Bernie Sanders and the Killer Mike Factor

Let's put something aside here. There is a very legitimate and challenging debate among an admittedly small radical left regarding support for Bernie Sanders' run for the Democratic nomination. Anyone who says it's not challenging, or that the other side doesn't have serious arguments for or against, is frankly a liar and/or doesn’t take politics seriously. I am far less interested in Sanders himself or his campaign than what they represent.

And after his showing in Iowa last night, one has to say that what he represents is something very real and very powerful. Case in point:

Putting aside the very real nature of the Democratic Party as a graveyard of social movements, putting aside Sanders' shameful support for Israel's apartheid state and his shit stances on US imperialism, what he is delivering in this video is probably the most unapologetically leftist speech delivered by a major political candidate since Jesse Jackson ran for the nomination in the 1980s.

This goes well beyond the fact that Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist, or that a majority of Democrats in Iowa may identify as the same. Getting corporate money out of politics, taxing the rich, instituting a livable minimum wage, prison reform, universal healthcare, free education. These are basic old school social democratic demands. They are absolutely not revolutionary or anti-capitalist on their own but they are certainly a huge break from the neoliberal policies that have dominated the politics of the US for the past few decades. If the age demographic breakdowns coming out of Iowa are to be believed, then we are seeing a very concrete political expression of young people who have yet to see any recovery in their post-recession living standards.

One of the criticisms that some people shared with me regarding my latest piece on Donald Trump’s employment of aesthetics was that I didn’t use the opportunity to compare the “aesthetics of Trump” to what some called “the anti-aesthetics of Bernie.” After all, while the Donald has famously aestheticized himself to the point where he cannot even relinquish his obviously expensive toupee, Sanders doesn’t even to bother combing his hair. I didn’t want to take that up in the piece partially because “anti-aesthetics” are not actually a thing. Mostly because, for as much of a contrast the “look and feel” of #FeelTheBern may represent, it really is a small glimpse of the kind of revelatory aesthetics that pour out of a genuinely liberatory politics. And it is always a mistake to confuse a corner of the canvas with the full landscape.

Nonetheless, from a radical artistic and cultural perspective, there is undoubtedly something interesting and frankly exciting happening here. And it gives us an opportunity to discuss something that grabbed my attention and yours two months ago:

This speech is pure fire. No two ways about it. Killer Mike is dramatic, passionate, eloquent, and there is not an ounce of “acting” in it. There are a few poetic turns of phrase in there; just enough to remind you that he is indeed a wordsmith (and a ridiculously good one at that) but not so much that he’s relying on schtick. Compared to the high orchestration of most establishment political campaigns, there is a feeling of relinquished control in Mike’s words. And by throwing in a few well-meaning nudges aimed at how a preacher might invoke Dr. King to introduce Sanders, Mike even manages to cut briefly cut through a bit of the treacly, sanitized stereotypes normally trotted out when a major candidate wants to court “the Black vote.”

Again, let’s be frank. There have been grievances put forth by the Black Lives Matter movement against Sanders that deserve to be taken seriously, and these grievances in some ways reflect a very real limitation for American racism to be tackled solely through electoral means. The Sanders camp has attempted to rectify how it addresses these shortcomings, and it likely will have to keep working on this. But I would like to draw readers’ attention to the segment in this video where Killer Mike – who has over the past year emerged as one of the sharpest voices in rap openly allied with Black Lives Matter – takes on a newspaper critic. The critic who in particular “broke my heart” according to Killer Mike is the one who wrote “I don’t listen to rap music and after tonight I won’t be listening to Bernie Sanders.”

There is a word for someone who won’t listen to a political candidate because of their vague association with a genre that has emerged out of the struggles of people of color. That word is “racist.” That this particular racist has a major metropolitan newspaper willing to give him a platform speaks toward how necessary the Black Lives Matter movement is right now. The writer’s logic is very much in line with the kind of broad generalizations trotted out by Sarah Palin when she asserts that Common’s visit to the White House was akin to letting a thug or murderer through the front door. It has very little to do with the actual content of the music and far more to do with the racialized stereotypes that have always been painted across hip-hop with an over-broad brush.

