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And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw with the ox. (Isaiah 11:7)

 

The problem is that White America has never solidly committed itself to the cause of racial justice… to constructive committed alliances… a willingness to go with us all the way… Black and White together we shall overcome. (The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King)

 

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around -- (laughter) -- when yellow will be mellow -- (laughter) -- when the red man can get ahead, man -- (laughter) -- and when white will embrace what is right. (The Reverend Joseph Lowery, Inauguration Day, 2009)

 

The “Culture-Con”

At the risk of boring you, I have to repeat – a big part of our difficulty planning the next social arrangement is that we don’t have our own language and we don’t speak podrunk.


But the problem’s more insidious than that. Podrunks not only superimpose their face onto every social institution, they devotionally dedicate their lives to keeping us from creating anything that is all our own, and to subverting – by redefining, packaging and selling as a commodity – what we do create.


As the podrunks only allegiance is to ‘Power’ (the illusion of rule), culturally, they are adrift. Their primary skills are in the thievery and manipulation line, not creation, so ‘culture’ is quite beyond them. Moreover, precisely because ‘culture’ means the self-creation of a people, they perceive it, correctly, as a threat to their ability to ‘create’ us.


Their giggling seizure of Machiavelli’s The Prince as their Bible is illustrative.
Vanity drives them to conceive of themselves as “princes,” and their duplicity, joined with a bottle-fed vapidity, prevents them from creating their own self-adulatory treatises, so we, the people, the captive audience, are treated, in being forced to bear witness to their public arrhythmic writhings-about, to endless iterations of their interpretations of Machiavelli’s advice.

… there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast,…and that the one without the other has no stability,…and that he who was best known to play the fox has had the best success…It is necessary, indeed,…to be skilful in simulating and dissembling. But men are so simple, and governed so absolutely by their present needs, that he who wishes to deceive will never fail in finding willing dupes. …It is not essential…that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated [mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religion], …but it is most essential that he should seem to have them; I will even venture to affirm that if he has and invariably practices them all, they are hurtful, whereas the appearance of having them is useful. Thus, it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, religious, and upright, and also to be so; but the mind should remain so balanced that were it needful not to be so, you should be able and know how to change to the contrary. …And you are to understand that a Prince, and most of all a new Prince, cannot observe all those rules of conduct in respect whereof men are accounted good, being often forced, in order to preserve his Princedom, to act in opposition to good faith, charity, humanity, and religion. He must therefore keep his mind ready to shift as the winds and tides of Fortune turn, and…ought not to quit good courses if he can help it, but should know how to follow evil courses if he must. A Prince should therefore be very careful that nothing ever escapes his lips which is not replete with the five qualities above named, so that to see and hear him, one would think him the embodiment of mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religion. And there is no virtue which it is more necessary for him to seem to possess than this last; because men in general judge rather by the eye than by the hand, for every one can see but few can touch. Every one sees what you seem, but few know what you are, and these few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many who have the majesty of the State to back them up. …Wherefore if a Prince succeeds in establishing and maintaining his authority, the means will always be judged honourable and be approved by every one. For the vulgar are always taken by appearances and by results, and the world is made up of the vulgar, the few only finding room when the many have no longer ground to stand on. A certain Prince of our own days, whose name it is as well not to mention, is always preaching peace and good faith, although the mortal enemy of both; and both, had he practiced them as he preaches them, would, oftener than once, have lost him his kingdom and authority. (Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, written in 1513)

‘Force,’ is not the only worm at the core of ‘civilization,’ a.k.a. ‘class society.’ Its partner in crime is ‘Duplicity’ – the false face.


Podrunks preoccupied with choosing the precise right mask to con us with haven’t the time, inclination, or inspiration to develop any substance behind the mask.

 

“[The Prince] must therefore keep his mind ready to shift as the winds and tides of Fortune turn… Every one sees what you seem, but few know what you are…”

 

The problem for our modern papier-mâché “princes,” having no substance themselves, schooled in the peculiar logic of “eat-or-be-eaten,” “kiss-up-and-kick-down,” “boss-or-be bossed,” is that Independent Judgment, Creation – which by definition requires authenticity – can find no purchase in barren souls.


As a result, no matter how many readings of The Prince they devotionally treat themselves to, they can never really ‘see’ us, the wind from below, or grasp, derivatively, “culture,” the self-creation of a people. 


But they do know one thing for certain: that which will never grow in their gardens, they definitely don’t want growing in ours.

