Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
I was involved in a rather spirited discussion recently, with some former classmates whose brains have been consumed by the ghastly Trumpinista walking dead, and have become mouth-gnawing-bone-breaking-mindless-shuffling-toward-any-loud-noise-or-smell-of-blood Zombies themselves.
It was sad to see once beautiful and sexy women reduced to spittle-flecked, red-eyed rage, and once lithe and athletic men now gray and bloody and mad, frantically tearing at corpses long void of any discernible nourishment.
These weren't Zombies from some Caribbean Mythic conjuring though, so I had no choice but to retreat to the high ground to gain some better bearings.
One would think, that if these Zombies looked in the mirror, they would know their mortal coil has been conquered, that their Souls have left the vessel, that their broken and flailing limbs, their skulls absent of brain tissue, the ganglia hanging loose and dripping a slimy green liquid, you would think that would give them a clue to their predicament. But they only respond to a bright flash, a jarring thud and the smell of raw meat. So they shuffle and grasp and mouth senseless words that are mere recitations embedded in a lizard-center of a forgotten hormonal gland activated by Fox News wireless electrical shocks.
Maybe it's cruel for me to say so, maybe it's inflammatory to call these folks the walking dead and use such ghastly, grade-b monster movie metaphor.
Maybe it's simplifying matters to call these folks mindless Zombies, when they know damn well what they are doing. Just as the Good Germans, they so mightily resemble, did before, during and after the fall of the Third Reich.
These Trumpinista complain of brown people harrassing them with cupped hands begging for something not due them. These Trumpinista complain of the jobless as losers who should be left to disappear in some other ether, just don't park on their street or ask for a job at their shop. These Trumpinista consume the most and give back the least, and cheer when doctors are assassinated while advocating for a woman's right to choose.
The Trumpinistas say they harken to the Silent Majority from the time of Nixon and Reagan. Rather than silent, they are a cruel majority, a cruel majority that would rather see a child die of sickness than extend healthcare. A cruel majority that will kick a man or woman when they are down and then penalize them for complaining about it. A cruel majority that expects the unflinching fealty any bully demands, from any who comes between them and what they wish to possess.
The cruel majority emerges!
Hail to the cruel majority!
They will punish the poor for being poor.
They will punish the dead for having died.
Nothing can make the dark turn into light
for the cruel majority.
Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror.
If the cruel majority would only cup their ears
the sea would wash over them.
The sea would help them forget their wayward children.
It would weave a lullaby for young & old.
(See the cruel majority with hands cupped to their ears,
one foot is in the water, one foot is on the clouds.)
One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud
between his thumb & middle finger,
to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps.
He is a little god but not a poet.
(See how his body heaves.)
The cruel majority love crowds & picnics.
The cruel majority fill up their parks with little flags.
The cruel majority celebrate their birthday.
Hail to the cruel majority again!
The cruel majority weep for their unborn children,
they weep for the children that they will never bear.
The cruel majority are overwhelmed by sorrow.
(Then why are the cruel majority always laughing?
Is it because night has covered up the city's walls?
Because the poor lie hidden in the darkness?
The maimed no longer come to show their wounds?)
Today the cruel majority vote to enlarge the darkness.
They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds
Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass.
The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel majority.
Hail to the cruel majority!
Hail! hail! to the cruel majority!
The mountains skip like lambs, the hills like rams.
The cruel majority tear up the earth for the cruel majority.
Then the cruel majority line up to be buried.
Those who love death will love the cruel majority.
Those who know themselves will know the fear
the cruel majority feel when they look in the mirror.
The cruel majority order the poor to stay poor.
They order the sun to shine only on weekdays.
The god of the cruel majority is hanging from a tree.
Their god's voice is the tree screaming as it bends.
The tree's voice is as quick as lightning as it streaks across the sky.
(If the cruel majority go to sleep inside their shadows,
they will wake to find their beds filled up with glass.)
Hail to the god of the cruel majority!
Hail to the eyes in the head of their screaming god!
Hail to his face in the mirror!
Hail to their faces as they float around him!
Hail to their blood & to his!
Hail to the blood of the poor they need to feed them!
Hail to their world & their god!
Hail & farewell!
Hail & farewell!
Hail & farewell!
-- Jerome Rothenberg
“A Poem for the Cruel Majority”
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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This July, I traveled to Barbados to unwind and get away. I didn’t know I’d encounter a monument that would help me understand how America processes our history.
Heading into town from the airport, we circled a statue situated in one of the most prominent intersections in town. It depicts a black man, Bussa, breaking the chains that bound his hands in slavery. In 1816, Bussa, an enslaved African, organized enslaved black people across every major plantation to stage a nationwide revolt in what is now known as Bussa’s Rebellion. His actions were instrumental in bringing about the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.
As someone who grew up in Florida, I had never seen anything like it. For me, a racial justice activist, it communicated viscerally what no study or analysis ever could. It helped me imagine a landscape of liberation.
That night, I tweeted an image of the statue. People began tweeting back pictures of others just like it. Statues in Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Colombia, Jamaica, Saint Martin, Haiti, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Curaçao — all of black men and women who organized, fought, and risked their lives for emancipation. Free. Fearless. Empowering by design.
