Friday, September 28, 2007

Well, duh. They moved to Jena... This column by Gary Younge puts it perfectly.

I dread going to see Banished, about the racial cleansing of towns in George, Missouri, and Arkansas, just a few of the cases. Pogroms and cleansing actions, can't happen here? Already has, my friends. We know Jim Crow and American apartheid warped everyone involved, so that those poodle-skirted 50s white girls howling for blood in Little Rock (nice old grannies now, some of them?) were victims, too, but try as I might I can’t whip up any sympathy up for all that psychopathic hate. You know, don’t you, about the Hershel Gordon Lewis film, Two Thousand Maniacs? Car load of northerners gets waylaid by a village of down South. Sub-Corman, and yet virtually a documentary. I mean, these were people who picnicked while hanging, castrating, and burning their fellow human beings.

And speaking of the unredeemable, there will always be soldiers, won’t there, and cops, and Blackwater goons to enforce their master’s filthy will? Burma’s foots soldiers, many probably just peasant boys, are doing their masters bidding to destroy the will of their own people. So it ever is. Boys made into tools. Kent State. Jackson State. Newark. The state’s tools will gun you down when you get ahead of them.

India and Japan are both big investors in the Burmese generals (Pol Pot-like fantasists, the've created their own capital city deep in the jungle); they at least are democracies, susceptible to internal pressure. China, of course isn’t. Haven’t you boycotted Chinese stuff yet? For Darfur, for Burma, for poor Tibet? It’s no hardship, stopping the purchasing of that shit. It can’t make you happy; in case you haven’t noticed, the voracious machine of consumption doesn’t want you happy, because you might stop buying if you were happy, because you must keep buying to attain happiness, which is precisely the point because the shit isn’t happiness.

No comments: