David Simon on Moyers

The Wire's creator David Simon gives a GREAT interview on The Journal.

Report from the Left Forum

Yesterday I managed to crawl out from the book cave otherwise known as my apartment to spend the day at the Left Forum in New York. The Left Forum, for those of you who don't know, is a huge academic/activist conference held every year in the city. It's absolutely massive, with the leading lights from the national and international left presenting. While I've heard that it's been different in previous years, this year there was a strong youth activist presence that balanced out the old balding white guys nicely.

I managed to get to three of the seemingly numberless panels: David Harvey, Doug Henwood, Nomi Prinz, and Fred Moseley's "Nationalize the Banks! What Does it Mean?", Richard Seymour (aka Lenin), Samuel Moyn, and John McArthur's "Liberalism and Human Rights," and Adolph Reed, Jr., and Walter Benn Michaels' "Diversity in the Age of Obama." The first two were excellent, the last was a travesty.

The presentations on banking were extremely interesting. Doug Henwood began by noting that two years ago if the Left Forum had a panel on banking, very few people would have showed up (there were approximately 250 yesterday). He proceeded to argue that, contrary to common sense, booms are often more conducive to radicalism than busts. The antiglobalization movement came after four years of job creation in the 90s, the 60s came on the tail-end of the postwar boom, etc. At the same time, the crisis of the 1970s failed to produce any major radicalization in the US.

Therefore, given the weakness of the Left in this crisis, Henwood argued that we should be putting forth a minimalist program based on nationalizing finance, bringing it under more democratic control, and channeling credit towards more socially responsible projects like affordable housing and green energy. While it's obviously good to argue that crises don't automatically produce radicalization, I think Henwood misses the dynamic in which this crisis, combined with the discrediting of conservatism by the Bush regime, actually is producing a major shift to the Left right now. If we're to have any long term persuasiveness in giving this shift organized form and expression, we need to do more than articulate a minimalist program and talk seriously about our long-term goals for changing society altogether.

Fred Moseley, an exceptional Marxist economist, largely agreed with Henwood. He argued that the demand for a bailout should be used as an argument against capitalism, as it demonstrated both that the system is inherently unstable and that when it does collapse it places the burden on ordinary taxpayers. Somewhat incongruously, he hitched this rather large-scale argument to Henwood's assertion that the Left should busy itself at the moment with articulating a minimalist program based around the democratization of finance.

Nomi Prins, who I hadn't heard of before, provided a somewhat refreshing counterweight to Henwood and Moseley. She delivered an angry presentation about the bankruptcy of the concept of "too big to fail." Interestingly, she argued that the state shouldn't nationalize institutions like AIG, but instead work on breaking them up.

David Harvey went last, and basically delivered a polemic against his fellow presenters. He began by noting that "Economics is a discipline that is dominated by people who have no idea what the fuck is going on." He then went on to argue that it was foolish to talk about "speculation" as a bad activity or to separate finance from the "real economy." Speculation and finance have played a crucial role in capital's development since its beginning, and it couldn't exist without them. Therefore, any move towards addressing the financial crisis would have to come to terms with its role in capitalism. He also argued that there's always been a "state-finance nexus," but that it has undergone multiple revolutions since its establishment, from the gold standard to neoliberalism. With this emphasis on the long term tendencies of capitalist development, Harvey described crises such as the current one as "irrational rationalizers of an irrational system," a brilliant description in my opinion.

The forum then opened t Q&A, but I left when six people wearing Revolution t-shirts bum rushed the mics all at once. Seriously RCP, you give the rest of us a bad name.

