cheese it, the cops!

i'm slowly making additions/adjustments to the hip hop list per online and offline suggestions, by editing the entry below. what a remarkably rich and various form. i can do a similar thing with country at about the same length, but country starts (recording-wise) in the 20s. anyway, this beats the healthcare debate. or: it represents my healthcare program. i know you gonna feel better. "death panel" would be a pretty good name for a hip hop act. euthanizing that ass. easy-e, tupac, biggie, big l, and jam master jay would make a good death panel.

History of Hip Hop

This playlist, at something more than a hundred songs, is intended as a history of hip hop for my class on "Hip Hop and Politics," for Spring 2010 at Dickinson College. It is a compromise between trying to get items of definite historical significance and the songs and artists I actually like best to listen to. So, for example, Eminem and Immortal Techinique - whom I believe are the best mcs ever - are overrepresented, while perhaps Jay-Z and Nas are a bit underplayed, though present. I actually don't like listening to Public Enemy; they're pointedly abrasive just on the beat. But I admire their records, and they are the biggest single influence on world hip hop, and on the idea of hip hop as a political discourse. There's a lean toward the west coast in the war; I love Dre's tracks.

There is a pretty elaborate representation of underground hip hop - Immortal Technique, Brother Ali, Atmosphere, Aceyalone. I think this work is more important for early-2000s than, say, Ludacris, or 50 Cent. I tried to cover very poppy stuff - Salt n Pepa, e.g., or Eve - which shows the effect on the music in general. But I also have basically too-hard-for-the-radio stuff.

One reason to put this up is so people can tell me what has to be on here that isn't: either what you love or respect, or what you think is a movement or a moment or an artist that is under-represented. Well, the South is, for one thing. So tell me what my students have to hear. If one way or another you try to download this list, or otherwise assemble it, I'd also love to hear what you think about the overall effect. One thing is for sure: there is a shitload of amazing music on this list.

Some artists I listened back to, and didn't necessarily hear something that I felt needed including: Ice-T and Big Daddy Kane, e.g.

I'm going to put this in rough chronological order. There are anomalies and it's hard to represent very early hip hop because the artists didn't record, or recorded only later (Kool Herc, Cold Crush Brothers, Grandmaster Flash).  Also for the most part I've grouped all the songs by an artist together even where they have had long careers.

Hip hop is a cultural/aesthetic system in various media. Traditionally it has four elements: djing, rapping, graffiti, and break dancing. But it also encompasses styles of dress and comportment, body modification and festival, politics and substance abuse, gender and race. Jamaican dj and dub music is at the base of the form, not musically but in terms of technique and performance style and context, whereas the initial directly musical materials are provided by funk and disco. Defining features of hip hop as a musical form: The music is constructed to some or a large extent by sampling, using turntables or digital devices. This makes the instrumentation of hip hop coincide roughly with the entire history of recorded sound. The beat is 4/4 and rigid, characterized by pretty extreme repetition. The lyrics are for the most part chanted (rapped) rather than sung. It is the most text-heavy of all popular music forms, by a long way, which opens up the possibility of full-scale short stories, political speeches, and so on.

(1) Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight"
(2) Grandmaster Flash, "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel"
(3) Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force, "Planet Rock"
(4) Spoonie Gee, "Love Rap"
(5) Sugarhill Gang, "8th Wonder"
(6) Kurtis Blow, "If I Ruled the World"
(7) Kurtis Blow, "Basketball"
(8) Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Message"
(9) Run-DMC, "You Be Illin'"
(10) Run-DMC: "Walk This Way"
(11) Fat Boys, "Can You Feel It?"
(12) LL Cool J, "Rock the Bells"
(13) Whodini, "Five Minutes of Funk"
(14) Whodini, "I'm a Ho"
(15) Beastie Boys, "She's Crafty"
(16) Beastie Boys, "Fight for Your Right"
(17) Blondie, "Rapture"

Newcleus, "Jam On It"

