"America was born in the streets," the posters for "Gangs" proclaim. Later,
Amsterdam Vallon, in the aftermath of the draft riots, muses that "our
great city was born in blood and tribulation." Nobody as steeped in film
history as Mr. Scorsese could offer such a metaphor without conjuring the
memory of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," and Griffith, along with
John Ford and others, is one of the targets of Mr. Scorsese's revisionism.
In Griffith's film, adapted from "The Clansman," a best-selling novel by
Thomas Dixon, the American republic was reborn after Reconstruction, when
the native-born whites of the North and South overcame their sectional
differences in the name of racial supremacy. Ford's myth of American
origins - which involved the subjugation of the frontier and the equivocal
replacement of antique honor by modern justice - also typically took place
after the Civil War.
"America was born in the streets," sounds like an ad from 1 of R bad boyz Rap star latest release and indicates within itself changes in who people think things out and articulate.
Perhaps a week ago I saw a review of Gangs on the History channel with commentary about the 1928 book, "Gangs." I plan on seeing this movie today or tomorrow.
The movie "Birth of A Nation" had a profound ideological impact on the consciousness of America, that would not be decisively overturned until the emergence of the Civil Rights Reform Movement. "Birth" justified the overthrow of Reconstruction, the brutal subjugation of blacks and the need for them to remain sharecroppers as opposed to the independent farmer implied in Jeffersonian democracy.
What is referred to as the "American Republic" after the overthrow of Reconstruction is the actual link up between Northern Yankee finance (imperial) capital and the remnants of the broken slave oligarchy. This political alliance ushered in the first form of fascist rule during the epoch of industrial capital and was in fact the dictatorship of the most reactionary section of capital. Hitler would later copy this political form of rule in Germany, down to the black codes as methods of rulership.
Between the time of "Birth of A Nation" and the Second Imperial Capitalist War, the general mass consciousness of the Negro People was that of "happy-go-lucky" ignorant singing blacks deserving of the most terroristic modes of rule to preserve "law and order" and cement a high standard of living for "whites." In past history, this material bribery of the Anglo-American peoples, who were formed from various European immigrants made it possible and profitable to burn our churches, rape, lynch and engage in an orgy of violence against a scattered and defenseless peoples.
Clearly the mechanization of agriculture, with its removal of the sharecropper from his class position as sharecropper, his migration into the small urban enclaves of first the South as a Region and then the industrial North made it increasingly difficult to rule this most oppressed and exploited lot of Americans on the same basis and with the same methods as in the post Reconstruction years.
The turning point in the social struggle was the 1967 Rebellion in Detroit, which carried to another level the 1963 rebellion in Birmingham Alabama and the 1965 Watts Rebellion. During this unfolding historical process from 1910 - 1967, various class alignments and political forms of struggle for direction of society operated. Reducing these political forms to their class components tends to blunt the human drama, but helps make sense of our history.
Without question wer has passed another juncture in our history which demands a general revision of the past. The Marxist historians have in the main been in the forefront of describing a more accurate presentation of living history and their materialist conception of history has generally triumphed and captured the imagination of a huge section of humanity - including the arts.
"Gangs" . . . is not the ruling class in all era's nothing more than a gang!
"Gangs," . . . has not all social struggle been decisively fought out in organizational forms that reduced themselves to a gang! History contains its own logic and in the last instance the ancient behavior - born within the economic, social and ideological sphere of agricultural (patriarchal) relations, called "honor" was most certainly superseded by the gang concept of "modern justice."
Justice has thus far meant "Just Us" and is in need of a revolutionary reformulation. It would seem that "Gangs of New York" will not only supersede "Birth of A Nation" and the "Godfather" saga, but carry "Boyz In the Hood," "Colors" and "New Jack City" to a history making level.
Yea ... got to see this one.
Oh ... saw Star Trek Nemesis last week when it opened. Underlying theme ... we can always be bigger and better than what we are and have become and the genesis of our birth and circumstances should not be used to prevent one from becoming . . . more humane/human.
M. Power
