Notes on the Wisdom of Action
or
How to Jump Out of the Box
Essays By Marvin X
Contents
1. Parable of Woman in the Box
2. Jump Out the Box of Pax Americana
3. Toward Systematic, Structural Change
4. Parable of Broken Systems, Broken Minds
5.The Politics of War and Tricknology
6.The Art of Deception in the Middle East
7. Dr. Yacoub's America
8. Happy Thanksgiving: Apartheid in Oakland
9.Obama Drama, A Tragi-Comedy
10.Hypocrisy of Neo-liberial, Pseudo Left
11. And the winner is Jean Quan, Mayor of Oakland;
OPD Killing Black Men Continues
12. Kill African, 2 Years; Kill Dog, 4 Years
13. Oakland Braces for Sentencing of Oscar Grant, Jr. Killer Cop
14. Is Berkeley off the hook?
15. Parable of Mother to Son
16.Obama Drama: When in trouble at home, go abroad, Onward Christian Soldiers
17. Parable of Purple
18. Poet Returns Home to West Oakland
19. Parable of the San Francisco Negro, Part II
Wisdom is knowledge plus the right action.
--Buddha
There was a woman who lived inside a box. Her whole life had been spent inside the little box, squeezed in from all sides. She never went outside the box. People brought her food to eat but she ate it inside the four walls of the box. She was cramped to the point of being crippled because she could never stand up inside the box. Not only her body but her brain and spirit were crippled from living inside the box.
Her thinking was confined to what she could imagine inside the box, and that was very little, no big grand thoughts, only micro imaginings. Even her God was a little god, one that fit into the box. She could not envision her God outside and that her God ruled the whole world, not just her little world inside the box.
Now and then she would beat on the walls of her box in a vain attempt to break them down and escape. But whenever she did, someone would come by and whisper to her to be quiet, she was making noise and disturbing other people.
She would comply with their request, trying to be nice, since she really was a nice person, she just didn't know how to escape the box. And she had to be nice to the person who brought her food because they might not return if she got angry and loud, started screaming, hollering and foaming at the mouth. Inside the box, she lived the life of a stunted woman, her mental growth stunted as well.
She could not imagine the finer things of life, or how she might expand her spiritual development. She did not know how she might be able to fend for herself, make her own money for food and other things she needed, even if she stayed inside the box, but she really wanted to get out. Somehow she gathered the energy to have a thought that went beyond the box, energy that would stop her from being a stunted woman, unable to stand tall and rise from her condition inside the box.
She began to figure a way out, a way to free herself, mind, body and soul. She had to do some hard thinking but she was determined to liberate herself. She saw nails in the walls and began to tinker with them, push them a little with her fingernails, then wiggled around and backed into one wall, then the
other. After a time, she could see a little break between the walls. She came up with a name for the nails that kept her down. One nail she called ignorance. She knocked and knocked until it loosened. Then she beat and pressured another nail in the box she called passivity. When she put counter pressure on that nail the box started shaking.
She tinkered with another nail she called lack of desire and will. Then she started talking to the walls, telling them to open up she was coming out. She
even told her little God to give her a hand. Her little God gave her a hand. Some people came by and seeing the walls shaking, tried to pound on the nails, but the woman commanded the nails to stop in their tracks and they did as she commanded. She continued her resistance until the walls of the box gave in and was able to gradually stand and eventually began to do a little dance.
of Pax Americana
A free man exercises the divine and human right to self determination in his thinking and right actions. He thus thinks globally but acts locally, for he must remain grounded in the reality that surrounds him. He cannot get lost in the stars, in the other worldliness of global events to the extent he loses focus on events in his daily round.
For sure, he must, as Baraka urges us, stop thinking like an American, since he is never treated as an American for one moment, despite all pronouncements claiming his American citizenship, yet we ask a simple question, why does the voting rights act need renewal to affirm he is a citizen like all others? The African proverb tells us that wood may remain in the water ten years but will never become a crocodile!
But it is an awesome task to command his thinking apparatus to transcend the American mythology of lies, deception, innuendo and circumlocution that confounds his very being, keeping him in a state of nothingness and dread. In his utter denial, he claims a healthy mental condition, while we know better, we know the severe stress brought on by a continual social insecurity that persists even when we would think things are getting better--look who's in the White House, surely time has brought about a change, surely it is no illusion or delusion that he is now king of the hill!
Ah, don't be fooled by the one billion illusions of the monkey mind, Guru Bawa taught us. What appears to be is not! It is a charade, a masquerade that shall surely be over 'round midnight!
But how shall we think, how shall we climb out the box of our negrocities (an inflamation of the negroid gland at the base of the brain caused by bad habits--said Baraka in A Black Mass, "Where the soul's print should be there is only a cellulose pouch of disgusting habits!".
We must find a quiet place to still ourselves, to detoxify from the world of make believe, the world of conspicuous consumption. Discard the cell phone, the giant TV brainwashing you and your family. Remove your children from the enemy schools, after all, they come home hating you and everything you're about, and you wonder why! What people in their right minds would send their children to the enemy to be educated?
So come out of denial we enjoy a healthy mental state, admit to ourselves and another the degree of our sickness, our nothingness and dread. Yes, it is a painful realization but we must finally be true to ourselves, our mates and children. We will not conjure the energy to inform our children we live in a war zone, a low intensity war but war none the less. After all, we attend the last rites of our children on a constant basis coast to coast. Yet, we do not force upon them the need to don the armor of God, we send them naked into the battlefield, yes, with pants sagging off their behinds! What soldier would enter the battlefield in such a wretched condition. What sane parent would allow their children to go out into the battlefield so utterly unprepared? The Boy Scouts taught us to "be prepared"!
Each day we see the rapidly deteriorating condition of our people. We observe their physical and mental aliments. yes, even the doctors are sick! Many of the doctors maintain a residue of faith in Pax Americana, just as we maintained faith in ole Massa, even when we were emancipated, for where shall we go and how shall we get there, unless a Harriet Tubman comes along with pistol in hand to dare us turn around on the pain of death! We love you ancestor Harriet! What did she say, "I could have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves!"
--Marvin X
10/18/10
3. Toward Systematic, Structural Change
If we desire to change ourselves and the social order, we must first think long and hard. We may need to isolate ourselves where we can experience neural placidity, a changing or rearranging of our brain cells that has had us in a box of ignorance and stupidity. If we want to jump out of the box of our addiction to disgusting habits, we must find a place to detox from that which we have become addicted. Detox involves resting from the stress of our existence, from the repetition of bad habits that lead us to nothingness and dread.
Such a situation is personal and communal, affecting both the person and the society generally. After detoxing for a period of time, after coming up for air, literally, we begin to think a new way, we should find ourselves in harmony with nature, in a non-antagonistic, positive and loving relationship with all that is, ever was and shall be. We do not desire to harm anyone or anything.
We will not desire to allow ourselves to be harmed by anyone or anything. We will systematically begin casting out all things detrimental to our existence. We may find our personal behavior a danger to ourselves and others, thus we execute radical change in our actions that derive from our thoughts--thoughts are things! Yes, our thoughts are killing us because they are negative thoughts that derive from negative values learned from the mythology of our culture.
We cannot expect the rapist or violent male to stop raping when the myths he lives by have trained him that women are his property, his booty for being a man, whether in love or war. It is not enough to jail him, to order he attend anger management, for he must make fundamental, systematic structural changes in his values based on mythology. Yet society is founded upon myths that society itself is not prepared to eliminate. Politicians, teachers, preachers, mothers, fathers, are duty bound to enforce the mythological values of said society. The preacher cannot teach a new way because he is steeped in myth or religiosity. He must enforce tradition. Therefore he cannot tell the rapist to make fundamental changes in the behavior in which he has been socialized. It is of no use to tell the rapist or partner beater to go and sin no more, especially when the social order is clearly designed to perpetuate violence based on ownership, greed and domination.
Alas, the rapist is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a social order. And in ancient and modern society, the man is taught greed, domination, ownership. He is taught to fight, kill and die for "his."
Thus, we must ask is the society prepared to make systematic structural change or only superficial adjustments. Without the detoxification and recovery mentioned above, there shall only be Miller Lite changes of a bourgeoisie kind, therefore only pseudo changes, i.e., the more things change the more they stay the same.
