back to top

Professor Cornell West, ‘No time for hate’

By najwa

Apr. 26 (AGR)— “Shortly after September 11th, a white student of mine came up to me and said, ‘Professor West, for the first time I feel like someone is out to get me because of who I am. I’m scared for my life.’ ‘First time, huh? Congratulations,’ I said, ‘You’ve been niggerized.’” Professor Cornell West’s point is hard to miss; terrorism didn’t start on September 11th, 2001. For hundreds of years, Black people have learned to live in fear. As have women, Queer people, economically-poor people, and other oppressed peoples throughout the world. The difference, West poses, is in the response to such terrorism.

Renowned for his critical analysis of American culture and society, Professor Cornell West graced the campus of Western Carolina University last week to talk about terrorism, racism, and the commercialization of America. Although the tangled web he spoke of was difficult to unravel, West’s intellect, wit, humor, and incredible stage presence made for an enthralling evening of learning; whose insight no attendee could deny.

When the four little girls playing in the basement of a Baptist church were killed by a white supremacist and his bomb, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in front of the families the next day and stated that they must fight the war on terror with an arsenal of hope and love. Similarly, when Emmit Till was killed because of the color of his skin, his mother stood up and said to the world, “I have no time for hatred, but I will dedicate my life to justice.” Professor West asks how these two individuals, and so many other oppressed people, can stand in the face of terror and denounce hate, while President Bush responded to September 11th by declaring a world war of hatred and violence.

In short, West explained in response to his own question, what we have witnessed is the “gangsterization” of American politics and culture. Professor West explains gangsterization as the break down of the search for truth and justice into a cycle of violence and short-sited “victories.”

So where does this “gangsterization” come from? In his lecture, West drew many connections between Bush’s gangster mentality and the fetishization of the market. Churches, political leaders, and pop culture, West poses, have all become subject to commercialization. In turn, they, too, become tools in the process of construction a consumerist culture run by gangsterism.

But how does a consumerist culture divert oneself from a nonviolent path towards justice? Simple. Consumerism doesn’t reward truth or justice. Consumerism rewards short-term gains, big publicity stunts, and polls. Truth and justice are life-long struggles that have no monetary gain or sleek PR campaigns.

West describes the pervasive consumerist mentality as “spiritual emptiness.” “Where’s the sweetness? Where’s the tenderness?” He asks. Professor West suggests that we must seek and speak truth, if we are to survive this “experiment in democracy.” He used the moniker of Tupac Shakur as an example in this pursuit of truth.

“I know what you are going to say,” West stated in preemptive response to his statement that we should listen to hiphop artists such as Tupac, “‘But Professor West, Tupac was a thug and a gangster.’ Yes, he spoke about the reality of life on the streets of America. He spoke of the realities that so many people face. And those realities often include violence. But he spoke the truth, didn’t he?” We often times don’t want to listen to the voices that speak the truth because it is difficult to face the miserable reality that so many people live in. But if we are to stand up, shed our hatred, and work towards justice, we must be honest,” West states.

“It is no coincidence that the negro national anthem is ‘Lift Every Voice,’” he exclaims. “Without every voice, there is no democracy.” By creating a violent and hateful war on terror, West alludes, we are suppressing the voices of millions, just as the US has done since its inception, and denying ourselves a chance at democracy.

Following his lecture, Professor Cornell West engaged in a long and insightful question and answer period. The discussion, focused mostly on issues of racism, covered such topics as how to unify the younger generations, how to educate white people about racism, patience, and disrupting the repetition of so-called intellectuals.

West stated that young people today must learn a sense of self-love that “is not couched in ego, but flows into the move for social justice.” He went on to point out that many young people are gaining a sense of this self-love and pointed to such examples as the protests against the WTO and conscious hip hop.

In response to a question about how white people can educate their white friends and family, West responded by first stating that white privilege has nothing to do with intention. It’s a fact of growing up in a society that gives oneself privilege for the color of their skin. This seemed to be a call for all white people to challenge their inherent racism and unearned privilege rather than focusing solely on the acts of more overt racists.