For the Sanders camp to, in the midst of all this, still put Mike onstage to introduce Bernie reveals at the very least a willingness to publicly put itself at odds with a virulent strain of conservative, “color-blind racism” that lives very prominently in mainstream American culture. It is, in a weird and rather imperfect way, reminiscent of the broad support Obama received from rappers and other artists from the hip-hop community during his first campaign in 2008. That support was frequently apolitical in nature, but it also reflected America’s demographic shift and, in some very vague ways, discontent with the neglected state of the country’s disenfranchised majority. Obviously we know how that played out, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that there was something real being expressed in the midst of the electoral dog-and-pony show.

Now, in 2016, the contradictions are sharper, but so are the possibilities of where things can go from here. What Sanders and Killer Mike are putting forth in terms of image is not exactly grassroots or bottom-up aesthetics. Insofar as they are the “politicization of aesthetics,” it is fairly tepid, concerned far more with content than with form, but it is obviously markedly different from what “establishment candidates” usually put forth, which is to say nothing of how it compares to Trump.

Is it radical enough? Well, what is “enough”? The full on expropriation of the culture industry into the hands of cultural workers? The subsequent institution of democratic control over record labels, art galleries, publishing houses? The providence of community resources so that artists might have a chance to explore the limits of their creativity without being hamstrung by marketability? Sure, but all of that is just rhetoric in the here and now. The challenge is to connect it to the politico-cultural expressions emerging at this particularly heady moment, to figure out what parts of these expressions we can move with the grain of and which ones should be hedged against.

I will not be voting Democrat whoever winds up on the ballot come November (and no, that’s not an “official Red Wedge position,” whatever the blue fuck that would mean). But I cannot deny that there is a certain “Berning” to be felt. The question springing from that is how to make it more than a feeling, more than aesthetics, no matter what happens in November. It’s not easily answered, but if we can ask it right then there might be something very promising on the other side. And it won’t be held back by a coin flip either.

Trump, the Freedom Kids and Fascist Aesthetics

It’s been a couple weeks since those cute little Riefenstahl clones put themselves on a stage of a rally for Donald Trump in Florida and gave us the GOP ear-worm of primary season. A lot has happened since then, and none of Trump’s actions really have diverted from his usual script of “Satan’s campaign for class president acted out on the front walkway of a Hobby Lobby.” Point being, you might well have forgotten about the “Freedom Kids” in the past couple weeks, just because Donald Trump is nothing if not consistently devious and brilliantly conniving.

Nonetheless, there is something instructive in the Freedom Kids, something that can shed light on at least one aspect of why Trump is such a phenomenon and maybe help clarify the persistent (and, frankly, annoying) debate about whether The Donald is in fact a true-blue fascist or whether the designation is little more than a (well-deserved) slur. And it's a something that can be illuminated by the always brilliant, always tragic, never sugar-coated Marxist scholar Walter Benjamin. Goes to show, once again, that Benjamin's shadow deserves to loom much larger over modern radical politics than we have perhaps allowed for.

My hope is that the article I had published about Trump and the Freedom Kids at In These Times today can maybe influence this discussion. Briefly: no, he’s not a fascist, but the savviness with which he employs art, aesthetics and fragmented ideas could very well have been pulled from Marinetti’s playbook.

First few paragraphs are below, full article is at ITT.

Donald Trump does not make it easy to refrain calling him a fascist.

To be sure, people have been willing to call him that well before Democratic non-entity Martin O’Malley called him that. Since then, the debate has not so much boiled over as been reduced to a simmer, percolating and waiting for the billionaire-candidate to say or do something that would once again push it back up over the top.

