January 2007 Archives

You know how high school kids, when they're emo about something and they don't want to talk about it so they just post song lyrics in their livejournals? I need to do that now. Okay.

The Evens.

Cut from the cloth, and cut quite severely
Is this my world I no longer recognize?
I'm hearing common words, common expressions
But nothing is common in my eyes

How do people sleep amidst the slaughter?
[editor's note: stop right there for second. it's easy to react to that line and think it is cheesy and trite, and like something Midnight Oil might say. That was my first reaction, to roll my eyes and go "Ohhhhh, Ian!". But if it sounds trite, maybe you've heard it a lot because it's an irreducible truth, but dealing with it is hard so we have this coping strategy we come up with: cynicism. What happens when we let that lyric hit us? Take a deep breath and ask yourself, how do we sleep amidst the slaughter? What mechanisms exist to distance us from the bad shit? It really is a good fucking question, isn't it? Back to the song?
Why would they vote in favor of their own defeat?
Get out to the well and check the water
Results were incomplete

Cut from the cloth, and dead to the masses
Just another case to be eulogized
But I'm breathing, breathing with no assistance
And responding to stimuli

Can anyone explain these new laws of nature?
Why would they rule in favor of their own defeat?
Cynics are excused from standing up to problems
Because they can't get out of their seats

Cut from the cloth, ran out screaming
I hope that none of this will stick to me
Everyone is nice, everyone is kind now
At least they're nice and kind to me

Why would they fold up something so precious?
Why would they sing in favor of their own defeat?
Maybe they found their voice while out shopping
The price was hard to beat

From Democracy Now:

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of his birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

Democracy Now! provides a convenient podcast-sized MP3 with two of King's greatest speeches from late in his career. We'll be blasting it from the P.A. this afternoon in Anacortes while we play our monthly kickball game.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

And from his final speech, "I have been to the mountaintop":

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively -- that means all of us together -- collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles. We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other bread? -- Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town -- downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank. We want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. Go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something that we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We are telling you to follow what we are doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."

Now these are some practical things that we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.

Withdraw from unjust economic systems. Invest in economic systems that are fair. Pretty simple.

Recently confirmed: I will be speaking in Grand Rapids, Michigan in late March at Calvin College's "Festival of Faith and Music." The website describes it as:

Designed to forward a comprehensive interrogation of the ways grace, love, compassion, and the Christian faith are expressed in the world of popular music.

Events for ffm 2007 include two nights of LIVE performances by some of the leading artists in folk, rock, roots, and independent music, workshops led by musicians, critics, scholars, producers, and keynote speakers.

Anyway, I'll be presenting some of the findings of my undergraduate thesis on hip consumerism in Christian media culture, with a focus on Relevant Magazine, and probably some additional reflections on the theological basis for a renewed independent cultural praxis. I'm very flattered and grateful to have been invited to be a part of it. Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case(?), and Emmylou Harris (?!?) will be among the performers. And a bunch of pretty legit-looking speakers who write books with titles like Colossians Remixed: Subverting The Empire(!)

Full info is here.

By the way, have you heard that Neko Case record, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood? I know, you're thinking "pretty alt-country lady, boring!" but really it is my favorite record of the past year--at least as adventurous, textured, and sonically engaging as the last Xiu Xiu record, with some really weird dirty organ sounds, deep deep reverb--and the songs are just heartbreaking, surprising, inventively structured.