Requiem for a DREAM 

(Why Trayvon Matters so much)

Last night driving home from work I listened to the local right-wing radio jockey stir up anguish in his nearly all white audience on the Trayvon Martin verdict.  I was amazed at the level of bravado with which callers waxed poetic, philosophical and with indignant rage about the primacy of the criminal justice system and the sanctity of “the process”.  I was reminded of a professor of political science many years ago who, in his examination of 20^th century political movements shared the idea that: “having an ideology means never having to say you’re sorry.”  These were folks defending a system which produces a dissonance that is simply too loud to ignore; while figuratively standing over the body of a 17 year old boy. Trayvon Martin is just the latest young martyr of institutional racism that will haunt us all until we can look truthfully at the system in which: 

• While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned.
• According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.
• Students of color face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, leading to a higher number of youth of color incarcerated.
• According to recent data by the Department of Education, African American students are arrested far more often than their white classmates.
• African American youth have higher rates of juvenile incarceration and are more likely to be sentenced to adult prison.
• As the number of women incarcerated has increased by 800 percent over the last three decades, women of color have been disproportionately represented.
• The war on drugs has been waged primarily in communities of color where people of color are more likely to receive higher offenses.
• Once convicted, black offenders receive longer sentences compared to white offenders.
• Voter laws that prohibit people with felony convictions to vote disproportionately impact men of color.
• Studies have shown that people of color face disparities in wage trajectory following release from prison.

Source:  Center for American Progress 

The system of Justice, which produces this reality, in fact, perpetuates and protects injustice.  But it can only do so with the explicit consent of those that continue to validate it.  Please stop.  To defend these outcomes; to defend this empirical reality is tantamount to defending an explicit doctrine of racial superiority.  For if you defend as “Just” and “Impartial” a system that produces and perpetuates this reality how can you escape the conclusion that these results, which produce such regular disparities, are anything other than a measure of the implicit inferiority of those for whom the systemic results are so negative?

I did not follow the Zimmerman trial closely. The technical aspects of trials are always the key in the process.  I have no problem believing that per the process a jury would find George Zimmerman "not guilty."  I don’t know if he is a racist and I don’t care.  The verdict is the process of a machine which is tainted and which favors the perpetuation of a society in which people of color do not have equal justice.  That system then, is what must change.  I am not simply talking about the criminal justice system, but a comprehensive system of racial superiority which is so embedded that otherwise reasonable people will defend the validity of that system even in the face of overwhelming and consistent empirical evidence of racial bias. 

It’s time to stop.  Yes I am a man of color, and yes I am biased; in favor of my own survival and the survival of my children. I am biased in favor of their ability to be seen and treated as equals.  I am biased in favor of the dreams and aspirations of the students of color that I am privileged to serve, who deserve to be treated every bit as precious and beautiful as the white classmates that they stand beside.  They are all precious and beautiful.  Your criminal justice system is not just to me. The evidence is overwhelming.  People of Color are reacting in response to this verdict to communicate exactly this fact and the empirical evidence has told you this over and over.  We are reaching that incendiary point at which the benign neglect about the continuation of this situation is starting to look more and more like a malicious design.

Doctor, doctor help me please!!!

I am a lifelong fan of loud, passionate and unbridled rock and roll (if you are surprised by this – we have never met). The spirit of this music flows through me like oxygen – I have even been called a bit of a rock snob to boot. As I was driving home with the wife and youngest from the park the other night – Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” came onto the radio. It immediately struck me how long it had been since I had heard this song. This was a stark contrast to the ubiquity of this song on classic rock radio from my earlier years.

As the song played (I subtly edged up the volume – met with a complete absence of protest), Oscar -my eleven year old- says from the back seat, “I thought that this song was faster.” It occurred to me – somehow miraculous that he had escaped the irresistible temptation to listen to this song over and over the first time he heard it – that I remember so clearly from my own first encounter with this monolith. “Just wait” I responded, and edged up the volume a little more.