 

So, with “culture,” as with everything they don’t understand and fear, they try to redefine by dumbing-down, thinning-out, packaging, and commodifying.


If they can own it, they reason, they can control it.


Obsessively, doggedly, they strive to discover and alter the content, and the avenues, of our discourse.


So with “culture” as with every powerful or loaded word or way, we, the people, encounter the same problem: we look for what we’ve lost and discover that the podrunks have seized it and inserted podrunk-friendly content, bleeding the life out of it, painting it bland – making it a challenge just to carry on a conversation, to know what we’re saying when we say it.

 


** ...commodification is taking something alive and making it dead...


Authentic, critical content – whether its inner-city fury, or prison farm blues, green awareness, or organic food – will be trivialized and ridiculed (they will never admit that what’s going on is an attempt at self-creation) until they can catch up to what’s alive: grab it, commodify it (taking something alive and making it dead), and start selling it back to us.


So, rather than “culture” being the tapestry, the river, the interweave of past, present and future, we’re told it’s actually ‘styles of consumption,’ or having money, or symphony orchestras and extraneous paintings priced beyond our means – or “the systematic development of truth in scientific form.”


Podrunks fiercely police the intellectual terrain to ensure that all roads lead back to our being bossed.

 

There’s another way in which podrunks hope to confuse or demoralize us with the notion “culture.” They either equate it with words in service of class rule, like “civilization” and “democracy,” and “technology,” or it’s handed over to the “sciences” to further denude it of anything that frightens them, anything that grows itself – i.e. without asking for permission – and painted with the ‘primitive’ brush.


The primary purpose of the “disciplines,” specialization, academia, is to keep us dependent and separated from our pasts, from nature, and from each other – across time, place, and culture – so the podrunks can feel safer.

 

When you make a ‘study’ of our relations (with all living things), they cease to be our relations and become instead objects of an objectified ‘Mind.’


Now that is terrain podrunks can traverse comfortably.

 

When the servants of capital – wearing the academic mask, the priest’s robes, or the soldier’s uniform – fall upon peoples as they are, as they find them, and collect their frozen specimens, their snapshots of a whole people, they begin the process of halting, annihilating and cannibalizing culture.


Most of the cultures around the world today are in limbo, crippled or effectively (or actually) annulled, used to either fuel the commercial imperative or serve capital’s ideological war with “we the people.”


Once plugged into the commercial imperative ‘culture’ becomes a parody of itself. Cultural evolution halts under assault. A living culture, like any other living thing, takes in food, processes new information and ideas, and ejects what it doesn’t need.


But when it’s being fixed in place, these processes stop.

 

Podrunks of every nation participate in this con, this diminishment of the full complex of our possibilities.


No ‘ruler,’ or pretender to rule, wants commoners to embrace either this full complex or to embrace across cultural divides. So we’re told lies about ourselves and about each other. We’re taught, via the propaganda machinery that capital owns or controls, to fear our own ‘wildness,’ as well as the strange ‘other’ – the Arab, the Asian, the African, the American…the Woman… the Youth – who is reduced in ‘Thought’ to a caricature, i.e. distorted, frozen, and packaged as commodity, ideological and otherwise. And information that conflicts with the officially-promoted culture-cons is kept from public view (one of the reasons podrunks are so annoyed that Barack is president.) *


Capitalism tries to freeze and invalidate ‘culture’ to keep us separate – from each other in present time, and from our earlier selves. It likes this idea of hard and fast lines between us very much – and it loves the ‘eternal “Now.”’ 
A people-originated culture, a living culture, is a conversation, a negotiation – of the present with the past and the future, which are forever in flux. It poses a threat for this reason as well, because podrunk propaganda would have us believe that there is no past, no future – there is only ‘Now.’


“Don’t look ahead, don’t look back, just watch for the pieces coming down the track (or piling up on your desk).”


Of course this is not what they tell themselves, oh no (hence the significance of the grandfather.clock set ahead in one of their secretive little-boy-clubs). They are always ever studying the past, and preparing for, planning, the future they want (you know, the one where they stay on top, in perpetuity.)


People frozen into predictable packages are trapped, immobilized – and kept divided from their fellow commoners of other lands, stuck in the boxes made for them by their winds from above.


(Of course, reality remains, nonetheless, somewhere, underneath all the pretend – and it will rise, it’s our biological inheritance. Our nature is open, creative, flexible, and generous. Our chief gift is malleability. I mean, if we can be wolves [at tremendous cost to our intestinal tracts and longevity, as our bodies are not designed for eating “meat,” raw or otherwise] we can be anything, right?)