(18) MC Hammer, "Can't Touch This"
(19) MC Hammer, "It's All Good"
(20) Vanilla Ice, "Ice Ice Baby"
(21) KRS-ONE, "You Must Learn"

Marley Marl and the Juice Crew, "The Symphony"

(22) Public Enemy, "Don't Believe the Hype"
(23) Public Enemy, "Fight the Power"

Ice-T, "Original Gangsta"

(24) NWA, "Straight Outta Compton"
(25) NWA, "Fuck the Police"
(26) Eric B and Rakim, "Soul"
(27) Eric B and Rakim, " "Paid in Full"
(28) Kool Moe Dee, "How Cool Can One Black Man Be?"

Heavy D and the Boyz, "Black Coffee"

(29) Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Dogg, "Nuthin' but a G Thang"
(30) Dr. Dre featuring Snoop, "Fuck Wit Dre Day"
(31) Warren G, "Regulate"
(32) Warren G, "Do You See"
(33) Snoop Doggy Dogg, "Tha Shiznit"
(34) Snoop, "Gin and Juice"
(35) Snoop, "Murder Was the Case"
(36) Coolio, "Gangsta's Paradise"
(37) Ice Cube, "It Was a Good Day"
(38) Wu-Tang Clan, "C.R.E.A.M."
(39) Rahzel, "Wu-Tang Live Medley"
(40) GZA the Genius (RZA), "Shadowboxin"
(41) Ghostface Killah, "Assassination Day"
(42) Ghostface Killah, "Fish"
(43) De La Soul, "Me, Myself, and I"
(44) Tribe Called Quest, "Can I Kick It?"
(45) Digable Planets, "Rebirth of the Cool (Cool Like Dat)"
(46) Salt-n-Pepa, "Shoop"
(47) Da Brat, "Funkdafied"
(48) Da Brat, "Fa All Y'all"
(49) Tupac, "Hit 'Em Up""
(50) Tupac, "Shorty Want to Be a Thug"
(51) Tupac, "Gangsta Party"

Tupac, "Death Around the Corner"

(52) Dr. Dre featuring Tupac, "California Love"
(53) Us 3, "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)"
(54) Notorious B.I.G., "Juicy"
(55) Notorious B.I.G., "Big Poppa"
(56) Jay-Z, "Hard Knock Life"
(57) Jay-Z, "Renegade"
(58) Jay-Z featuring Beyonce, "Pray"
(59) Jay-Z featuring Lil Wayne, "Hello Brooklyn 2.0"
(60) Gang Starr, "Work"
(61) Fugees, "Fu-Gee-La"
(62) Fugees, "Ready or Not"
(63) Wyclef Jean, "Apocalypse"
(64) Wyclef Jean, "Staying Alive"
(66) Black Star featuring Black Thought, "Guerilla Monsoon Rap"
(68) Talib Kweli, "Move Somethin'"
(69) Talib Kweli, ""This Means You"
(70) Mos Def, "Ms. Fat Booty"
(71) Mos Def, "Got"
(72) Nas, "If I Ruled the World"
(73) Nas, "Life's a Botch"
(73) Nas, N.I.G.G.E.R."
(74) Kid Rock, "Paid"
(75) Kid Rock, "Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp"
(76) Eminem, (several obscure downloaded freestyles)
(77) Eminem, "My Name Is"
(78) Eminem,  "The Real Slim Shady"
(79) Eminem, "Square Dance"
(80) Eminem, "Business"
(81) Eminem, "Lose Yourself"
(82) Eminem, ""My Mom"
(83) Nelly, "Country Grammar"

Timbaland, "Luv 2 Luv U"

Eric Sermon, "Music"

(84) The Roots, "Proceed"
(85) Self-Scientific, "Love Allah"
(86) Self-Scientific, "Return"
(87) Jedi Mind Tricks, "Trinity"
(88) Jedi Mind Tricks, "Exertions"
(89) Jedi Mind Tricks featuring R.A. the Rugged Man, "Uncommon Valor: A Vietnam Story"
(90) Beatnuts, "Se Acabo"
(91) Spooks, "Other Script"
(92) Eve, "Let Me Blow Ya Mind"
(93) Everlast, "What It's Like"

