Proof 'Progress" Isn't

Really? Rape? Still?

I don’t know about you, but the massive amount of stories about rape in the last year is something out of the ordinary. During the presidential campaign we had various troglodyte chauvinist Republicans claiming rapes don’t cause pregnancy much, or women who were raped deserved it in some way. They were ‘easy’ and as such, this might be a case of ‘legitimate rape’ or “God intended’ rape. Or that ‘rape’ was a chance to have more children! This was a head-scratcher. Even though they knew that women vote, they couldn’t help themselves saying incredibly stupid and unscientific shit. 191,670 rapes were reported in 2005 in the U.S. – no small number.

Then the scandal in the U.S. military broke about the ‘rape cult’ there involving a large minority of men and officers, leading to possibly a third of all combat women being assaulted in some way. No real follow-up, no prosecution, all kept ‘in-house,’ like the Catholic Church. Even some officers in charge of looking into assaults on females were accused of harassment and assault. This was no surprise, as anti-female, anti-gay, anti-hippie, anti-foreigner slurs are all part of basic training, and have been for many years. After all, not all men join the ‘volunteer’ army due to economics or patriotism. Many join because they want to be a ‘man’ – whatever that seems to them. And being a ‘man’ in the military means hating female characteristics. Even male draftees in Vietnam who were not macho enough were abused.

Then there was the publicizing of rapes, first of foreigners, then of many local women in India, with Mumbai and Delhi being the capitals of Indian rape. 24,000+ rapes were reported in one year, but campaigners estimate the real number is far greater. Massive demonstrations followed, but the cops and government, as usual, sat on their hands. Rapists are typically not convicted. Domestic rape is not illegal. Of course, India is one of the most chauvinist cultures in the world. Sexual harassment in Mumbai is endemic. Rape has doubled between 1990 and 2008, as neo-liberal economic polices have grown. Arundhati Roy, in her recent book, “Walking with the Comrades” (reviewed below) revealed how many rural Indian women have joined the armed revolutionary groups in the forests because it is the one way to get away from Indian chauvinism.

Recently Serena Williams, a rich black woman, said that the drunk girl in Steubenville is an example of why girls shouldn’t be drunk or they’ll get raped. This ‘blame the victim’ moralism is big among the black and white middle-class. Or male comedians making rape ‘jokes.’ You gotta wonder.

U.S. colleges like University of North Carolina, Dartmouth, Occidental College, Amherst, Swarthmore, University of Montana, Oklahoma State, University of Notre Dame, Yale and UC Berkeley have all recently been accused of ignoring sexual assaults - treating them as private matters like the Catholic Church and the military do.  Now Chile is in the midst of a controversy over a pregnant 11-year-old who was raped, and in which Chilean law (also heavily influenced by the Catholic Church) forbids an abortion.  These kind of events are repeated all over the world.  

This is astonishing really. At this time in history, women are still treated like sexual dog-meat across the whole world. The backwardness this reveals, even in so-called ‘progressive’ cultures, is extremely significant. As Chairman Mao said, “Women hold up more than half the sky” – ok, I paraphrase – and yet women are demonized, belittled, raped and killed, all promoted by various male chauvinist conservative cultures – Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, even Buddhist. Those cultures do not stand alone without a material foundation, much as shallow Democrats would have you believe it is all just a culture war with ‘bad people.’ Women provide vast amounts of unpaid or low-paid labor across the world (See review of “In Letter of Blood & Fire,” below), and in order to keep this coming, women HAVE to be kept in their place. It is an economic imperative for an exploitative system.

As if to emphasize this, reports have just been made about rape of female Latino farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley by supervisors in the fields.   Of course, some are 'illegal' so they are afraid to report the rapes and harassment. And now we have reports that a Norwegian woman in Dubai was raped, and then jailed for having 'sex outside of marriage.'  Yeah, you got that right.  The Muslim-crazy millionaire sheiks of this country still believe in jailing rape victims.  To top that off, female genital mutilation remains almost universal in Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, and Egypt, with more than nine out of 10 women and girls aged 15-49 being cut. In countries such as Chad, Gambia, Mali, Senegal, Sudan, or Yemen, there has been no discernible decline in female genital mutilation... even with laws against it.  Its not the laws - it is the male chauvinist version of the religion and the subsequent culture that dictate these behaviors.  And of course, the 'laws' are not enforced.

It is also a ‘male bribe’ paid to some men in order that they can at least say, “well, I’m not a woman, thank god” much as whites in the U.S. south and now north can say, ‘well, at least I’m not black.” This divides the working class, and diverts male anger from capitalism to women – and mostly to the women they know. According to a recent WHO study, 80% of all assaults are by people known to the attacker. World-wide according to WHO, a third of all women are raped or assaulted. I suspect economic and material conditions play a large role in this.

Rape is merely a physical manifestation of economic and political domination, of the class system, of inequality, of capitalism, projected onto personal relations. Yet women have the power to upset every traditional capitalist society in the world, if they would only gain the confidence to do so. This has been lacking for years, especially in the U.S., as many women think everything is solved, and follow in the trail of the Democratic Party. Because, after all, oppression oppresses. Many don’t understand this. Many think oppression only creates ‘nobility.’ It doesn’t. It damages people, sometimes permanently, sometimes in many ways that people don’t even recognize. Fear and passivity are results of this. Even being out after dark is still a fear, so more fearful women limit their mobility.

Take Title 9, adopted in the U.S. in 1972. Title 9 changed a lot of things. For the generation of women who grew up in the U.S. prior to Title 9 (women now in their 50s and 60s) many don’t have many physical skills – self-defense, bicycling, sports skills, physical strength in lifting, etc. Some swim or garden, and that is about it. After Title 9 women were allowed to participate in sports in schools, and now many young women can do more than swim. Women are at least 1/3rd of bicyclists in our town, if not more, which means they can handle that bit of risk and effort. Younger women are less reticent to carry heavy things, to play sports, to run, to sweat, to box or fight, to canoe and portage, to roller-blade – you name it.

Affirmative action programs in federal and state, and later private employment, allowed women to enter some blue-collar working-class jobs that demand physical strength – laws that did not exist in the ‘60s or prior. Of course, these laws don’t address the role of class backgrounds, in which working-class and poor women do much more physical work than middle and upper-class women anyway, something no ‘law’ can change. Many middle class women look down on physical work as something fit for ‘washer-women,’ ‘fish-wives’ and ‘farm wives.’ Somehow they think it makes them less feminine and lowers their class standing. What it actually reveals is that they have not really absorbed the women’s movement.  Of course, middle-class men are no different.

Title 9 and affirmative action ultimately allowed some women to defend themselves better, and deflect the view of many men that women are mostly just wimps and physically helpless. There are even some female action stars in films, reflecting this development – Linda Hamilton in Terminator II, Angelina Jolie, Kate Beckinsale, etc. However, even the tougher women in the military are still raped and abused, so this is no ultimate defence - because the system protects rape and violence. Women are still second-class citizens – and in many places in the world, third-class. Yet they have one of the keys to the class war, if only they would use it.

