VOGUE copyright Conde Nast
© 2023 h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com
© 2023 KM Fikes
The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. Merchant of Venice, III.i.59-73
Theory of tickle-down economics oppression. Shakespeare, despite deplorable anti-Semitism, still managed some feat in delivering Shylock's insightfulness - peculiarly endemic to the persecuted - thru defining trickle-down oppression. Over four-hundred years 'removed'.
Alas, we cannot be removed from a continuum chronic in its contamination. Let us set the timeline yet, pray, know ye first that dire interconnectedness is our impetus of chronicling along said 'line'. Indeed, a line ties recent events and one worries what becomes of potential evolution when thwarted by untethered reception. Are 'ends' left to knot themselves - loose or tight? Are we out on these lines, sometimes 'wired', alone?
Jan. 3
Keenan Anderson, a 31-year-old teacher, succumbs to cardiac arrest after repeated police tasering. Anderson, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrice Cullars' cousin, dies hours after the accident-related traffic stop.
Jan. 7
Tyre Nichols, skilled skate boarder and aspiring photographer, at the age of 29, is beaten to death by five Black officers.
Jan. 18
'Tortuguita', given name, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a medic and community organizer, is dead at age 26. Police 'intervention' cleared an environmentalist encampment where unidentified gunfire resulted in the death of the queer activist. Their social media posting matched a reputation of demonstrating conscious adherence to non-violent action. They died from several rounds of gunfire by the SWAT team.
Jan. 19
David Crosby, folk-rock musician, indelibly linked - or 'in line' - with the Kent State campus massacre for recording, Ohio, lyrically documenting the injustice, dies from natural causes - at age 81, not 18.
Jan 21
11 are killed at a dance club in Southern California's Monterey Park on Lunar New Year. The dead suspect was a 72-year-old Asian man. Suggestions of possible domestic dispute and/or untreated mental distress accompany the investigation - alongside the exhaustively customary calls for stricter gun control statutes.
Jan 23
7 are shot dead on a mushroom farm in Northern California's Half Moon Bay by a fellow farmworker, age 66, also of Asian descent.
Jan. 26
Georgia Governor Kent Kemp declares a "State of Emergency" which can employ the National Guard to quell peaceful civil disobedience as a response to Tortuquita's killing.
A thread. Wound in one direction.
Were we to dare name this timeline? State Violence. To be sure. While ism residue of ilks equally irksome abound, the timeline above is an ominous ode to State Violence. It must be named and one fears all occurrences listed may be viewed as disparate instead of corresponding. Oh so to our detriment!
The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. Merchant of Venice, III.i.59-73
Even cries today, this very hour, before a service can lay Nichols to 'rest', demands - yet seems deficient - of this broader framework. With this weekend's video release, whether one chooses to view or not, a pointed response will be elicited into our shared ether. Attention honors Tyre Nichols’ memory, his family, all relational bonds, and wider Memphis. One hopes this moment - too fertile, ripe for seeing so much farther or inward and in ‘line’ - is not minimized by a myopic reading. May there be reverence in insistence upon a knitting-needle analysis where one skilled string guides our collective garment.
About that pulled string? What is most problematic about policing is its raison d'être. Slave patrols auto-deputized those who could prove their patriotism thru racialized force. Extricating an institution from roots so foul would be some fool's errand if not for its implicit danger. Plucking 'police brutality' from the ruthlessness roundly comprising Da State makes us derelict in duty as a critical citizenry. Bad apples grow from and fall off the tree of a militarized state. When we fail to trace the trajectory of rotten 'produce', we wind up with surreal scenes like tanks rolling past Ferguson neighborhood lawns. Remnants of our 'forever wars' abroad, Homeland Security's response to the World Trade Center collapsing in on itself, once externally hit, and our continued compliant numbing of nuance in supporting an Israeli occupation, make wartime vehicles, armament, but more so, and quite disturbing, military tactical training quotidian interactions jeopardizing community cohesion.
And that of trees.
Forest defenders in Atlanta have been protesting the $90 million planned 'Cop City', a law enforcement training facility that would not only be the largest of its kind in the US, but also not incidentally, neighbor communities of color. Like Ferguson before it, 'Cop City' would share tactical expertise with the State of Israel. Crowd control or indiscriminate dispersal protocols apparently exclude no living entity. 'Cop City' is holistic in its approach to brutality, commencing its construction with deforestation. The majority of residents surrounding Weelaunee Forest have not supported the facility either. Ecological concerns are social justice personified. Here, the seamless merging laments the prospect of vast lost acreage and equally gutted civil acumen.
