I shut my eyes, and I’m back
Wandering down 15th and Lincoln
Through the alley, following street lights
Past groups of kids hiding beneath hoods
Huddling by tagged up garage doors
Kings, crowns, royalty
I close my eyes, and I’m back
Walking down 27th and Forest Home
Past the graveyard, cutting through lawns
Behind the house, dead grass and hoops
Running up the steps to the back door
Weed smoke, ghosts, family
Bodies wait in white chalk
The names of children written
On the sides of city buildings
The names of couples carved
Onto trees on busy streets
With names of a lost generation
Drawn in lines on the sidewalk
Flowers wilt by a quiet home
The sons of immigrant mothers
Left on the curb for dead
The sons of immigrant fathers
Buried by old white men
The sons of a lost generation
Celebrated on a dirty lawn
The sun succumbs its luster to October heavens
As the trees wallow like wraiths and fall apart
I believe it’s fair to say we’re fucked
And as this state of delirium encapsulates
Every single element of my rotting brain
I could eradicate this postulation of love
And as this suffocating seizure floods
Every miniscule bit of my plotting defense
I could shatter this delusion of fervor
I may see it off in the firmament
I may then give it credence as true
But never today and not once tomorrow
“*There are more African Americans under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste—not class, caste—permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.”
First track off the new Tallest Man on Earth album that will be my soundtrack for the pending warm weather months.
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
”— Howard Zinn
“Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)
Inevitably, then, such people react with rage when they’re shown up on their facts or basic logic — it’s an attack on their sense of self-worth.”
- Paul Krugman
The rampant anti-intellectualism in America has confounded me, but this is a really logical look at why it’s gotten as bad as it has.
A major part of the conversational problem is the use of platitudes to shroud massive levels of ignorance. “For those of you who don’t know what a platitude is,” as Michael Ian Black once said, “it’s a platypus with an attitude.”