With regards to overt racists, however, West suggested that it is necessary to get into “their” world and hear what they have to say. One must deconstruct and demystify the beliefs held by overt racists. Often, he explained, these people are deeply in pain (economically depressed, sexually abused, etc) and are projecting their anger onto an “other.” We must offer democratic visions that benefit these overt racists directly as well as everyone else. To that, he articulated that we must not stop with the issue of racism. We must also challenge the pervasiveness of homophobia, misogyny, anti-semitism, and other forms of oppression that serve to divide us and deny out hope of democracy.

We can’t expect change overnight, West explained. We must have patience. But it is not a passive patience that West proposes. He speaks of what he calls, “revolutionary patience.” We must be disciplined enough to walk step-by-step. We must fight for justice, but never have an orientation of all or nothing. This “engaged” patience must be intellectual, political, and spiritual. This patience must also include the Socratic method of critique. We must always question the path we are on and the tools we are using. We must always stay engaged. If we do not, West states, this “experiment of democracy is in deep trouble.”

back to top

Country Joe Band, 2004: “Uncle Sam needs your help again”

By Norman Solomon

Apr. 23 — Taking the stage at a community center in the small Northern California town of Bolinas, a group of four musicians quickly showed themselves to be returning as a vibrant creative force centered very much in the present.

Not that the music of Country Joe and the Fish ever really disappeared. Since the release of the band’s first two albums in 1967 — “Electric Music for the Mind and Body” along with “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die” — many of its songs have meandered through the memories and semi-consciousness of millions of Americans who came of age a third of a century ago.

Now reconstituted with four of the legendary group’s original five members, the new Country Joe Band has just begun to tour. When I saw them perform, midway through April, the music was as tightly effusive as ever, with poetic lyrics mostly brought to bear on two perennials: love and death.

Their new song “Cakewalk to Baghdad” is in sync with Country Joe McDonald’s compositions that stretch back to the escalating years of the Vietnam War. With the post - “victory” occupation of Iraq in its thirteenth month bringing death to many people including children, his old song “An Untitled Protest” remains unfailingly current. Sung the other night, it was no more dated than today: “Red and swollen tears tumble from her eyes / While cold silver birds who came to cruise the skies / Send death down to bend and twist her tiny hands / And then proceed to target ‘B’ in keeping with their plans.”

No less than its previous incarnation, the Country Joe Band exemplifies how rock music can transcend itself as an art form. This is no small feat for any musicians, including those who create songs that encourage resistance to deadly routines of the status quo.

Rhetoric is destructive to art. On the other hand, ambiguous or self-absorbed artistry is apt to be isolated from key social realities. But the Country Joe Band is not agitprop or evasive. For an overview, take a look at www.countryjoe.com — a website that reflects how a creative process can stay grounded in humanistic projects of our times.

Songs that Country Joe and the Fish released in 1967 are so intricate that an attentive listener is bound to agree with McDonald’s recent comment to an interviewer: “Those songs are very complex and difficult to play, they’re less rock ‘n’ roll and perhaps more ... well, symphonic.” Rendered by the Country Joe Band, the psychedelic sound can seem orchestral. Yet there’s still no reliance on high-tech sound effects.

By now, apparently, we’d be foolish to take the integrity of talented artists for granted. Maybe, as a late ’60s advertisement proclaimed, “the man can’t bust our music” — but the corporate system can sure water it down a lot. Or turn music into outright pabulum. Television showcases plenty of grim results when so many knees bend toward corporatized altars.

These days, cynicism about famous musicians with protest credentials is running high. Weeks ago, Bob Dylan began to appear in a Victoria’s Secret commercial. It may seem that the times they are a prostitutin’.

Media outlets are filled with ads, commercial plugs and vapid — or corrosive — content leaving the impression that gifted artists sell out to the almighty dollar sooner or later. “Today’s musical superstars seem more interested in hawking their clothing lines and name-brand perfumes than in any meaningful form of political action,” magazine editor Leslie Bennetts wrote in a Los Angeles Times essay. By coincidence, the article appeared on the same day that I saw the Country Joe Band in concert.