P.S. - As if to emphasize the point on bringing back a real women's movement to the U.S., thousands of Texans flooded the Texas Legislature in Austin Tuesday night (25th) to back up a long, long filibuster by Democrat Wendy Davis against abortion restrictions.  Not content to watch on U-Tube or comment on Twitter, the huge crowd - in person - helped derail a vote to virtually end the right of abortion in Texas.  It was a small re-play of Wisconsin, an occupation of the government chambers.  What we really need is a permanent occupation of the government chambers, as representative democracy is a sham.  We need real and permanent 'participatory democracy,'  not a 'representative' democracy owned by big business, the bourgeois state and corporate media.

Red Frog
June 23, 2013

A Working-Class Hero Is Something To Be

“Searching for Sugar Man,” Documentary by Malik Bendjelloul, 2012

This British/Swedish documentary is a heartbreaker.  Sixto Rodriquez made two albums of political folk music in the early 70s, only to disappear in Detroit.  He became a huge star in South Africa (and Australia) but his records sold almost nothing in the U.S. after being issued by a small black-owned Detroit label, Sussex.  As it was explained, who cared about a Latino guy who sang psychedelic folk music?  But in South Africa he was known as “Rodriquez” – much as we know that Memphis boy as “Elvis.” 

Rodriquez was so big in South Africa because at the time young white South Africans were waking to the fact that apartheid was corrupt and the Afrikaner dictatorship smothering.  Rodriquez’s songs talked of rebellion, sex, bad jobs, a repressive government and became anthems of sort to South African youth, rising in the charts, to the point where every liberal household had a copy, and they were played at every party.  His lyrics are reminiscent of the '60s political Dylan before ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ but sung by a sweeter, clearer and more soulful voice.  Some say sounding more like Dylan crossed with Donovan.  Rodriquez has more soul in his voice than 99% of folk singers because, I think, he's grounded and real.  No mechanical crap or fake reality.  The apartheid regime had a strict policy of censorship and coupled with international sanctions, did a job of cutting off the whole population from world culture.  So Rodriquez became an underground sensation.  His albums encouraged a new generation of Afrikaner rockers and folk singers to become public. 

The film focuses on two Cape Town white South Africans who decide to track down what happened to Rodriquez and also to ‘follow the money.’  They had been huge fans in their youth – one ended up running a record store; the other was a journalist.  The rumor in South Africa was Rodriquez had killed himself on-stage in some dramatic way.  In the late 1990s they put up a web-site, asking for information.  In the process they find the producer of those Sussex recordings who their information shows received the money from Rodriquez' hit records.  He laughs at them and surreptitiously threatens them about money from ‘so long ago.’ 

Eventually they receive an e-mail from one of Rodriquez’s daughters.  Incredulously, they ask her how Rodriquez died.  She replies – “He’s alive and living in Detroit.”  They are dumbfounded – sort of like being told Elvis is still in south Memphis, just a lot older.  Or Jim Morrison is living in the Faubourg St. Germain. 

Rodriquez is the real thing, boyo.  He’s still a ‘deconstruction worker’ in the slums of Detroit, gutting and tearing down old houses and buildings as part of a demolition crew.  He still lives in the same house near downtown.  He made very little money doing this, but he’s been doing it since the early 70s.  At the time he was a man of mystery, playing in dumpy clubs with his back to the audience, like Miles Davis or Robert Johnson facing his corner.  Many thought he was homeless.  No one knew what happened to him except his 3 daughters.  They talk about his run for mayor; his political activism; his taking them to museums and educational events.  To this day, Rodriquez is a working-class hero, in the best and most real, John Lennon, sense.  Rodriquez is a modest man, liking his work, not intent on being famous.  But it happened.

Rodriquez never knew he was big in SA or Australia, because evidently he never got any royalties.  They invite Rodriquez to Cape Town for a concert.  He arrives at the airport with his daughters, who expect some weird reception and a concert at a small low-key club.  Instead two limos pull up.  They think they are for someone else and step aside so the important people can get to the doors.  The limos are for them.  The concert in a huge hall is sold out – 20,000 screaming fans.  Rodriquez plays with local musicians who already know all his songs.  His voice is still just as good.  Journalists thought that someone was playing a trick, faking his return to life to make money.  The minute he starts singing, they all know he is the real deal.

His two albums, “Cold Fact” and “Coming From Reality” move up the charts once again – even a bit in the U.S. which is so hostile to political music.  Rodriquez has come back to his real home – which is South Africa evidently.  He gives any money earned on a series of concerts away to his family and friends, and continues to work tearing out buildings and living in the city.  Modest, political, unassuming – and talented. 

(Read other reviews about music, “Laurel Canyon,” “Let Us Now Praise the Dead,” “Just Kids” and “In Search of the Blues,” all reviewed below. Also specifically on political music, “33 Revolutions Per Minute: The History of Protest Songs.”  Rodriquez should be mentioned there, but he’s not.)

Red Frog

June 19, 2013

Ludd Was Right!

“In Letters of Blood and Fire – Work, Machines and the Crisis of Capitalism,” by George Caffentzis, 2013

Caffentzis is a Marxist philosopher in Maine, U.S. who writes in support of proletarian movements, no matter their formal content, while shying away from Leninism – or what passes for Leninism nowadays.  Oddly, he is probably more in tune with working-class anarchism and seems to be a ‘state capitalist’ in his analysis of pre-1989 Russia and present-day China.   He sees the class struggle not just in the activities of factory workers, but working people in every area of life.  This book is a series of essays, written from 1980 to 2010.  One of his main insights is that alienated work and the struggle against the alienated work regime is a constant thread in society.  Workers and ‘non-workers’ attempt to recover their time and energy from the capitalists, in either obvious, or in subtle and sneaky ways.  Your time, of course, is one of the main things capitalists purchase - or compel.  And ultimately you run out of time, while they plan to be here forever.

Caffentzis is a mercurial thinker, and covers many issues in a swirling analysis, but ultimately  concentrates on several key topics.  He takes on Sweezy and Monthly Review indirectly and several leftist thinkers like Jeremy Rifkin and Antonio Negri directly, debunking the latter two quite handsomely. He also enters into polemics with the ‘communitarians,’ the 'autonomous" Marxists and bourgeois neo-Freudians like Foucault.  I will track his essays, though of course I can only sketch them. 

In his first essay, Caffentzis quite literally comes out with all thoughts blazing.  This fruitful essay concerns the crucial period of the 1970s, when the ‘energy’ crisis and the ‘profit’ crisis came together.  Caffentzis asserts that high energy prices are the way capital can extract high profits across all sectors of the economy and all populations, and this is why ‘energy’ suddenly became key in the world-wide profit strategy.  He also points out that profit rates were at a low level during this period, given all the rebellions among youth, workers and women, which resulting in capital changing its basic strategy from a Keynesian one to a return to aggressive profiteering, society be damned.  I.E. neo-liberalism and the commodification of everything.