The song took over the mood of the car and its wonderful accelerating pace and volume enveloped our imagination and the mood of the moment. The song was wistful and mystical, transcendent and passionate – and the all too familiar path from placid calm to swirling tempest that characterizes this beauty transfixed our ride home. It was perfect. It was rock and roll. It reminded me of why I love that music so much and reminded me of simpler times – when I was not so predisposed to bury my own head in the more complex world of grown up issues and actions. The juxtaposition was captivating. I wondered if this juxtaposition provided any opportunity to reconcile the weird and sometimes deflating character of some of the things happening in our common culture today. I wondered if I might try...

:)

So here...with a little help from the Greatest Rock and Roll Band of all time...and utilizing the lyrics from what is arguably the greatest rock and roll song of all time (at least the second greatest in my book) is my attempt to soothe my own soul spreading the healing power of rock and roll over the fractures and contusions of some of our clumsy and bruising public discourse.

SATISFACTION– by the Rolling Stones
(as playfully amended...it helps if you actually hear the song in your head)

(transcendent opening guitar lick here....)

I can't get no satisfaction
I can't get no satisfaction
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can't get no, I can't get no

"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress." ~John Adams

When I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I can't get no, oh no no no
Hey hey hey, that's what I say

"As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use. A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices." ~William James

I can't get no satisfaction
I can't get no satisfaction
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can't get no, I can't get no

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between" ~Oscar Wilde

When I'm watchin' my TV
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me
I can't get no, oh no no no
Hey hey hey, that's what I say

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.” ~Winston churchill

I can't get no satisfaction
I can't get no girl reaction
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can't get no, I can't get no

"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." ~John Maynard Keynes

When I'm ridin' round the world
And I'm doin' this and I'm signing that
And I'm tryin' to make some girl
Who tells me baby better come back later next week
'Cause you see I'm on losing streak
I can't get no, oh no no no
Hey hey hey, that's what I say

"YOU LIE!" ~Congressman Joe Wilson (R- SC)

I can't get no,
I can't get no
I can't get no satisfaction
No satisfaction,
no satisfaction,
no satisfaction

"Well, I learned a lot. You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries." ~Ronald Reagan talking to reporters upon his return from Latin America. 12/4/1982

...song fades...

An Exercise in Futili-TEA

If I didn’t love this place and the ideals that I hold dear so much I might just think that what was happening with the political right in the United States was the most beautifully absurd political theatre I had ever seen. It is becoming more and more painful to hear how earnest so many of them are in their hope that what they are calling “Tea Parties” will actually result in anything other than the status quo from a right wing political establishment that is just shy of eating its young to survive. It makes it harder and harder for me to listen to and watch these media vultures perpetrate what seems more and more clearly will be a tragic and shameless exploitation of faith.

If I didn’t care – I might just sit back and watch things happen, but the fact is....I do care. I care about political ideals and a healthy marketplace of ideas. I care about a balance of power and I care about a path with a profound sense of bitterness at the end of the road and it turns my stomach to watch people be lied to and to watch people be used.

So here…addressed to my rank and file adversaries on the right – are my concerns for your political future. You are being swindled! You are being lied to! You are being exploited! And those that are doing this have done it to you before and will continue doing this as long as you let them. I am talking about FOX news, I am talking about Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and…. – and any actual Republican elected official who has the brass juevos to show up at any of your Tea Parties. They will even trot a few pop media whores across the stage to hock their latest wares. Remember when you see them that these geniuses are the EXACT bunch whose strategic wisdom has painted you into a desperate corner in a cold room. Do you need a revolution? Absolutely! But what you need most is a revolution of leadership, ideas and strategies in your own party – or a new party all together.

