Democracy of Misrepresentation

Stop trying to figure out who's going to win the election this year. It doesn't matter.

As of right now, the imperialist swine that dictate campaign finance and strategy (read: Karl Rove) have your nuts in a fucking vicegrip. The democracy has been taken over by the hegemony of propaganda. You no longer control your own destiny.

It may sound like a bit much, but the truth remains: the voters are now, more than ever, a market to be cornered instead of served. Manipulation of media and word wars between Yale-educated system pawns dictate the flow of information, deciding what voters see, hear, think. And while the YouTube debates are certainly a step in the right direction, for the most part we are doomed to live in the blackhole of reliance on mainstream media instead of the golden age of oration. We have little or no idea what any of these candidates will do once in office, and we must realize the limiting factors of the office itself. A President, though influential, cannot change the system.

A bunch of old white guys still make laws for a country that is harly old, or white, or male. The representative democracy the United States has always claimed has always been a democracy of representation - representation of freedom, of wealth, of equality. But on the ground these things take on different guises and meanings, become entirely different things. Tell a businessman in the suburbs he's a free man and he'll tell you he knows; tell a migrant worker in Texas the same thing and he'll scowl at your hubris. Policy and politics and language mean nothing on the ground, and the beat of work and of the sun reminds our worker just how far from Washington he is, and just how far Washington is from him.

The unspoken arrangement of politics in this country is simple: we know better than you. We know the way the world works, we know the how to manipulate it, we know what's best for America. We know because we are white, and male, and rich. We know because we sat in classrooms and listened to people like us. We know because we got jobs working for people like us. And we know because of the money we've made off of people like you.

Make no doubt about it, the power elites understand this relationship. Politicians know that their power is couched in the denial of agency. CEO's know their fortune is couched in the exploitation of labor. And oil companies know their future is couched in the rape of the environment. They understand the way their world works - as a zero sum game. One up means one down, and more often two or three or ten down.

So as you watch this election season, perhaps the most ridiculous of all time, remember that you are a target. You are a consumer, a piece of the market to be cornered and exploited. You are put into groups based on race and gender and class and religion; a demographic and a number and nothing near a human being. Whether you purchase Romney or Clinton or Guiliani or Obama or, God willing, Huckabee, remind yourself that your vote comes at a price. And if you choose to be apathetic, at least do so with passion.

Less Decadent, More Depraved : NASCAR and The Great American Spectacle

So we're allmost out of oil. And carbon emmissions from petroleum burning engines are destroying the environment. But we're America, so we do the only logical thing: we build 800 horsepower, fuel guzzling racecars, and have them chase each other around a glorified hampster wheel for 400 laps at a time. We do it every weekend (3 times every weekend, actually), and 150,000 people come to watch.




That's three colliseums' worth of people - and the comparison is no mistake. In many ways the NASCAR phenomenon is akin to the spectacles of ancient Rome, spectacles where human life was regularly destroyed in the name of visceral entertainment. While the possibility of death, or at least the anticipation of disastrous high-speed collisions, is certainly a major draw for many fans, the sacrifice in NASCAR comes from the bosom of of Mother Nature. By most accounts, an average NASCAR series season comsumes about 200,000 gallons of fuel. This figure excludes practice, qualifying, and tuning, all of which undoubtedly inflate it considerably. The consumption itself is staggering, to be sure, but the rate at which these machines suck down gas is matched in intensity only by the jet-engine-level noise they throw into the atmosphere. The shit is loud. Really loud. Ears-bleeding, eyeballs-bulging, rib-shaking loud.

In fact, the experience of the racetrack is blistering for all five senses. Not only is your auditory capacity at the complete mercy of these massive, churning dynamos, the smell of burning rubber and Marlboros stuffs your nostrils, the cold, damp touch of a sweating Budweiser can preoccupies he fingers. And then the sights - oh the sights! Jean shorts and flame-tagged hats, no-name hightops and decaled pickups, meth addicts, swingers, smokers, mullets, spare rib and hamburger profilgacy, small children and old ladies, beer bellies and big titties, booze upon booze upon booze upon booze, more booze, a strikingly high number of full families, and a surprisingly low contingent of police. And caucasia everywhere.



They are 150,000 pilgrims to the high altar of motorsports, and on sunny Sunday sabbaths they trade in church for, as one pre-event prayer read, "racing in the name of Jesus Christ, the way God intended." And for many the spectacle is nothing short of a religious happening. Mom, Dad, and Grandma show up in the RV on Thursday night, watch qualifying, the truck race, the Busch race, and then gear up for the main event, the consecration of the entire ceremony, the culminating act of the whole shebang: the Nextel race.