These statues represented a reality I did not experience growing up. The monuments in my hometown celebrated the men who fought to keep those who look like me enslaved, not those who fought for freedom. A monument in downtown Orlando where I grew up depicted a Confederate soldier, rifle over his shoulder and towering above his surroundings. At its base was a plaque celebrating the “heroic courage” and “unselfish patriotism” of their cause. A few miles down the road, children spent their days learning in the classrooms of Robert E. Lee Middle School.
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According to Baltimore's WBAL, the four monuments removed were a statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott; a monument to Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson; a monument to Confederate soldiers and sailors; and a Confederate women’s monument.
The New York Times reports that small crowds were present to celebrate the removals and that Black Lives Matter was spray painted on the pedestal of the Lee-Jackson monument.
Baltimore-based writer Alec MacGillis documented the overnight removals:
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As part of Tuesday afternoon’s bizarre remarks on the white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump suggested that removing monuments to Confederate military and political leaders could put the United States on a slippery slope.
“Was George Washington a slave owner?” he asked, rhetorically. “So will George Washington now lose his status ... are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?”
Tucker Carlson sought to further muddy the waters on his Fox News show Tuesday night, by observing that figures such as Plato and Mohammed also owned slaves.
These arguments aren’t exactly offered in good faith. But even then, they reflect a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the Confederacy as a project — and of the difference between commemorating its leaders compared to America’s Founding Fathers.
Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and the other politicians and generals who served the Confederate States of America aren’t noteworthy historical figures who also happened to benefit from the institution of slavery. They are historical figures who are noteworthy almost exclusively because they led an insurrection against the United States of America, an insurrection whose primary purpose was to perpetuate slavery.
Owning human chattel — and offering intellectual and political defenses of the institution of American slavery — is an important and dishonorable part of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy. But it’s the entirety of Davis’s legacy.
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In angering the NFL’s white billionaire owners, the quarterback lost his job but started a movement. Slate: Colin Kaepernick Won
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On March 17, Colin Kaepernick celebrated the success of a joint effort to prod Turkish Airlines to fly 60 tons of food and aid to people in Somalia. That same day, Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman reported that, in the words of an anonymous NFL executive, a good proportion of league decision-makers “genuinely hate” the anthem-protesting quarterback “and can’t stand what he did. They want nothing to do with him. They won’t move on. They think showing no interest is a form of punishment. I think some teams also want to use Kaepernick as a cautionary tale to stop other players in the future from doing what he did.” Three days after that, the president of the United States bragged in the third person that “NFL owners don’t want to pick [Kaepernick] up because they don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump.”
Five months later, Kaepernick—who threw 16 touchdown passes and just four interceptions for the San Francisco 49ers last season—remains unsigned, just as Trump predicted. Back in August 2016, when Kaepernick made the simple, radical decision to stay seated for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” nobody noticed or cared. When reporters finally asked him about it a few weeks later, the quarterback explained he was protesting police brutality and noted that in some jurisdictions cosmetologists get more rigorous training than cops. Kaepernick’s on-field demonstration, and his explanation for it, spawned a level of hatred—Exhibit A: Tomi Lahren’s vow to “eviscerate [Kaepernick’s] mouth diarrhea”—beyond even what New York Jets fans direct toward their team on Sunday afternoons. At the same time, he won the grudging respect of then-President Barack Obama and earned plaudits from a huge proportion of the press and pro football fans, who made his jersey the top seller in the league’s online shop.
Colin Kaepernick can’t reasonably be described as an unpopular figure. He is a uniquely polarizing one. One year after he began his protest, Kaepernick has won with the media and lost with the man. We should not be shocked that a league that polices players’ touchdown celebrations would not abide a quarterback who took a knee for social justice. The NFL has always been and will always be a redoubt for reactionaries. It is also a closed system, one controlled by billionaires whose views are much further outside the mainstream than Kaepernick’s.
In November, the Guardian reported that NFL owners donated 42 times more cash—$8,052,410 vs. $189,610.72—to Republican causes as compared with Democratic ones in 2015 and 2016. The Daily Beast subsequently wrote that of the $107 million raised to finance Donald Trump’s inauguration, the NFL’s money men chipped in roughly 7 percent, with Washington’s Dan Snyder, the Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, the Rams’ Stan Kroenke, the Patriots’ Robert Kraft, the Texans’ Bob McNair, the Jaguars’ Shahid Khan, and the Jets’ Woody Johnson giving $1 million each. Johnson, for his part, was recently confirmed as the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom.
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Nigeria has started a $41 billion railway expansion to reduce dependence on oil and diversify its struggling economy by improving transport links to allow the movement of goods around the country and to ports.
“The plan we have now will go to every nook and corner,” Transport Minister Rotimi Amaechi, 52, said in an interview in the capital, Abuja.
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A recent analysis conducted by The Marshall Project confirms what most of us have known, or at least suspected, all along: when a black man is killed by a white person in America, their killer is less likely to face legal consequences, and the killing is more likely to be deemed justifiable.
The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization that covers criminal justice in the United States. The organization recently examined homicides committed by civilians between 1980 and 2014 and found that in one in six of those killings, there was no criminal sanction.
The term ‘justifiable’ is used to describe situations where a police officer or civilian kills someone who is committing a crime or in self-defense.
While police normally classify less than 2 percent of homicides committed by civilians as justifiable, over the last three decades in cases where the victim was a black male killed by a non-Hispanic white civilian, 17 percent were categorized as justifiable.
According to the Marshall Project, this “disparity persists across different cities, different ages, different weapons and different relationships between killer and victim.”
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