Enter the “Freedom Kids,” three adorable little girls who opened up Trump’s campaign stop in Tampa, Florida. To the tune of the “Over There”—the feel-good hit of trenches and mustard gas—they invited the audience to join them in celebrating as America’s enemies “face the music.” Behold... (Read more)

From the Cutting Room Floor: Bowie and Identity

My article on David Bowie's years in Berlin went up at Jacobin on Wednesday. More than anything I'm just glad it's no longer sitting on my "to-do" list, as it's one of the most difficult pieces I've ever written. There were a lot of ideas to draw together, so many things I could have chosen to write about, and most of those were scrapped. 

One of the strains I left on the cutting room floor was a bit of a glimpse into how I came to care about Bowie at all. I think it was the right call to junk that section, but I nonetheless wanted to post it here because it may push discussions about identity under capitalism should be regarded by Marxists and radicals preoccupied with art. Maybe. Or maybe not. I leave that to the reader to decide.

* * *

In 1997, I am fifteen and, characteristically, pissed off at everything. My CD collection is overflowing with the Clash, Fugazi, Black Flag and other essentials for the punk purist. But when I first hear David Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans,” I take notice. Buzzing, menacing, stylishly sardonic, it managed to seamlessly aim barbs at everything in Clinton’s United States I was instinctively estranged by but lacked the vocabulary to articulate.

This was Bowie in his Outsider persona, one of his reinterpretations that took themes of social alienation to a fairly literal degree. It was a trope that sat well with the surge in popularity of trip-hop, trance and electronic; musics of a cosmopolitan life sensing its own inner decay. 1997 was, after all, also the year of Daft Punk’s Homework, Radiohead’s OK Computer and the first singles of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. In line with this, Bowie’s Earthling incorporated a digital-industrial soundscape of jungle and drum and bass. Collaborating with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor -- whose iconic The Downward Spiral was itself just a few years old -- Bowie’s sense of artistic timing was deft. The gulf between America’s truth and self-image had been the object of his fascination before, and he was attempting a version of it for pre-millennial anxiety.

I wouldn’t realize it until years later, but “I’m Afraid of Americans” was one of those small but key artistic links in forging my own identity as an artist, a writer, and a socialist. It was a reference point peeking out, dressed in the the outlandish raiments of a weird quasi-alien irreverently gesticulating at the hypocrisy of evangelism, gun culture and globalization. Bowie’s own politics weren’t radical, even in that song, but they were just subversive and catchy enough to play a role in shaping my attitudes. When I heard from others that capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy deserved to have their collective heads torn off, the pounding electronic rhythms of the song -- along with the sound of many others -- had a grip on enough synapses for me to reply “well, that makes sense.”

Identities are fictions, but very real fictions. They are the crystallization of moments and meanings. They are manifestations, monadic for a fraction of a second, instantly losing their hard edges when others bring their own moments and meanings to them. They can be enforced, chosen, or a combination of both, signifiers of personal freedom or societal burden.

Identities are also inescapable, whether we are conscious of them or not. We are born into a world in which certain things are expected of us and are seen as natural. Why wouldn’t we internalize them, live them, reproduce them in our own existence? The now-departed David Bowie’s music and art provided jarring answers to that safe, rhetorical question time and again.

Hillbillies For Ecosocialism

Why play this song? Because Woody Guthrie was a hillbilly and a communist. And because both the Bundy militia and the vast majority of mainstream reportage on the Oregon wildlife refuge occupation would never mention that such a combination could exist.

Because while it's true there would be far less tolerance for the occupiers if they were Black, race and culture aren't the only factors at play. Because the Bundys don't represent rural America as a whole, and are in fact representatives of a wealthy and privileged minority. As a comrade recently pointed out to me, cattle barons are called "barons" for a reason.

Because the notion of "land management," while certainly tied up in all sorts of unsavory and racist hangovers from America's genocide, should ideally exist to prevent overgrazing and mis-use of the land by private interests. 