I had been looking forward to the next session for some time, having been a big fan of Richard Seymour's writing for some time now. The first presenter, however, gave Seymour a hard act to follow. I hadn't heard of Samuel Moyn before yesterday, but his presentation made it clear that he's one of the best people out there currently thinking about rights discourse, imperialism, and capitalism. Moyn argues that appeals to rights are divided by a fundamental discontinuity between human rights and the rights of man. The latter, arising out of the crucible of the American and French revolutions, were always articulated in an appeal to sovereignty and nationality. Despite this entwinement with some rather nasty formations, insurgent movements, such as the Black Jacobins of Haiti, were able to use the Rights of Man as a framework with which to push some very progressive things. The shift to human rights, in the aftermath of WWII (though crucially, not originally a response to the Holocaust), severed rights from an appeal to a specific polity to the supposedly more universal "human rights." The early codification of human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while including a number of economic and social rights which are often elided today, crucially lacked any discussion of self-determination. In the context of decolonization, this was not an innocent silence. Moyn went on to argue that appeals to human rights have more often than not been an excuse to violate a given nation's sovereignty (Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc etc). Thus human rights, while supposedly more universal, have often played a more reactionary role than the rights of man.

Seymour gave an excellent presentation on the history of liberalism's relationship with empire, interspersing it with the great jabs at pro-war leftists anyone who reads the Tomb knows and loves. Since I've read his book and read the Tomb religiously, there wasn't much new for me in his prepared remarks. He closed, however, with a compelling argument that a renewal of Marxism is absolutely necessary if liberal interventionism is to be combated. Simply put, no other framework/movement has been able to combine a militant insistence on self-determination with a broader program of human emancipation. Fabianism lacked the former, while anticolonial movements too often papered over the latter.

John McArthur's presentation was what one would expect from the publisher of Harpers. Lots of really interesting anecdotes that don't necessarily add up to anything convincing. In the discussion, McArthur tipped his hand and argued that he thinks foreign policy is almost wholey determined by domestic politics, an analytically worthless argument that reveals nothing so much as McArthur's demoralization.

I would take McArthur's resignation anyday, however, over the next panel. Adolph Reed is a smart historian and political commentator. His writings on Du Bois, the Black academy, and contemporary politics are sharp and deserve wider reading. He has hitched himself to a rather shoddy star, however, in Walter Benn Michaels. WBM is the author of a book called "The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Forget About Inequality." A promising title, no? Unfortunately, it's little more than a screed that argues that antiracism is a right wing, neoliberal politics. WBM makes this argument by arguing that people who talk about racial disparities in things like income imply that if proportionate numbers of Blacks and whites were in the various income quintiles, that everything would be fine. This, of course, leaves class inequality itself untouched. Therefore, it's neoliberal to talk about racial disparities in income. Any questions?

Of course, WBM's argument is little more than sleight of hand. For one thing, it's hardly impossible to argue that it would be better if the lowest income brackets weren't stuffed with people of color and that we should abolish class society. For another, the argument presumes that the only serious way to talk about racism is to talk about income distribution (a curious proposition in the age of Sean Bell, Adolph Grimes, and Oscar Grant). WBM argued that such blatant bigotry is no longer the rule, and Reed rather cavalierly dismissed the importance of such events.

During the Q&A, I asked what the speakers thought the left attitude towards Islamophobia should be. Since Islamophobia is a major justification for US capital's designs on the middle east, and since it helps to bind US workers to US capital by convincing them that their major enemy is scary Moslems, it seems to me that it's fairly self-evident that a politics of antiracism around Islamophobia is hardly neoliberal. Adolph Reed responded by assuring me of his personal abhorrence of Islamophobia, and then moving on to another subject. WBM, in an evasion charming for its naivete, responded by saying that Obama, raised by a Muslim, obviously wasn't an Islamophobe, and that neoliberals wanted to see more Muslims in the billionaire's club. As if Obama needed a personal fear of Muslims to promote racism against them.

WBM's ideas are nothing less than poison to the worker's movement. I used to think that academic accusations that the left doesn't want to talk about racism were based in little more than caricature and fantasy. Unfortunately, this panel proved me wrong. Apparently there are some walking fossils who think that Eugene Debs was right to say that the Socialist Party has nothing to offer Black folks.

All in all, though, the forum was a huge success. It brought the best of the academic left into contact with some of the most vibrant young activists in the city. If the seriousness with which people were grappling with theories and strategies is any indication, the US Left is laying the foundations for some major growth.

