Author: Elizabeth D

x-posted from Street Prophets

Kalamu ya Salaam calls himself “the griot of New Orleans.” “The griot is a West African storyteller/historian/musician,” he explains online. Street Prophets member “under the bodhi tree” had been familiar with Kalamu’s work and pointed out here that he was going to be speaking in my city (Madison, WI) last night in conjunction with the Wisconsin Book Festival. Black history and performance poetry are not areas of special interest for me, and it would not have occurred to me to go to this event if it had not been suggested–but that was kind of why I heeded the suggestion. I was sure I’d learn something.
Kalamu is one of us, a very bright down to earth guy with typical liberal sensibilities; “a non-theocentric spiritualist,” a loather of corporatocracy, and in real life it was obvious he didn’t actually think the universe revolved around black people, which I confess had been an impression I’d gotten from reading some of his writing beforehand–I think life confronted him in a big way with blackness, and he neutralized it with a big embrace. I went from thinking that was something that made him different, to kinda identifying with it.

I took a lot of notes. This is a close summary of his talk, though some bits are slightly rearranged.

He began by speaking about the history of New Orleans. The city was founded in 1718 by three French aristocrats, a priest, some soldiers, and a bunch of criminals from French jails. France did little with it though, and sold Louisiana to the Spanish in 1769. The Anglos didn’t get there till 1804. The French Quarter, the oldest part of the city, was built by the Spanish, and although the street signs say “rue,” original ceramic plaques on some of the buildings use the Spanish word for street, “calle.” There’s no French culture in New Orleans; it’s the Caribbean culture of French-speaking Haitians who arrived around the turn of the 19th century, doubling the city’s population.

During the Civil War, the Union seized the city, and large numbers of blacks, many of them already trained soldiers who had worked for the Spanish, joined up. There was slavery in New Orleans, but it was often unlike slavery elsewhere; it was not unusual to see a black man walking down the street with a rifle in his hand, money in his pocket, on is way to the house he owned. A large number of “Maroons,” escaped slaves, lived in the surrounding swamps and bayous, often allying themselves with the Indians.

Kalamu went on to describe what he thought was the needed response to Katrina:

1. Listen To the People, his project to gather and share New Orleans stories via the internet. They’re gathering existing media stories, collecting oral histories, and doing selective video interviews. The project doesn’t focus solely on race, but also looks at issues of class, gender, ethnicity (New Orleans had 12,000 Vietnamese who lived in a submerged section of town, as well as the largest concentrations of Hondurans outside Honduras), the GLBT community, undocumented workers, and the incarcerated.
2. Environment: concerns directly tied to how one treats the land where one lives. There is no hiding from this issue. “I believe that rather than less, we’re gonna see more natural disasters going on…. Let New Orleans be a wakeup call.”
3. Levee Protections: “They can no longer control the river.” Bush has systematically cut funding for the Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains levees all over the country, for the last four years.
4. Where’s the money going to come from to rebuild New Orleans? An audience member shouts (to laughter): “Tax the rich corporations!” Kalamu says, skeptical of the likelihood, “You can ask em!”

His further comments on Katrina:

After Katrina some people said God smote New Orleans because of lewdness, homosexuality, and dope fiends, but they must be crazy, Kalamu says, because the major concentration of that action, the French Quarter, was high and dry. “Their God was missing!”

Noting that there are New Orleans refugees even here in Madison, Kalamu urged that this winter, we should reach out to NO refugees we may know, not with a blanket or a jacket, but to be there for them as a human being. Novelty will wear off, and people who have lost most of what they had find themselves in a strange place and may never have seen snow, and they will be homesick and lonely. Winter, he observes, is suicide season.

“If you ask people from New Orleans, we say government ain’t shit. This administration is systematically dismantling government as a force in life. They’re putting incompetence in charge. It cannot be an accident; it wouldn’t occur naturally! You have to pick stupidity to be so consistent.” There’s a quotable quote for ya, that was the biggest laugh. Though in this liberal town there were cheers throughout the talk for anti-Bushism and anti-corporatism and anti-racism. Kalamu emphasized that “politics is affecting our every day existence, every moment,” and that it was necessary to be aware and engaged.