 

If “force” is their mantra, “divide and conquer” is their guiding principle.

 

It seems odd sometimes, doesn’t it, that a strategy so well known can still work so well? It’s like The Prince itself. Most of us understand the meaning of “Machiavellian,” know that podrunks worship the ideas comprised by that term, particularly the ones that glorify rapacious acts and promote a utilitarian and contemptuous view of one’s fellow humans:

It should be borne in mind that the temper of the multitude is fickle, and that while it is easy to persuade them of a thing, it is hard to fix them in that persuasion. Wherefore, matters should be so ordered that when men no longer believe of their own accord, they may be compelled to believe by force…It is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need [“want,” “necessity”] is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you…and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserved you by a dread of punishment which never fails. (Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince)

But even though we know that the podrunks are “Machiavellian,” i.e., manipulative, to the core, we have yet to show them the door. Why is that?


Why is what Machiavelli observed five hundred years ago still true, that “…all [the people] ask is not to be oppressed.” Why is that all we ask?


And it is mostly true – most of us just want to live, love and honor the ancestors well. Which to podrunks, across time, space and nation, will ever and always only mean that we are stupid, because we do not lust after ‘Power’ as they do.


Of course all it means in truth is that we are not them, not we, the earth-connected European tribal peoples – who still exist in biological memory – and not we, the earth-connected tribal peoples of the global South.


John Trudell has said:

What we all have in common is that we are the descendants of tribes. We are all the descendants of a spiritual reality. The faint ancestral memory is always there…The behavior here [Western colonialism] reflects what happened to the tribes of Europe. They no longer had the perceptual reality of what it meant to be a human being. They were owned.

Projection is a phenomenon with both macro and micro dimensions. (Israel comes to mind.)


Perhaps our story, restating “misery loves company,” is “pain resolving itself.” A gash in the human family, followed by festering, followed by scabbing and eventual healing – and the whole process stretched over millennia? While the ancestors turn our heads en masse to…what? – the way out? the wholeness, the light at the end of the tunnel, the path through the mountain of ego?… learning, eventually, at the end of specificity, that we are light, the secret we discover when we die, and the longing of our hearts while we live?


‘Light’ – a lovely word after all?

 

Across time, across millennia, the woundedness of podrunks is palpable. Little has changed. Despite their longing that we mirror their disconnection from true power, we can, and do, reaffirm our relations. How / why their disconnection happened is a matter of speculation, but the result – imbalance – proved self-reinforcing. “Power is contagious,” Marilyn French said, but she added: “so is pleasure.”

 

If Nesucom walked in and made orphans of some of us, who then made orphans of all of us – because Power is a closed system, a self-reinforcing cycle – a unity that will one day make orphans of none of us (one way or another) – leaving us where we started (or extinct), only in accord as a global ‘thought’ – then what do we make of it all?


Is there only “oneness/split/oneness again” – as dispassionate as a bowl of water poured into two cups?


Starting with Fellowship, breaking with Faith, using Fire to re-claim Fellowship, passing necessarily (if we survive) through Acknowledgment – of all that was used, mocked, dismissed, and treated as object?
                                                                              
Towards the end of Dreams From My Father, when Barack is in Kenya, he urges his grandmother to tell him his grandfather Onyango’s story. She tells Barack that Onyango learned to read and write, which “made him useful to the white man;” that he moved to town and was introduced to the grim, white, imperial way; and that he brought some of those ways back with him to the village.


It was a confusing story for Barack, who’d imagined his grandfather as strong, independent, “a man of his people, opposed to white rule.” His grandmother tried to explain the complexity of her husband:

I also did not always understand what your grandfather thought. It was difficult, because he did not like people to know him so well. Even when he spoke to you, he would look away for fear that you would know his thoughts. So it was with his attitude towards the white man. One day he would day one thing, and the next day it was as if he was saying something else. I know that he respected the white man for his power, for his machines and weapons and the way he organized his life. He would say that the white man was always improving himself, whereas the African was suspicious of anything new. “The African was thick,” he would sometimes say to me. “For him to do anything, he needs to be beaten.” (Dreams From My Father, p. 407)

Later, when “people began to talk about independence,” and Barack’s father started bringing home these ideas, his grandfather said:

“How can the African defeat the white man…when he cannot even make his own bicycle?” And he would say that the African could never win against the white man because the black man only wanted to work with his own family or clan, while all white men worked to increase their power. “The white man alone is like an ant,” Onyango would say. “He can be easily crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together. His nation, his business – these things are more important to him than himself. He will follow his leaders and not question orders. Black men are not like this. Even the most foolish black man thinks he knows better than the wise man. That is why the black man will always lose.” (p. 417)

Self-created peoples’ cultures produce people that think for themselves, and such cultures by definition become targets of a system that requires submission.