Missing the Racist Forest for the Trees

I imagine by quitting time today most people will have heard about the NY Post cartoon that ran yesterday. It depicted two police officers with guns drawn and a bullet-riddled monkey. One cop is saying "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." I don't believe I've seen such as racist cartoon since the publication of the anti-Muslim Danish cartoons of a few years back.

CNN's Roland Burris and Al Sharpton have called out the cartoonist and the Post for the vile history in the US of referring Blacks as 'monkeys' and the vigilante and state terror that have gone hand in hand with it. A relatively unreported fact has been that hate crimes against Blacks has INCREASED after the election. Sean Delonas, the cartoonist, claims that it is standard practice to mix two current events in a political cartoon. We all know about OBAMA's stimulus bill (many defenders of the cartoon point to the fact that the 'kill Obama' implication is patently false because the legislature, not Obama wrote the bill. Pure bollocks.) But, who the fuck has heard of the other story, the Connecticut monkey attack incident? I surely haven't.

My biggest beef with the backlash against the cartoon (and admittedly I have not done a wide survey of the responses online) is that no one is calling out the implication of police brutality!!! Police have ramped up their killings and shootings of young Black men. Look at Oscar Grant. Delonas and his 'freedom of speech' defenders are apologists for the very real racism that continues to exist despite the historic election of Obama and are actively contributing to the climate where cops get off scot free for murder.

Getting to Know Dr. King

It's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and, for the first time I can remember, the holiday isn't being greeted with an avalanche of cant. Yahoo News ran a good story about Dr. King's frequently forgotten commitment to economic justice, and CNN has an article interviewing SCLC leaders and King's sister. The right wing, meanwhile, which never wastes an opportunity to hijack King's legacy, has been curiously silent, with the exception of Michelle Malkin, who wants to paint King as an enemy of teacher's unions (right. he supported sanitation workers but drew the line at educators.)

Clearly, this has something to do with Obama's election, which has helped make clear the drastic changes in American racial attitudes over the past few decades. Viewing this sea change, I am reminded of Marx's appropriation of Hamlet: "Well grubbed, old mole!"

Given the reprieve we've been granted from right wing idiocy about King, now is a perfect time to familiarize yourself with the radical Dr. King.

Brian Jones - The Martin Luther King They Won't Celebrate

FAIR - Martin Luther King and Affirmative Action

Kai Wright - Dr. King, Forgotten Radical

Brian Kelley - Unfinished Business: Martin Luther King in Memphis

Stevie Wonder also has something to say:

Protesting Police Executions

Here is a demonstration of how little they care about our lives: when the Bay Area Rapid Transit directors had a meeting with the public to discuss the murder of Oscar Grant, Director Lynette Sweet complained that the meeting was keeping people from watching the NFL playoffs. Fortunately, both San Francisco and New Orleans (responding to the murder of Adolph Grimes) residents have begun organizing to ensure that these executions will not fade quietly from public view. SF has set up the Coalition Against Police Executions, and is regularly organizing protests. In New Orleans, a group of ministers and the NAACP are pushing for an FBI civil rights investigation into the shooting. The FBI, of course, with its own illustrious history of murdering Black leaders, will probably do nothing, but it will at least keep the killing in the press.

Young Black Man Killed by New Orleans Police

Again. Did cops all around the country get a memo or something? Is this some kind of sick civilian corollary to what Jon Stewart described as Israel's "civilian carnage Toyotathan" before Obama comes to office? Are police departments all over the country getting their fill of murdering young Black men before the inauguration?

Anyway, here are the details. Adolph Grimes III was in New Orleans visiting his family for the holidays. He was waiting to meet his cousin in a rented SUV, when a narcotics force out on a sweep found him. The police claimed he fired at them, and they released a hail of 48 shots in response. Perhaps they've been watching the news and learned to follow Israel: when you shoot an innocent person, claim they shot at you first! Here's some excellent coverage of the protests Grimes' murder has sparked.