Outkast, "Sorry Ms. Jackson"

(94) 7l and Esoteric, "Operating Correctly"
(95) Atmosphere, "Scapegoat"
(96) Atmosphere, "God Loves Ugly"
(97) Aceyalone, "Cornbread"
(98) Murs, "Murs Rules the World"
(99) Demigodz, "Captivate/Deactivate"
(100) Brother Ali, "Three-Day Journey"
(101) Brother Ali, "Soul Whisper"
(102) Delinquent Habits, "Here Come the Horns"
(103) Cool Calm Pete, "Cloudy"
(104) J-Live, "Not Satisfied"
(105) Non-Prophets, "Fresh"

Big L, "Put it On"

UGK, "Front Back Side to Side"

Dead Prez, "Police State"

(106) Immortal Technique, "Obnoxious"
(107) Immortal Technique, "Freedom of Speech"
(108) Immortal Technique, "The Cause of Death"
(109) Immortal Technique, "Obnoxious"
(110) Immortal Technique, "The Point of No Return"
(111) Immortal Technique, "Peruvian Cocaine"
(112) Immortal Technique, "Hollywood Drive-By"
(113) Immortal Technique, "Golpe de Estado"
(114) Immortal Technique, "Payback"
(115) Collie Buddz, "Come Around"

Third Mind, "Sold Your Soul"

The Streets, "Prangin' Out"

Li'l Wayne, "Fireman"

down at my ma's i finally read the book wittgenstein's poker, which is built around an incident at cambridge in which, more or less, the great philosopher ludwig wittgenstein menaced the great philosopher karl popper with a fireplace poker at a colloquium, during a dispute over the nature of philosophy. as an intellectual popularization, it is exemplary, and one thing i can say for it, the characterization of difficult philosophical positions - not only w's and p's but bertrand russell's and the logical positivists', and others - is amazingly clear and accurate and even readable by a lay audience: quite the accomplishment.

you may know that i have, in my time, reviled ludwig wittgenstein, and characterized him as the most overrated philosopher in history by a long way. this book confirms my diagnosis in a variety of ways. in particular, the cult of wittgenstein is displayed in all its glorious slavish stupidity: actual graduate students and philosophy professors dressing like him and talking like him, their ultimate question being "what would wittgenstein say?" in other words: not philosophers at all but acolytes in a messianic religious movement. i was taught, i must say, by a couple of these very people - cora diamond and renford bambrough, to name names - and as you might imagine, i went far out of my way to provoke and ridicule them - or rather, provoke them by ridiculing wittgenstein - though they were perfectly nice people. such is the origin of my wittgenstein loathing.

he had terrible effects on people, including his mentor russell. there are astonishing quotations in poker: russell - at the time the foremost logician in the world - said that after dealing with wittgenstein, he could no longer do logic. he felt too stupid. he thought that wittgenstein would re-articulate the bases of logic, for the first time on firm ground etc. the sort of thing he was talking about is embodied in the tractatus logico-philosophicus. but i think this was more about wittgenstein's mesmeric fu manchu superpowers - his gaze went through you like a bullet through a blancmange, changing you forever (for the worse) - than it was actually about his achievements. if you were enumerating the great advances of logic in the 19th and 20th centuries, you would talk about frege, and russell, tarski, godel, perhaps quine, and perhaps kripke on modal logic. but i think no particular solid fundamental result is associated with the tractatus, or indeed with wittgenstein at all. russell was deluded: he was easily the better and more important logician. the only actual achievement in this line that edmonds and eidinow can point to is truth tables. now these are useful, but they are useful only as a convenient way to represent the already-understood content of the logical connectives; they are definitely not a fundamental discovery.