“I believe that New Orleans is gonna be an example of urban development for 21st Century America; whatever they do in New Orleans, they’re gonna do every place else. It will be a community planned by the power brokers.”

New Orleans schools laid off ALL the schoolteachers, telling them that their last paycheck had been their last. This was the largest concentration of college-educated black people in America. Katrina wiped out the black community. He reemphasizes, “It represents the future how they rebuild it.”

Because the tourist sections of town survived Katrina, “You could go to New Orleans this January and not notice any difference, except a few less black people on the street.” It was ordinary people who were harmed, not the money interests. However, he doesn’t want to present blacks as victims.

Kalamu next read his essay “Jazz 101,” an introduction to the spirit and cultural history that produced jazz music–being abducted into slavery, then rural blacks coming to the city with their uncouth ways and their troubles, and still full of verve and life. The good lines I’ve recorded are “the white way may be correct, but it sure ain’t right.” and the clever neologism (not coined by him) “status crow.”

Now when I say that he next performed his poem “A System of Thought,” what I really mean is that he was possessed–primal shrieks, tears, staccato pleas. This performance was brilliant and would not have translated adequately to radio or even TV, it was so abandoned and courageous. The title refers to the system of thought wherein black people are taken from Africa, transported across the ocean, enslaved, expected to thank boss whitey for it, and even earnestly profess and try to believe they’re grateful, however, ultimately, sitting on rooftops as the water rises, “water comin’ boss, help! help!,” begging whitey in his helicopter to drop a little water cause they’re dying, that becomes plainly impossible. The poem was written well before Katrina, he says, but new lyrics were added, and they give it a huge immediacy. Nothing has explained to me so well why race is an issue in the Katrina disaster.

Kalamu says we’re all in danger, though. “If you don’t understand what’s going on, you’re not going to make the sacrifices necessary for change.” “People who have been brought up in America believe in magic formulas. Don’t believe in magic fomulas.” “Don’t trust men with guns.” “Pick something you’re passionate about, and be it. Even if it is crocheting. Instead of crocheting in red white and blue, maybe you could crochet the colors of the Pakistani flag to show support for them.” “I resist easy solutions.” He quotes a friend, “Mask no difficulties. Claim no easy victories. Tell no les.”

He made a point of noting that we can’t hide from gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered struggles; regardless of what one think based on religion, etc–those people are our brothers and sisters, and we have to cut off a part of ourselves not to care.

It is important, he says, to show support for the disaster victims. “Coming out tonight is a showing of support. The next step is getting someone else to show up the next time. We need a critical mass.” “We lost a lotta people in New Orleans. It’s never happened before in modern history that a major metropolitan area has been wiped out.”

We must resist: “The government showed they were willing to let people die. If you don’t see it now, you’re never gonna see it. It’s unspeakable.” He says yes indeed he thinks it’s true that people shot at rescue helicopters. “Sure they shot at the police, because the police shot at them. The administration failed. They blinked. Seems they’d never been in a situation before where they thought they were gonna liberate people, and people shot at them.”

He said something I’m not sure if I’d not heard before, and that he swore was true: that there was a battallion of over 200 armed National Guard troops in Hall A of the Convention Center in New Orleans very quickly after the Katrina disaster. They parked dump trucks in front of the door so people could not get to them. “I think they were afraid. People in New Orleans were not ready to roll over and play victim.” Might these have been the National Guard who were already in NO and got flooded out of their headquarters which was near a burst levee, and lost their communications equipment?

Okay, I lied about the other line that I said was the biggest laugh; this was: “I used to wonder about you-all cheese heads. It’s snowing, you all got no shirt on, you got cheese on your head. That’s the kind of courage it’s gonna take to defeat George W Bush!” Well I don’t even know what to add to that. He’d also complemented Wisconsin earlier for our long history of progressive politics, which he attributed to the fact that “you all didn’t come from England!” But I’m from New Jersey originally and not Wisconsin; the descendent of Puritan pilgrims, here I was in the cheese state listening to a New Orleans version of a West African storyteller lambaste a Texan in Washington, DC, and all that seemed proper and human.