George Ciccariello-Maher on Oscar Grant's Murder

You might know George Ciccariello-Maher for his excellent writings on Chavez and Venezuela. Here he has a truly necessary piece on Oakland and Oscar Grant's murder. He goes through Oakland's foul history of police executions, and also the magnitude of outrage the murder has sparked. Well worth reading.

Police Executions

With the spate of recent attempts on Black men's lives by police officers, I thought I'd post a few songs on the subject.

Another (!!!!!!!) Young Black Man Shot by Police

Thankfully, Robbie Tolan survived the assault. He will live the rest of his life with a bullet embedded in his liver, however. Tolan, 23, was shot in his driveway in Bellaire, Texas, by a police officer who accused him of stealing a car. Bellaire is a mostly white suburb of Houston. Get this: the officer who shot him is named Jeffrey Cotton.

Riots and Demonstrations in Oakland Over Oscar Grant's Murder

Oscar Grant's murder has sparked some serious outrage in Oakland against police brutality. Socialist Worker has excellent coverage of the demonstration, while the Oakland Tribune has surprisingly good coverage of the riot:

The protesters were "calling attention to something that is a systematic problem, which won't go away with an apology," said a 29-year-old who identified himself only as B. Rex. He was arrested and taken by police in a squad car soon after.

The Murder of Oscar Grant

There is no reasonable doubt here.

Racist Cops in Oakland Execute a Black Man

From Socialist Worker:

ON NEW Year's Eve, as scores of horrified people looked on, Oakland transit police forced 22-year-old Oscar Grant to the ground, kneeled on his head and then shot him in the back.

Grant, an African American father of a 4-year-old daughter and an Oakland grocery story worker, died several hours later. The bullet entered his back, ricocheted off the concrete floor and punctured his lungs.

Police attempted to confiscate cell phone videos taken by Bay Area Rapid Transit passengers and initially claimed that security cameras didn't record the incident. However, in the last two days, they have been forced to admit that the security cameras did capture the assault.

Additionally, one especially graphic video taken by a passenger was released by the Bay Area television station KTVU. It shows an unarmed and unresisting Grant, lying face down, shot at point-blank range by an officer as his horrified friends and onlookers watch.

Death Cults

William Kristol says Hamas is a death cult. What do you think?

Abortion in an Anti-Choice Culture

The New York Times has an interesting article today on the growing use of ulcer medications to induce abortion. The article, which focuses on Dominican women in Washington Heights, is tinged with liberal racism, explaining that Dominican culture is socially conservative and pro-life. Two responses. First, American culture is socially conservative and pro-life (Knocked Up, anyone?). Particularizing this pathology to Dominican culture is absurd in a country that can barely say the word abortion on television. Second, it's worth questioning just how "socially conservative" Dominican culture actually is when women can walk into a pharmacy, say they need to bring down their period, and pharmacists will know they are asking for abortificants. This sounds to me like a widespread understanding and acceptance, on a subterranean level, of the practice of abortion. Maybe Dominican culture is actually complicated and can't simply be described as socially conservative?

This kind of essentialism aside, the article highlights a number of important facts. The first is that even in a culture which officially disproves of abortion and stigmatizes those that seek it, women will continue to terminate their pregnancies. It also shows that the stigmatization and criminalization of abortion hurts women, who, when denied safe medical care, will use other means, even at the risk of substantial self-injury. Finally, the article shows how abortion is a positive experience in many women's lives. The caption of the photo on the first page speaks directly to this - “It’s cheap but dangerous. Certain people are more delicate than others. But afterwards, I felt relief.” While liberals go on about reducing the number of abortions and how it's sad and tragic, they ignore the fact that for millions of women every year, an abortion is a victory in the struggle for control of their bodies.

Pity and Patronizing

Adi Dvir sez "don't pity the Palestinians." Why? Because "To pity the people of Gaza is to patronize them." What should be the proper attitude? Belligerently backing their slaughter at the hands of the IDF, of course!