Unlike the profuse and dreary examples now personified by Dylan, quite a few musicians — renowned or scarcely known — have successfully struggled to retain creative control over their work. They continue to resist the corporate juggernauts that routinely flatten talent into the pap of pop.

A new development to celebrate is the rise of the Country Joe Band. While standing the test of time, music from the ensemble group resonates profoundly each day as young Americans in uniform do their best to survive in a faraway country: “And pound their feet into the sand of shores they’ve never seen / Delegates from the western land to join the death machine / And we send cards and letters.”

It happens that Country Joe McDonald and the band’s other musicians have returned to public space together at a time when many American soldiers — following the orders of the commander in chief — are continuing to kill and be killed. An old question is also new: What are we fighting for?

“And those who took so long to learn the subtle ways of death / Lie and bleed in paddy mud with questions on their breath / And we send prayers and praises.”

Norman Solomon is co-author, with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich, of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.”

Source: CommonDreams

back to top

Incredible credibility
Richard Clarke’s decision to step out publicly and write
Against All Enemies is more shocking than the revelations within

By Jason Vest

Apr. 15 — Men like Richard Clarke do not, as a rule, write books. Mandarins of the national security establishment who long ago embedded themselves in the bureaucracy, the closest they ever come to anything like public authorship is via the pens of others. They frequently speak to journalists, sometimes on the record as adjuncts of the political master du jour; other times, only on background, perhaps in the service of what they see as sounder policy than the White House does. They consider their import to be their possession of more focused experience and better institutional memory than the strictly politicals they work for; yet by and large they are committed to working within the system, and even in anger rarely consider transgressing the informal boundary that lies just beyond the utterance of an undermining anonymous quote to a major daily newspaper.

For any of these bureaucrats to step in erudite anger from the wings to center stage, then, is rare. For one to do it by name — and in no less than book form — is exceptional. That the author in this case would be Richard Clarke is all the more compelling. I doubt there is a diplomatic or national security reporter who hasn’t occasionally talked with Clarke over the past two decades; even at his most forceful on-the-record or cryptic deep background, I can’t think of a time when Clarke said anything that would have seriously jeopardized his national security chamberlain’s privileges. Nor can I think of a politico/bureaucratic scrap in which Clarke hasn’t at least held his own (or even relished, as only a street-fighting kid from Dorchester, Massachusetts, can). For a man like Clarke, then, the threshold for publicly turning on any president — by writing a detailed critical indictment of him and his administration — is naturally very, very high.

This is part of what makes Clarke’s Against All Enemies — and his blunt statements to the Sept. 11, 2001investigation commission and the press — so satisfying. Thus far, he’s forced the White House to send Condoleezza Rice before the Commission, and has sent some partisan Republicans into such a tizzy they’re demanding the declassification of previous closed-door Clarke testimony, hoping to find “discrepancies” between Clarke’s current public and previous classified comments. Yet Clarke’s broadside hasn’t prompted righteous rioting in the streets. So far — if polls are to be believed —he’s nudged both the pro- and anti-Bush numbers up a tad but produced no shift in the current myopic yin and yang that is the American polity.

I can’t say I find this surprising. As H.L. Mencken once noted — in an epigram that perhaps sums up the gap between Americans’ perceptions of the intelligence community and the realities for the best of those who work in it — “the public demands certainties … but there are no certainties.” For those who want to believe the worst about the Bush administration, Clarke’s nuanced criticisms of the Clinton administration — and his own sleights of hand about mistakes that seem clear in hindsight — are to be ignored. For those deluded in their goal of realizing an easy “region transformed” by exploiting post- Sept. 11 cognitive dissonance — or trying to defend a disengaged pre-Sept. 11 president who easily acceded to a poorly considered endeavor in Mesopotamia — Clarke’s renderings are nothing more than the revisionist self-justifications of a civil servant who dropped the ball.