A white female audience member who said she was from New Orleans herself and had just come from there, said “The whole city smells like death. We don’t even know what death smells like, and it smells like death. Our home smells like death.“

Kalamu.com

Kalamu ya Salaam’s poetry and essays

Yesterday afternoon at Barnes and Noble I found a particularly good article in American Scientist magazine about the somewhat-nebulous concept of “emotional intelligence,” and the scientific questions related to it. One specific fact in the article led me to clarify something unusual about myself, and also form an intriguing hypothesis about the neurology of politics, and particularly the tendency toward bigotry.

I offer a theory that, often for physical, neurological reasons, people who use rational bases for decision-making may tend to be liberal, and people who use emotional bases for decision-making may tend to be conservative. My path to this theory leads through the front of my own brain, which has literally, physically, in all seriousness, lost its ability to use emotion to make decisions. This affects my way of thinking in ways that I believe shed some light on political thinking in general.

You know how abnormal psychology has long been a focus of psychological research, because the exceptions to the rule shed light on how the mind functions in a way that normalcy doesn’t? My own unusual neurology has become my personal laboratory. I have injuries to my prefrontal cortex and the fronts of my temporal lobes. I also have some other unusual neurology that I was born with, but which I won’t get into here.

This knowledge is important because it clues me in to specific physical reasons for unusual features of my personality, intellectual style, and behavior. The neuro quirks are also uncommon enough to be useful for comparing and contrasting myself with “normal” people (in a world where we are all unique, there is no “normal,” but at any rate people who mostly don’t have these specific conditions). A little knowledge of the things that make one’s own brain unique can be quite helpful in forming an experiential understanding or model of the way brains in general work, and why people are the way they are.

Anyway, the American Scientist article (“Feeling Smart: The Science of Emotional Intelligence” by Daisy Grewal and Peter Salovey) described an early 90’s study that shed light on emotional decision-making:

The day before yesterday my boyfriend and I went to the grocery store together. I wanted to buy some kind of frozen food to eat for dinner this week. After mulling several choices with price and taste in mind, I picked up a small-size Digiorno veggie pizza and took it to our cart. I started to think about nutrition, though–the pizza had quite a lot of crust and fat and not enough of anything healthy. I stopped, frozen by indecision. It wasn’t obvious which of the factors was more important. “Put it in the cart,” said my boyfriend, who wanted to check out and go home. I explained my dilemma. “Put it in the cart and come on,” he said, in a flash of irritability, “it’s not that hard to make a decision.” I did as he asked and felt unhappy with myself. “It really is that hard for me to make a decision,” I said.

This scene probably doesn’t sound unusual at all. But it happens so constantly to me that I’ve long understood that there is something abnormal going on. I am an extraordinarily slow and indecisive shopper! As far as I can tell, it is literally true of me that I can’t and don’t use my emotions to make a decision. If I can’t make a satisfying decision based on logical factors, I have to fish around for something to break the tie (or be aided by my boyfriend demanding that I put the pizza in the cart!).

I think this insight about emotions and decision-making has broader implications. Both the article and my own long experience support the idea that “separating thinking and feeling is not necessarily more adaptive and may, in some cases, lead to disastrous consequences.” But it could be very misleading to connect more strongly emotional decision-making with “higher emotional intelligence.”

I suggest that, for instance, people who tend to strongly base their judgments on emotions are more susceptible to become bigots. The anti-gay movement, for instance, has no logical underpinning, unless you count some ambiguously-applicable scripture references. It rests fundamentally on its members experiencing their distressed emotions about homosexuality as valid information on which to base an ideological choice (in some cases, distressed emotions about their own homosexual inclinations).

A Daily Kos diary this morning about the experience of seeing the news world through the FoxNews lens described The O’Reilly Factor thus: “The show is all about placing blame. Almost every story centered on getting at who was ‘at fault.'” Commenters interpreted this as a culture of victimhood–but what if it is more accurately seeking to use emotions as a basis for grasping the nature of events and their causes–as a valid means of discernment? Who’s at fault? Probably the usual suspects, if our feelings tell us right.

Some people who use the emotional style of reasoning feel besieged by modernity and challenges to traditional beliefs about the nature of things. Scientific reasoning has been considered by some conservatives through the ages to be anathema, nihilistic, disturbing– because it is guarded against emotional reasoning and the “wise judgment” of emotionally-justified human beliefs. And this is perceived as tantamount to being against God–against morality and reality and the truest authority!