 

C.L.R. James has said that “passive obedience is precisely the basis of bourgeois society.”


Inculcating this mental habit is only doable if you discredit a people’s culture in their own eyes, and then destroy their ability to maintain their own culture.

 

“Divide and conquer” continues to work so well because they have undermined us from within, compromised our confidence in ourselves, our framing members – using ‘Reason’ – the Rationality-Con – as the battering ram.

 

What Barack’s grandfather met when he went to town were representatives of the conquered peoples of Europe.


But freedom in dormancy crouches in the veins of the conquered too.

Capitalism in general, and America in particular, has been an experiment in the annihilation of culture. Podrunks have tried to create here human beings that acquiesce in being servants – both of markets, and of machines.


Many people have argued that the reason machines seem to be getting more human-like, more able to replace us, is not because they are becoming more like humans but because we are becoming more like machines of generic construction – complete with on/off switches, specialized functions, short shelf-lives, indistinguishable one from another, easily slotted in and out, easily replaced, readily disposable, no souls to placate or maintain.


We are so malleable we’ve allowed this disaster to happen to us because it’s happened incrementally and we’ve been cut out of our tapestries. We’re like those shell-shocked frogs wanting desperately to survive, turning off thought, trying to believe against all hope that the warming water that’s about to destroy them is a gift. No one wants to believe something so devastating is being done to one, especially on purpose.

 

If this disaster was done to us by destroying our ability to create and maintain our own cultures, the only way to renounce our subject status and claim our inherent Freedom is to start rebuilding living cultures.

 

When, in a culture, the children feel isolated and alone, when they are bombarded with the clear message loudly resonating throughout the visible world that “you can’t trust nobody,” “it’s dog-eat-dog,” and “you’re on your own” – that’s a dead culture folks. I’m sure you already knew that, or had your suspicions, but sometimes you just have to have reality confirmed, said out loud, in order to start figuring out what to do.


And of course it’s much worse for our children today than it was for me. Conditions have deteriorated.


But almost fifty years ago James Baldwin told us the same thing – “conditions have deteriorated”:

I was born in Harlem, Harlem Hospital, and we grew up – first house I remember was on Park Avenue – which is not the American Park Avenue, or maybe it is the American Park Avenue – Uptown Park Avenue, where the railroad tracks are. We used to play on the roof and in the – I can't call it an alley – but near the river – it was a kind of dump, garbage dump. Those were the first scenes I remember. I remember my father had trouble keeping us alive – there were nine of us. I was the oldest so I took care of the kids and dealt with Daddy. I understand him much better now. Part of his problem was he couldn't feed his kids, but I was a kid and I didn't know that. He was very religious, very rigid. He kept us together, I must say, and when I look back on it – that was over forty years ago that I was born – when I think back on my growing up and walk that same block today, because it's still there, and think of the kids on that block now, I'm aware that something terrible has happened which is very hard to describe.
I am, in all but technical legal fact, a Southerner. My father was born in the South – no, my mother was born in the South, and if they had waited two more seconds I might have been born in the South. But that means I was raised by families whose roots were essentially rural – Southern rural, and whose relation to the church was very direct, because it was the only means they had of expressing their pain and their despair. But twenty years later the moral authority which was present in the Negro Northern community when I was growing up has vanished, and people talk about progress, and I look at Harlem which I really know – I know it like I know my hand – and it is much worse there today than it was when I was growing up. (James Baldwin in a 1963 interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark)

Barack recalled (in Dreams) that during a neighborhood meeting, a fellow activist named Will, urged the group to remember why they were doing community work. Emotion choked his voice:

“I don’t see kids smiling around here no more. You look at ‘em listen to ‘em…they seem worried all the time, mad about something. They got nothing they trust. Not their parents. Not God. Not themselves. And that’s not right. That just ain’t the way things supposed to be…kids not smiling.” (quoted in Dreams From My Father, p. 177)

Recently I re-watched the Akira Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai.