These shameless weasels are doing their very best to cozy up to the organizers of your Tea-parties to co-opt your outrage and energy and turn it into fundraisers and campaign designs for their own benefit. They WILL be asking you for your money AND your time! They WILL say that you must not advocate an actual revolution; they WILL say that the Republican party needs a major overhaul and just look over there at the ones that need to be exiled! They WILL say that they feel JUST AS ANGRY AS YOU ARE. But they don’t mean a word of it. They are leeches and the blood they are sucking is your credibility.

On Thursday morning, when you have watched yourself on the news and you are settling into the understanding that what I have said is true, there is gonna be a nasty, dirty taste in your mouth and you will feel every bit as used as that lonely character you’ve seen in the romantic tragedies time after time who finally thought that it was true love and finally gave into the pressure and the urges…but ultimately woke up all alone again…and now for the last time!

(Epic and bloody crime spree to follow)…

Thunder in the Distance (spastic sputtering from the right)

The first time you inhale the stench of death it changes you. There is a profanity to that experience that transcends singular sensory perception. As an odor the reaction pulls at your lungs in a way that tugs the other organs convulsively along and leaves you with an earned understanding of foulness that you will forever recognize at the slightest whiff. It is odor beyond odor that wrecks your emotion with primal instinct. This stench is in the air.

Of late – this nastiness seems to be slathered about any and all right wing sycophantic talking heads like they are bathing in vats of it as cologne. This can’t be good. The fervor seems to be moving towards manic and their eyes are darting back and forth like rats in boiling fishbowls, but with less natural grace. I don’t need to name names here because you instinctively know the ones I am talking about. They are a shameless breed of opportunistic hucksters who have built an industry on the mystic art of stirring up and identifying with the discontent in a population that is seething but does not know why and is starved for validation.

The bureaucratic imperative is a simple law that says that the first rule of any bureaucracy is to survive; to perpetuate its own necessity. So then it is the first rule of our modern breed of political hack to perpetuate their own relevance. They have made their way for years with shrill, mean spirited and over simplistic pandering to the basest instincts of an audience in whom they have worked with singular focus to fan embers of bitterness into flames of inchoate rage and who are shamefully quick to jump onto the simplest, most convenient and least personally accountable answers. An ever growing sense of alienation is a hallmark of job security for them – and therefore must be nourished carefully and attentively. They depend on these masses for meaning and have come to a space in a place where oxygen is scarce and a foaming fervor is their last desperate lifeline.

Their time has passed but they will rage against the dying of their dingy yellow spotlight like werewolf Quixotes on a mutated caffeine strain. The show promises to be dangerous and is moving like a hammer-throw windup through an antique shop. My advice is don’t stand too close and cover your tender parts in protective clothing. The death rattle here will be kaleidoscopically messy and projectile in nature. They will grasp desperately with piercing volume at the lowest hanging fruit no matter how rotten or festering the logic is. The newest version of the red scare is well underway and if the early returns are any indication it promises to make McCarthy seem cautious, measured and reasonable by comparison. They will promise doom and disease, they will diagnose certain death and absolute Armageddon with a tin hollow booming conviction whose volume belies its own credibility.

Listen to these desperate, anachronistic brutes at your own risk. This is a stench that rubs off on you and seeps in to the marrow and I would think twice before letting these sickly wounded screeching vultures start to let that foulness loose in my dreams.

The Province of Night

Something about the dark of night matches my character in ways that I cannot fully understand. It is not sinister, but is not innocent. There is something viscous and slightly more delicious about the way that thoughts move through the air and isolation in the dark of night. Movement is elegant and thick reminiscent of bubbles rising through shampoo bottles as they turn, only the shampoo is all around and the bubbles are everything that moves or changes.

I remember watching “Little Miss Sunshine” for the first time as the characters retreat to their first night in their respective motel rooms and slip comfortably into their anonymous and most comfortable vices (addiction, despair, optimism, ambition, isolation…) - something about that scene spoke to me deeply. Night is retreat to that which stabilizes our least self conscious sense of who we are. We are absent the distraction afforded by being able to see the world around us and the sphere of our perceptual experience becomes concomitantly smaller affording focus to naturally turn inward.

