I’ve been thinking a lot about history. Here are some things that all seem somehow related to me. Hopefully I’ll find the time to try to explain how it all fits together for me.
- A talk with the guy at the radio station who is obsessed with Norman Corwin and other WWII era radio journalists and really, that era as a whole.
- Tom Brokaw’s assy book The Greatest Generation.
- Paper Clips, an assy movie about Holocaust rememberance.
- A telephone conversation I had with my friend Jenny about a lot of these things and about nostalgia for the days of only a few years ago of vibrant campus activism and the beginning of the anti Iraq-war movement.
- My own fascination with the civil rights movement.
- Reading Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community by MLK Jr. as part of that fascination.
- King’s account, in that book of painfully deliberating and arguing over language and tactics, esp. “Black Power”.
- King’s reference to the idea of “legitimate power” (“… Black Power, in its broad and positive meaning, is a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate goals.”) and this quote:
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desireable but necessary in order to implement the demans of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, the philosopher of the “will to power,” to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “will to power” in the name of the Christian idea of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demans of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
- In the aforementioned phone conversation with Jenny, talking about how colonialism causes opressed people to internalize fucked up power dynamics and how structures of opression and control outlive the opressors. She cited South Africa, Apharteid, the Truth and Reconcilliation Comission, and the current corruption within the ANC-lead government as an example. I feel like I read about a bunch of similar examples in The Open Veins of Latin America.
- The fascination with punk kids on folk music, Rymodee wanting to do a workshop titled how to not bastardize folk music at PIX Fest, Madeline’s “I work my hands to the bone woah oh oh” song, Riot Folk, and this story by MLK Jr about folk music from Where Do We Go …:
“Two years ago my oldest son and daughter entered an integrated school in Atlanta. A few months later my wife and I were invited to attend a program entitled “music that has made America great.” As the evening unfolded, we listened to the folk songs and melodies of the various immigrant groups. We were certain that the program would end with the most original of all American music, the Negro speiritual. But we were mistaken. Instead, all the students, including our children, ended the program by singing “Dixie.””
- What songs did Chinese railroad workers sing?
- How thinking about the last few things makes me dream of a panel discussion about folk music, punk, cultural appropriation, race, and class at PIX Fest with Rymodee, Viviane Saleh-Hanna this radical criminology doctoral student at IU who is teaching a class titled Crime Resistance and Song, the Riot Folk kids, and James Spooner who made that Afropunk documentary which I’ve never seen.