Scientists and liberals are as emotional as conservatives, and are no less able to have convictions (or religious feelings). But, are we people who, for neurologically-based reasons, tend to make decisions based on various external factors, more so than on emotions? And are far-right conservatives people who, for neurologically-based reasons, experience their emotions as a strong basis for decision-making?

I am liable to be misunderstood: I’m not remotely saying that liberals are brain-damaged, nor that brain injury makes you more “logical,” nor that wingnuts should be lobotomized. I was always a logical thinker and I am 90% sure I would have been a liberal regardless of whether I’d hit my head. But this specific unusual feature of my neurology, the loss of my ability to use emotion as a direct decision-making criterion, does make me think a little about the role of this particular faculty in human life.

There are some highly intelligent people who are staunch bigots. Poor reasoning ability is not necessarily the problem; an unfortunate judgment based on a negative emotional feeling is. Some people, maybe particularly more intelligent people, can be convinced that factual evidence or rational arguments are compelling enough to outweigh the emotion, and they can change their opinion. During the 20th century there were a great many people who came to realize blacks and whites are not different kinds of people but morally the same kind, and bigotry and segregation therefore irrational and morally and socially harmful. Gradually a similar kind of realization is happening in regards to homosexuality. Though there will always be bigots, because some susceptible people will always feel emotionally uncomfortable about particular categories of people, and behave as bigots. This is human nature.

(I would argue that I am particularly non-susceptible to that type of bigotry. And yet, I want to make the point that I could be bigoted in a slightly different sense, because I have certain convictions and beliefs, and I am sometimes prone to pass judgment on groups of people I think are wrongheaded or ignorant or uncompassionate. Perhaps this is the typical liberal version of bigotry–and I take it seriously. The “rationality” of it can be seductive [“what’s the matter with Kansas??? they’re fucking morons who vote for the culture war rather than their own interests, that’s what!!!”], but since it can lead to unkindness and divisiveness, it does concern me. I think the conservatives call it “liberal elitism;” if you think about it a little bit it makes a little sense as the “enlightened” rationalist’s “elite” scorn for the non-rationalist. What would happen if we appropriated the term “elitism” to use ourselves? Hey, if gays can call each other fags, and blacks can call each other niggas, liberals can surely call each other elite, or, ah, 1337, though that would be a different connotation. 🙂

This diary is not the entire explanation for the brain basis of political alignment, and I don’t believe liberals and conservatives split strictly as “rational vs emotional.” But divisions on a fair number of issues, especially bias issues, can be described at least partly along the lines of (negative emotional judgment) vs (positive emotional judgment and/or rational judgment).

Some Americans had the appropriate negative emotional reaction to terrorists, and used that as a basis for supporting actions to destroy or at least defy and torment Muslims in general. And they are scornful toward the liberals who have had the same appropriate negative emotional reaction, but use a rational basis to argue for reality-based strategies to prevent and defend against terrorism rather than making more terrorists by enflaming the whole Middle East. They are scornful because the liberals’ failure to use their emotional pain and anger as a basis for their course of action seems just wrong, and almost inhuman. It calls their loyalties into question.

See? Am I right, is so much of this based on such a little aspect of the way the brain works?

The American Scientist article includes a little portrait of Mr. Spock captioned, “Emotion was considered irrational by the Stoics, a view that has persisted into modern times and is epitomized by the character of Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy on the Star Trek television series. Spock hailed from the planet Vulcan, where pure logic is exalted, making him the consummate Starfleet science officer; yet his Vulcan father had married a human schoolteacher, giving Spock a vulnerable emotional side.” Spock was as “human” as anyone else, but his ability to make decisions based on logic alone gave him a particular kind of wise judgment.

