Today is May Day, Comrade!
Throw of those shackles of oppression!
Class Warfare is the Engine of History!
My friend L bristles when I mention communism favorably, but he's
reacting in the conventional manner to the suggestion of
brutal statist regimes and all that general Cold War hostility,
while I'm thinking instead of commune-style living in a worker's
paradise. Where I picture an equitable redistribution of wealth,
he sees seizure & confiscation of assets and the KGB. I see Joe Hill, he see
Joe Stalin. My own socialist ideal is the way they live on Pern, in Anne McCaffrey's
"Dragon" books. What I find appealing is the idea of communal
dining in large public halls. What is unappealing
is culture based strictly on doctrine - it's so boring, it can't possibly
withstand the bright light of international public scrutiny. Check out
North Korea's official web site
and you can see what I mean. How can anyone take that stuff seriously?
I've got one of my archival videos playing in the background, as I
type this - "Back To The Future", one of my favorite films
<1>. The other
movies on this tape are "Mothra" and "Don't Look Back" (the Dylan tour
documentary). As ever the sound is coming out of my stereo and the
picture is on this monochrome (green) Apple monitor my brother N donated
(it's the only CRT in my apartment). This particular section was taped
on Election Day 1992 off KTLA channel 5, so during the breaks, along
with the archaic five-year-old commercials, one finds frequent
announcements of Clinton's victory by (award-winning) Hal Fishman.
A guy <2> on Terri Gross' "Fresh Air" radio show today is talking about how
James Brown is really the Godfather of Funk, how his sound
is all around us now in the form of Funk and Rap music. Describing the revolutionary
structure of 1965's "Poppa's Got A Brand New Bag", he said "...'soul
music' peaked in 1966-1967, and really ended in 1968 with the death
of Dr. Martin Luther King." I've been mulling over this... the timing
seems right, but I've never heard that linkage before, and the
more I dwell on it the more specious it seems. The interview was from 1990;
played again as part of a James Brown Special Birthday show (he's 70?). The
anecdote about him I recall was a news factoid from several years back during one
of those stretches he was doing jail time. A surprise inspection
uncovered $40,000 cash in his cell; when asked about he said it was
"For smokes, man."