but let me say that i have recovered from my brush with the wittgenstein cult. w died in 1951, and no one is going to be taught by his students any more, and even his students' students are fading. and i feel more distance. the ordinary-language style stuff of the "later w" - above all the philosophical investigations, is - if i want to be honest - very important. "meaning is use," "family resemblance," "language-games," "form of life," "the private language argument": these are important conceptions in philosophy that are still being played out. in my anxiety to destroy an irrational religion, i turned away from a set of important ideas.

now i will still say things like this: w's writings are extremely pretentious and obscurantist attempts to display his own genius. this is a complex matter; they're not obscurantist the way hegel or derrida is obscurantist, by just sinking into impenetrable jargon and extreme syntax. they are in a way deceptively simple. but that doesn't mean you can understand them, really, one factor in the never-ending industry of w-interpretation. as people keep saying in poker, they are "oracular." they're more like the tao te ching than phenomenology of spirit, but my own sense is that w is nowhere near as profound as lao tzu. they are elusive as a way to make you always think there's something you're not quite seeing, an egomaniacal strategy to persuade you that you are stupid in comparison to the author, which worked even on russell. but they are not merely that, and a little real genius shines through the "i-am-a-genius" persona. so i intend to go back and read again.

the debate between wittgenstein and popper was about whether there are any real philosophical problems, or only linguistic puzzles to be untangled (p held that there were philosophical problems). now i think that even an issue this fundamental to philosophy professors could be handled with a bit of a light touch. (certainly weapons won't help you win the argument, though they might help you win the argument, if you get me). in a way, i'm not horribly unhappy however it comes out, and if i could go back there and get a word or poker in edgewise, i would argue that there is no hard-and-fast distinction between genuine problems and linguistic puzzles. look. if you could elucidate the uses of the word 'true' in language-games, or whatever, that would be a way of addressing - a strategy for addressing - the classical problem of truth. i'd just say that the question is partly about language, or is profitably approached, or even ultimately can only be approached, from within language. that doesn't mean it's not a real problem, right?

i like j.l. austin's view: he makes no grand claims about what you can and cannot possibly do: he simply deploys an ordinary-language analysis strategically: it gives some leverage, gives you fresh insights and so on. is there a problem of truth outside language? it's not clear that's a sensible question, which means that you don't really have a position on it one way or another. you could tackle it head-on: here's my theory of truth. or you could tackle it by analyzing uses of words. these are less different than they might appear, and it's hard to tell what might help until you actually see the elucidation. on some construals "what is truth?" and "what is the meaning of the word 'truth'" are the very same question, but in any case they are inextricably intertwined.

as also i've said before, j.l. austin does very much what later w does: but he does it more clearly, and far more wittily. i just wish he'd finished more books.

back and bloggin, beeches.
i watched the obama town hall yesterday, and i'll say this: as often, he was masterful. let me offer one criticism, which i hope is substantive. a woman asked him not about death panels, but about proposed best-practices panels and their role in deciding who gets what sort of healthcare. he thoroughly dodged this question, saying that such a panel would, perhaps, get rid of redundant tests through better electronic records sharing etc. you don't need a panel to tell you that. and then he said such panels wouldn't be telling anyone to do anything, only making recommendations. i think that is disingenuous: such panels wil determine how healthcare is to be rationed.

now the whole concept of insurance arises with the invention of probability theory and depends on it to be financially viable. that is why, for example, there are pre-existing condition clauses in policies: obviously, if you insure people who you know have cancer, e.g., you wlll lose, relative to that patient, a load of money, and if you insure everyone in that circumstance, you will make it impossible to offer insurance to anyone, because you will go out of business. he kept calling that "discrimination," but it is an obviously rational assessment of risk of the sort without which insurance is impossible. on the other hand, of course, this creates devastating results for human beings in that position: no treatment (=death) or bankruptcy etc, or finally both. this is a real problem.