This is a common trope in reactionary thought. There is no greater crime in human relations than to patronize someone (that such things can issue from the mouths of the very same people who described Muntadar al-Zaidi's protest as demonstrative of Iraqi freedom is only the tip of the ironic iceberg.) I think a strong case could be made that callousness in the face of suffering (described by Baldwin as the only way to be "truly despicable") is a far more grievous offense.

Israeli Foreign Minister: "There is No Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza"

Yup. That's right. This is the kind of blank-faced denial of reality one usually hears from tin-pot dictators, but now it's coming from one of the most powerful politicians in the world. Tzipi Livni, despite her reputation as a 'moderate,' has always been a warmonger, but in the context of a barbaric siege and indiscriminate bombing campaign, she has outdone herself.

Lies such as this are a special sort. China Mieville has pointed out that some lies told by the ruling class are simply not meant to be believed. Instead, their purpose is to muddy the waters of debate. Livni doesn't want the argument to be about why Israel is rejecting a humanitarian ceasefire offer, but whether such an offer is needed.

To be clear, Israel is rejecting the ceasefire because the target of this offensive is the civilian population of Gaza. Israeli defense analysts are remarkably frank on this point, comparing "Operation Cast Lead" to "Operation Shock and Awe" in Iraq. One Haaretz analyst was quite blunt about it:

"Like the U.S. assault on Iraq and the Israeli response to the abduction of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser at the outset of the Second Lebanon War (the "night of the Fajr missiles," a reference to the IAF destruction of Hezbollah's arsenal of medium-range Fajr missiles), little to no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians."

Just as Shock and Awe's purpose was to terrorize the population of Iraq until they understood that resistance was futile, so Operation Cast Lead is designed to punish the population of Gaza until they reject Hamas in favor of leadership more willing to grovel in front of Israel.

Israel's success on this front has been mixed. To be sure, the blockade has reduced the standard of living of Palestinians so drastically that many are inclined to look with favor upon the period of Israeli occupation, when at least there was food. However, the air strikes, and probable ground invasion, increase support for resistance by whatever means necessary and unify the population of the West Bank, under Fatah rule, with that of Gaza.

The siege has already reduced Gaza to a state of near-famine (as Brecht says, famines under capitalism don't just happen; they're organized). The air strikes have crippled government infrastructure and overloaded barely functioning hospitals. A ground invasion will in all probability destroy any significant institution of Palestinian civil society. Given the paucity of Hamas' military ability, if this barbarism has any chance of being halted it's going to come through the actions of people around the world demanding actions like the boycott of all Israeli institutions.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Or, Forrest Gump, Part II

This was not a matter of one's inevitable mortality, of a man going round taking names: it is one thing to know that you are going to die, and something else to know that you may be murdered.
-James Baldwin, Just Above My Head

Last night I went to see "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" with my family. I knew little about the film, save that it was about a man who aged backwards, starred Cate Blanchett, and was directed by David Fincher. I thought this provided a decent enough basis for a good movie. I was wrong.

"Benjamin Button" is an awful movie. It it sentimental, mythologizing garbage. Ostensibly concerned with examining the meaning of death, loss, and love, the movie can only deal with these issues in the most milquetoast manner possible, as it evades every aspect of history that makes them matter.

The film begins in New Orleans in 1918, with a blind clockmaker (actually it begins in a modern day hospital in a framing narrative. However, this narrative is completely undeveloped and nonsensical, so I am going to be ignoring it here). The clockmaker has just lost his son in World War I, and has retreated to his workshop to design his masterpiece. When it is finally completed and hung in the New Orleans train station, those present at the ceremony are astounded to see the clock runs backwards. The clockmaker explains that he designed it as such in hopes that he could run time backwards and bring back the boys lost in the war so they could live full lives. This moment is the most significant engagement with history in the film; it's all downhill from here.

Soon afterward we see an Armistice Day celebration. A man rushes home to find his wife dying after giving birth. The child is deformed, he looks like an eighty five year old man. Panicking, the husband dumps the child on the doorstep of an elder care home run by an African American woman, Queenie.