The two trends in capitalist thought on the ‘environmental’ issue are the technological fix and the return to primitive agriculture, both of which he rejects.  Caffentizis makes comparisons to physics as reflecting, not fully scientific ideas, but also capitalist ideas (see the review of “The Ten Assumptions of Science,” below), especially concerning the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  The bourgeois attempt to get around the law of ‘entropy’ - the 2^nd Law - is computerization, according to Caffentzis.  (Which oddly enough, corresponds to Borchardt’s theory that there are forces counter-indicative to the 2^nd Law.) Caffentizis supports the theory that high ‘constant capital’ invested in many machines can drain profitability – citing Marx on the falling rate of profit.  This is due to the fact that labor is no longer being as directly exploited, contradicting Monthly Review who feel this was a mistake of Marx’s.  In essence, to Caffentizis the ‘intellectual’ workers of Silicon Valley at Apple are paid for by the labor of the Chinese Apple workers at Foxconn- the River Rouge of the modern economy.  High mechanization and computerization, replacing labor, essentially has to be compensated somewhere else, and it is the ‘low constant capital’ areas (or low organic composition of capital) where this happens.   Capital is a ‘system’ that aims for an average rate of profit across the whole web of exchanges, not just in each isolated unit, and hence capital flows between capitalists, not just between workers and bosses. 

Monthly Review does not mention the computer revolution as one of the key production waves that has kept capitalism profitable, unable to understand it is equal to the railroads and the automobile as a stimulus to capitalist profits.  I think this is because this contradicts their theory of a ‘tendency’ to constant stagnation.   I sent my review article on this issue, “The Ogligopolists Unite  - The Endless Crisis …“ (reviewed below) to its author, JB Foster, who never replied. 

Caffentzis is especially attuned to unpaid housework as part of the maintenance and reproduction of the working class, considering it as mostly a female issue. The rebellion by women on this issue was part of the women's movement in the 1970s in the U.S.  This was made an international issue by Marilyn Waring, a New Zealand parliamentarian and feminist in 1988, who wrote, "If Women Counted."  However, many U.S. working-class men contribute around the home by repairing cars or the house; by building additions; by doing the taxes, paying bills or doing yard work or other traditionally ‘male’ tasks.  Since the 70s, young men are also cooking, cleaning and taking care of children.  So unpaid ‘housework’ in a wider definition, has become more and more a burden on not just on women, but both members of the family in advanced capitalist countries.  In other parts of the world, women still ‘hold up more than half the sky.’ And it is still unpaid.

Essay Two is titled “Mormons is Space.”  Yes.  In essence, capitalism’s utopia would be the denatured astronaut/robots of space-work, who have no messy human or natural issues.

Essay Three is a refutation of Rifkin and Negri.  According to Caffentzis, both based their analyses on the growth of machine/computer technology.  Rifkin believed this would lead to the ‘end of work’ - except non-profit, volunteer work; while Negri, amazingly enough, believed this would create a class of ‘computer programmers’ who would be a vanguard of independent communists.  If you’ve spent any time around computer IT people, you know these people are many times contract workers; isolated in limited time project work; can be on a 24 hour call, so that the definition between work and ‘home’ is increasingly blurred; consider themselves to be independent, ‘sole contractors,’ ‘smart’ and intellectual, ‘above’ others; and are also always afraid of the cheap labor HB1 visa substitute coming in.  They are nowhere near any kind of collective ‘communist’ vanguard - though they may be a libertarian vanguard!  As to Rifkin, he was a right-wing leader of SDS in the 60s and wrote a dreadful, anti-communist book on that experience. His idea that computers and machines would replace work assumes that capitalism doesn’t need surplus value, rent and interest.  In addition, who maintains the machines when they always break, or mines the materials, transports the materials and builds the machines in the first place?  This is a total fantasy under a capitalist regime.  Again, you can see Caffentizis continues to understand the value of ‘labor power’ in every situation – never negating it. 

This essay is in contradiction to the thread of the ‘post-industrial’ society or the ‘knowledge society’ or the ‘service society’ that somehow replaced the nitty-gritty of agricultural, industrial, white-collar, pink or unpaid home labor in the imagination of the capitalist propagandists.   These kinds of theories are part of the magic of the ‘disappearance’ of the working class and work itself. When in fact the working class is the majority in the world, and with small farmers and peasants, constitute the overwhelming bulk of humanity.

Essay Four is about the continuing enclosure of the commons.  Caffentzis makes the odd statement that ‘capitalism has not fully started yet’ because it is still attempting to turn everything into a commodity.  Revolts against privatization are constant:  water (Cochabama, Bolivia - see review of “Secret History of the American Empire” and “Rebel Cities,” below); the forests (India – see review of “Walking With the Comrades,” below); artistic production (trade negotiations going on now between the neo-liberal US delegation and the French - from 6/7/2013 Guardian); intellectual property and the internet (Concerning free software and non-corporate sites. See review of “Cypher Punks” below.); charter schools (The Chicago Teachers Strike); GMO / Monsanto patented corn, etc. 

Caffentzis’ example is how hoboes ‘socialized’ the private railroads yards, cars and tracks in the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S., when the unemployed road the rails in their hundreds of thousands, which only stopped during World War II.  The U.S. Occupy Wall Street tried the same thing to ostensible ‘public parks,’ as did radicals in Egypt, Greece, Spain and Bahrain  Right now Turkish youth and workers occupying Gezi Park in Istanbul against Turkey’s neo-liberal Islamist government, have just been thrown out by police.  The government is trying to destroy a public park for a fake historical building and a mall development. (See review of “Rebel Cities’ below, on the geography of struggle.)

Essay Five continues his polemic against theories of post-industrial ‘cognitive capitalism’ presented by Negri and others. Caffentzis agrees that labor is key in the ‘knowledge’ economy (which he says actually has no definition according to these thinkers.  His definition is that it creates commodities of intellectual property...) and praises the ‘autonomous Marxists” for concentrating on the new (or increased) forms of work that have developed in the computer economy. Yet he maintains these are only more rarefied forms of commodified labor, paid for by low-capital investment labor somewhere else.  The autonomous Marxists claim that the work of IT/creative workers is so highly developed that capital no longer controls their work, and they have in fact broken its bonds.  They are in essence free agents, sort of like ‘rock stars’ who write their own ticket.  A, even very few rock stars write their own ticket, and b, most IT/creative workers are not Steven Speilberg.  Most rock stars, when taken over a lifetime, are actually temps.  It is the same with actors.  Reality is far more prosaic.