This is because we are trapped in mythology, the basis of our value system. We will not and cannot jump out of the box, for where shall we be, where shall we land, certainly not on solid ground. Nothing shall happen until we decide to make a revolution in our psychosocial behavior--again, the absolute need to detox, the neural placidity alteration from environmental change. Take a trip to the woods, the ocean, mountains, river--go inside the self, that monster we fear more than life itself! Get yo ass off the cell phone and get a life! Use the mind God gave you, boy--my Mama told me!
Yes, we now begin the long process of becoming the new man and woman. But we cannot arrive at our destination alone, it is a family affair, involving parents, children, relatives, friends and society in general.
We must instruct all the people we know to join in this process called revolution, the radical restructuring of the vital relationships and institutions in the society. The economic order must be radically altered, but only because we think a new way devoid of the singular profit motive by any means necessary.
We will kill to make a profit. By violence and war, by overthrowing democratically elected governments, we will seize the natural resources and labor of any people we can for our pleasure, so that we may drive our gas guzzlers to nowhere, to enjoy our world of make believe and conspicuous consumption. We will destroy nature itself for our benefit. We shall consume the majority of the world's energy in the name of White supremacy or any other supremacy except the supremacy of the Divinity. Alas, we will even lie that we are doing such filthy deeds in the name of God, whose wrath is coming upon us for practicing iniquities in His/Her name.
Systematic Structural Change involves a fundamental altering of reality and all therein, all relationships, all institutions. The White Supremacy educational system must be destroyed because it perpetuates the world of make believe, the curriculum is dead in the water for the New Age.
The religions based on archaic mythology must be dumped into the dustbin of history. The politicians must be radicalized or voted out and/or thrown out, literally, by the hands of the people, for they rule, we were taught, by the consent of the governed.
Finally, we should not worry about Mother Earth. We are confident Mother Earth has the wherewith all to take care of herself, since she has been around trillions of years. What man must do is get in harmony with Mother Earth or Mother shall remove all those not in harmony with the flow of the flow.
--Marvin X
11/26/10
Black Friday
Buy Black
4.Parable of Broken Systems, Broken Minds
The oil contaminating the Gulf is but the most recent example of man's mind failing him as a result of greed. Anyone who believes the white man knows what he is doing in the world is a triple damn fool. This man is a danger to himself and others. He should be confined to an institution for long term recovery from the addiction to white supremacy.
What we perceive as reality is most often a reflection of imagination, of mythology and ritual, or simply the mind of man is the macrocosm, reality the microcosm. Systems thus reflect the mind of man--did not someone say creations only reflect the mind of the creator. Broken systems, therefore, originate in broken minds. Yet we wonder why systems are broken, e.g., school system, political system, economic system, religious and moral systems.
But systems are not the problem, rather it is the minds of men that are broken irreparably, suffering a mental atrophy, an anorexia, a paralysis of imagination. The causation is simple greed, selfishness and lust for power. It is augmented by the quest for the acquisition of things, the wanton addiction to materialism or the world of make believe, the illusion that the microcosm can satisfy the macrocosm, when the real deal holyfield is the inner rather than the outer. Yet men fear to go there, deep down into the metaphysical realm where the darkest mysteries lie seeking edification and recognition. Thus, we find ourselves at the precipice, about to be consumed by the wonder of life.
Elijah told us, "The wisdom of this world is exhausted." And so it is--spent, obsolete, retarded, and yet we wonder why we are immobile, transfixed--stuck on stupid! Why no systems work.
How is it possible for the great Toyota to need recalling, a consummate machine suddenly dysfunctional. What caused this sudden breakdown-- some internal defect in the machine or in the mind of man?
Look at the educational system, confounded by the ideological foundation of white supremacy capitalism that continues to prepare students for a world of work when there is none, especially with living wages in an economic system that demands cheap labor and resources, a socalled free market system that will transcend the national needs for the wants and desires of global finance gangs, connected with, supported and defended by the military, i.e., the Christian Crusaders, soon to be supplanted by Communists from China, India and Russia.
The teachers were long ago taught to teach a new way--back in Egypt they were told to teach with compassion and love. Yet what we see today is the pedagogy of hate. It is a system that rewards ignorance and punishes wisdom and creativity, especially of the thinking variety. Any original thought is suppressed or deemed antisocial thought and behavior, often resulting in the student diagnosed to require psycho drugs that turn him into the zombie required by the society of the walking dead.
The religious system is the same. It is in full blown denial about the meaning of the cross and the lynching tree, about the mission of the prince of peace. For the most part, the religious community is Silent Night about the trillion dollar military budget that allows mass murder to take place across the planet. Along with Silent Night, it sings Onward Christian Soldiers as its sons and daughters crisscross the planet to secure labor and natural resources for the pleasure of the walking dead, and most especially the miserable few who enjoy the high life.
It is all about the glorification of Pharaoh and his magicians. God, in the minds of men, is a business, big business. There is no desire for spirituality, only prosperity, minus compassion for the poor, homeless, jobless and broken hearted, crushed to earth like the pot in the hands of Jeremiah at the gates of his city.
In the minds of politicians, there is no compromise, only preparation for the next election, or the assumption or resumption of power at any and all costs, no lie is exempt, "Vote for me, I'll set you free!" All bribes are acceptable--politicians are thus loyal to lobbyists, not the people who are expendable.
The lips of politicians do not say let us reason together for the sake of the people, for the love of the people, for the consent of the governed. These men and women of the political realm only know the language of no, no, no. As the people starve, become homeless, jobless, we yet hear the mantra of no, no, no, late into the night. No compromise, no reconciliation, only recalcitrance and niggardliness. They are fast to reward the robber barons, the blood suckers of the poor. Eventually, a few crumbs, kibble and bits reach the poor, if ever, unless there is revolt. And then Pharaoh sees the light, suddenly, but he will send his magicians to placate the poor with more crumbs, kibbles and bits.
Between good and evil, evil is the choice, with greed the foundation stone in the minds of men. Amazingly, the people see clearly. They feel change in the wind, not the change in the educational system or the political or religious, but in the wind. They smell the rotten hearts of men who lead into nothingness and dread, with their pitiful strut of the peacock, the one legged dance of the flamingo.
Pharaoh magicians gather in dens of iniquity to share blood money. Teachers, preachers, politicians, all there to party on the backs of the poor. The military stand post at the door of the den, ready to club the wretched into submission, even death, if they dare enter the den of thieves, robbers, murderers, and those who perpetuate the world of make believe.
Inside the den we hear a symphony of sick sounds, giggles, wails, grunts emanating from putrid minds exhausted from wickedness. The result is systematic gridlock--it is 5pm and the freeway is jammed with drivers full of road rage, ready to kill in an instant. It is thus a destruction of self by self, internal combustion.
Unlike the car, there is no forward motion or backward, or perhaps it goes both ways simultaneously, if such is possible in the world of physics, but after all, the minds of men defy all laws, except the law of the jungle and the devil.
But there shall be no forward motion with the present mind-set. Jack must jump out the box of his own making. He must take wings and fly away into a world beyond his imagination.
This is the only way out the morass of his mind. All the technology is to no avail, for he talks, but more often says nothing, he listens but hears nothing, deaf, dumb and blind.
--Marvin X
2/17/10
5.The Politics of War
and Tricknology
Isn't it absolutely amazing we are in three wars: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, yet the elected politicians, the media magicians, the left, are in total silence about the wars, blood and bones on both sides, the billions missing from reconstruction funds in Iraq and Afghanistan. Surely such terror and looting should be the subject of political discussion. But the Americans are such deaf, dumb and blind dupes for twiddle dum and twiddle dee, they will vote for persons, Democratic and/or Republican who have presented nothing in terms of a policy agenda to address the global wars, the unemployment problem, foreclosures, immigration, education, amnesty for prisoners.
Obama has presented nothing useful on behalf of his party, nor have the Republicans or their sycophants, the Tea Party goers. We wonder are these politicians brain dead or simply full of chicanery to the degree they know the ignorant will vote, no matter what, for they are easily hoodwinked and bamboozled.