Because the rain does not follow the plow. Because the last time land was mismanaged to the degree the Bundys would like, it precipitated a previously unseen ecological crisis, devastating countless small farmers. (Guthrie was not a small farmer, but was impacted enough by the surrounding crisis that he too had to famously join the ranks of Okie migrants. And he came to realize the role that this unsustainable model of farming played in the Dust Bowl.)

Because the Bundys, should they get their way, will be free to overgraze and mis-use the land in a similar way. Because California is no longer "a garden of Eden" potentially providing refuge and respite, but is quickly becoming its own Dust Bowl. 

Because ghosts exist and haunt the present. Because the past is not only neither prologue nor really past; it has repeated itself on the same loop for so long that the worn groove is warping the record. 

Slingshots and Dabkes

May all your slingshots have Dabkes. May all your intifadas inspire dancing.

#شاهد| لقطة طريفة من شاب فلسطيني خلال مواجهات مع قوات الاحتلال تصوير: Faten Elwanتابعونا على انستغرام: https://instagram.com/shehabagency/

Posted by Shehab News Agency on Tuesday, October 13, 2015

On the Death of Rico Rodriguez and the Refugee Crisis

There is a strange kind of symbolism in the death of Rico Rodriguez coming as it did ten days ago, right as Europe's ongoing refugee crisis was becoming unavoidable. There is really no doubt that the man had soul and put it all into his trombone playing, that he was an important figure in the British 2 Tone scene and deserved all the recognition he is now receiving. But what stuck out to me upon first hearing the news was his age when he died: Rodriguez was eighty years old.

This may not seem particularly noteworthy on its own, but when you take into consideration the average age of most denizens of the original 2 Tone movement, it becomes clear that he was significantly older than most of them. If you watch closely this video of “A Message To You Rudy” (probably the best-known single from the Specials that he played on) you can clearly see that while most of the band members are around their early twenties, Rodriguez looks to be about in his early forties.

Youth subcultures, particularly in the turmoil of late 70’s Britain, are rather well-known for being mistrustful of older folks. Insert here the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” mantra that we all know so well; certainly a cliche but it also comes from somewhere. And the the young people comprising that first wave of punk and the British ska revival surely exhibited a markedly different outlook on life than their parents, whatever their political outlook might have been. The notion that the security and stability of the 50’s were over and that they weren’t coming back, that one must embrace the decay to fight and transcend it, this was a worldview that outright alarmed those who were old enough to remember World War II.

Rodriguez was an exception. What was it that commanded respect among the younger generations? Rodriguez wasn’t born in England. He was born to Afro-Cuban parents who moved to Jamaica when he was a baby. It wasn’t until 1961 that he came to Britain in search of work -- not quite the Windrush generation but pretty close. By the time of the 2 Tone movement he was already a veteran of the British roots reggae scene. So much so that acknowledging only his work with the Specials does something of a disservice to him.

In some ways, Rodriguez’s participation in the 2 Tone movement speaks to just how influential anti-racist ideas had become among so many British youth in the late 70’s. This influence was by no means absolute -- these were ideas that at many points had to do literal battle with racists and fascists attempting to exploit fears around immigration -- but it nonetheless created a sense that blacks and migrants were more a meaningful part of the social landscape than anything to be feared and kept at bay. Such ideas, when given enough credence, can create a kind of fluidity that tests a great many de facto subcultural assumptions (“no old folks allowed”), in turn creating the potential for it to transform from a subculture into a counter-culture.

Now, put these notions in context of the refugee crisis. Conservatives like David Cameron and Angela Merkel will wax tragic about the thousands of displaced while also warning against “chaos” should the integrity of their countries’ borders break down. Those of the far right will howl about protecting the sanctity of “my culture.” But figures like Rodriguez, the Specials and countless other artistic manifestations reveal just how dynamic culture becomes when its presumptions are thrown out the window and different expressions are allowed to collide. There is nothing inherently sacred about this or that country’s artistic traditions; in fact most of the time those selfsame traditions are themselves the result of different tendencies, ethnicities and experiences having the chance to meet. 2 Tone, one of the most recognizable and influential moments in post-war British music, would almost certainly never have happened if the government would have listened to Eric Clapton’s advice to “get the coons out.”