(Incidentally, there’s a book titled Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. It’s not a reference to Spock, but “an allusion to Vulcan, the crippled armaments maker of the Gods, who defended heaven.” I think the neo-cons are Romulans. 🙂

I’m not going to claim I’ve never asked for recommends before, but I am going to claim this is the most important and thoughtful diary I have written, and I do hope people will get to see it and think about it. There are many theories about why people are liberal or conservative. George Lakoff’s strict father/nurturant parent model is one I have respected but increasingly felt dissatisfied by. Yes, people have these kinds of models in their heads–but why? Physically, neurologically, where does it come from? That question is not quite answered in this diary, but I think it’s very related. Perhaps because people who reason less on emotion are less behaviorally reactive and more, well, nurturant.

(x-posted from Daily Kos)

Update [2005-8-3 15:5:37 by Elizabeth D]: Some people had questions about, for instance, whether I am wrongly over-simplifying everything to a dichotomy between rational and emotional. My point is more specific than that, and my replies below go into more detail about that and other questions.

Hello Booman Trib, I put a lot of thought and effort into this diary and it scrolled off into oblivion at Daily Kos, with half a dozen recommends and no substantive comments (I know, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, but it can be so heartbreaking), so please don’t fail me!

I spent several hours writing this diary, the first of this type or length I have done. But, as a dedicated and thoughtful Star Wars Prequels fan, I wanted to outline some of my thoughts about Star Wars and where and how it interesects with the real world, especially with politics.

I begin with summaries of the political plots of the three Prequel films–the machinations of Darth Sidious drive these stories, but they often fly right past viewers (and reviewers!), so I thought it might be useful to separate them out from the larger plot, in a somewhat simplified form. I then explain a little about the characters, a little about George Lucas’ approach to storytelling, and then a little about the intersection of the prequels with contemporary current events.

Star Wars is high fantasy. It’s mythology. People like to complain that it’s not “good mythology,” and to complain that George Lucas’ talk about mythology is pretentious. Star Wars is going to suck for you if you don’t accept the story as legitimate. It’s pathetically lame if we evaluate it as psychological fiction a la Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky–it doesn’t work on that level at all. (if you are convinced Star Wars is empty drivel I accept that… but I don’t agree so please indulge me for the duration of my diary!) Here is George Lucas explaining to Bill Moyers in 1999 about what level he is trying to tell the story on:

Lucas had a well-known friendship with mythology guru Joseph Campbell, whose Jungian interpretations of world mythology contributed to Lucas viewing Star Wars as an iteration of timeless human archetypes. In some sense, I think the saga is less a story about a particular individual who is seduced by evil and redeemed by the goodness of his child, then a representation of the concept that parents are redeemed by their children–and a host of other discrete concepts. Lucas names some in the Moyers interview:

Back to the politics: Revenge of the Sith was not designed as an anti-Bush polemic. The general story concept preexisted Bush’s presidency–The Phantom Menace obviously was made before Bush was elected. But when events in real life paralleled the story in such obvious ways, it made sense to draw the audience’s attention to some of the parallels. I think it was well done and appropriately done, and that it made a point that relates to Joseph Campbell’s concept of mythology: that myths are true. They represent things that were true long, long ago, are still true, and will remain true in the future, because they reflect intrinsic human nature.

If you try to line the plot and characters up point by point with current events, they actually do not fit very precisely at all. The analogies are loose. For instance, in some regards Palpatine parallels Bush, and in others, Anakin does. Bush is not metaphysical evil, like Palpatine, and he is not literally a dictatorial emperor. But he has manipulated America into war with lies and hidden alliances with trade entities and “military-industrial” types, and eroded American democracy in alarming ways. Bush was probably never a good-hearted cherub who went bad, like Anakin, nor is he naturally superior at anything. But he has been led down a dark path by a tunnel-vision notion of protecting what is most precious at all costs, and destroying it in the process. He is won over to the wrong kind of patriotism, inverted religious values, and black and white, with-me-or-against-me thinking. Anakin breaks Padme’s heart and Obi-Wan’s by embracing the inverse of their moral worldview. They both affirm “I don’t know you anymore.” “I hate you!” he cries to Obi-Wan, a groan from the depths of his soul, as he slides toward hell.

I don’t know some of these Republicans anymore– though “I know there is still good in them. I know it!” Maybe they will be redeemed by their children.

In the meantime, I am a Jedi. They can destroy everything I love and they can kill me, but they won’t make me other than a Jedi (so help me Force!).