Forest protectors in Atlanta, in the unrelenting nook of now, mourn and recalibrate and wade thru swamps of shock for semblance of a substantive reply - any shade of 'green'. Might there be a more definitive diss to the life of George Floyd or the untold, globally, who filled the streets due to the cause of his death, than this fatal erection of 'Cop City'? Yes, the diss deepens. A BIPOC non-binary healer is snuffed out in Georgia like books in schools or libraries to support gender expansiveness, leaving Da State absent a nod towards protest as our right to assemble. That aborted assemblage reclaims the common sense that State Violence must ignore in 'order' to ignite.
Assemblage of the common needs not only a permit; a soundtrack backs our gathering. One troubadour is dead and the 'folk' tune that falls silent was historical documentation. Others - who are ever 'othered' - protest ever - in poetry, its cousin, hip hop, and in labored as rhythmic breathing. When Da State cannot hear us beg for our last gasp. But Crosby was white and male and known. As were or could have been students at Kent State, opposed to the Vietnam War. As were and might have been upper-middle-class babies from Sandy Hook who would have grown to young adulthood, where those engaged begin to develop a world view. That view varies wide and far, as well it should, benefiting our maturation with respect for that breadth of beliefs - and consequent organizing on those beliefs' behalves. From and about Southeast Asia to Atlanta and the Middle East to Ferguson, some may or may not find how rarified few is the view solidified for the sake of humanitarian stakes. Some may or may not learn their world community can stand united, officially condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine as much as Israeli settlements violating international law. All grasp the risk of that protest song: too high for white activist-entertainers or shot college students or shot babies. When white celebrities or shot college students or shot babies - who are not poor - do not move ‘Merica to act, we know we are all in some down deep trouble. Hence, Crosby’s hushed mic counts, if only symbolically in the suspended potentiality of freedom struggles heard more and thereby with better chance for change.
BLM placards on lawns were sinking into mud before California's torrential storms. Black Lives Matter co-founder, Cullars' - in a three-year span - 'weathered' Da State declaring not Jan. 6 insurrectionists terrorists, but her activism. A social justice organizer goes from state-declared terrorist to suburban-embraced 'visionary' to personally mourning the very State Violence that founded her movement as resistance to Trayvon Martin's murder in 2012...in the first damn place. Meanwhile, Floyd's Policing Act of 2021, a promise, is mired in the muck of Congressional gridlock.
The immediate State Violence example of Nichols, not harkening back to George Floyd nor Michael Brown but Rodney King in 1991, is curiously coupled with the persistence of Asian hate. Two elderly Asian men, in tragedies separated by the span of just two sunsets, acquired arms — as “instructed” Americans “will”. Following the former administration stoking xenophobic flames via delusions of scapegoats for COVID, gun purchases spiked among Asian-Americans. When older masculine expression is left ‘loaded’ with only an ‘arm’ to speak its survival of supremacy, a gun — no longer locked — is backed by law never meant for him.
Kemp, backed by law drafted for him, declares a "State of Emergency". All hell hail! Bring in Da State. When the ten tears we weep are the shape of our toes. Sometimes weeping does not register as a wet cheek. Weeping can take the form of gathering together, pointing one foot in front of the other, linking arms, and raising signage as our humming-into-shouting. Grief, undistinguished from informative anger, is the trademark of trauma.
The conditions at a fungi farm, in wealthy Half Moon Bay, but throughout agribusiness - for immigrant farmworkers - may be constructed as their own forms of humanitarian violence. Violence wears many a mask: in the threat of reports to ICE, and/or in the indignities that lead Californian farmworkers on a 550 mile-month-long march from Delano to Sacramento. Their aim of blistered, bleeding brown feet in the August heat? To garner a signature - mere white fingers' swipe of the pen - from vineyard owner/Governor Newsom. Bill AB 2183, the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Choice Act, was signed the last day of this past September. Still, legislation to aid organizing did not prevent the assailant, living in conditions whom officials are calling "deplorable", from anxiety over a $100 bill from his employer to repair a forklift. As of Jan. 29, investigators have released the suspect's professed disgruntled motive - that most current as reluctant 'Merican pastime: debt.
