Blacksmythe

I’m combining two posts that are related.

Rachel is talking about the recent election of Deval Patrick in Massachusetts. Someone asked a group of Asians, Latinos, Whites, and African Americans to name their biggest concerns. Education, crime, jobs, and healthcare (or some combination) was on everyone’s list. But for whites, taxes were also listed. As Rachel notes, when folks say taxes what they really mean is “we’re paying too much and want our taxes cut.”

Which brings me to my girl Tayari, who is touting a Netflix like book service. You pay them loot, tell them what books you want…they drop the books off, and then you send them back when you’re done. Great right?

Only….aren’t libraries one of the things we PAY TAXES FOR?!? I check out whatever books I want…get to keep them for a few weeks, and if they’re late i pay what? Maybe .50c per day in late fees?

What’s happened over the course of some 27 or so years–going back in the modern era to Proposition 13–is that the anti-tax movement has become the norm. We no longer believe that government can or even should provide valuable services–like libraries, good roads, and the like. The end result of this logic is something like Katrina….where people are saying with a straight face that it isn’t the role of government to protect us when catastrophic events occur. One of the reasons we’re homeschooling now is because no one believes enough in the public schools to put the money in them that they should have to do their job.

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Picked this citation up browsing:

Abstract: This article analyzes the high and sustained levels of popular support for President Bush’s policies during the Gulf War using a composite model of public opinion formation drawing on the rally around the flag effect noted by political scientists, the spiral of silence hypothesis drawn from communications studies, and the concepts of priming and framing drawn from political psychology. By linking the aggregate effects noted in the rally and spiral of silence hypotheses with models of individual cognitive processes, the composite model explains, better than either the rally or the spiral hypothesis alone, the sudden shift toward supporting the use of force on January 16, 1991 and the high levels of support that persisted through July.

The Media and the Gulf War: Framing, Priming, and the Spiral of Silence

Barbara Allen; Paula O’Loughlin; Amy Jasperson; John L. Sullivan

Polity, Vol. 27, No. 2. (Winter, 1994), pp. 255-284.

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Kawaida is the philosophical foundation for what many of us now celebrate as Kwanzaa.  Maulana Karenga developed the philosophy of Kawaida as a way to develop an alternative set of cultural values that were themselves based on the best of black diasporal life through time.  The seven principles of Kawaida (Ujima, Umoja, Ujamaa, Nia, Imani, Kujichagulia, and Kuumba) were supposed to be both pre- and post- Ten Commandments, according to Amiri Baraka (once practitioner–Baraka was given his name by Karenga).

So i was looking for a richer conception of Kawaida that I could use for my book, and I don’t have Karenga’s writings handy (they are at home in Baltimore and I’m in Detroit) so I went to Wikipedia.  Couldn’t find it.  Thought I might have spelled it differently.  Nope.  I stopped trying to add my own twists there after a fight with someone over Afrocentrism.  If someone, anyone, has the time to come up with a nice entry for Kawaida, I probably won’t need it by then …but it’ll be appreciated.

Until that is, someone tries to rip it to shreds.

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I don’t know if they’d call it a manifesto, but what the folks at Democracy and Hip-hop have laid down certainly reads like one. Let me say at the outset that this is the type of critical work that we need to be creating and fighting about. This is the only way we’re going to be able to make sense of the reality we find ourselves in without resorting to the language and ideas of times past.

With that said though I have a number of questions. In fact this will probably be split up into a number of posts.
How are we to judge the following statement:

“we conclude that hip-hop, as a form of culture with literally millions of participants here and across the globe, is the best indicator; the best gauge of the consciousness of the masses of people throughout the world and it expresses not only all that is ugly about them, but all that is beautiful and all that yearns to be free. It gives the best approximation of where they are and where they are going, of the present stage in their historical movement to institute a free and democratic society.”

Is this just a numbers thing? That is, can we make this claim about hip-hop because more people listen to it/practice it than other forms of popular culture? I could easily make such a claim about house music–I could definitely make more of a claim about its rootedness (because it is largely faceless and because it wasn’t started in nyc, American music executives were loathe to try to make headway into the genre).  I could make similar claims for electro, for techno…and a lesser claim for bass music.

Further, it’s a stretch to say that hip-hop is the “best” arbiter of what the masses of people are doing.  If by “best” you mean “most representative” then perhaps you can make a case.  People who are performing and consuming hip-hop do so in a wide variety of mind states, and express those states in a variety of different ways.  But in America and elsewhere those ways are skewed by market forces.  Those market forces may actually skew how humanity behaves in a way that makes it LESS representative.  Even the underground responds to the market–acts putting out mixtapes just to get a record deal, which in turn skews the artistic decisions they make as far as what to include/not include in a track.  Breakdancing has already moved out of the clubs and into spaces formerly reserved for house because the clubs want to maximize bodies per square foot.

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Ok.  I was checking out an interview with Minister Faust.  Faust, wrote one of the most original pieces of science fiction that I’d read in the past few years in The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and given that he’s got a new book coming out I wanted to see what he was up to.  As an aside we really need more folks like Faust in the game.But anyway that’s a tangent.Did you know that somebody owns the moon?  AND the other eight planets?So…turns out that when countries began moon exploration, the UN passed a law preventing governments from owning celestial bodies.  But that law didn’t cover individuals or corporations.  About 26 years ago….someone took advantage of this loophole.  And the result is The Lunar Embassy.  This is not a joke.Can you imagine what type of lunacy was required to actually conceive of and follow through on this idea?

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