What I am arguing here -- and what I think the music of Rico Rodriguez and the Specials represents -- goes far beyond the bland liberal notions of multiculturalism that see disparate ethnic or racial experiences as respectfully standing next to each other without reaching across the boundary. What I am arguing is that there are entirely new cultural logics that get created out of such moments, evolutionary artistic steps that push art as a whole forward. Yes, 2 Tone was on the surface the meeting of “white culture” with “black culture,” but it also created something entirely new, with gestures and narratives that hadn’t been seen in quite the same fashion before. Outsider affinities between Jamaican reggae and British punk may have been there, but it took actual human agency to draw them out so starkly.

Naturally, none of this is possible in a world of closed borders. Those who seal themselves in a bubble will likely find their worldview warped and atrophied in very little time (look at how stultifyingly provincial most white supremacists seem and you’ll catch my drift). Cosmopolitanism is fluid, unpredictable, often dizzyingly anarchic, but it is also just about the only redeeming quality of life under capitalism. The 2 Tone movement, on a very instinctual and basic level, got this. If the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party and the thousands he spoke to on Saturday’s refugee solidarity rally in London are any indication, then it would seem that a growing number of today’s young folks get it too.

Sleepstreams

This is the first of several stories I have written as a reward for Red Wedge's annual fund drive, which promises a weird flash fiction story about or inspired by anyone who donates fifty dollars. The story below is for Joe Macare and Megan Groves, both longtime friends and supporters of Red Wedge and sometime contributors. It is greatly influenced by both a recent re-reading of Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air and research on the politics and science of sleep. If you'd like to find yourself trapped in one of my weird tales then donate to the fund drive!

* * *

City streets take on a certain quietude at 4am. It isn’t just the lack of people. Something fresh and the slightest bit moist turns over right around the time the clock strikes four. Why isn’t it three? Why not five? It’s not clear. Four o’clock in the morning just seems to be the time when everything becomes new and still, when the strenuous, anxiety-inducing motions of life finally cease long enough to give you time to take one precious breath so you can shore yourself up against whatever slow-simmering trauma might we waiting for you.

This is what Meg thought every morning when she went to the window. For two straight weeks she had been rising at 3:55 exactly and walking straight to the window so she could stare at the liminal daylights that were starting to peer out over the rooftops of their neighborhood. Something about the gray-bluish illuminations made the previous night’s trash recoil, as if it were almost ashamed that it hadn’t dried up and retreated to a corner out of respect for the light.

Of course, there was absolutely no human in sight, but this didn’t seem to characterize the impenetrable silence so much as organically spring from it. As if everyone instinctually obeyed and revered the city street’s demand for nothingness. Everyone, of course, except for Meg.

Meg had no idea why she did this. She hadn’t set her alarm to 3:55. It didn’t matter whether she went to bed early or late, or how tired she was. After she started noticing the pattern she had experimented with her sleep schedule. One night she took a bunch of melatonin at 5pm so that she could get a full nine hours in and get up at 2am. She nodded off at around 5:45pm; the next thing she knew she was wide-eyed, rolling straight out of her bed on the way to the window, the red numbers on the clock reading 3:55.

Another night she had attempted to stay up through to 4am so that she could investigate. Was there something unexplained happening in the apartment that was causing her to get up at 3:55 every morning? That too ended up a failure. As it happened she fell asleep on the couch at 3:50 exactly and woke up five minutes later, that same gravitational force pulling her toward the front window.

She tried everything. Different types of prescription and non-prescription sleep aids. Coffee, energy drinks and caffeine pills. None of it worked. No matter how late she stayed up, no matter how early she went to sleep, she was awake at exactly 3:55 and was at the front window at 4am, just in time for the flecks of pale blue to begin dancing across the sidewalk. She had no idea why. But as every morning passed with the same routine, she had become more unsettled, more anxious about what it might mean.