Essay Six is about a perpetual motion machine – an “SRA’ - a robot that can create and maintain itself, thus eliminating all human labor.  The capitalist dream, sort of the new version of alchemy. This seemingly theoretical exercise shows how a machine like this – or ‘tending’ in this direction, could be profitable even though they involve no human labor, thus create no surplus value.  But it could make profits because it would suck profits from low organic capital industries.  In a way, this explains what is happening in the world between high organic capital industries and low.   Caffentzis cites the prohibitively expensive ‘nuclear’ power industry as one such example of a system tending in that direction.  Profits in the system as a whole are ‘average,’ so a sweatshop that squeezes the most out of its human cattle must pay some bigger capitalist piper somewhere else, thus moving some of its profits upwards.  Caffentzis actually creates a picture that explains the present state of world-wide capitalist production and finance quite simply.   The Dickensian slums of Brazzaville and the tony suburbs of Silicon Valley are intimately connected.

Caffentzis says the next target for increased exploitation is Africa if any new kinds of high constant capital industries take off.

In a sense, Marxism explains crises through the stagnation of profits, debt and asset bubbles, over-production, imperial and class conflict.  Keynes explains crisis through ‘under-consumptionism.’  One mainly looks at all forms of labor as key.  The other puts its primary value on the consumer.  Caffentzis is quite rigorously on one side, not the other.   Any time someone starts babbling about the consumer having ultimate power, you know they are on the wrong track.  (See “No Local,” and “Reviving The Strike,” both reviewed below.)

The next several essays deal with an historical analysis of how Marx dealt with the question of machines, and the bourgeois ‘ideology’ of machines, as part of the political struggle in the 1800s.  The capitalist plan was that machines then, like now, were to overcome and replace humans.  Still hasn’t happened.  Caffentzis traces the machine ideology from simple machines, to ‘heat’ engines and now to the modern computer, or what he calls, as philosophers do when they can't find a simple word, the “Turing” machine.  Alan Turing developed the fullest idea of the computer in the 1930s, though Babbage had been influential, even in Marx’s time, on earlier ideas.  Caffentzis shows that Marx incorporated the first and second laws of thermodynamics in his theories, and that he was familiar with many writings on machines, though not Babbage.  Caffentizis wants to update Marx here and challenges theories that intellectual property is really created by ‘immaterial production,’ as some theorists assert.  He also repeats that machines alone do not create value. 

The last shorter essays are on war, crisis theory, social reproduction and the 2008 crash, invoking similar themes to the above. He ‘seems’ to take on Baran and Sweezy’s theory that military production is merely a sinkhole for excess profits, which I’ve always found somewhat suspect.  Without the ‘armed bodies of men’ where would the capitalists be?   How would they insure their global control?  In the imperialist era, the lead imperialist HAS to have a large military sector.  And two, military production is ALSO quite profitable, in spite of its high 'organic capital' composition.  The U.S. is the largest arms dealer in the world, and sucks billions of dollars out of sheikdoms, dictatorships, Isreal and so-called parliamentary democracies. They also benefit with ‘aid’ packages that countries use to borrow from the US for US weapons.  In other words, the military and financial sectors create more profits out of arms, not the reverse. 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 16, 2013

Happy Bloom's Day - June 16, 1904.  Celebrate what critics have voted the greatest novel ever - "Ulysses," by the exiled Irishman, James Joyce. Today is the day that novel describes, a day in Dublin.  Joyce chose this day because it was the day Joyce first went out with Nora Barnacle, who 'made him a man.'  You don't want to know, but that was Ireland after all.

Not Really Faulkner

“Child of God,” by Cormac McCarthy, 1973

The title is sarcasm.  McCarthy, a dark horse who sees himself as our new Faulkner, penned a novel that is more like a sick potboiler of horror than a literary work ala Faulkner.  Faulkner wrote un-sensational Southern noir swimming in Jim Crow, unlike the loyal Catholic Flannery O’Connor, who also wrote stories dipped in horror.  Unlike McCarthy and O’Connor, Faulkner never overdid it.  Faulkner's writing seems real, if hallucinatory.  McCarthy in this story instead plumbs the depths of hillbilly stereotypes about loners living in the hills of East Tennessee - a guy named Lester Ballard.  I will not reveal the horror story here, but only to say it becomes so weird it is laughable. My Precious!  Tell me this is based on a real news story, please?  McCarthy claims it is based on a real person.  If this is true, then it only confirms all the hatred Northerners have for hillbillies and ‘red-necks.’  It is McCarthy’s gift to them.

The question is why would someone bother writing about such an outlier?  Many of McCarthy’s books – not all - dwell on violence, isolation and perversion as somehow normal.  Is this in a sense a reactionary writer offering up demons as the real heart of humanity?  Certainly in this novel it is so.

There is a religious angle to this, but damned if I can figure it out.  A plea that even the most barbaric humans must be pitied and forgiven? Somehow, it doesn't work here. 

McCarthy is a poet with words.  ‘Suttree,’ one of his best novels and poetic at that, took 20 years to write, published in 1979.  This slim volume was published in 1973 and seems like a strange warm-up to ‘Suttree.’ Both take place in East Tennessee, where McCarthy hung out for several years as a poverty-stricken tramp.  It is set in Sevier County, around Knoxville, which was a pro-union county in the Civil War (See review of “Guerrillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front,” below.) 

Back to this book.  Lester Ballard is a loner and ace shot and lives on squirrels, stolen eggs and vegetables in a cave hard by the Great Smoky Mountains.  He's sort of like Gollum from LotR.  Daddy was in an off-shoot of the Klan, the White Caps.  The story is told from Ballard’s point of view, from the view of the people in town who reflect on him and in just plain third person.  Eventually Ballard goes from loner to totally alone – outside society in every way.  Is this a cautionary tale about the endpoint of total male ‘independence’?   The fantasy of living in the woods without anyone or anything?  Some would see it that way too.  In a sense, only human society restrains some people from falling off the edge. 

Cormac McCarthy wrote “The Road,” and “Suttree.” (Both reviewed below)

And I did not buy it at Mayday Books

Red Frog

June 5, 2013 

The Reason for Those Saggy Pants

“The New Jim Crow – Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” by Michelle Alexander, foreword by Cornel West, 2010

This instant classic is the product of a liberal black civil rights attorney who suddenly realized that she had not been paying attention to the key issue of black time – the mass jailing of hundreds of thousands of black, mostly male youth in the U.S.  This so-called ‘post-racial’ society – isn’t.  The U.S. has the highest incarceration rates of any country in the world – higher than all the ‘bad’ countries in U.S. mythology – Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, North Korea.  2.3 million now sit in jail, while another 5.4 million are on parole, or in some other continued chain to their time as felons.  

Alexander clearly links indentured servitude, slavery, the subsequent forced labor regime associated with Jim Crow, and its present successor, mass incarceration, usually for ‘drug crimes’ – as natural evolutions of white supremacy.  (A history of mass convict leasing under Jim Crow, “Slavery by Another Name,” reviewed below.)   The U.S. government was set up on the basis of making accommodations to slave holders.  Hence the existence of a Senate, which reduced the influence of populous states; the electoral college, which took voting control out of the hands of the voting population; federalism, which accommodated ‘states rights,’ and the ‘compromise’ that a black person was 3/5ths of a person, as stated in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution.  (now repealed.)  In essence, she says the U.S. was founded on white supremacy and that still is an essential part of its regime of labor and social control.  It has only changed form.