Nextel races draw, on average, more spectators than for any other major sport in the United States. They command the second position, behind NFL football, in the television ratings battle. And watching a race, either in person or on that magical talking box Americans love so much, one is exposed to unparalleled volume of corporate sponsorship. Alcohol manufacturers, car insurance dealers, office suppliers, home-improvement stores, and even the US National Guard claim primary sponsorship of a Nextel car, a billion dollar a year commitment. Their logos displayed prominently on all sides of the vehicle, creating a permanent, three-hour long TV spot and a mobile billboard at the same time. Merchandise sales routinely top $2 billion annually, everything from model cars to clothing to furniture.



So why do they come? Why do these people tune in and turn out 40 weeks of the year to this fuel-wasting, environment draining, consumerism-inciting spectacle of excess and incest? They do it because the human animal is addicted to entertainment, compelled naturally toward the possibility of destruction, still governed, at some level, by the craving for viceral stimuli. And Goddamn it, dem cars go real fast.

To: Anonymous - From: The Kids

From the kids of the street:

Fuck you nigga.

You heard me.

Fuck you, Nigga.

Wow nigga
how nigga
now nigga

tell me how i'm supposed to rise above the violence and strife
when the smell around me cuts like a knife
when none of the my brothers' fathers call my mother their wife
when the game pins my ambition tight like a vice
tell me how i'm supposed to live my life.

school's out prison's in
it's where i'll find my closest of kin
doin time in the joint for smokin' a joint
mothafuckas i know you got my point man

held up in cuffs like scotland yard
playin' the trump card; rat
me out i'm beggin you please
my homies'll have screamin 'don't' from your knees
just be thankful i'm smokin' those trees

make 5.50 to work, lose 10 from welfare
you do the math like sebastian telfar,
couldn't count the numbers on the fuckin' contract
even if he could make the shot after contact.

so hedge fund your bets trustfunders
and let the system pull me under
pregnant by 15, addicted at 20, dead at 40,
damn sure MY record never made no royalties
still holdin tight in my pocket to my false sense of loyalty

to the streets.

so fuck you nigga.

you heard me.

fuck you, nigga

- the youth

Why Hip-Hop Is Better Than Government

Spits straight, gains weight, won't take your claim, shit on your game, take aim at your will.

No, hip-hop won't hate, won't comiserate with these fools at the gates with these cats, straight house cats not wiling to go and see the results of their elite complicity, the ghettos full of kids left behind and junkies in a bind, sleepin' on the streets while the politicians' daughters win track meets.

Hip-hop can't classify, identify, indemnify the causes of the american poverty, the highs in white houses spitting lies at black faces, forgetting the truth about people in places, constantly avoiding all incriminating traces, denying different races play a role when the dark-skinned ones are the only ones that they stole.

Hip-hop won't judge and won't budge, holds deserved grudges and has its own judges, taking cases to street over soul-inspired beats, speaks to those who listen and listens to those that speak, evolves of the mind and never abandons the grind, working hard for effortless flows, from the cypher to the show, takes you as you come and may never let you go.

Hip-hop is the meditation of the mind, a divine contraception of ideas and reception, the confluence of lessons learned in long private sessions, with friends and L's moving in procession to the beat, the beat, the beat of impression that never preaches down to the masses but comes up with the grasses between the concrete blocks of the world that walks.

Hip-hop don't charge taxes, it relaxes, the body and mind at the same pace, sayin' grace to the pioneers of street lure and emcees of rap galore, spreading the rhetoric of a new asthetic in rhymes and sayin' fuck it to the times, fuck it to the lines of propaganda bullshit, fuck it to the last of this too long BUSH-shit, fuck it to the congress and courts that try to save, all they've done is re-enslave.

Hip-hop is better than government.

The New Democracy: Government on the People, at the Cost of the People.

Get out the champagne, crack that bottle you've been holding on to, smoke that secret stash you've been saving. I figured it out. I figured out how to fix Iraq.

1). Invade the country for no reason, with no evidence, and with a wafer-thin authorization from Congress.

2). Create a Public Relations campaign the likes of which America has never seen; a propaganda circus that includes fake news, embedded censorship, and an unrelenting assault of false statements.

3). Proclaim a premature victory to rouse nationalism against the barbarians.

4). Send a whole bunch of able-bodied American men to be killed. (But try to take the poor, the brown, the uneducated, marginalized. We never liked the fuckers anyways.)