Queenie sees the child, and adopts him, naming him Benjamin. Benjamin spends his childhood in Queenies' elder care home, thus growing up with death as a regular and unremarkable part of life.

This is where the movie's evasions begin. To begin with, there is no hint of racial tension in the New Orleans of Benjamin's youth. At one point, we see Benjamin and an African man he has befriended riding the city public transportation. White and Black sit together comfortably in the same seat in the same section of the train. At one point, the African man even makes a point of frightening some white children, with not the slightest hint of reprisal from the trolley driver or any other white citizen. All of this harmony on the trains in the city of Homer Plessy.

Queenie runs a nursing home taking care of mostly white clients. Though it's never explicitly stated, Queenie appears to be the proprieter of the establishment, making her decidedly wealthier than the majority of inhabitants of the city. That white seniors would hand themselves over to a middle class Black woman is simply a ridiculous premise. It is one thing to have Black maids; it is quite another for whites to patronize Black businesses.

Queenie's character is one of the film's most offensive. She is, to put it bluntly, a mammy. She is a Black woman whose only real purpose seems to be to take care of white people. Her dialect is ridiculous. The audience, of course, is encouraged to laugh at this vile archetype as she dispenses folksy wisdom. At multiple points in the film, she is giving advice to Benjamin and he dismisses her with a curt wave of the hand. Black people are funny, it seems, as long as they know when to shut up.

Benjamin continues growing up (or down) and joins a tugboat crew. His travels eventually take him to Murmansk, Russia, before the Second World War. During the entire period he is in Russia, the film gives not the slightest hint that Benjamin is in the Soviet Union. There's a brief reference to his hotel, the "Winter Palace," but it's unclear whether the film has any consciousness of the significance of this name. The Soviet Union is as equally vacant of history as New Orleans.

Soon the tugboat gets orders to become a military ship, and its crew is drafted. Here we meet Queenie's only rival for the film's most offensive character: Dennis Smith, "a full blooded Cherokee" whose family, Benjamin reminds us, had been in America more than five hundred years. Dennis loves America more than any other character in the movie, even treating us to a nice explanation of why pacifism is wrong: "You have these pacifists. They say they won’t fight on conscience. Where would we be if everybody decided to act according to their conscience?"

Dennis' family may have been in the United States for a long time, but they probably wouldn't have been citizens until 1924 when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act. Given that Dennis is a Chief Gunner in the movie, he probably was not a US citizen until he was four or five, despite his family's length of residence. His parents were probably alive for the 1879 Standing Bear trial, before which Native Americans weren't even legally human beings. That the film would choose a Native American in the 1940s for its representative of American patriotism is disgusting. It was at this point that I decided I hated the movie.

If Benjamin Button's erasure of history sounds familiar, it's because it is. It was done in much the same way 14 years ago in "Forrest Gump." The similarity between the two movies became glaring partway through, and when I got home I found out that they were both written by the same person, Eric Roth.

Comparing the Benjamin Button to Forrest Gump is not a compliment. Gump is, as H. Bruce Franklin likes to say "one of the worst movies, ever!" Vietnam is a scary jungle that shoots at nice American boys who happen to be walking through it. Vietnam Vets are spat on and called baby killers by antiwar activists. And to top it all off, the film's protagonist is constitutionally incapable of understanding history or his place in it. He bumbles his way through some of the most important episodes of American history, reassuring us that it isn't important to understand the world in order to change it.

Gump and Button also share a specific archetype: the slut who must be punished. In Gump, it's Jenny, Gump's childhood friend who becomes a sexually promiscuous hippie. The film punishes her, quite sadistically, with abusive boyfriends, drug abuse, and finally cancer. In Gump's world, women who stray from their place deserve no quarter.