Have you ever noticed that the best conversations you have ever had are nestled deeply in the stillest part of the night. It is then and only then that the absence of external stimuli meet the sleep deprivation induced abandonment of social convention and quite naturally provide for something approximating real communication; a communication of thoughts and ideas absent of the otherwise omnipresent bias of self consciousness. It is a perfect storm of communication potential.

The dark of the night recalls demons for some. They are in the closet and under the bed. They are stuffed resoundingly in the dusky compartments in our own head. They roam the streets and forests with weapons untold and bursting with violent and vicious capacity. This is where the wild things are. The werewolf of legend is recalled from his beastly slumber within the confines of his human prison at the primal wash of the light of the full moon. Perhaps even the most sinister of all fantastic characters – the vampire can only come out at night to engage in his carnivorous endeavor and shrinks from the light as his mortal foil.

What subconscious monster lurking within causes us such primal terror? The fantasy of consuming flesh is not so intangible for anyone who has ever really made love with abandon – even taking nourishment from the very lifeblood of our objects of adoration. Flesh is both beautiful and delicious. Have you ever watched a nursing child? The connection between mother and baby as the fleshy cheek and lips meet fleshy breast and nipple is singular in nature as the purest demonstration of sustenance. It is not strictly vampiric but it is about as close as can be righteously imagined. Watching mother and child is beauty at fullest blossom – but it somehow is the stuff that terror is made of.

This is the province of night. When that which is most beautiful of all is deeply terrifying; when we can abandon the limits of the oneness of ourselves for the universally accessible holism of selflessness; when our most comforting vices connect us not to only to individual tragedy but to the tragedy implicit in all of humanity; when agape love connects us all like warm shampoo moving as the earth moves in its timeworn orbit; and when discovery of oneness and newness and humanity is a nourishing revelation each and every night.

As the stars shine to us from millennia long since passed – teasing from the infinite.

The King of Kong - Defender Memories and Brent Sanchez

If you have read my blog you may remember me waxing philosophic about the video game Defender from the eighties and my tragically flawed best friend from Junior High. His name was Brent Sanchez and he was a twisted piece of work - but my brother in arms and hopeless fellow rock and roll junkie and girl watcher for 7th and 8th grades.

This weekend I got to indulge myself a bit and rent a few indie DVD's. One of these was King of Kong - an interesting, hilarious, puzzling and insightful documentary centering on the world record high score for the classic video game "Donkey Kong." I highly recommend that you see it - whomever you may be and THANK YOU for recommending it to me, Dan.

If you have no interest in the classic games this movie may lose you, but for me just seeing those massive free standing consoles with the joysticks and the multi-purpose concave buttons brings back a mad rush of memories. I watched this movie gleefully in a cocoon of warm nostalgia. Perhaps the movie's most interesting (and personal) turn for me actually occurred long after the DVD ended. When I got curious today and visited the twingalaxies web site (the official record keeper for classic video game world records) to see what the high score for Defender might be. The world record high score for Defender is somewhere in the 250,000 range.

Brent Sanchez was robbed! In the movie they went to careful length to explain what happens in these classic video games on what is called, the "Kill Screen". This is when the game essentially runs out of new challenges for you and cannot continue. You have beaten it, and what happens on this final screen in some of these games is that the game essentially displays a partial screen and partial gibberish because it has run out of code.

Defender, however, does not. Defender, the classic Williams arcade game, just turns over and starts again once you reach a million points. That's right...I know what happens on Defender when a player reaches a million points. Do you know how I know this? Because I have fucking seen it! Brent Sanchez used to do this instead of (perhaps even in PLACE of) talking to his mother and father and/or relating to anyone in his family. He was something of an asshole savant in real life - but a Zen master at this damn game. Brent, if you are out there...a terrible injustice is being perpetrated and your place in history calls for you to claim it. I am here and ready to cheer you on. Hell - I used to feel like a toad for only being able to get to 200,000 and it isn't that far from the world record. Is someone selling this game in the classic arcade console - with a little practice maybe I can avenge the injustice done to Brent by the cruel march of pop culture and his own tragically self destructive tendencies.