5) Award billions of dollars of military contracts to your buddies. Cuz fuck 'em, why not?

6). Try to institute a democratic, power-sharing government in a country that has never seen power-sharing, democracy, or government. Oh, and we destroyed the entire infrastructure. No more moads, policing, sewers, drinking water, airports, banking. Our bad. But hey, more contracts for your buddies.

7). When the American people find out what's going on, silence the dissenters. If the war is good against evil, only the hippies will pick evil. And remember, God Loves the Patriot Act.

8). Build a wall in the middle of Baghdad to separate the two sides. We know building walls to separate people works really well. Just look at Germany, Palestine, and Northern Ireland.

9). Fight to the death to keep the troops in Iraq, to the point of absurdity. 3,000 are already dead, what's another 500? Americans won't remember in five years anyways, right?

10). Get the hell out of dodge. Go find yourself a nice ranch in Texas. Smoke those Cubans the CIA stole from Fidel, blow that coke you extorted from the Medellin, drink that bottle of vodka you scammed from Putin and the Scotch Tony Blair gave you to let him suck you off. And while you're at it, fuck that 15 year-old virgin the bin-Ladens gave you to 'make this whole thing go away.'


What's that you say? It didn't work? Iraq is still a disaster? Well, fuck 'em. You're rich.

An Audience of One

From the start, let it be clear that any undue loss of life, no matter how small or large, is a crime and a tragedy. To force someone else to unwillingly lose their life is to rob them of their future children, their future loves, their future professions, their future hopes and aspirations - in short, the future.

So when we come face to face with death on such a large scale as the recent events at Virginia Tech, we must, absolutely, take pause to reflect upon the state of a world that allows such things to go on. We must examine the structures that support a worldview like the one that caused the death of 32 innocent students. And of course, we must grieve over the loss of a pool of human resources so wide and deep it can never be recreated. But in this reflection we must be honest about the ways of the world and try to look at the underlying causes and power structures that harbor violence within their ideological walls.

As the media coverage has rolled on, nearly ubiquitously, the solutions to problems like this have been simple: increase security, provide counseling, try to screen for disturbed youth. In short, the answer has been more guns, not less. The answer has been to increase security, not to decrease hate. The answer, American as America gets, is more and more and more instead of simply better. And as the media continues to broadcast from Virginia Tech and continues to show the manifesto tape of the killer, we are confronted with yet another truth: this is exactly what he wanted.

The shooter credits the two young men from Columbine High School as "martyrs" in his taped remarks, a sign of the increasing allegiance to violence as the means of escape from a culture of hate and degradation that follows many adolescents. What made this student so angry was the affluence and entitlement that surrounded him, the feeling of unnacceptance that comes with being a brown person in a white country, the sense that everyone around him was the recipient of a divine grace that he missed. In short, he was seduced by the great American myth of more and not better, unaware that many of the affluent and entitled students he was seeing through angry eyes were the victims of the same dissafection.

But the point here is that he had a model to follow. Columbine, as the firestarter that ignited a trend of school shootings, painted a picture of the rebels that stuck in the minds of others. All over the country, students from high school to elementary school were bombarded by the images of the two shooters in trenchcoats, enacting their revenge upon the popular, the wealthy, the entitled, the authorities. All over the country, students watched blueprints and timelines and examined every aspect of the incident, from the weapons technology to the manifesto to Marilyn Manson. And suddenly, all over the country, students who felt the same way had an example.

As we are faced with a tragedy that matches Columbine in scale, why are we doing the same things? Instead of diagramming the hallways and remarking the shooter's expert marksmanship, why are we not interviewing students who aren't letting this violence affect their lives? Why, instead of silencing the voice of violent oppression, are we giving it primetime media coverage. The end message is this: "if you feel silenced, or oppressed, or disenfranchised, and you want to do something about it, violence will give you a voice. Violence will lead the way. Violence will help you reach an audience of half a billion people." Thirty-two students later, this shooter got what he wanted all along: a voice.

By all means, we must protect ourselves. But we must do so in the manner that makes the most sense: by listening. There are other student out there who are watching and learning, others who feel the way this student did. And though there is a difference between feeling and action, that difference can be erased by a single hateful comment, a single act of ignorance or malice.

So in honor of the fallen students, and in hope for the future, turn off your television and open your eyes and ears. With an honest desire to listen and learn instead of fear and loathe, you might just stop the shooting.

Maybe it's time to go home.