And so the wars continue going nowhere except for the wasted blood, bones and billions of dollars for the cause of the military/corporate/university complex. Like a drug addict who has hit rock bottom yet continues his addiction in utter denial, America has no intention of leaving Iraq, or allowing a functional government in Iraq, after all it has been since March that elections were held, yet there is no government--yes, in the great democratic society America has established in the Middle East. But seven billion of nine billion dollars in reconstruction money has disappeared in Iraq, no one can explain where it went! In Afghanistan, eighteen billion in funds for contractors has evaporated into thin air according to US Government auditors.
Yet, the American public is not concerned that they have been robbed in broad daylight and left half dead on the roadside. They shall celebrate Halloween this weekend, in costumes of ghosts and goblins, taking their children on trick or treat missions. But their very lives are a trick, for they live in a state of tricknitis, victims of tricknology by the devil.
Have we not been tricked out of employment with Global outsourcing, tricked out of homes by the subprime loan scam, tricked with religiosity that has one believing pie in the sky after you die; tricked to send children to public schools where they are dumbed down into nothingness and dread. Alas, 50% of them drop out or are pushed out of school each year, and those who do make it to colleges and universities are edumaked into a higher degree of white supremacy mythology that allows them to beat their mates into submission if they rebel against chattel slavery or personal property slavery and domination wherein they actually believe they own each others sexual organs, so they endure physical, verbal and emotional violence until their lives become a matter of the criminal justice system. The mates are forced into anger management, the children into foster care, the women into battered women shelters. This is the other war politicians will not speak about, for they are participants in this marital and/or martial drama.
The war on drugs is but another sham and scam involving billions of dollars. There are at least ten thousand drug/gang related deaths in the US each year, and in the last few years, ten thousand people have died below the border in Mexico. And after imprisoning tens of thousands of young black and Latino men and women for drug offenses, California is about to pass legislation to legalize marijuana. Imagine, as we write, white boys and girls are legally selling weed at their clubs, but blacks and Chicanos are arrested and jailed each day for selling the same marijuana on the street. War!
And so the global wars continue, as well as the war in the hood that has impacted almost every family: there are no families who have not lost sons, daughters, cousins, nephews, fathers, mothers and friends in this hell hole. War and rumors of war!
Parents know not what to tell their children as they depart the house each day. The mothers are in stress and trauma until their children, especially their sons, return home safely. The parents do not tell them to put on the amour of God or utilize spiritual consciousness, otherwise known as common sense. After two homicides at a barber shop in the hood, I must find another shop. This is common sense. Vote for me, I'll set you free!
--Marvin X (Plato Negro)
Academy of da Corner
14th and Broadway
Downtown Oakland
10/29/10
6.The Art of Deception in the Middle East
The 'Lebanonisation' of Iraq - In Depth - Al Jazeera English
The Middle East is the prime area on the planet for the play out of deception in the political arena. Of course, it is original home of the the Assassins, those deceptive, double dealing Medieval hashish smoking Muslims who killed Christians during the Crusades. And since we are in the midst of the neo-Crusades, including the Jewish occupation of Palestine, the US occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, we should look for a repeat of the art of deception in geo-politics. And we find the practice in full bloom. Imagine, the majority hijackers of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, yet it has not been attacked. Alas, the Bin Laden family members were able to fly out of America when no other plans could fly. The Saudis have not been bombed, though clearly 9/11 was a Saudi theological and mythological adventure. The Saudis are deeply involved in the Iraq Sunni insurgency as well as the Afghanistan Taliban jihad, in coordination with Pakistani Intelligence and USA complicity. Of course in the geo-politics, India is involved to keep the Pakistanis off guard in Kashmir .
So the Saudi offer to mediate the political stalemate in Iraq is subterfuge and political chicanery at best, for Saudi Arabia has no intention whatsoever to allow a functional Shia government in Iraq, especially under the tutelage of Iran, although it is what it is, as they say in the hood.
As per the future, look toward Iran and Turkey to play a vital role, for they are the best answer to any regional solution, even with Iran's present theo-political crisis and its mythological president, though he is no more mythological than the Zionists, the Crusader Americans and the Sunni reactionaries.
Clearly, the time has come for Shia rule, no matter their heretic tendencies. Sunnis, get over it! Swallow the bullet, for the Shias have the guns and shall not give them up any time soon. And war is politics by other means!
We know for a surety that Sunni Muslims have no love for Shia Muslims, never have and never will, for the Shia are heretics of the first order, according to Sunni Muslims, thus, they can be killed at will for heresy, as they killled Hallaj who merely cried Anna Al Haqq or I am the Truth, thus I am Allah--one attribute of Allah is The Truth.
And now the Shia have the grand opportunity to rule in Iraq, across the border from their Shia brothers in Iran, creating a Shia pathway from the Tigress and Euphrates to the Mediterranean.
Hezbollah protects their gateway or "sirata al mustaqim" to the sea.
The Sunnis in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf States have conspired with America and the Israeli Zionist entity to insure the destabilization of Iraq if the Shia government refuses to share power with the Sunni. And why should they do so after centuries of Sunni oppression of the Shia?
Yes, the March election has been in a quagmire because the USA, in conspiracy with the Sunni regional powers, have every intention to prevent the installation of a continued Shia regime.
In truth, America doesn't give a damn about Sunni or Shia, all he wants is oil and geo-political domination as required of white supremacy mythology, in unity with Zionist mythology.
And so the latest call for a conference of all parties in Saudi Arabia is but the latest scheme in the diabolical attempt to further the destabilization of the area, mainly to keep the Shia from wielding power history has blessed them with.
According to intelligent sources, it is indeed Shia Iran and Turkey that shall exercise power in the region, especially since they have a history of democratic institutions. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf States are Stone Age creatures who are not about to institute democratic reforms. And America is their best buddies as they tread the path of reaction.
We need only recall that in Iran a democratically elected prime minister was overthrown by the CIA and the Shah reinstalled. The Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini ran the Shah out, but then came the Iraq/Iran war that caused the death of millions on both sides, with America supplying the poison gas and other war materials to the Iraqis. Thus America is in no position to play a fair broker. She plays, as they say in hood, dirty pool!
7. Dr. Yacoub's America
In the populist black studies of Elijah Muhammad, we are taught a big-head scientist genetically engineered the white man by separating the dominant and recessive genes from the aboriginal Asiatic black man. Yacoub's bio tech lab was not much different from the bio-tech labs operating in Berkeley and Emeryville, a few blocks from my house. We have no doubt they have cloned a man in these labs, but are simply delaying the announcement.
According to Elijah's Myth of Yacoub, the young scientist found the magnetic attraction between two pieces of steel. We maintain America is the land of Yacoub's children who love playing with steel. America spends a trillion dollars making weapons of steel, making her the number one arms merchant of the world. Children in the hood are addicted to steel as well, whether guns to mainly kill each other or cars they turn into weapons of destruction, using cars in "side shows" where people are needlessly injured or killed. The children will stand in the street or walk directly into a two thousand pound piece of steel and plastic, fearing nothing. If you stop before hitting them, they will curse you and/or pull out a piece of steel to shoot you. They use steel to resolve all disputes, sometimes before a discussion or conflict resolution.
Yocoub utilized three workers on his bio-tech project: the doctor, nurse and undertaker. These workers conspired to create the man of steel or devil. They practiced a form of selective breeding, allowing the black to mate with a brown and a brown with a lighter person until the white devil was created after hundreds of years, 600 to be exact. Two blacks were not allowed to mate in this experiment. Even today, there are some blacks who demand their children not marry another black skinned person, only someone lighter. This is no doubt residue from the Yacoubian psychopathology. If two blacks produced a baby, the doctor, nurse and undertaker would conspire to murder the baby to keep the experiment on track.
In modern America, we must note the three workers, doctor, nurse and undertaker, are aided and abetted by workers from the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industry, who are determined to fulfill their wish, "let us make a man." The petrochemical workers produce the food in oil, not earth. As much as possible the crops are genetically engineered. If not, they are created by a healthy dose of insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and dyes.