In it there’s a character played by Toshiro.Mifune who’s a natural mimic and storyteller, a gifted entertainer, a Pied Piper for all the children in the small rural community where the story unfolds. They follow him around like a flock of baby ducks in mama’s wake, laughing delightedly at his antics. Listening to them laugh – such a delicious sound, like air, water, food, like a warm bed to lay on, a deep massage for the soul – I felt the truth of Will’s words. We never hear children laughing anymore, not with that laughter that bubbles up from sheer unreserved delight. I certainly don’t hear it in my low-income community.


How bad does it have to get, do you think, before we decide, like the farmers in Seven Samurai, that enough is enough? (Of course there are no samurai for us to hire, or plead our case to. There’s no messiah to wait for, no designated heroes to open the door, take our hands and lead us through. That’s the point. We either grow up, or go down. Do we value our earth, love our children, do we want freedom for them both, and for ourselves?)

 

When we buy into the way of being of mind-worship, and sacrifice our wholeness on the altar of Mind, it’s almost enraging to see wholeness in others – even in our own children – to be confronted, unconsciously, with what we’ve lost.

 

We are dangerous, brutal people without healthy cultures.

 

We’re only as good as our environments, as the forces and influences we surround ourselves with, or allow ourselves to be surrounded by. To say that our sources of power are the ancestors, the earth and each other, and therefore to be cut off from them diminishes us, requires a look at the form diminishment takes.


If we surround ourselves with commercials and electronic substitutes for real human interactions, what are we?


*** If we turn ourselves (and our children) over to a market (!) to define us, what are we?


We become mere extensions of the technology and of the market, rather than the other way around.

 

Again: if this disaster was done to us by destroying our ability to create and maintain our own cultures, the only way to renounce our subject status and claim our inheritance, Freedom, is to start rebuilding our living cultures.

 

John Trudell has also said that, “we need to think in terms of evolution, not revolution. If we have evolution, then we move. But revolution means you only get back to where you started.”


Because Power is a closed system, a self-reinforcing cycle, the only way to negate it is to embrace what it has negated. We have to go outside that cycle.

 

As you’ve no doubt figured out I love the movies, from the masterpieces to your basic, silly entertainment. They all testify about the state of this system – all, then, have something to suggest about how to escape it.


But I do prefer the ones that were cared about, thought through and packed with what the writer, director, or both have learned and want to share. Great films compel usually because they intersect with our experience on multiple levels, and because they’re packed with ideas.


The Godfather is compulsive viewing, for example, because it forces you to think about issues of family, loyalty, culture, alchemy, inevitability, human nature, violence, and, of course, power. * As studies of ‘Power’ The Godfather, and DeNiro’s eventual sequel, The Good Shepherd, together with the work of the Coen brothers, have handed to us almost all we need to know about its circularity.


There’s a scene towards the end in which Don Corleone, played by Marlon Brando, talks about his life as he counsels his son Michael, played by Al Pacino.

Michael:  What's the matter? What's bothering you? I'll handle it. I told you I can handle it, I'll handle it.
Don Corleone:  I knew Santino was going to have to go through all this and Fredo... well, Fredo was... But I never wanted this for you. I live my life, I don't apologize to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool dancing on the strings held by all of those big shots. That's my life I don't apologize for that. But I always thought that when it was your time that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone. Something.
Michael:   I'm not a pezzonovante.
Don Corleone:  Well, there wasn't enough time, Michael. There just wasn't enough time.
Michael:    We'll get there, Pop. We'll get there.
Don Corleone:      [kisses Michael] Listen, whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting he's the traitor. Don't forget that.

Hearing those words takes you right into the film doesn’t it?


Well, I think the main reasons why the film resonated have to do with our longing for our long-gone cultures – the backup provided by the tribe – and our ache to escape the tentacles of the state. When Don Corleone says, “I refused to be a fool dancing on the strings held by all of those big shots,” in our hearts we know that he’s right – not about our being fools, that’s subject to debate, but that we are, all of us, dancing on those strings, and want to be free of them.

 

 

Continue to "Culture" - Part 2

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)

 

 

* One of my favorite examples of suppressed facts that challenge the official stereotype are those kick-ass ladies of the French Revolution who marched to Versailles chanting, “Allons chercher le boulanger, la boulangere et le petit mitron!” Translation: “Let’s go and find the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker boy!” Kisses were not being blown along the way. No feminine mystique burdened their backs. There was a bread crisis on and they were pissed. This was not that long ago.

* We probably have Mario Puzo to thank for this density of thought but the cultural influence of the film has surpassed the book at this point, at least on my bookshelf.