Friday, July 06, 2007

Why I Like Hip Hop

check this out.


Will's Speed Racer tee is one of the first outbreaks of hipster witnessed anywhere in the western world. I remember wondering and loving that shirt, when i was twelve and all the world seemed like it might well be Golden Gate Park. Now I'm 27, and most of the world seems like Markham, when I was young - hot, buggy, and perhaps not all that worth the while.


But this song - and the history which precedes it - signifies everything grand. Fuck trouble, forget heartache - it's warm, and the earth loves you.
Hank and Barry, For Reals




Henry Wallace and Pete Seeger, rockin' it

So, everyone's crowing about Barry's hitherto unheard-of level of fundraising. Some left bloggers (mydd, in particular) have spied out the fact that Obama's money machine is not, like Dean's, entirely reliant on internet donations. Neither, however, is it based on high-dollar corporate giving, as with Hills (and every Republican candidate).
Rather, BAM's money is coming from live events, from those 15,000-20,000 person rallies he's held in Oakland, Atlanta, and other places. This use of the rally atmosphere (music, sun, folks and their kids, face-painting etc.) reminds me of another left-wing presidential candidate. In 1948, Henry Wallace, FDR's VP and a leading light of the anti-Cold War, progressive wing of the Democratic Party, was thrown off the ticket to make way for a good ole Missourian machine man, Harry Truman. Wallace, upset with the 1 million deaths of the two atomic bombs, with pervasive segregation, exploitation, and anti-black violence in the South, and with the growing resurgence of reactionary forces in general (see Taft-Hartley, etc.), decided to run an independent campaign for the presidency.
This is the famous "Dewey defeats Truman" election, and the forecasts were so close for a reason. Truman faced breakaways on the right and left, with Strom Thurmond pledging to fuck over the blacks (except, one imagines, for the ones he was sleeping with), and Hank Wallace inspiring the still-vibrant American left, and few observers expected him to capture the presidency.
Of course, in the end, he did, and hating Henry Wallace became a highly profitable pastime for those on the "reasonable" left, the people like Arthur Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr, who we are now taught to revere. And yet, the left's potential was never truly tested... until now.
In short - BAM is cool, Hank was cooler, and may we all pray that motherfucker wins the nomination.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Good Advice, Long Delayed

I was advised a while back that personal news, rather than random trifles of political interpretation and off-color material, was the key to a blog item of any general inter-est. I'm awfully prone to emoting in a confessional mode, having been reared a papist and taking a perverse pride yet in its wondrous inversion of the dubious art of psychotherapy, wherein one's story of sin redeems itself in the telling. So here's some personal news:

I'm still terribly nasty to myself. I've inoculated myself against any remnant idea of fair play and perspective, and so grow irritable and entertain violent thoughts. The angel on my right shoulder says, "you've been offered so much, with white skin and quick tongue and taxpayer support, if you don't make something of it you'll be hapless, worthless, and entirely beyond the pale. The devil on the left laughs at the notion, knowing that you haven't had anything from your parents and betters that others didn't get (except for the occasion not two months ago which saved your life, and dares not speak its name); that success is suspect, given the country and the prospect of 20 years of Weimar America, where people I know now will be blamed for knifing the government in the back; and that the "gap between rich and poor" (how anodyne a metaphor, the "gap"; sure it should be minded, but there's no comforting chasm between the 70 hours a week by force and the 60 hours a week by choice crowds. Manhattan mixes them together, and leaves those without to wonder and uneasily avoid the conclusion even Aerosmith knew to draw) means I will always seethe in stupid, nonsensical, unhelpful, confused anger.

When the joy of becoming a historian, and speaking however helplessly to the enormous condescension of posterity thus far happily bestowed on my subjects, will return, is more than I know. I think my best friend is sick to death of me, and can't see how to persist and abide when I don't know any other strategy. I owe my brother money, and still indulge myself in vices the vast majority of people my age foreswear.

But self-loathing is so 2003, and can't bear any more of a burden than it already does. Thank god for good role models.