Naturally, the oil based rather than soil based food leads Yacoub's children directly from the fruit of petrochemical workers into the hands of pharmaceutical workers in league with the doctor, nurse and undertaker. The prescription drug dealers connect with insurance companies to guide the patient into the hands of the doctor, nurse and undertaker.
When poor Michael Jackson was found dead at the hands of his doctor, we knew the Myth of Yacoub was alive and well. Michael was so addicted to the Myth of Yacoub that he exceeded the limit of propriety in attempting to alter his blackness in favor of the Yacoubian ideal of whiteness. But note his doctor administered the hemlock that took him into oblivion.
There is almost no way to avoid the scheme or conspiracy of the Yacoubian team of workers, the petrochemical, pharmaceutical, medical and funeral agents.
When a man entered prison, the inmates warned him, "Don't get sick. Whatever you do, don't get sick up in here. There's a prison graveyard full of nigguhs who got sick." And so it is the same in America, don't get sick. Yacoub's team of workers are eagerly awaiting you, sharpening their knives until you get to the doctor and nurse, and finally the undertaker.
The only solution is to avoid stress, for dis-ease is brought about from stress, thus the food (petrochemical) is useless and dangerous; the medicine (pharmaceutical) is useless and dangerous as it is not designed to heal only prolong the illness unto death. Part of the last rites administered to the victim of Yacoub is that ride in a steel hearse.
--Marvin X
11/21/10
8. Happy Thanksgiving: Apartheid in Oakland
It began long ago with Negro Removal or Urban Renewal, the destruction of the economic and cultural vitality of the North American African community. At least San Francisco's Mayor Joe Alioto apologized for destroying the Fillmore. But many blacks were involved because they were part of the Redevelopment Agencies, thus they made decisions detrimental to our cultural vitality. Call it apartheid in black face!
The Fillmore is a graveyard compared to its former designation as the Harlem of the West. West Oakland the same. Of course, before we get to today's apartheid or more precisely, ethnic cleansing, aka, gentrification, we must recall how the Crack epidemic or pandemic destroyed communities coast to coast and throughout Pan Africa, from Jamaica to the Motherland. The Crack germ/chemical warfare destroyed people as well as property after the Crack addicts stopped paying rent or mortgages , leading to lost of property, deterioration of mental and physical health, including those infected from STDs and HIV/AIDS.
In many cases property was sold for little or nothing to the dope man. Many children who inherited property sold it for Crack, although Crack was inter-generational, grandparents and parents succumbed to the US Government supplied drug. In some cases great grandparents were addicted. Of course violence aided the destruction of community when rival gangs fought for turf.
President Reagan allowed the Contras in Nicaragua to bring cocaine into America to aid them in the fight against the Sandinistas. With money from cocaine, the Contras bought weapons.
In Oakland during the reign of black mayors, beginning with Lionel Wilson, then Elihu Harris, the reconstruction or development of the hood was ignored for downtown development. And then came Gov. Moonbeam, Jerry Brown as mayor. He expanded downtown development at the expense of the hood, although West Oakland was the exception since he told the neo-colonial yuppies and buppies that West Oakland is closer to San Francisco than San Francisco. Yes, the West Oakland BART train ride to San Francisco's financial district is less than ten minutes. This created a rush for West Oakland property, and by hook or crook, the neighborhood was further destroyed, although new housing and reconstructed housing boomed. Most of the blacks had long gone from the area due to redlining, Crack and violence. As we see with Fillmore, West Oakland and elsewhere, buildings and houses do not give birth to culture, but rather people who have traditions and shared culture. Capitalism cares nothing about tradition or culture, except as it relates to global finance that we see is in its final stages.
The sub prime loan scam put the death nail in the West Oakland community, also East Oakland, as it has done nation wide and worldwide. But finally, blacks and poor are being excluded, ethnically cleansed, from Oakland entirely by rental costs that price them out of the market, even when they may have Section 8 or subsidized housing, for they are required to have income from employment that excludes them. We may say it is not racial but class since poor persons of any ethnic group will find rental housing almost impossible to obtain with the income restrictions.
Apartheid is thus in full swing. Not only are blacks and other poor being pushed out of San Francisco but Oakland as well, heading to Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, Madera and Fresno.
We wonder what shall they do in these cities where there is high unemployment and massive forecloses.
Apartheid shall continue its run unless there is an emergency jobs and housing program that is focused on the poor, which seems very unlikely unless Oakland's new mayor Jean Quan has some revolutionary ideas, certainly our President seldom mentions jobs and housing for the poor, except for terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Enjoy your turkey--don't be a turkey!
--Marvin X
9.Obama Drama, A Tragi-Comedy
I love the nigguh but I knew he was crazy when he vowed to enter Pakistan during the election campaign. Entering Pakistan is probably the only thing he vowed to do and did. Certainly, there is no change we can believe. He drew down a few troops from Iraq, but fifty thousand remain and two hundred thousand contractors, i.e., mercenaries, Special Ops killers. The boy shifts like the shifting sands in the Middle East. Before midterm elections he vowed to draw down from Afghanistan starting in 2011, after the election we hear the draw down will begin in 2014. So we have a man who speaks with a forked tongue, a deceiver in the night, who talks a good game if one is ignorant of Supreme Wisdom and doesn't know the lesson, "Can a devil fool a Muslim?" Answer: No, not these days!
What Muslim in his right mind can believe his phony Cairo speech or the recent poppycock rap in Indonesia? Don't you dare tell me you want peace and understanding with Muslims while you occupy one inch of Muslim land, whether Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. What are the facts on the ground? The facts are you are determined to have a permanent presence in Muslim lands for the foreseeable future. Don't try to tell us otherwise. You are now in too deep in the devil's den of inequity, thus the works of the devil you shall do. He is a liar and murderer and you are the same. Yes, Wall Street supported you and you repaid them, now they shall dump you as they did in the mid-term elections and shall do in 2012. Yes, your benefactors shall either dump you or kill you, for by 2012 you shall have outlived your usefulness.
This man must be brain dead to the cries of the poor, the jobless and homeless. He never speaks of them. While the unemployed lines grow, he speaks of the urgent need for a nuclear weapons agreement with Russia, a missile shield over Europe, while we know the greatest enemy of the white man is the white man, not Russia, China, India, Brazil, the new boys on the block. They are going to take power and no amount of American aggression or chicanery will prevent the rise of the BRIC powers.
Thus, the proper policy is for America to look in the mirror and help those within the borders who shall ultimately be your worse enemy, not Iran, Russia, China, but the dispossessed with whom the rich will either decide to share the wealth or shall be dispossessed of their wealth when the wrath of the people reaches the boiling point, which is near. Dissatisfaction brings a change, the Tea Party is only the beginning. The ruling class think they can whip the deaf, dumb and blind whites into a frenzy against their own interests, hoodwinking them into believing they shall gain power with the fascists who shall only use them against the masses as they always have, tricking the trailer house trash whites the blacks are their enemies while the ruling class whites actually treat the poor white worse than they treat niggers. These ignut Tea Party whites want to undo all the good Obama has done, meanwhile they are without health insurance, jobless, homeless, without proper education, and the only white men and women in jails and prisons are the poor, yet they want to unite with their ruling class brothers who shall only use them as cannon fodder to take power in 2012. Trick or Treat! In America it's Halloween every day.
We cannot understand how long this president is taking to address the jobless and homeless condition of the middle class and the poor. Yet he is in full agreement that jobs, education and homes will be provided to the terrorists abroad if they will only lay down their arms and submit to the quisling regimes under US hegemony in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
Meanwhile, the police state is in full swing in America, the prisons and jails are full of those who commit petty crimes to survive. Does anyone question why America is the number one prison house in the world? Has Obama ever thought about a general amnesty for the petty criminals in American jails and prisons? Has he ever thought about an amnesty for all the political prisoners in American gulags, from Abu Jamal in PA to Ruchell McGee in Cali? No one need inform us about American torture chambers in foreign lands, we are well acquainted with the US torture chambers in American juvenile halls, jails, prisons and mental hospitals.
We were initially in glee at the Obama Drama, but the drama has degenerated into a tragi-comedy in the classic tradition of Shakespeare. To be or not to be a man of truth, a man of change, a man of action on behalf of the poor, the downtrodden, the brokenhearted that he learned about while organizing in the streets of that wicked city Chicago.