* * *

It was the stirring that woke Joe up every morning at 4:05. He knew why of course; that’s when Meg came back to bed. This in itself didn’t bother him. Truth be told, he was glad to be awoken, because the dream was what always put him on edge. Joe’s dreams had never been of the odd variety, and prior to the past two weeks he had been able to count the number of nightmares he had had on one hand.

What really unnerved him though was that the dream wasn’t so evidently terrifying. In fact, the dream itself was quite pleasant, but there was always something so unreal about it as to make him wonder what was underneath it. Something told him that it wasn’t anything in his own mind, and that’s what made him wake up feeling like he had an anvil on his chest. What made him scared wasn’t the dream, but the fact that he was scared of the dream.

Meg would ask Joe absent-mindedly whether he had the dream again; Joe would mumble something to the affirmative before then asking whether Meg had been at the window. She would answer yes, and both would eventually nod off, hoping the ethereal silence from outside could be kept at bay long enough for them to get back to sleep. Was it the ever-present din they longed for or the crushing noiselessness? Neither of them knew, and neither would ever find out because that was as far as they were willing to take the conversation.  

As Joe nodded off he would have that imperceptible moment of relief knowing that the dream was gone again for at least one more day. There would be no more formless shimmering pale yellows and blues that floated him over the asphalt and concrete and bounced off the windows he could never make out. No gorgeous tranquility that made him feel both wonderfully lost and as if he were a piece of nocturnal flotsam so hopefully out of place. No certainty that the world’s eyes were bearing down on him from some prismic entity he couldn’t quite make out.

None of those feelings would return. At least not until the next night. It was new and it was enough to freeze their stomachs solid. In the midst of an ever-fluid city, Joe and Meg were privy to the most motionless moments. Why them? What made these two chosen to see when everything stood stock still? It was enough to keep them up at night. But by 4:15, they were both fast asleep again.

Benjamania

I made another meme...

I think I may need professional help...

In all seriousness, however, there has been some good material released about Walter Benjamin lately. I read this as very positive. Benjamin's understanding of history, aesthetics, culture, modernity and so much else make him a crucial yet undervalued resource for any Marxist. I'm in full agreement with Neil Davidson and others who claim that Benjamin needs to be counted as part of a real, dynamic, revolutionary socialist tradition.

First is MacKenzie Wark's piece at Public Seminar insisting on the relevance of Benjamin's media theories for today. This is a particularly relevant argument given how dominant postmodernists like Marshall McLuhan are in contemporary media studies, imbuing a quasi-mystical power to the media itself. Benjamin's thoughts on the matter are far more material without becoming mechanical or deterministic. The more they can be integrated into a Marxist framework the better.

Then there's the audio from this presentation given at Berkeley by the authors of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings. The book was released last year (I have yet to read it myself but am planning to shortly) and the presentation was given this past November, but the audio made its way to the website of Heathwood Institute only yesterday.

The presentation is worth listening to. It's rambling and often quite dry, but its most interesting moments are when the authors are clearly grappling with how one best renders the life and work of Benjamin. One should listen to it with a few grains of salt on hand, however: the authors have some very unkind words for Terry Eagleton's Walter Benjamin: Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. Their gripe? That Eagleton claims Benjamin for Marxism against the efforts of a literary criticism divorced from a socialist project. Taking issue with this seems silly to me, given that there is no way to reasonably reckon with Benjamin's strengths as a critic without fairly approaching his Marxism. Parsing the two apart is rather like trying to pull apart the twines of a rope: you can certainly do it, but the rope loses all ability to fulfill its aim. Nonetheless, an interesting listen.

On a similar note, I'm currently working on an essay about what Benjamin's theories about the aestheticization of politics can teach us about Donald Trump. Stay tuned for it.