Alexander does a short tour of U.S. history and the evolution of systems of black labor control.  Only in short periods was this system disrupted - after the Civil War during Reconstruction; after the end of World War II and the return of black veterans and after the victories of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s.  She carefully notes that it was in periods of unity between black and white workers that the planters, big farmers and capitalists instituted laws against the fraternization of the ethnicities.  This happened after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, which lead to the wholesale adoption of formal black slavery and the ending of white indentured servitude.  It also happened after the successes of the Populist movement of the 1890s to unite whites and blacks, which brought in strengthened Jim Crow laws as a response.  Roosevelt’s policies, which benefited black and white workers, also angered the segregationists, but still allowed them Democratic Party control in the South. The present hostility to black and Latino felons is the result of the successes of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, which united southern blacks with northern whites.

The response to the wave of social change in the 1960s was ‘law and order’ politics.  These politics were first mentioned by Barry Goldwater, then made weak government policy by Richard Nixon, enforced and institutionalized by Ronald Reagan with support from a majority of Democrats, and fully embraced by the Democratic Party under “new” Democrat Bill Clinton.  Alexander even calls Clinton ‘the president, more than any other, responsible for the current racial under-caste” given his passage of ‘three strikes and you’re out” and the turning of welfare into limited block grants in the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.” (an Orwellian name, if any.)  Federal money from welfare then flowed into the burgeoning prison-industrial complex instead. Clinton, of course, grew up in the segregationist state of Arkansas. The 'Drug War' is essentially the name this whole process was subsumed under, though drug use was going down when Reagan proposed it. (Read "The Marijuana Diaries," fictional books about weed, reviewed below)

This is the drug-war/law and order state we live in today, under a half-black president.  Evidently, the White House Negro does not notice.  Given U.S. history, only a class-based approach will unify blacks and whites, and break the ‘racial bribe’ paid to white workers.  Indeed it is the only thing in history that has.  This is something the U.S. Marxist and communist movements have understood very well, and which has been a basis for their organizing.

THE ROUNDUP

Alexander, an attorney, goes into case detail on the Supreme Court decisions that have made the drug war easy for the government.  “Consent” searches and ‘pretext” car searches allow cops to search numerous people and their property without cause, negating the 4^th Amendment to be free of unreasonable search & seizure.  Under Reagan, money began to flow to police departments for seized goods, and the Pentagon and federal programs started providing military weaponry and massive amounts of money to start anti-drug programs.  Local SWAT teams based on Pentagon funding have grown exponentially, and are now most used in ordinary drug arrests.  The Supreme Court, in essence, has become the chief drug prosecutor.  Obama increased funding to Clinton’s federal drug programs, both COPS and the Byrne grant program, which increases payments to localities for each drug arrest.  Yes, the more you arrest, the more you get, courtesy of the federal government.

INCARCERATION

Alexander shows how the drug war is carried out against minorities, even though all statistics show white people are more liable to be drug sellers and drug users.  The media, in hand with the government, has cooperated in showing ‘crime’ and especially ‘drug crime’ to be an overwhelmingly black and Latino issue – crack whores, gang-bangers, ghetto dealers and the like.  (See review of “Bad Boys, Bad Boys” below, about television crime shows.)  Her legal approach cites Supreme Court case after case that protects prosecutors, jury selection and the court system from any accusations of racial bias except based on direct racist statements.  The public defenders offices have been defunded and most defendants who are poor plead guilty to avoid mandatory sentencing guidelines.  Police have been allowed by Supreme Court decisions to base stops on ethnic characteristics – as long as they are not the ‘only’ reason - thus justifying racial profiling.  Statistics that show black and Latino people to be the overwhelming victims of arrest, property seizure, jailing, convictions and prison time for drug offenses have been ruled inadmissible.  Since no one any longer is stupid enough to clearly state racial bias, the practice instead has been institutionalized as ‘color-blind.’ So smoking weed while white (SWWW) is far less dangerous than driving or walking while black. (DWB & WWB)

PERMANENT SECOND CLASS STATUS

After conviction, felons in many states are barred from voting, cannot serve on juries, are kicked out of federal public housing, lose food stamps, become ineligible for student loans and are forced to tell prospective employers that they are felons, thus reducing their chance of ever getting a decent job.  Picture that you are a former drug ‘felon’ and now you cannot even vote the shitbags out of office that put you there.  These votes, of course, would have turned the tide in many elections. Given this treatment once released, many turn to crime as the only way to survive.  A majority end up homeless.  Many cannot pay the large fines, costs and charges associated with probation, and end up in debt, even if they have a job; or worse, back in prison.  Alexander calls this continuing form of discrimination, which is not used in almost any other country in the world, part of the new Jim Crow.   It relegates felons to second-class citizenship in a permanent under-caste.

She both compares mass incarceration to old Jim Crow, showing the similarities and differences.  The similarities are somewhat obvious.  The differences are the criminal justice system is not openly based on racial categories, unlike Jim Crow.  White stoners can end up in jail next to black brothers (although some whites were also imprisoned in labor camps in the South during Jim Crow for the same bogus reasons as blacks…)  Her third point is that there is black support for ‘get tough’ policies, especially from black churches and upper-middle class blacks. 

Alexander discusses the shame that permeates the black (and presumably Latino community too) about incarceration.  You do not mention it in your church, your job, even your family.  Black churches especially maintain a moralistic tone that puts ‘felons’ on the outs with ‘good black people.’  This moralism has led to the growth of high-profile Republicanism among some blacks, as well as upper –middle class scolds like Bill Cosby and Barak Obama lecturing on ‘missing black fathers.’  As Alexander points out, no one wants to face the fact that all the ‘missing black fathers’ are in fact locked up in jails!  Where have all the black men gone? ask the many single black women.  Into the prison/industrial complex, my dear! 

Alexander describes ‘gangsta rap’ as a modern-day minstrel show, celebrating the very prison of oppression that has incarcerated so many black men, many times for a majority audience of whites, who see it as confirmation that blacks naturally should be behind bars, as it is part of their ‘culture.’

Alexander criticizes the modern ‘civil rights’ movement’s focus on affirmative action, which many times only benefits the black elite.  Obama ran with a prominent 'drug warrior,' Joe Biden; had Rahm Emanuel, a proponent of stricter drug laws and slashing welfare, as his Numero Uno; and appointed to the DOJ Eric Holder, who campaigned in D.C. for harsh mandatory minimum sentencing for marijuana.  (Read commentary on Eric Holder, "Fire Holder, Don't Hold Your Fire," below.) Instead, she echoes Martin Luther King’s later call for a ‘revolution’ – not piecemeal reforms of the structural racism evinced by the criminal justice system.  She describes the massive forces financially benefiting from the prison/industrial complex – private prison corporations, gun manufacturers, security firms, health providers and over a million employees working in the jail business.  She even points out that unemployment figures would be much higher if prisoners were taken into account, which they aren't.  