The same is true in Button. Here it's Daisy, Button's childhood friend, who goes on to become a dancer in Paris and Manhattan. We learn of her scandalous sexual activity in her dance troupe, and when Benjamin visits her she has the audacity to dance with and kiss another man. Like Jenny, she must be punished. A car accident shatters her leg, ending her dance career.

Like Gump, Benjamin Button's evacuation of history results in the film being utterly unable to deal with the issues it raises. The film is a tear jerker for its sentimental lessons about loving life no matter what cards you are dealt, and learning how death makes life valuable. This is standard stuff. But as Baldwin reminds us, there is all the difference in the world between dying and being murdered. Countless characters in the film die of old age after leading fulfilling lives doing what they love. There is not much to be learned about how to love life from studying this.

It would be a far more interesting film that explored how to love a life marked by the bitterness that is cultivated by what human beings can do to each other. Would we be so eager to celebrate Queenie's life if hers had resembled at all that lived by most African Americans in early twentieth century New Orleans? What joie de vivre is produced among les damnés de la terre? This is an emotional and intellectual project worth doing. The length of this review is warranted not by the film's worth, but by the importance of the questions it evades. How we can keep the bitterness that grows out of oppression from consuming our lives is not merely a worthwhile project, it is a necessary one.

Poetry from Langston Hughes

The Bitter River

(Dedicated to the memory of Charlie Lang and Ernest Green, each fourteen years old when lynched together beneath the Shubuta Bridge over the Chicasawhay River in Mississippi, October 12th, i942.)


There is a bitter river
Flowing through the South.
Too long has the taste of its water Been in my mouth.
There is a bitter river Dark with filth and mud.
Too long has its evil poison
Poisoned my blood.

I've drunk of the bitter river
And its gall coats the red of my tongue,
Mixed with the blood of the lynched boys
From its iron bridge hung,
Mixed with the hopes that are drowned there
In the snake-like hiss of its stream
Where I drank of the bitter river
That strangled my dream:
The book studied-but useless,
Tool handled-but unused,
Knowledge acquired but thrown away,
Ambition battered and bruised.
Oh, water of the bitter river
With your taste of blood and clay,
You reflect no stars by night,
No sun by day.

The bitter river reflects no stars-
It gives back only the glint of steel bars
And dark bitter faces behind steel bars:
The Scottsboro boys behind steel bars,
Lewis Jones behind steel bars,
The voteless share-cropper behind steel bars,
The labor leader behind steel bars,
The soldier thrown from a Jim Crow bus behind steel bars,
The 150 mugger behind steel bars,
The girl who sells her body behind steel bars,
And my grandfather's back with its ladder of scars
Long ago, long ago-the whip and steel bars -
The bitter river reflects no stars.

"Wait, be patient," you say.
"Your folks will have a better day."
But the swirl of the bitter river
Takes your words away.
"Work, education, patience
Will bring a better day-"
The swirl of the bitter river
Carries your "patience" away.
"Disrupter! Agitator!
Trouble maker!"you say.

The swirl of the bitter river
Sweeps your lies away.
I did not ask for this river
Nor the taste of its bitter brew.
I was given its water
As a gift from you.
Yours has been the power
To force my back to the wall
And make me drink of the bitter cup
Mixed with blood and gall.

You have lynched my comrades
Where the iron bridge crosses the stream,
Underpaid me for my labor,
And spit in the face of my dream.
You forced me to the bitter river
With the hiss of its snake-like song-
Now your words no longer have meaning-
I have drunk at the river too long:
Dreamer of dreams to be broken,
Builder of hopes to be smashed,
Loser from an empty pocket
Of my meagre cash,
Bitter bearer of burdens
And singer of weary song,
I've drunk at the bitter river
With its filth and its mud too long.
Tired now of the bitter river,
Tired now of the pat on the back,
Tired now of the steel bars
Because my face is black,
I'm tired of segregation,
Tired of filth and mud,
I've drunk of the bitter river
And it's turned to steel in my blood.

Oh, tragic bitter river
Where the lynched boys hung,
The gall of your bitter water
Coats my tongue.
The blood of your bitter water
For me gives back no stars.
I'm tired of the bitter river!
Tired of the bars!

