[In a late night editing session glitch, I inadvertently deleted this post and the ensuing comments. Here is the post again although I believe the comments are wandering around lost somewhere in the vast internets. Sorry].
Mr. Parrish commented on something I wrote in Booman’s recent article Ambassador Rice Got Screwed. It pissed me off.
Here it is.
You’re right, Arthur. Form means nothing. Content means everything.
Which is why, in a world populated by billions of unique individuals, when you make sweeping statements that whole classes of people are indistinguishable, I start thinking of all the other people, now and all through the history of the world, that have lumped large classes of people together as indistinguishable because of one common trait. Party affiliation, say, or what they do for a living, or religion, or class or race or gender. They are all the same, right, Arthur? And, inevitably, you’re better than they are, too, amirite?
Content means everything, Arthur. Yours included. Wake the fuck up.
I started a reply and it grew. It grew into a statement about why I write what I do and some of the life experiences that have motivated me. So here that is as well.
Read on if you’re interested.
Or not.
I “make sweeping statements that whole classes of people are indistinguishable?” When do I do that, exactly? Regarding the leftiness blog world? Hardly a “whole class,” Geov. A few thousand people at best. Party affiliations? In my view the only characteristic shared by people with an unshakeable “party affiliation” in the U.S. is that they are either being scammed by a vast criminal conspiracy…as are all of those who believe what the news and the other segments of the media culture tell them to believe…or they are themselves a witting part of the scam. What people do for a living, their religion, class, race or gender? None of these things enter into any part of what I am saying here.
Am I “better” than the people about whom…and to whom I might add…I am writing? I’m different from them, that’s for sure. I started to walk away from this culture at about the same time JFK was killed…not simply because he was murdered but also because the coverage and investigation of that crime was so blatantly false yet almost the entire culture bought into it. The subsequent course of the country…the unsolved/falsely investigated political and cultural crimes that I have witnessed…only served to further separate me from this system, as did my own dumb luck in having chosen a profession that took me through just about every racial and class culture in the country and also sent me around the world not as a tourist or a spectator but as a cultural “worker.” As a functioning part of many subcultures that middle class-bred white U.S. citizens almost never enter as an equal. My final radicalization occurred when I was on tour in S.E. Asia for a month during the Vietnam War. I saw the results of U.S. imperialism quite clearly, and it was a horrific sight. Bangkok was nothing more than a huge whorehouse for American soldiers and most of the soldiers themselves were totally disillusioned about why they were there. Especially the black soldiers, with whom I spent a great deal of time in a jazz club called Jack’s American Star Bar, kind of a ghetto organ trio bar transposed from Philly or Detroit right into Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness. This current epidemic of rape and suicide in the military? No surprise to me and really no surprise to any clear-eyed observer of what we are doing around the world. The contradictions between what we say we are doing and what is really happening become clear to those who are involved in the butchery, and many of them go nuts behind it. The armed forces bases in Vietnam and Thailand where we gave performances and the other cities we saw? Indescribably rotten in every sense of the word. After that month our very next gig was in Honolulu, and my shock at seeing the fat, stupid, self-satisfied middle class American tourists in their ill-fitting clothes was life-changing. I had never seen them before. Not really. It was as if a filter had been ripped from my eyes during the preceding month.
Does all of that make me “better?” No, it just makes the scope of my life experience a great deal broader than that of most people. Like I said, my dumb luck. I didn’t choose to be a jazz or latin musician with that result in mind; music was simply an undeniable passion. Neither did I “choose” when I was born, where I was born or my own gifts and weaknesses. No one does. I do choose to try to point out to others what is perfectly clear to me about the current system in the U.S., and I do so knowing quite clearly that I will only reach a few people. I teach music with the same idea. If I reach one single person, if I change one mind then I have done something useful in this little corner of the universe. So it goes. You don’t like it? So that goes as well. Have a nice day.
Later…
AG