For partisans of one side, any inconsistency or error is proof positive of the self-serving or crypto-liberal; for the other, he’s a folk hero, his role in dubious international activities, like undermining Boutros-Ghali and bombing the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, unacknowledged. In essence, he’s either a demon by commission or a saint by omission.

Which is sad, because it’s precisely Clarke’s status as an unabashedly hawkish but realistic (and sometimes wrong) veteran of the morally ambiguous national security world that gives his account its gravitas. In that realm, things often are bungled in the execution of policies good or bad; its people like Clarke who generally help pick up the pieces and spin the press, even if they don’t fully believe themselves. But when there is the absence of actual policy — or the presence of policy dangerously at odds with reality — it offends the sensibilities of smart, knowledgeable and (like Clarke) arrogant civil servants who live and breathe policy they consider paramount to the national interest.

When they run into this unpleasant reality too forcefully, many simply quit and keep to themselves — mere GS-12s know that being publicly critical even once they’ve left is an endeavor fraught with peril. I’m sure Clarke was well aware of what was to follow from his decisions — he’s willing to risk a lot of long-term unpleasantness — because his book reads like it was written by a true civil servant. His motivations might be characterized as conservative in the best sense: He doesn’t like seeing capital — political, financial, human — misspent. And it doesn’t take much space for him to explain, with unadorned clarity, how the current Bush administration has wasted spirit, blood and treasure. (Of 11 chapters, only two are devoted to the W years.) Nor does he require much space to carefully assign responsibility for national security failures intrinsic and systematic.

But the primary utility of Against All Enemies lays not so much in the summations of failure and prescriptions for reform but in a storyline that explains how we came to be where we are today. For those citizens who have spent the post-Cold War days happily ignorant of the generalities and specifics of how the national security components of their government operate, it’s an eminently useful and accessible primer on how strands of intransigence, myopia, and lack of leadership and new ideas have come to make up the rope the current administration has slipped around the neck of sound national security and foreign policy. For those already steeped in those realms, it’s merely more validation of worst-case assumptions.

Not only does Clarke narrate an engaging tour of institutional recalcitrance and pettiness that most rightly assume is intrinsic to bureaucracy (the painfully slow evolution of making al- Qaida a priority; of FBI-CIA cooperation on al-Qaida; of ponying up money from jealously guarded budgets for innovative endeavors), he confirms that the hawks of the current administration are hopelessly stuck in the past. Though his characterization of Rice isn’t quite as piquant as what one former colleague of hers told me several years ago (“She hasn’t had a new idea in her head since 1989”), key is his briefly mentioned realization that neither the new national security adviser nor her deputy had “worked on the new post-Cold War security issues,” as is his weary recollection of daily NSC staff meetings “filled with detailed discussion about the ABM Treaty and other issues that I thought were vestigial Cold War concerns.” Indeed, if one looked at what most of the national security political appointees were doing for right-wing think tanks during the ’90s, they seemed intent on continuing to fight a modified vision of the Cold War, obsessed with ways to both tie up loose ends (i.e., Fidel Castro) or find a new polarization of nation-states status quo.

And even in the wake of the bombings of US embassies and an American warship, al Qaeda’s terrorism was hardly on this crew’s radar. After Sept. 11, Clarke once again confirms the worst, reporting that the ideologues could see only the tragedy through the retrospective prism of Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Perhaps most disturbing about Clarke’s account is the cool certainty with which ideologues like Paul Wolfowitz discuss their warped view of reality and condescend to the career professionals who have been working al-Qaida and Iraq for years. One wishes one could have seen Clarke’s face when Wolfowitz — back in government just five months after nearly a decade of dwelling in the ivory tower of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) — champions the daffy notions of right-wing conspiracy maven Laurie Mylroie, telling Clarke: “You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor.”

Clarke ends his book noting that he and his former colleagues are now teaching graduate students, “hoping we can help the next generation of national security managers to understand the dangers of simplistic and unilateral approaches to counter-terrorism.” One cannot help but rue the fact that Clarke wasn’t teaching before — perhaps at SAIS, where Wolfowitz and others might have learned a thing or two had they sat in on his class.

Source: In These Times