We wonder what persona lurks underneath that great smile, that sharp tongue that often stutters now, an indication a lie is about to be spoken.
I shall only say what my woman told me when I fucked up, "You blew it buddy!" You had the whole world in your hands, but you blew it buddy!
--Marvin X
10. Hypocrisy of Neo-liberal, Pseudo Left
In his letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said he would rather be with the KKK than phony white liberals. The OJay’s told us “They smile in your face but all the time they want to take your place….”—or shall we say keep you in your place!
The arrogance of KPFA Radio's addiction to white supremacy or the intention to maintain a Jim Crow media is evident in the recent moves to eliminate quality programming, especially such programs as the Morning Show with Amy Allison, Hard Knock Radio with Davey D, Africa Today with Walter Turner and Transitions on Tradition with Greg Bridges. Clearly, to eliminate these shows is tantamount to eliminating the Black presence on this socalled progressive station.
But the supreme irony is how KPFA can eliminate Black shows while simultaneously beg for money by airing its extensive archives of Black social justice activists such as Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, Martin and Coretta Scott King, James Baldwin, Cornell West, Angela Davis and others. It appears KPFA is squarely in the white supremacy tradition of “You love everything about me but me,” as Paradise tells us in his classic poem. If I may paraphrase, “You love the black voice, you love the black sound, you love the black knowledge, you love the black philosophy—you love everything about me but me!”
Yes, while the station is kicking black programs off the air, it is raising thousands of dollars for the continued pseudo leftist/Zionist programming. How arrogant can you be to think in 2010 only white people are qualified to discuss national and international affairs, or local affairs for that matter?
The American tragedy is that she never asked the descendants of kidnapped and enslaved Africans what they think about the world. We must listen to sick, depraved white people who think they are so damn smart but don’t know shit about the world as former Brazilian president Lula informed his French counterpart. “You blue-eyed people think you are so damn smart but it’s obvious you can’t solve the world’s problems because you are the cause of them.”
And yet you have the never to pimp the voices and wisdom of our ancestors for the benefit of white supremacy. Ishmael Reed is correct, you are the Jim Crow Media and the Nigger Breakers!
--Marvin X
11. And the winner is Jean Quan, Mayor of Oakland; OPD Killing Black Men Continues
The more things change, they more they stay the same.... New mayor, same old shit with OPD killing another unarmed black man, brother Jones. Jean Quan is Oakland's new mayor, the first Asian and woman. At least she has a history of being on the ground, unlike outgoing Mayor Dellums, the Distant Lover who rarely showed his face in public, even as the people suffered trauma and grief at the Miller Lite sentencing in the Oscar Grant murder by BART police.
We wonder how will Jean Quan run Oakland? Will the OPD absorb 100% of the City budget? How is more police the answer to economic injustice, educational and health disparities? Will we be satisfied when Oakland becomes under full police occupation, mainly for the safety of white people, for sure North American Africans feel no safety from the police, never have and never shall, especially as long as the police are outsiders, in short, foreign invaders, aliens with no love for the people in the hood.
Will Mayor Jean Quan understand that if America can offer education, jobs and housing for terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, she must find job for young people in the hood who are unemployed, armed and dangerous. These young men and women are suffering traumatic stress syndrome, to no less a degree than soldiers returning from the wars abroad. American youth in the hood reside in a war zone. Parents never known if their children will make it home safely. If the police don't kill them in a freak confrontation, their turf rivals may smoke them, or they may get caught in a partner violence situation. Ray Charles sang about the Danger Zone. "Look around and you will see what's troubling me--the Danger Zone is everywhere."
I have warned people about the tone test when stopped by police: based on our tone of voice, we will be killed, arrested or released. Ask Harvard professor Dr. Gates! In our partner relations the tone test or the failure to exercise discipline in conversation escalates to verbal violence, followed by physical violence and/or emotional abuse.
Will Mayor Quan address such issues or will she continue the tradition of placating the business community at the expense of the hood? One thing for sure, her Asian community may not need much of her assistance. Chinatown is booming with banks on every block, housing, an economic vitality unsurpassed elsewhere in the city. Little English is spoken, yet a Chinese need not leave his community for any reason. All bills can be paid in Chinatown, phone, water, electricity, etc. Medical care is available in the hood. Actually, Asian money owns most buildings in downtown Oakland!
From our Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, we can view City Hall, so we shall keep an eye on Mayor Quan. We will not doctor her to death, but we will keep our eyes on her to make sure she is doing all in her power to cure the sickness to save the patients, the citizens of Oakland.
12. Kill African, 2 Years;Kill a Dog, 4 Years
And so it is, Amerikkka is alive and well. True to the die hard battery. The Africans did not take it well, not well at all, the sentence given to the BART officer who murdered Oscar Grant. No one, most of all the murderer, accepts the lie the police mistook his gun for his Tazer. It is a great legal defense, after all, it worked.
The people of Oakland were mortified, traumatized and beyond belief that they had been tricked into believing justice was the American way. We were hoodwinked and bamboozled by the judge with a long train of tricknology. We understand he was the judge in the Ramparts case of LA police committing a multiplicity of crimes under the color of law, shakedown, false evidence, false confession, robbery, dope dealing, murder, money laundering. The usual. This is the American way, get over it. Get real! Stop crying crocodile tears! Denzil Dowell, Bobby Hutton, Tyrone Guyten, Melvin Black, Oscar Grant, all martyr s caught in the American way. Young people slaughtered by the police. And then we slaughter our own kind. Which is worse, them killing us or us killing us?
No one shall respect you when you don't respect yourself! You shoot each down like dogs. You have lost the human touch. You need a healing. Someone must, in the name of love, lay hands on you. You are a danger to yourself and others, thus fit for the mental ward.
You are angry with the police for killing Oscar Grant, but you give yourselves a pass when it comes to brother killing brother. No march, no rally.
Today at Academy of da Corner, I used the example of the Gay and Lesbian community in San Francisco. As you head down Market Street to the Castro Distric, the gay/lesbian flag is flying on the light posts. The closer you get to the Castro the bigger the flag. So you understand you are in an enviornment of people who have taken authority over their lives. You cannot come into their community calling the punks, dykes, bull daggers, etc. Such verbal abuse is a hate crime, a terrorist threat. You can be arrested by, yes, a gay and/or lesbian police officer.
On the other hand, there is no Red, Black and Green flying in the hood. No sign of national consciousness, that a people are alive to themselves, their soul, spirit. We must fly the national to let all people know we are a community and we shall allow no bullshit in the hood. I gave the example of when you go to Santa Rita County Jail, the inmates demand you take a shower before you hit the bunk, even though you may be exhausted from 24 to 48 hours on concrete benches and floors from holding cell to holding cell. But you washed yo ass! the brothers demanded it. In the hood we must do the same thing, we demand unity, we demand honesty, we demand justice in relations with each other. We must not disrespect brothers and sisters. We must secure our community. The police have not and cannot keep the peace, so we must take it upon ourselves to secure our communities. We cannot have senior citizens robbed at the bus stop by teen age girls or boys. We love our children but they must think a better way out of their economic desperation.
The police shall continue in their iniquity. They have no desire to be peace makers, they are too busy being peace breakers.
Maybe we can break them, in fact, we should disrupt the entire economic and political life of Oakland, let's make the downtown workers flee the back hoard as they did the day of the verdict in the Oscar Grant trial. Let them flee for their lives. Shall we rally everyday for justice, most of all, political justice, and especially economic justice.
Walking by Oakland City Hall tonight, we happened upon a press conference with Jean Quan, soon to be announced Mayor of Oakland. We heard her tell of the measure that she wrote in support of money for the police. The police consume 75% of the City budget. Yet there is no peace in the hood. High unemployment, low educational skills. We shouted to the the mayor-elect, "What about jobs." She mumbled something, some political gibberish.
Yet the president tells the world they are willing to offer schooling, jobs and housing to terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere if they lay down their arms and pledge alliance to the constitution of their lands. But you cannot offer schooling, jobs and housing to the boys and girls in the hoods of America to stop the killing and general mayhem?