I will only end here with a point from Marx.  Alexander is not a Marxist, but a left-liberal disgusted by the evolution of slavery in the modern day.  The large prison population in the U.S. does not even reach the level of a ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ – as that army occasionally has a job, certainly more than many released felons.  Prisoners are almost permanently warehoused because capitalism is not just racist – it actually cannot provide jobs for its citizens. So it locks them up, using your taxpayer money.  The system of incarceration and the criminal justice system terrorizes the rest of the present black and Latino population, just as Jim Crow's prison labor laws affected all the 'free blacks' in the South.  It just took capturing a critical mass of that population to scare the rest, much as large unemployment scares the employed.  Racism is a tool it uses to divide black, white and Latino workers, and to justify incarceration, not just a 'bad idea.'  No surprise here.

But all of this is done for ultimately financial reasons, as it was under slavery and Jim Crow.  Wasting labor and talent is business-as-usual for capitalism, if it means staying in control.  Mistaking the mask for the face is what liberals do.  Yet under the hood is the local businessman and the international businessman.  Dig deeper and you see a very profitable strategy – one that has been the basis of U.S. society since the beginning.  Of course, this strategy is not confined to the U.S. but is present in every capitalist country to some extent.  Yet it is in the U.S. that this strategy has reached its apotheosis - although South Africa gives the U.S. a run for its money, and still does.

And I bought it at May Day Books

Red Frog

May 29, 2013

Aren't You Glad Capitalism Has Been Restored? Part III

Hungary Today

Evidently, the Fidesz government in Hungary has revised the Hungarian Constitution THREE times in the last several years.  They are attempting it again.  The Fascist Jobbik and the Rightist (Horthyite) Fidesz are in league, dominating the government with one other party.

Benjamin Atban on April 3, 2013 says: 

“More particularly, the Constitutional Court is no longer allowed to give its opinion about the content of laws and to refer to its own case law – which results in the loss of almost all monitoring power on the legislature and the executive.”

Which means that any higher lawful review is now ended, and the government is free to act in any way they please, without legal oversight.

“Only a few days ago, Orban officially decorated three extreme right-wing leading figures: journalist Ferenc Szaniszlo, known for his diatribes against the Jews and the Romani people, whom he compares to “monkeys”; anti-Semitic archaeologist Kornel Bakav, who blames the Jews for having organized the slave trade in the Middle Ages; finally, “artist” Petras Janos, who proudly claims his proximity to the Jobbik and its paramilitary militia, responsible for several racist murders of Romani people and heiress of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party, which organized the extermination of Jews and Gypsies during World War II.”

Emerging Europe on 3/7/2013 says:

“Civil-rights groups have complained about the (May 2013) amendments that, they say, would narrow the notion of family to heterosexual married couples with children, outlaw political advertising during election campaigns, abolish the financial autonomy of universities, or allow the government to prohibit homeless people from living in the streets.

Watchdog.net says:

“Hungary is no longer a democracy.  (Because of the ending of national court oversight evidently …)

President János Áder has just signed (March 2013) away the rights of all that was left of Hungary's opposition parties after years of gutting legislative powers, crippling the free press, and eliminating all mention of a "republic" in the country's constitution.

If this trend doesn't sound familiar, here's something to jog your memory: along with criminalization of the homeless and attacks on women and the LGBT community, Hungary's seen a horrific spike in state-sanctioned antisemitism and racism, including the decoration of three men known for their connection to the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party. 

We've seen the steps Áder's taken before. We know these signs. And while the European Union continues to stay silent, the situation for women, ethnic minorities and religious groups in Hungary becomes deadlier by the second.”

The EU is not doing anything about these developments – in effect not invoking Article 7 of their Charter about the ‘defense of democracy.’ 

Al Jazeera says:

Al Jazeera published on May 22 a video, available on UTube, of the developing fascist movement in Hungary, summarizing many of the developments already reported on this site. (Type in ‘Hungary’ in the Google text search box on this blog to read other commentaries.)  Note, this is a station homed in Abu Dubai, which you think would not be too upset by anti-Semitism.

The video, among other things, shows Hungarian Jewish philosopher Agnes Heller, who lost her father in Auschwitz, pointing out that Jobbik’s parliament speech calling for a listing for all Jews in Hungary was going over a line, making legitimate and public something only whispered in private.  The video reports that Laslo Csatary, the most wanted Nazi still alive, lived openly in Budapest for many years.  He was the sadistic head of the Kosice camp in Slovakia, and was only recently taken into custody last year.  10% of Hungarians are Roma (gypsies), who are the Hungarian underclass. The video reports that death squads were liquidating Roma in certain small villages; the homeless have now been criminalized; the Methodist church was not approved as an official religion; and 30% of journalists have been fired for political reasons.  All of these things have been a subject of late, yet Al Jazeera putting them all together is very interesting. 

And I saw it on the Internet

Red Frog

May 28, 2013

 

Philosophy of the 'Smarty Pants'

“The Ten Assumptions of Science,” by Glenn Borchardt, 2004

This slim volume of scientific philosophy also applies outside of science.  It is a through-going intellectual broadside against idealism and anti-materialism in favor of materialism.  The author takes on aspects of Einstein while making fun of monkeys typing novels, un-noisy falling trees, time travel, the ‘end of history,’ creationism and the big bang.  Borchardt’s own name for these dueling dualisms are ‘determinism’ and ‘indeterminism,’ which amount to the same concepts, or, in his terminology, ‘similar’ concepts.

The U.S. is not friendly to philosophy – unless it is some version of pragmatism, which barely qualifies as an ethos.  Borchardt understands that basic hypotheses – let’s say ‘infinity’ - cannot actually be tested.  Ultimately, philosophic ideas are based on assumptions that underlie research, providing direction or context in regard to that research.  Borchardt does not choose his assumptions out of the blue, but based on generally accurate orientations that match the accumulating facts, as he and science understand them.  For instance, many scientists assume the ‘big bang’ is true, even though it has not been proved.  Yet, according to Borchardt, it makes sense to them because they believe in certain untested quasi-religious assumptions about time and matter.  Those are their assumptions.

Borchardt is a dialectician, and certainly a materialist, at least in the realm of science and extending into the ideas of human society.  He does not use the moniker ‘dialectical materialist’ however. These are his 10 assumptions and their dialectical opposites; thesis and anti-thesis, neatly arranged, in a sort of faux-dialectics:

1.         Materialism                                         -1.        Immaterialism

2.         Causality                                             -2.        Acausality

3.         Uncertainty                                         -3.        Certainty

4.         Inseparability                                      -4.        Separability

5.         Conservation                                      -5.        Creation

6.         Complementarity                                -6.        Noncomplementarity

7.         Irreversibility                                       -7.        Reversibility

8.         Infinity                                                 -8.        Finity

9.         Relativism                                           -9.        Absolutism

10.       Interconnection                                   -10.      Disconnection

As you can see, this lineup shows one of these columns to be at a disadvantage as far as science is concerned, though perhaps not at the religious charter school, the home-schooler near you or CNN.  As the decades go by and more and more scientific information becomes available through research, idealist/indeterminist ideas become more and more questionable and pushed to the ostensible margins.  Time is on the side of materialism, evidently, unless materialism is destroyed by fascist reaction, authoritarianism or barbarism.  However, Borchardt points out that idealism still exists among the ranks of scientists themselves, which should be no surprise given the society we live in. 

