In our community we have children refusing to go to school. Not because of
violence by recording but by the violence of professionals who bad mouth the
educational system in an unending vitriol that if loosed in the Stock Market
would destroy it. We expect our kids to filter the BS from the
constructive criticism while they have more homework, more difficult
assignments, more pressure from above then we ever had. The problem is
not them but us. Why should they learn advanced physics if they are
taught by the society that it is impractical and that their teachers are
idiots? Why should they practice long term discipline in the arts when
their parents are so unable to do the same in their lives?
Bill Clinton talked the Market up. He did the same in education. We have
gone from light to dark. Positive reenforcement to pain and punishment.
You couldn't even train a rat to perform in such circumstances! Let's
bring sex back to the Government! Or it will be:
"I have longed for all and bid farewell to hope,
And I have lived and loved,
And shut the door." R.L. Stevenson
Those of you in the U.S. should catch the Press Dinner on C-Span. It will
assure you that our President is a dope and that the economist children of
Master economists (Ben Stein) are truly incapable of humour. The bottom
line is truly the bottom line only of retail. They should leave humour to
the Pros. What makes people laugh is harder than what makes people buy.
Up with the Future of Real Work that would make a child want to live, have
a profession, an inner life and full relationships at home and in community.
That will be the death of the Trans-National Ideal, an ideal that sounds
true but creates death.
Crooked Face Harrell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ed Weick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2001 3:01 PM
Subject: Re: what's ailing kids
> This makes a lot of sense, but its scary. The step from BN to Columbine
may
> not be very large.
>
> Ed
>
> >
> > An op-ed from (of all places the Wall Street Journal) seems to fit with
> the
> > thread.
> >
> > FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2001 (A14)
> >
> > Notes From the Hip-Hop Underground ---- By Shelby
> > Steele
> >
> > The Wall Street Journal
> >
> > Think about it. If you were a slave, what sort of legend or myth would
> most
> > warm your soul?
> > One of the great legends in black American culture has always been that
of
> > the Bad Nigger. This
> > figure flaunts the constraints, laws and taboos that bind a person in
> > slavery. The BN is unbound
> > and contemptuous, and takes his vengeance on the master's women simply
to
> > assert the broadest
> > possible freedom. His very indifference to human feeling makes him a
> > revolution incarnate. Nat
> > Turner, a slave who in 1831 led an insurrection in which some 60 whites
> were
> > massacred, was
> > the BN come to life.
> >
> > But for the most part, the BN is the imagination's compensation for the
> > all-too-real impotence
> > and confinement that slaves and segregated blacks actually endured. He
> lives
> > out a
> > compensatory grandiosity -- a self-preening superiority combined with a
> > trickster's cunning and
> > a hyperbolic masculinity in which sexual potency is a vengeful and
> > revolutionary force.
> > This cultural archetype, I believe, is at the center of rap or hip-hop
> > culture. From "cop killer"
> > Ice T, Tupac Shakur and, today most noticeably, Sean "Puffy" Combs and
> > Eminem (who is
> > white), we get versions of the BN in all his sneering and inflated
> > masculinity.
> >
> > Having beaten gun and bribery charges in a high-profile New York trial,
> Mr.
> > Combs -- who has
> > just announced that he wishes to be known, henceforth, as "P. Diddy" --
is
> > the baddest BN for
> > the moment. A man with both the entrepreneurial genius and the fortune
> > (estimated to be in the
> > hundreds of millions of dollars) to live far above the fray, he has
> > nevertheless tried to live out
> > the BN archetype in a series of ego feuds, thuggish assaults, and
> late-night
> > escapades that ought
> > to bore a man of his talent and wealth.
> >
> > But Mr. Combs is caught in a contradiction. At the very least, he must
> > posture, if not act out, BN
> > themes, even as the actual condition of his life becomes conspicuously
> > bourgeois. Rap culture
> > essentially markets BN themes to American youth as an ideal form of
> > adolescent rebellion. And
> > this meeting of a black cultural archetype with the universal impulse of
> > youth to find themselves
> > by thumbing their nose at adults is extremely profitable. But the
rappers
> > and promoters
> > themselves are pressured toward a thug life, simply to stay credible, by
> the
> > very BN themes they
> > sell. A rap promoter without an arrest record can start to look a lot
like
> > Dick Clark.
> >
> > But the Puffys of the world cannot market to an indifferent youth. The
> > important question is how
> > the BN archetype -- the slave's projection of lawless power and
revenge --
> > has become the
> > MTV generation's metaphor for rebellion. And are conservatives right to
> see
> > all this as yet more
> > evidence of America's decline?
> >
> > I think the answer to these questions begins in one fact: that what many
> of
> > today's youth
> > ironically share with yesterday's slave is a need for myths and images
> that
> > compensate for a
> > sense of alienation and ineffectuality.