If we offer them nothing and they persist is criminal activity, we shall send the slave catchers (police) to jail them, wherein they are worth $50,000.00 per inmate per year. Imagine, the California Correctional Officers Union is the most powerful union in the state. The officers tell the niggers, "Keep coming back. I got me a yacht , now I need one for my son, so keep coming back to jail and prison."
Mayor to be Jean Quan, we call upon you as your first order of business to find employment for the perennially unemployed, that you offer a general amnesty to all inmates in the City jail and Alameda County Jail. This may assuage some of the trauma and unresolved grief in the people of Oakland.
At the Rally of Friday after the sentencing of the officer, we heard expressions of deep pain and sorrow. Many said they were sick to the stomach. Many seemed shocked beyond belief that America is still a racist pig. Just as they had no mercy on Oscar Grant, they shall have none for President Obama but shall continue to crucify him for being a black man in the white house.
They shall obstruct him at every turn, making mockery of his policies. Their entire agenda is to stop him in 2012. Along they way, we shall hear their mantra NO, NO, No, No, no. No, nigger no, no nigger no. So what part you don't understand, the no or the nigger?
--Marvin X
11/8/10
13. Oakland Braces
for Sentencing of Oscar Grant, Jr. Killer Cop
Again, the City of Oakland circulated a letter to downtown businesses to use their best judgment whether they should leave early on Friday in anticipation of a light sentence for theBART police officer who shot Oscar Grant in the back while under arrest on last New Year's.
Men's Warehouse is boarded up. Shall there be another Day of Absence with white workers fleeing the area early Friday afternoon? They did so when the verdict was announced. They fled by car, bus, subway, taxi, and on foot. It was a day of fear of the North American African response to injustice by Euro Americans, part of a 400 year train of injustices.
Will the murder cop get 14 years? We highly doubt it. Some say five years, 31/2 serve, 1/1/2 years probation. Of course this is a light sentence by a wicked society protecting one of their own who kill under the color of law.
What should be our response? Personally, we feel brother Lovelle Mixon got justice for Oscar Grant when Mixon smoked four Oakland police. The universe has a way of getting justice. Sometimes we pray when God has already answered!
There is no black army for justice. The Oakland Black Panthers were the last to attempt putting police under community control. At least they took the oppression off the people for a moment by having the police focus on crushing the Panthers. Panthers gave the people a time to breathe while the pigs killed Panthers and Panthers killed them. The BPP became a threat to the national security of the United States, according to the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover. His plan COINTELPRO or counter intelligence was to stop the rise of a black messiah by any means necessary, including assassination or outright murder in the case of Chicago BPP leader Fred Hampton, Jr. and Oakland's Lil Bobby Hutton, murdered by the OPD in a shootout in which Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver was wounded.
When violence occurred a few months ago after the verdict, manslaughter instead of murder, small business owners suffered damage and could not understand why they were attacked. Many purposely displayed an Oscar Grant poster in their windows. The small business owners should be spared violence. But we know agent provocateurs shall be in the crowd. And the police are totally useless and themselves provocative. After the verdict was announced and looting at Foot Locker, radical civil rights attorney Walter Riley was beaten by police as he tried to enter his office next door to the Foot Locker. The police were apparently unconcerned about the looters.
The Nation of Islam's newspaper Muhammad Speaks used to have a cartoon of police brutality that asked in the caption Who do you call for protection? We must protect ourselves. We can provide community security. In Iraq the US stopped the insurgent violence by hiring them to secure their communities. It offered the insurgents jobs, education and housing. It is doing the same in Afghanistan with the Taliban.
So we must move beyond focusing on the police, they are the neo-slave catchers and must fulfill their duties. We can respond to them tit for tat, as Mixon demonstrated, liberty or death!
We can also stop being reactionaries and be proactive with respect to black on black violence. Is Oscar Grant selective suffering? Why is there no anger when we kill each other but only when the white man kills us-- murder is murder, death is death, and wrong is wrong. It is hypocritical for us to only respond to police abuse. What about all the suffering families who've lost loved ones to black on black homicide. Why don't we riot about that, kick some doors in about that?
Why do we not protest black on black murder. Why do we not demand blacks use their arms for community defense rather the attacking each other for mostly minor matters. Ain't no nigguhs getting killed over millions, billions or trillions. Most of the homicide is over pussy and dick, not drugs, but pussy and dick matters between all genders. Domestic violence, partner violence is such that half the community attends court mandated anger management classes.
We must get beyond physical violence, verbal and emotional abuse. We suggest a self imposed tone test with each other and the police. Based on our tone of voice, we can, when stopped by the police, get killed, arrested or released. With each other, whether on the street or in the home, we can use the language of love and unity.
We must practice eternal vigilance, stay aware of our surroundings and not try to function in a mind altered state. These are dangerous times and we must wear the armor of God consciousness. For example, we were trapped in the crowd of the millions for the Giants World Series parade. People were pushing at our back yet there was no room to move. We could have reacted to the constant pushing and shoving, but we kept our cool, refused to respond to the fools at our back. We could have turned around and bust them in the mouth. But we were cool, even though the day was hot, the crowd impossible, we're sweating and fools trying to push us forward.
There comes a time when politics becomes war. But you can't make war if you are not prepared, if you are not organized. Marcus Garvey said the world is moving against all unorganized people.
Mao Se Tung told you to get organized. Yet it is helter skelter in the hood.
We like to cry crocodile tears, attend funerals and suffer our grief alone. Whatever the sentence tomorrow, whatever the community response, this will not bring Oscar Grant back, and yet because family and community organized, a killer cop was at least charged and convicted for the first time in California history. Imagine, Oscar has had more power in death than in life, a few days ago the Longshoreman's union closed down all Bay Area ports in honor of Oscar Grant. There were proclamations by European countries in honor of Oscar Grant. Honor him by continuing to organize against all violence, whether police under the color of law, or black on black violence, or the violence caused by the trillion dollar US defense budget that causes violence around the world.
--Marvin X
14. Is Berkeley off the hook?
For sure, the young men were desperate and committed acts of desperation in Berkeley, a town touted for the University of California, yet these days very few blacks are enrolled there, and other than athletes, most of the black students are females. We know the drill, the brothers go to jail, the sisters go to college, but Dr. Wade Nobles says college is prison for the sisters as well. Most of them will come out suffering the trauma of a white supremacy education or mis-education. They will be fortunate to find a mate from their ethnic group.
Berkeley is segregated with whites living in the hills and North American Africans in the flatland of South Berkeley, although gentrification is in motion to remove them entirely from the area--of course this is a nationwide trend. Socio-economics is wreaking havoc in the hood. On the news last night, we learned Gary Ferguson, Jr., a young man with a troubled life, was gunned down in broad daylight at Sacramento and Russel streets. Another brother was wounded but died later. Two suspects in hoodies fled on foot. Yes, we are the KKK these days, we wear the hoods.
We know the family of Gary Ferguson, Jr. His father, Gary Ferguson, Sr., was a drug addict who recovered to establish a center until recently when he relapsed and lost the multiple story house for recovery. We are also aware of the grandmother of the slain man. She was grieving over the criminal activities of her grandson. Now she must grieve at his transition.
At one point a nephew of mine was in a dispute with young Gary and I was approached to take him on a national book tour with me because his life was in danger. After some convincing, my nephew agreed to leave Berkeley for the first time in his 25 years; the first time he would fly on a plane. On tour, he accompanied me to Philly, Newark, Brooklyn, Harlem and Boston before he returned. He had the time of his life and has enrolled at Contra Costa College in Richmond.
We are happy to help my nephew but it is no joy to see the destruction of Ferguson, his friend, and so many other young men who cannot figure a way out of this nothingness and dread.
--Marvin X
10/27/10
15. Parable of Mother to Son
Love, Marvin X
8/20/10
16.Obama Drama: When in trouble at home, go abroad, Onward Christian Soldiers
After the failure of midterm elections, Obama and his shaggy, effete neo-liberal regime fled America for a propaganda journey throughout Asia. His first stop was India that is one of the new boys and girls on the block, a member of the new global power bloc called BRIC, i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China. He spent three days begging India to purchase weapons of mass destruction to help the staggering and stalled American economy that may continue its free-fall to the end.