Marxists attempt to apply scientific methods too, and closely follow developments in the arena of science. (See review of “Ubiquity” below, for more on scientific philosophy.)  This book will only bolster Marxist concepts – including those related to materialism, dialectics, constant change, spiral history and the impulse to organization, not just disorder.  Borchardt cites Engels only once, quoting him in support of the concept of ‘matter being unthinkable without motion’ (from Dialectics of Nature), which is part of Borchardt’s concept of inseparability. 

Borchardt is not alone in believing that assumptions underlie science.  His essay starts off with a riff on R.G. Collinwood, an idealist who also understood that scientific assumptions – metaphysics - were at the heart of much research and conclusions.   Borchardt quotes extensively from David Bohm, a philosopher-physician who shares Borchart’s views.  His overall view challenges mechanistic science of the Newtownian variety and ‘systems analysis’ of a more recent variety with an approach that puts everything in the context of a greater environment that embraces all things.  I am going to sample each assumption, but reading the whole book gives you a fair view of an advanced scientific outlook.  Don’t expect the Cliff Notes version to fully make sense to you.

1. Materialism.  The external world is not dependent on a solipsistic observer.  Ludwig Feuerbach observed that ‘faiths of all kinds were derived from the material existence of the people who held them.’  Without material reality, there is no science or actual knowing.  This seems to be pretty basic, from Democritus to today.
2. Causality.   Any effect has numerous material causes.  Since nothing is purely static, nothing is uncaused.  The motion of the earth around the sun, for instance, involves an infinite number of gravitational fields, among other forces.  Try to count them.
3. Uncertainty.  Heisenberg’s 1927 uncertainty principal was a groundbreaking development, which rejected ultimate knowledge.  Bohm himself thinks the search for Einstein’s ‘god particle' or ultimate law fruitless.  As Borchardt puts it, we can only know more about more, but never all about all.  “Chance’ – the favorite myth of indeterminists – is just another name for ignorance.
4. Inseparability.  “Without Separability, souls, ghosts and gods would find no home in the universe.”  Matter and motion are one, as pointed out by Spinoza, Hobbes and Engels.  Matter never stops moving and motion is matter in action.  There is no such thing as absolute zero – in fact it has never been discovered.  The third law of thermodynamics precludes it.  Energy can never be without matter, as it is just a characteristic of matter.  I.E. ghosts don’t exist, nor does ‘space-time’ in the conventional sense, as space is really matter and time is the tracking of motion.
5. Conservation.  Matter and the motion of matter can not be created or destroyed.  The Greek Aniximander and the Roman Lucretius pointed this out hundreds of years ago.  This is also the first law of thermodynamics.  Explain that to the ‘creationists’ of humans or the universe.  The universe will never disappear, nor did it 'appear.'
6. Complementarity.  Matter is subject to both convergence and divergence.  Borchardt takes on the second law of thermodynamics, which predicts ultimate entropy.  He argues that there are also complementary forces in the universe that ‘organize’ matter and motion, hence the second law is incomplete without its anti-thesis.  Everything does not head towards ruin, otherwise the universe would not have existed as long as it has.  He calls this the “SLT-Order paradox.”  “Negentropy” is the word for this opposing force.  Borchardt insists that the environment to every ‘system’ actually influences that system, hence ultimate entropy is impossible. 
7. Irreversibility.  Time travel is impossible.  Nothing happens the same way twice.  All experience burdens the future, and cannot be erased.  Time moves in one direction, not backward, not sideways, not cyclically, nor does it end.  Pretty basic also.  The second law of thermodynamics actually supports this assumption. 
8. Infinity.  The universe is both macroscopically and microscopically infinite.  There is no edge to the universe, nor are there ‘basic’ particles.  The ‘edge’ of the universe is only that area we cannot see.  It reflects ignorance again, like the role of God.   As science has found out, the atom and then the electron have been broken down into even smaller particles - bosons, leptons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.  There is no reason to believe there are not more or smaller ones.  As Borchart says, “Timid minds will seek shelter from the godless specter of infinity.  As always, it will be to no avail.” 
9. Relativism.  As opposed to Absolutism.  The Greek sophists were the first relativists.  They poked holes in every logical ‘law.’  Sophism is now an insult, usually hurled by apologists for conventionality.  For instance, analogy and disparity are useful in categorizing things. However, nothing is actually ‘identical’ to something else.  As Borchardt puts it, ‘in nature there are no absolute equalities and no absolute inequalities.’  Plato was wrong, as are the long line of idealists after him.
10. Interconnection.  Here is where we get spacey.  The world is both continuous and discontinuous, yet every single part of the universe is connected, as there are no isolated systems.  Empty space doesn’t exist.  Only matter in motion exists - everywhere - almost as a kind of ether.  Om and Gaia!  

Borchardt’s book actually makes great sense and is somewhat simple to read, once you understand he is not straying from the material reality we know.  It challenges certain ideas that float in the bourgeois air we breathe, and now you know why they are fraudulent.  

And I bought it at Mayday Books,  on the recommendation of John.

Red Frog / May 21, 2013

P.S. - Oddly enough, the May 23rd Guardian has a story called "Roll Over Einstein: meet Weinstein."  Evidently Weinstein is Eric Weinstein, a former scientist and now civilian and non-academic who has been invited by one of Oxford, England's top mathematicians, Marcus Du Sautoy, to give a lecture on theoretical physics.  And, oddly enough, Weinstein proposes to solve the contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics.  He is said to propose a 14-dimensional 'observerse' that could introduce another 150 sub-atomic particles which would 'fill in' the 95% of the universe that does not contain ordinary matter, but instead would explain 'dark matter' and 'dark energy.'  These other dimensions of the universe we cannot really 'see' yet, according to Weinstein.   As you can see, this fits in with what Borchardt said in his book about "infinity" and 'interconnection.'  However, as Borchardt points out, a mathematical construct 'can' lead to an observable event or not, unlike 'string theory,' which is a mathematical construct that has never been seen in reality.
                
 At any rate, the kicker for those who only believe in academic credentials are these quotes by Du Sautoy:
1) "I think this represents a new trend. It used to be that one had to be part of an academic hub, such as Harvard or Oxford, to produce cutting-edge research. But not any more. Part of the reason is the wide availability of scientific information on the internet. And I think this is a wonderful development, which should be supported." 
2) "I also see two lessons coming from this. The first is for the young generation: with passion and perseverance there is no limit to what you can do, even in high-end theoretical science. The other lesson is for me and my colleagues in academia – and I say this as someone who on most days takes an elevator to his office in an Ivory Tower, as it were – we should be more inclusive and more open to ideas which come from outside the standard channels of academia, and we'll be better off for it."