Jim Crow sharecropping replicated Da State because it too created debt. Reparation discussions historically mark ‘Merica’s indebtedness to its worst treatment of its labor ‘class’. Early on as colonies, forced labor of Africans was alongside indentured servitude of poorest Europeans, working off their ‘passage’ to the New World. In the Old World's twentieth century? Concentration camps in the Holocaust were oft referred to as ‘labor camps’. Back on this side of the pond, post-Reconstruction, incarceration’s synonym was ‘hard labor’. Origins of the labor ‘force’ have always been just that: a violence. Profit immense; villainy intense.
Not ironically - because that is the way continuums work, Monterey Park seems to suggest the flip, that 'brand' of resilience championed in the myth of 'full' citizenship. The affluence of Rosewood and Tulsa were decimated overnight by white supremacist massacres. Confined by segregation, industrious descendants of enslaved ancestry owned businesses and homes, experiencing the sovereignty of societal clout in ‘middle’-class status - sequestered, yet in prosperous enclaves. Until Da State had its say. Monterey Park presents as a modern-day community of the marginalized, straddling the 'line' of interior assumed or expected success, professionally as personally. Was the deceased shooter a Bard "instructed" 'merchant'? That ambiguity, enmeshed in supremacy's legacy, allegedly - from what can be ascertained thus far - visited a Luner New Year festival. Further, the manipulation of full access or inclusion in the guise of Second Amendment exploitation, granted entrance of Da State thru a presence least recognized as direct agent of Da State yet most familiar with Da State's insidious effect.
Villainy taught. Villainy learned. Villainy executed.
To describe the media that supports this armed status quo, some prefer the adjective, "cooperate" while others rely upon "mainstream". The same, really. One, however, leans towards "dominant" media. Seems a rather apropos signal towards the majority's 'might' as an actual aggression in conventional thought: how - in discourse as much as physicality - popular journalism outlets - too - suppress thru domination. Those who have their profession specified in the First Amendment seem content to question the Second Amendment - in the literal 'wake' of mass shootings that they incessantly cover - while failing to ponder the same Constitutional reach in our militarized ethos, our most omnipresent earner. Perhaps sponsorship of certain news organizations creates these 'strange bedfellows' from the war 'like' foxholes within boardrooms and ringing NY Stock Exchange. That inescapable straight line. Eisenhower identified it, coining, "the Military Industrial Complex". His only error, not so minor, was the date. A General warned his country in 1961 but First Nations caught 'wind' in 1492 and African descendants would soon concur after 1619. Chinese immigrants mark the calendar 1882 for their 'exclusion' while 1942 ‘timelines’ Japanese-American internment. Da State was on a mission then and now while capital has only affirmed this plundered enterprise that is a nation. Many who read that sentence, blurring the notion of "nation", may focus on words, "capital" or "enterprise". Key. Because those nouns are secondary to the adjective, "plundered". They are not only inextricably linked but entirely reliant upon "plunder", in its verb rotation, for their façade of progress.
Therefore, when Black cops slay a Black body, it should not confound, at least not by consensus. Five: the number of fingers folded into a fist. Two: both fists are in service of Da State. Any illusion of 'Elderly Asian-on-Asian crime' is inflicted as a reflection of and service for Da State. Whether the boot, itself, becomes a weapon, or a hand pulls the trigger of a Western instrument of annihilation, they are lethal tools - no different than those who picked the cotton to birth the NASDAQ index nor those who pounded nails to lay the Transcontinental Railway. Those tools extend from the oppressed body in 'order' to articulate Da State's intent.
Neither five cops nor two assailants are anomalies. Not holding Da State accountable impedes our evolution. Da State is incapable of innocuous influence - leaving none innocents. Whether unarmed students at Kent State in 1970, unarmed Wisconsin protestors shot by a teenage Rittenhouse for whom Da State rooted in 2020, the next unarmed motorist of color whom Da State will inevitably pull from their car to their death during Black History Month in 2023, the death of a non-binary first responder with no violent record, whom in-utero-‘Cop City’s murky account may continue to pervert, the unarmed death of a preteen in Gaza whom the Israeli Defense Force' account will continue to distort...
One cannot type further but only pause for our fate at the mercy of Da State. The above timeline is just that - a line of our times, thru our time. To be overwhelmed by State Violence here and then there is to discount the continuum. This moment is an alarm that we do not heed when we parse the details: this happened here and that, over there. Such practice leaves us discombobulated as media consumers and disempowered as citizens. We are left floundering, inadvertently elevating Da State - not because of its 'mind' control, but how complicit structures who do not take Da State to task encourage subsequent sensibilities to tear asunder our socio fabric. That string or line - severed - equates an abdication of our lone true throne: ResponseAbility. We can accept it or remain. Strung along.
Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...
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