Ironically, for those favoring the end of outsourcing, India says it is willing to outsource jobs to America, with slave wage jobs for unemployed, desperate Americans. Indian MBAs are paid $14,000 per year as opposed to American MBAs at $140,000. Will American workers accept the Indian pay scale? Take it or leave it! America needs India, India doesn't need America. For sure, India doesn't need America facilitation in its dispute with arch-rival Pakistan over Kashmir. America's failure to negotiate a two-state solution in Palestine is a pitiful example of American diplomacy and even handedness. As per Pakistan, America cannot decide if Pakistan is friend or foe. She bombs and invades Pakistan at will, yet claims Pakistan is a partner in the war against terror. An astute Indian student asked Obama why is not Pakistan declared a terrorist state?
Our question is why is not America declared a terrorist state? Its unmanned drone aircraft have killed an unknown toll of Pakistani civilians.
The regional players, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, will play a vital role in the ultimate peace in the area. America will not be involved. There shall never be peace anywhere in the Muslim world as long as the Christian Crusader armies occupy the land. The Afghanistan Taliban say they will not discuss peace with the quisling government of Karsai, Mayor of Kabul, until the Crusaders depart. At present, the Taliban control 80% of the land. Why else would the US concur to hold peace talks with the Taliban. When you're losing, you want to talk. When a wife is getting her ass beat, she wants to talk!
Obama doesn't understand that no amount of rhetoric will placate the Islamic world, thus his speech in Indonesia was poppycock, in line with his Cairo speech, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Yes, 100,000 troops may have departed Iraq since he became president, but 50,000 remain and 200,000 contractors and mercenaries, with the biggest US embassy in the world. Does it sound like America is truly ending its occupation of Iraq? Even the Defense Secretary Gates said there may be some rethinking of the departure date.
Afghanistan is lost, so on to Pakistan and Yemen with drones, Special Ops trained killers and other mercenaries of the Christian Crusader war machine.
--Marvin X
17. Parable of Purple
In Oakland, we grew up playing the dozens, rapping about another brother's mother, trying to "cap" or best the brother in desecrating our sacred Mother Goddess. The winner said the most hurtful things, and yes, the contest often ended with a fight because the loser felt ashamed and humiliated. The hip hop generation has upped the game.
On a recent Monday night, half a block from Academy of Da Corner at 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland, two young men had a rap contest on the street while a large crowd listened attentively. When Craig, aka Purple, won the contest, the loser, Mike, felt humiliated and ashamed, especially because Purple had rapped about catching Mike in a homosexual encounter. Amiri Baraka's 60s play The Toilet dealt with a similar encounter.
According to reports, Mike fired off two rounds into the ground and urged Purple to shut up, but Purple persisted, claiming he had the power of the Logos. He continued slamming Mike with crowd approval. Mike aimed his gun at Purple's chest and fired twice. "Told you to shut up, nigguh. Told you to shut up!"
Purple stumbled into De Lauer's bookstore next door and fell dead. There must be some significance to his dying in a bookstore, a place of light in a world of darkness. Such is life: sometimes we win only to lose.
--Marvin X
9/11/10
18. Poet/Playwright Returns Home to West Oakland
On Saturday, November 20, Marvin X.Jackmon,poet/playwright/essayist/producer/organizer/teacher, returned to his childhood neighborhood in West Oakland where he attended Prescott elementary and Lowell junior high school.
On Saturday afternoon he had a conversation with actors in the Lower Bottom Playaz who have been performing his first play Flowers for the Trashman, 1965, San Francisco State University Drama Department production while he was an undergrad.
He told the young actors he was flunking an English literature class taught by legendary Medievalist professor/author John Gardner. Gardner asked him what he wanted to do pass the class. The poet said write. The professor said write what. Write a play. Gardner said write it! Flowers for the Trashman was the product. The play became a classic of the Black Arts Movement and established Marvin X as one of founders of the most radical movement in American literature. BAM forced America to include ethnic and gender literature in the academic curriculum. See the Black Arts Movement by James Smithurst, University of North Carolina Press.
The poet described his childhood in West Oakland, Harlem of the West. While I was growing up, West Oakland was the Harlem of the West. I grew up on 7th and Campbell, in my parents florist shop. West Oakland was booming with a vital economic and cultural community on 7th Street, with shops, restaurants, cafes, clubs, associations. It was the end of the railroad line, home of the first black union, the Pullman Porters, led by C. L. Dellums, uncle of Oakland's Mayor Ronald Dellums.
My mother and father were Race people, the name accorded to those who had racial consciousness in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. They were activists in many social organizations, especially the NAACP. Before the family moved to Oakland, his parents edited the Fresno Voice, the first black newspaper in the Central Valley. His maternal great grandfather, E. Murrill, was mentioned in 1943 edition of the Fresno Bee Newspaper. He was so well known the newspaper noted that whites and blacks attended his funeral. His maternal relatives were pioneers to the West coast.
After the war, his parents left Fresno and came to Oakland. There my parents opened a florist shop while my mother worked at the Navy Supply Center as a clerk. The Army base at the end of 7th Street employed many blacks who migrated to the Bay Area during WWII. Seventh Street was bumper to bumper cars, especially on the weekends. The street was crowded with people enjoying Negro life and culture. See Marvin's autobiography Somethin' Proper, Black Bird Press, 1998.
The poet told of his introduction to drama at New Century Recreation Center on 5th Street at McFeely School where he attended elementary school. He recalled a dance teacher at New Century was Ruth Beckford, queen of African choreography in the Bay Area. She was one of the most beautiful women of my childhood with her short natural hair, African body and black velvet skin. I adored her whenever I could catch a glance of her. So fine, so fine.
While doing a play at children's play at Mosswood Park, the poet said he was in the sandbox when a little white girl called him a nigger for the first time and told him to get out of the sandbox. In those days, we didn't go to Mosswood Park often and definitely did go to Lake Merritt, only on holidays such as the 4th of July. A nigguh would get his ass kicked by white boys if caught at Lake Merritt.
Pine Street, where the Black Dot Cafe is located, was the ho stroll, from 7th to 16th by the Southern Pacific train station. There was a hotel near the train station where you could rent a room for a few minutes. Although the area where Black Dot is located is gentrified, someone in the audience informed the poet the hotel is still there.
As a child, the poet used to play up and down the streets in the vicinity of Black Dot Cafe, and later he used to sell black newspapers and magazines in the area, including Jet, Ebony, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Currier, Detroit Black Dispatch, et al. As a child, he also wrote in the Children's Section of the Oakland Tribune.
As per the play, the setting is a jail cell with the lead character the poet as a young college student with his ghetto friend. They had an encounter with the police coming from a dance and end up in jail for failing the tone test with the police. In jail, the story evolves into a narrative of the father/son relationship, although most critics focus on the rage expressed by Joe, the militant college student who goes off on the white man in the cell. This rage made it a classic of the Black Arts Movement nationwide and worldwide. The play was produced in Europe as well. It appeared in Black Dialogue Magazine and the 60s classic anthology Black Fire, edited by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka.
In conversation with the actors, they told the poet how the play affected them as fatherless young men, suffering the estrangement and abandonment by their fathers. For them, the play was/is a play within a play, thus giving a level of consciousness as they performed the ritual and were transformed by it. The poet told them this is the purpose of drama, to transform.
He said on one level, the drama reveals his failure as a father since when it was written he had fathered two sons by the age of twenty-one. The play ends with his lines "I want to talk with my sons. I want to talk with my sons." The poet noted that he had been able to talk with one of his two sons, but not with the other who is now almost 50 years old. This son still has feelings of abandonment and neglect. The poet told the young men and women we must break the cycle of such trauma. Otherwise it shall go on forever. Such is the purpose of Flowers for the Trashman, a man-hood training ritual drama to transform lives.
He spoke on the function of ritual drama to transform. This play Flowers for the Trashman is a manhood training ritual so that young men are changed by witnessing it. They will get over some of their hatred and trauma with fathers, for soon they shall be fathers and how shall they behave? Shall their sons hate them, shall they hate their sons, when shall it end?