Calling All Americans

" hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone." - John Milton

Who in the Western world, who in America, is ready to take to the streets to protest the rampant Islamophobia propagated by America's opinion-makers?

It's finals, so I don't have time to go through this article in detail. I'd just like to point out the bizarreness of the comparison with the Catholic church. The pedophile scandal in the church implicated members of the Catholic hierarchy all the way up to the Vatican. There was a church-wide effort to protect offending priests and keep their crimes from the media. The John Jay report found that 4% of all US Catholic priests had been accused of such improper conduct. In other words, the pedophilia scandal was a church wide problem.

Nothing remotely similar can be said about "Islamism" or whatever other stupid moniker pundits want to use. There is no conspiracy of imams to protect terrorists, and nothing even approaching 4% of Muslim religious leaders have participated in or encouraged terrorism.

In short, it's a comparison that makes no sense, except in the heads of racist blowhards like Friedman who think that finger wagging is the most appropriate response to something as horrible as what happened in Mumbai.

Is the US post-racial? Think again.

Following the historic election of Barak Obama in a country built on slavery, many in the media, Right and Left have argued that racism has ended and the 'divisive' concept of race has been rendered irrelevant. This article in the New Republic takes this argument to absurd lengths, suggesting that since neo-fascists and white supremacists such as David Duke do not hate Obama, we have somehow entered a new age of tolerance. The author suggests that

white supremacists feel compelled to explain away the confounding notion of an immensely gifted and appealing black man. Yet it also reflects the fact that, unlike Jesse Jackson, Obama simply lacks certain cultural signifiers--not to mention an urban-centric policy agenda--that would viscerally threaten racist whites obsessed with maintaining "white rights," ending affirmative action, and cutting off nearly all non-European immigration.

Frankly, in a country where millions of Americans stand to lose their homes, child hunger is skyrocketing, and jobs are being slashed in the tens of thousands, this country needs more 'urban centric' policies. And pissing off white supremacists is a great thing in my book.

But that's neither here nor there. On the question of racism, a recent incident of police brutality brings to the fore the weaknesses of Obama and his campaign to confront racist attacks from the McCain camp and Hillary Clinton and also to take up issues pertaining to the virulent racism of the criminal justice system (Sean Bell, the Jena Six, Troy Davis).

The father of Green Bay Packers star receiver Donald Driver was brutally beaten by Houston cops on Sunday. Police allegedly picked him up on a warrant for traffic violations and then took him behind a gas station and beat him mercilessly:

As they beat him and forced him to swallow something, the officers told Marvin Driver Jr. he was "going to see Jesus," according to relatives and community activist Quanell Evans, who identified himself as Quanell X.

"Mr. Marvin Driver Jr. is now at Hermann Hospital in ICU where he can't even speak," relatives said in a statement. "Doctors say there is some bleeding on his brain from blunt force trauma."

The two accused officers are still on the street, pending investigation. However, according to a community activist, "One of the officers named in the arrest report is Hispanic and has a history of harassing African-Americans."

This event is a sobering wake up call to people who believe that Obama's election could instantly bring and end to the systemic racism embedded in the US from housing and hiring to the criminal justice system.

In another sense, however, this event presents an opportunity to expose this. As Dave Zirin has argued time and time again, professional sports presents a huge platform for athletes to take a stand on against oppression and political injustice, like Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics, Billie Jean King's victory in the "Battle of the Sexes". Who knows how the Driver family will respond to this tragedy, especially given the pressures on athletes from their coaches, team mates, and the talking heads in the sports writing world (See Brandon Marshall and Josh Howard?) Despite these pressures, athletes are also affected by the sense of hope and joy that Obama's election brought about nor can they ignore the anger and mass outpouring of activism against the draconian Proposition 8. If Driver's brother's response is any indication of the sentiment shared by the family, we could be in for a battle: "if we can't trust these people, who can we trust? ... I think that my father was targeted for being black."