy, the wealthy elite grows richer

and killing women throughout the globe, false images, theft of beauty on the t.v. screens, billboards, magazines, school, office, your home, my home, kept around to suit the interests of man, work more for less, open up your body, and let them crawl inside, one out of every three men uses force, dying slowly, in make-up and lingerie

and killing 20 species a day, gone forever

and killing all memory of the peaceful societies that were turtle island, native people forgotten, cast onto reservations, racist movies and museums, and the middle passage expands to vast new highways and bi-ways, loopholes in the law, racist thinking never buried, still the African peoples work as slaves in amerika, in cyber-chains, cutting cane, rotting in prisons, overcrowded ghettoes

and killing for money.

Living, dying and killing for money.

Even in the spotlight, you assume I don't exist...

Impossible!

Nothing is wrong here!

A revolution?! Ha! Never!

school-work-tv-programmed sleepwalking automatons,

I hope you come down with a horrible sickness
So the revolting can begin....

- Taylor Sparrow