Immortality awaits...

Nevermind and Defender Changed my life (originally published on CNN's ireport 12/12/2008)

As we drove in the car on a recent trip I got to listen to whatever I wanted to on my iPod. "Sign of the Gypsy Queen" by April Wine began to play. It is a fantastic song that I was pleased to re-discover on iTunes. It is like a little time capsule from 1981. As the song played and the family slept in the car (hence my complete freedom for musical choice) I began to reminisce about that time.

In 1981 I was thirteen years old and my whole life was rock and roll, the fledgling MTV (where I was introduced to April Wine), my best friend and a fantastic and exciting new video game called Defender. He was from a broken home and had a history of abuse (Let me clip Your dirty wings). He had a reckless and unique sense of humor, a megalomaniacal personality and what I would later discover was a very addictive and self destructive side. We had no idea back then that we were the fledgling grunge generation or that we were enmeshed in helping to create the cultural landing strip for Nirvana's revolutionary impact.

He was fantastic at Defender. He was always better than me. He would steal money and spend hours at whatever arcade was open and play and play and play. I did not know then that he was seeking escape. It was fun to watch him play. I never got past the fifth level. He eventually discovered what happened when you reached a million points. The game just started over. His fingers were amazing when he played. His thumb slapped the reverse button spastically and his right hand melded with the joystick. Firing was a constant stream, but even I could do that. His magic was the placement of the ship and thrusting exactly right (I'm worse at what I do best, And for this gift I feel blessed).

This level of dedication was tragically misplaced and profound. The color scheme of the game was beautiful and even now if I could use this scheme to decorate my house I probably would. The colors were only dark and it was all set against a black screen. The colors were meant to make you feel like you were deep in another world where light was not plentiful. Even in the arcades it was always dark (With the lights out it's less dangerous). Sometimes April Wine even played in the background. He would get kicked out of school a few years later for doing lines of cocaine off of the Biology class room tables. We had grown apart as his behavior became more risky and blatantly hostile (Load up on guns and Bring your friends).

He would reappear in my life about ten years later as I was a college student in family housing in Seattle. It was grunge central and I was deep into the Sub Pop scene. He was looking for a place to stay after some or another part of his life had fallen apart. The soundtrack had changed profoundly.

Over this trip last Xmas I also got to listen to Nirvana and even received a Kurt Cobain figure from my sister as a Christmas gift. I still love Nirvana. They feel like home in a lot of ways. It occurred to me as I listened to Nevermind while doing the dishes that they probably played Defender as adolescents just like I did and I wondered what effect that color scheme had on them (I'm so ugly, But that's ok, 'cause so are you.)

The fundamental power of Nirvana is the bleak and explosive contrast that they create. They do not shy away from paradox of crushing and even violent volume with bubble gum melody but revel in it. I heard some narration from a history of rock and roll piece explain recently that Kurt had wanted to mix Black Sabbath and the Beatles. That seems to make some sense, but it does not capture all of it. If you listen to the music you can hear that the paradox is not only sonic, it is emotional and philosophical (I'm lucky to have met you I don't care what you think unless It is about me It is now my duty to completely drain you.)

That violent dissonant feedback and the fuzzbox screaming vocals are primal and they are dancing along the edge of something that seems apocalyptic in scope. I don't know exactly what the connection is between April Wine, my best friend from 7th grade, Nirvana and Defender but I know it is there and it means something. I think that the color scheme must matter a lot but I am not sure how and I wish that I could remember exactly how the sounds of the game used to make me feel.