> >
> > Of course, today's youth do not remotely live the lives of slaves and
know
> > nothing of the
> > alienation and impotence out of which slaves conjured the BN myth.
Still,
> > the injury to family
> > life in America over the past 30 years (from high divorce and
illegitimacy
> > rates, a sweeping
> > sexual revolution, dual-career households, etc.) may well have given us
> the
> > most interpersonally
> > alienated generation in our history.
> >
> > Too many of today's youth experienced a faithlessness and tenuousness
even
> > in that all-important
> > relationship with their parents. And outside the home, institutions
rarely
> > offer the constancy,
> > structure, high expectations, and personal values they once did. So here
> is
> > another kind of
> > alienation that also diminishes and generates a sense of helplessness,
> that
> > sets up the need for
> > compensation -- for an imagined self that is bigger than life, unbound,
> and
> > powerful. Here the
> > suburban white kid, gawky and materially privileged, is oddly simpatico
> with
> > the black
> > American experience.
> >
> > The success of people like Mr. Combs is built on this sense of the
> > simpatico. By some
> > estimates, 80% of rap music is bought by white youth. And this makes for
> > another irony. The
> > blooming of white alienation has brought us the first generation of
black
> > entrepreneurs with
> > wide-open access to the American mainstream. Russell Simmons, known as
the
> > "Godfather" of
> > rap entrepreneurs, as well as Mr. Combs, Master P and others, have
> launched
> > clothing lines,
> > restaurant chains, record labels, and production companies --
> possibilities
> > seeded, in a sense,
> > by this strong new sympathy between black and white alienation.
> >
> > Rap's adaptation, or update, of the BN archetype began in the post-'60s
> > black underclass. As is
> > now well established, this was essentially a matriarchal world in which
> > welfare-supported
> > women became the center of households and men became satellite fathers
> only
> > sporadically
> > supporting or visiting their children by different women. The children
of
> > this world were not
> > primed to support a music of teen romance -- of "Stop in the Name of
> Love."
> > The alienation was
> > too withering. Not even the blues would do.
> >
> > I think the appeal of the BN, on the deepest level, was his existential
> > indifference to feeling --
> > what might be called his immunity to feeling. The slave wanted not to
feel
> > the loves and fears
> > that bound him to other people and thus weakened him into an
accommodation
> > with slavery.
> > Better not to love at all if it meant such an accommodation. So the BN
> felt
> > nothing for anyone
> > and had no fear even of death. He could slap a white man around with no
> > regard for the
> > consequences.
> >
> > Rappers, too, gain freedom through immunity to feeling. Women are
> "bitches"
> > and "hos," objects
> > of lust, but not of feeling. In many inner cities, where the
illegitimacy
> > rate is over 80%, where
> > welfare has outbid the male as head of the household, where marriage is
> all
> > but nonexistent, and
> > where the decimation of drugs is everywhere -- in such places, a young
> > person of tender feelings
> > is certain to be devastated. Everything about rap -- the misogynistic
> > lyrics, the heaving swagger,
> > the violent sexuality, the cynical hipness -- screams "I'm bad because I
> > don't feel." Nonfeeling is
> > freedom. And it is important to note that this has nothing to do with
> race.
> > In rap, the BN nurtures
> > indifference toward those he is most likely to love.
> >
> > Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and
> > over-the-top vulgarity.
> > But it is important to remember that this music is a fairly accurate
> message
> > from a part of society
> > where human connections are fractured and impossible, so fraught with
> > disappointments and
> > pain that only an assault on human feeling itself can assuage. Rap makes
> the
> > conservative
> > argument about what happens when family life is eroded either by welfare
> and
> > drugs, or by the
> > stresses and indulgences of middle-class life.
> >
> > I listened carefully to Eminem's recent Grammy performance expecting, I
> > guess, to be disgusted.
> > Instead I was drawn into a compelling rap about a boy who becomes a
figure
> > of terrible pathos.
> > He is a male groupie who selfishly longs for the autograph of a rap star
> > while he has his
> > girlfriend tied up in the trunk of his car. Easy to be aghast at this
> until
> > I remembered that
> > Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground" -- the first modern novel
> written
> > more than l50
> > years ago -- was also about a pathetic antihero whose alienation from
> > modernity made him
> > spiteful and finally cruel toward an innocent female.
> >
> > Both works protest what we all protest -- societies that lose people to
> > alienation. This does not
> > excuse the vulgarity of rap. But the real problem is not as much rap's
> > cartoonish bravado as
> > what it compensates for.
> > ---
> >
> > Mr. Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author,
most
> > recently, of "A Dream
> > Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America"
(HarperCollins,
> > 1998).
> >
> >
>