So all you folks in basements with computers and internet access, start your engines

Smokin' Another Spike Lee Joint

“Red Hook Summer,” Film by Spike Lee, 2012

Spike Lee is one of those directors who’s movies always have something to offer, even if the film itself is not very strong.  That is the sign of a good director.  “Red Hook Summer” is his latest film, mostly ignored by critics.  

Lee told Quentin Tarantino recently that ‘slavery was not a spaghetti western’ and that is one of the great things about Lee.  Black people are not fucking clichés.  “Django,” Tarantino’s latest, runs like a revenge fantasy comedy/melodrama.  There is so much falsity about the whole thing, you can’t help but laugh – and then get bored.  After all, it is 2.5 long hours of predictable shooting and fake blood.  Like “Tremé,” the series filmed in New Orleans after Katrina (“Tremé” is reviewed below), Lee doesn’t people his movies with black gangsters, black buffoons or many stereotypes.  Now, I do have a weakness for Madea – one of my all time favorite funny women.  (As in, “Who you callin’ a buffoon?  YOU a buffoon!  Or did you call me a baboon? You racist son of a bitch!  I should slap your lips off.”)  But the middle-class black people in the Tyler Perry cohort should go back to Cosbyville... a place Medea sends them regularly.

‘Red Hook Summer’ concerns a 13-year-old Atlanta boy coming to visit his grandfather in Red Hook, New York for summer vacation.  It could have been only a gauzy coming-of-age story, set in storied Nu Yawk, but instead confronts two kinds of black.  “Old-time” religious black and ‘mohawk’ middle-class youth black, wielding his iPad camera like a junior Spike.  Grandpa is a Jesus nut and never shuts up about it.  This harangue becomes claustrophobic at some point during the film even for most viewers, perhaps just the way “Flik” feels it.  Flik’s a vegan, an atheist and won’t have anything to do with Grandpa Rouse’s lunacies.  Rouse locks the vegan food that his mother sent in a cupboard, and makes him eat eggs and ham.  Yeah.  So Flik steals chips and soda from the basement of “Little Heaven” to survive, the church where Rouse is the Bishop.  Rouse makes him work around the church, hand out leaflets for church meetings and generally tries to intimidate him into religion.  Flik wants to go home and his mother tells him to just try to survive.  Your sympathies as a viewer are with the young boy Flik, though some may be with Rouse.  If so, Spike has a surprise for you.

TV comedian Kamau Bell appeared this winter at the Cedar in Minneapolis, and, among his mostly ethnic and liberal humor, made fun of atheists as being somewhere on the level of Ben Affleck. (For my take on Affleck, see review of “Argo,” below.)  Actual black radicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s were wary of the church and the pastors, as they knew they were the conservative part of the black population.  MLK, the best of the preachers, was not for ‘black power’ and supported ‘turning the other cheek’ – an event Malcolm X derided.  Many black radicals in that time became Marxists, including the Black Panther Party, Amiri Baraka, many in SNCC, Robert Williams and Detroit’s various Leagues of Revolutionary Black Workers, among others.  We won't get started on African Marxists.  Nearly all Marxists are atheists.  So evidently you can be black and an atheist too.  Not by Kamau Bell!  Well, Kamau Bell is no radical, so no surprise here.  He’s a good left-Democrat and has a show on the FX network and you don’t. 

Atheists actually can suffer capital punishment in 7 countries in the world, all Muslim ones.  6 states in the U.S. have laws prohibiting atheists from public office and juries. Atheists are more hated than gay people, at least according to U.S. surveys.  This and more is all in a 2012 report by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).  So not exactly “Ben Affleck” status.  After all, Michelle Obama gave him an Oscar.   

Kamau Bell grew up in a conventional culture that is saturated with the church, and his attitude is somewhat understandable.  He’s blazingly pro-gay and some black churches are not – so he should wonder about that.  Marx called religion the ‘opiate of the people’ and nowhere is this appellation more appropriate than the black (and Latino) church.  The black church has also been a progressive institution, unavoidably I’d say, and only up to a point.  In white churches, on the other hand, so many are sunk in the ‘prosperity gospel’ or blandness that they mostly appeal to well-off whites – or those hoping to be so. (See review of “God and Wal-Mart,” reviewed below.) 

Well, for my money, Spike Lee has turned on that crazy black religiosity in this film.  The boy befriends a pretty local girl, daughter of one of the church members, and they spend the summer hanging out, even though they are different.  Her mother tells Rouse, over Rouse’s grousing, that Flik is ‘the nicest boy” her Chazz has ever met.  Flik makes an amateur bunch of shots of his experiences that summer on his iPad, and gives it to Chazz when they part.  In return, Chazz gives all she’s got – a cross necklace. 

Music is the soul of Little Heaven and the organist plays like he’s Booker T, while the Bishop preaches. The organist is Jonathan Batiste, New Orleans and now Harlem musician and educator. The little, broke congregation dances and sings, and yeah, its like a nightclub for people who don’t go to nightclubs.  Good shit.  Way better than white church music, as we all know.  Gospel was part of the birth of the blues and rock and roll, and for that we can be thankful. 

Lee gets in his digs at white homeowners and gentrifiers, the wish for making it big in the stock market, the ignoring of black poverty and the forgotten Red Hook projects.  The drunk church deacon downstairs knows the limitations of the Lord.  Lee’s political ideas are there.  And then some.  It turns out a ‘little Catholic’ bleeds into this film.  While preaching one Sunday, Bishop Rouse is confronted by a young man who accuses him of molestation years ago.  It is clear that the man is telling the truth, even to the Bishop’s friends and deacons in the church.  The Bishop forlornly admits it to Flik, while being filmed on the iPad, describing the sexual events while he worked at a church in Atlanta.  That church told him to leave when they discovered the abuse.  After this, Flik returns to Atlanta, where Flik’s mother, who is also Rouse’s estranged daughter, live.  And Rouse has to join him, as he is run out of Little Heaven.  So the point Lee is trying to make here, I think, is that people who are a bit too ‘emotionally’ over the top in their love of Jesus may be hiding something that you don’t want to know about.  Yeah, Jesus is failed by another of his fans. 

The film ends with the gauzy pastiche of the iPad patchwork shot by Flik all summer – the black and Puerto Rican people of this immortal neighborhood on Brooklyn, Long Island.  “On the Waterfront” was set in Red Hook, and so was “A View From the Bridge,” by Arthur Miller and “Memos from Purgatory” by Harlan Ellison.  It actually borrows bits of the story from "Go Tell It on the Mountain" by James Baldwin.

While 'Red Hook Summer' doesn't hold together very well, Lee takes a stab at black religion and survives.  Perhaps Kamau Bell too should realize being black doesn’t mean being religiously conservative.  Although that might not get the laughs on FX.

And I saw it on Netflix

Red Frog

May 14, 2013