Truth is, we were not brought over here to have healthy relationships, father/son, mother/daughter. We were brought here for our labor, to be slaves and later wage slaves, coming down to the present. In a 1968 interview with the poet, James Baldwin told him, "For a black father to raise a black son is a miracle. And I applaud the men who are able to do this. It's a wonder we all haven't gone stark raving mad!"
--Marvin X
11/20/10
Painters Dewey Crumpler, Arthur Monroe; Ishmael Reed, Conyus,
Marvin X, Al Young
photo by Tennessee Reed
San Francisco Main Library
Marvin X, Tennessee Reed, Conyus, Al Young
19. Parable of the San Francisco Negro, Part II
Today, Sunday, August 25, at the San Francisco Main Library, Ishmael Reed discussed his latest book Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, Return of the Nigger Breakers, Baraka Press, 2010. The esteemed Dr. Nathan Hare gave him a proper intro, befitting the great commentator Ishmael is, aside from being a novelist, essayist, poet, playwright and anthologist. Aside from his wife and daughter, the audience included Al Young, Conyus, Dewey Crumpler, Herman Rainey, Margot Dashield, et al.
Before the program began, Ishmael told me not to be selling my books at his gig, also please do not cut him up doing the Q and A. I ignored both requests. He signed a review copy of his book for me.
I respect Ishmael because he is my senior or elder, also one of America's most prolific writers, although I'm on his tail. Actually, he is the one who named me Plato, after stopping by one of my street sessions downtown Oakland at 14th and Broadway. I added Negro to distinguish myself from the Greek philosopher who plagiarized African philosophy (see Stolen Legacy by George M. James). But Ishmael has supported my projects and productions in the Bay Area, and he praised my play One Day in the Life as the most powerful drama he's seen.
But Ishmael is an interesting character, He comes from that group of black intellectuals who lived in Greenwich Village during the 50s and early 60s, including LeRoi Jones, now Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Calvin Hernton, Askia Toure, David Henderson, et al.
After the assassination of Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, aka Baraka, escaped the Village and sought refuse in Harlem. Askia and Neal were already in place. Ishmael declined to join the Black Arts Movement and was somewhat critical of it. He never claimed to be a revolutionary activist, and on Sunday at library, he made it clear he was not an activist nor revolutionary. He seems to take a centrist position, neither left nor right. He made it clear during his discussion that in his mind the Left has fantasies as fantastic as the Right. He recalled when Che Guevara was interviewed on New York's WBAI, Che laughed when asked if there could be a Cuban style revolution in America. Ishmael said Madison Avenue and corporate America would immediate co-opt the revolution, thus making it a fad, perhaps in the manner of Hip Hop culture. We imagine it might be similar to everybody in New York wearing the Kafiya scarf of the Palestinian revolution, but they ain't hardly with the Palestinian revolution, especially New York Jews, but they wear the scarf.
So where is Ishmael coming from? For sure, he's a thinker with an opinion that is often outside the box of Americana. In this we are similar, although I'm to the left of Ish, to say the least. I sense Ishmael loves America while I loathe America. I'm like that song Tobacco Road,
I hate you
but I love you because you're home.
Go git some dynamite and a crane,
tear it up and start all over again,
Tobacco Road (Lou Rawls version).
Ishmael speaks as an insider, I'm an outsider. He's one of the select public intellectuals, along with Michael Eric Dyson and Dr. Cornell West. White America has never heard of me, for the most part, and neither has a large portion of black America. My audience is the rejected and despised, a population America also wants to know nothing about.
Ishmael is a truth seeker, wise enough to reject the fiction of the fabricated America reality. The good Dr. Nathan Hare taught us the fictive theory: everything America says is fiction unless proven to be fact. Ishmael is excellent at tearing apart the Hollywood fantasy America, especially that portion perpetuated by the media, the witch doctors on Television, movies and internet.
He discussed the spin doctors and others of and in the white supremacy regime who castrate the black man at every turn. He noted the icons of the 60s, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Kwame Toure, Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Ali, who were torn to shreds by not only the media but feminist propaganda as well. Yet who do they have to equal such giants?
My special advisor, Ish, talked about the University as part of the military/corporate complex Eisenhower warned us about. After 35 years teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he asked where is the radical, socialist/communist academia?
I agree, after teaching briefly in academia, it is indeed part of the complex Eisenhower warned us about. Imagine, as we speak, a lawyer who endorsed torture is yet teaching at UCB, Professor Yu.
Ishmael still has much faith in Obama, while mine has waned, perhaps because he is more patient than I. After two white men tried to disrupt his discussion with leftist rants, Ish asked if they'd come with me, especially after he called upon me for an opinion on Arab liquor stores in the hood. Actually, he asked me to write an essay on the topic, but I said yes, the Arabs sell us swine and wine in the name of Allah, additionally, they sell dope, guns and pussy inside and outside their stores, and take liberties with our women, while they will murder us if we have sex with theirs, as happened in Sacramento when an Arab father found a black boy hiding under his daughter's bed. Ironically, the Arab got the NAACP chief attorney, Nathaniel Colley, to successfully defend him.
At the end of the session, while he signed books, Ishmael let me know he asked me to make a comment during the Q and A, not deliver a sermon. Now those who know, know better than ask me a question because I will give a sermon.
After pics with Ishmael, Al Young, Arthur Monroe, Dewey Crumpler, Conyus, Tennessee Reed and myself, I excused myself from a dinner invitation to make my way through San Francisco's multi-racial ghetto the Tenderloin. I had to visit my old hang out, though the artists warned me not to get stuck in the black hole.
On my way to the library, I had thought about those TL chicken wings at the Arab liquor store, but Conyus brought them back to my attention when he informed me he gave Al Young, poet laureate emeritus of California, a tour of the TL, after which Al wrote a poem, including the liquor store as subject.
When I arrived and got the chicken wings, I walked outside to meet a brother from back in the day, one of those wheeler dealers who has miraculously survived the rough and tough Tenderloin, one of the roughest and toughest ghettos in California, if not America. By the grace of God, I mastered every street in the TL, every alley, doorway, hotel room. I am not bragging, this is just a fact.
I showed my Obama book to my friend, but another brother checked it out. I also showed him Mythology of Pussy. He gave me five dollars for Mythology. Then I showed him Pull Yo Pants Up, he said he wanted Pull Yo Pants Up--said he knew enough about pussy. So I exchanged. He was happy, more so because he said he never bought a book before, nor had he ever bought a book from the author, so he was honored and said he was going to take it home to his peoples in Richmond and share it with them.
I was humbled. It is enough to kiss the ground when a black man says he's never bought a book, let alone from the author himself.
I departed the TL to across the street at Market and Powell. It is a movement from one block to another wherein one enters the world of the rich and white, the tourists from around the world who come to board the Cable Car, yes, only a block away from the TL, one of the most wretched areas in the world. A block away!
In my hustling days, I was not only the king of the Tenderloin, but on Union Square, the shopping area of the rich and famous in San Francisco. On this day I posted up by the BART escalator. I just wanted to observe before I boarded the subway back to the East Bay.
I stool around watching the action. I saw a police officer I recognized, Brother Payne who has a twin brother who worked the Cable Car line and was the champion Cable Car bell ringer. I watched officer Payne do his thing. He told a Negro to leave the area, when the Negro resisted, he pulled out his hand cuffs at shook them in the Negro's face. I knew officer Payne from the 80s and 90s when I used to hustle, so I made eye contact with him and signaled with my finger for him to come over. He came. I said how's it going, Brother? You brother Payne, right? He said yes. How you doing? He said it's rough. Rougher than it used to be. Rougher. Then he was off to a purse snatcher. I took out my promo for the book Pull Yo Pants Up. A young brother came by with two young girls who appeared to be his sisters. I gave him a promo. He read the title and said, "Wait a minute, let me pull my pants up." He pulled them up and showed me he was tightening his belt, then went on his way, but not before I said, "Thank you, brother!"
When the brother submitted so willingly, it let me know there are infinite possibilities here, and that the elders are allowing this negative situation to continue out of their sloth and laziness. Thus, we must get on our job and speak to our sons and daughters. They await the sound of our voices, the command of our message of truth.
--Marvin X
7/25/10
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