Over at the Other Blog…

The Coup - “Show Yo Ass” - Live performance clip from our favorite revolutionary Marxist funk and hip-hop band.

Asian Dub Foundation & Zebda - “Police On My Back” - Concert footage of a British Asian Underground/hip-hop band (who have lots of politics) and a political French-Arab hip-hop band joining together to play a great old punk rock song by The Clash.

Political Notes from M.I.A.’s blog and a few from me.

Statement from My Music Blog Regarding an “Ugly Coincidence”

I’m spending more of my time on my music blog these days; Commie Curmudgeon is going to be a much more occasional project, as far as I can tell, judging by my mood, etc.  But I’ll be stopping by here to do something once in a while…

And today, I posted a comment on that other blog which should carry over to Commie Curmudgeon: 

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Sometimes I post items about music originating from a certain place to coincide with world events.  Certainly, this was the case when I delved into Bangla music as Bangladesh was trying to recover from the cyclone.  However, when I posted the latest item, about a singer who was born in the North-West Frontier of Pakistan, in the now-embattled area of Swat, I had no idea that a couple of hours later, I would see news that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated.  Bhutto was far from perfect, but this is still upsetting and disturbing news. 

Not much else I can say right now, except…  If this was done by fundamentalist terrorists, these are the people who are trying to bring about the kind of rule that would suppress the creative expression in music, dance, etc., that I have been supporting here (not to mention a whole lot of other things that they would stifle and suppress). 

I am deeply opposed to those kinds of movements and the tactics waged to advance them, though I am also strongly opposed to G.W. Bush and dictators like Musharraf.  It’s too bad that so many people feel they must support one oppressive. authoritarian force in order to oppose another.  There aren’t many these days who feel they can even dream about creating a movement for equality, liberty, and real democracy. 

But, anyway…  Just had to say something in light of this unfortunate coincidence. 

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This evening, I’ve been doing some research to check back on a group that I saw speak here in New York City some years ago, who gained attention in radical leftist circles here during the time between the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.  They are called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

I’ll probably be getting back to that topic sometime soon.

A Good Book to Quote: The Trouble With Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality by Walter Benn Michaels

There are a couple of kinds of books that can be a real pleasure to read, for those of us interested in social and political matters.  One is a book that actually tells us things we didn’t know, informs us, maybe helps to clarify or shape our opinions in a certain way.  The other kind is the book that tells us things that have always seemed very obvious to us, but which we haven’t been able to articulate to so many people who don’t seem to get it.  That latter kind of book can help to ease the frustration a little.  There’s a good chance that the people who aren’t getting it aren’t going to listen anyway, but somehow, it adds a little hope when you see someone else figuring out a more clever and exact way of discussing these things. 

For me, Walter Benn Michaels’ The Trouble With Diversity… is the latter kind.  He’s not telling me anything I didn’t already know and didn’t already think was obvious.  But he’s articulating it all quite well, which is satisfying.  So, it’s worth quoting a few passages, at least - my favorites being very near the beginning…

From the Introduction:

…[T]he left today obsessively interests itself in issues that have nothing to do with economic inequality.

And, not content with pretending that our real problem is cultural difference rather than economic difference, we have also started to treat economic difference as if it were cultural difference.  So now we’re urged to be more respectful of poor people and stop thinking of them as victims, since thinking of them as victims is condescending; it deprives them of their agency.  And if we can stop thinking of poor people as people who have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who have too little respect, then it’s our attitude toward the poor, not their poverty, that becomes the problem to be solved, and we can focus our efforts of reform not on getting rid of classes but on getting rid of what we like to call classism… 

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[In regard to the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" response to the Katrina disaster:]

We want a fictional George Bush who doesn’t care about black people rather than the George Bush we’ve actually got, one who doesn’t care about poor people.

 Although that’s not quite the right way to put it.  First because, for all I know, George Bush does care about poor people as anyone else does.  What he doesn’t care about - and what Bill Clinton, judging by his eight years in office, didn’t much care about, and what John Kerry, judging from his presidential campaign, doesn’t much care about and what we on the so-called left, judging by our willingness to accept Kerry as the alternative to Bush, don’t care about either - is taking steps to get them to stop being poor.

 And, form Chapter 1, “The Trouble With Race”:

If none of the students in my class has read either Emerson or Douglass and if biology can’t connect the white ones with Emerson and the black ones with Douglass, what sense does it make to say either one belongs to their heritage?  Indeed, does it make any sense to say there is any such thing as heritage?  There are some things we inherit (our genes) and some things we learn (maybe Bantu or English, Emerson or Douglass).  But there’s no necessary connection between them.  There’s no reason why people with a certain set of genes outght to be reading a certain set of books and thinking of those books as part of their heritage, or why, when they read some other set of books, they should think of them as part of someone else’s heritage.  There are just the things we learn and the things we don’t learn, the things we do and the things we don’t do.