now, say the public option cannot discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. then every person with a a major illness will sign up for that option. the costs in such a case will be astronomical. the same goes if, as obama stated, there is no maximum of benefits. essentially, you're not running an insurance program at all, because their is no basis in probabilities etc. the costs are potentially unbelievably vast, and are to be borne not by the policy-holders qua policy-holders, but by taxpayers. and i think you'll find that the costs are utterly unsustainable: trillions upon trillions.

there is only one solution, then, and that is to do something analogous to what insurance companies do: in effect to ration care and limit benefits, which is what the proposed panels are for. (and that will include end-of-life care.) in effect there will be a thousand regulations limiting payouts. otherwise this program could not exist at all.

now i want to say this is a real dilemma. the way insurance companies ration care now has egregious effects. but if the public plan does not have analogous effects, it will swallow the economy. when you ask people, including me, offhand, whether healthcare is a right, we tend to say yes; we can't imagine just abandoning sick people and so on. but if you were to give people unlimited access to all the healthcare they need or want, you devour the whole society. so there have to be limits, and then the question is who is going to determine those limits. sadly i'm not comfortable with the insurance companies doing that, and i'm not comfortable with the government doing it.

it'll probably be a bit of relief to you that i probably won't be blogging until thursday; headin down to hang out with my ma, the redoubtable joyce abell (b. 1925). (i was raised by people somewhat to the left of liberal, which probably explains a lot.)

this story says that for the first time, analysts are regarding climate change as a national security threat. oddly, i've been reading that story for years. if it is a national security threat - "direct" to boot - then i'd say blow it the fuck up with our big weapons.

ok, just to go the other way for a second, on both healthcare and palin, this is horseshit.

i'm thinking that the backlash has begun, and will be massively and continuously reinforced by the arrogance and condescension of the left. it's not even going to be obama's fault; he's trying to bring people together, even now. but don't think that re-election in 2012 is a foregone conclusion. olbermann or whomever can still make a rejection of the whole thing the only decent position.

larry larocco at politico:

Astro-turf organizers of anger know the scene in the district is different than in the controlled and more secure DC environment As the purveyors of hate troll for angry town hall attendees, the lists they target to incite might go beyond the loyal opposition.

Federal judges in rural Montana have had their lives threatened. Bureau of Land Management buildings in Nevada have been bombed. Doctors have been shot and killed Do the folks inciting this anger really want to dial up the temperature as they seek to disrupt and disturb?

I don't want to read a headline that goes beyond ugly effigies, shout downs or plain old disrespect. The architects of this canned anger should step back for a moment and assume responsibility for their actions.

so, the idea is that, if you urge dissent, you are responsible for acts of violence that may happen sometime in the future, and which you do not advocate. this is the sense, i guess, in which these are "violent mobs." they could be violent sometime in the future, or someone could be. plus, if you vigorously oppose a particular healthcare program, you are retroactively responsible for...bombing the bureau of land management? this isn't an argument. it's guilt by free association. now tell me that we're not gearing up an argument for the repression of dissent. certainly, at least, we are asserting that if you don't like some particular healthcare program, you are an insane violent extremist being manipulated by monsters. that, of course, is compatible with you're being right. in other words, it's not an argument, just a series of incoherent insults.

the "secure dc environment" is contrasted to the redneck jungle of florida or whatever. this just puzzles me, but maybe it means that tallahassee should be a locked down? dunno.

look, even if you agree with every thing obama ever proposed, you are not obliged to go down this road of bizarre fantastic totalitarian crap, discrediting your opponents by vague innuendo and random connections to whatever.

really, it would nice for people to understand this. you can take a side, though i would personally recommend against being a democrat or a republican, a liberal or a conservative, on the grounds that the positions are internally incoherent. but even if you enlist on a side, there is absolutely nothing preventing you from disagreeing with others of your ilk, even when they're apparently all stampeding in the same direction. now if you weren't the kind of person who loves to live in a stampede, you wouldn't be a democrat in the first place. but still, you can draw the line somewhere. that is not a betrayal of your country etc., or even of your cause, particularly in a case like this, where the whole left seems to be hanging itself en masse, or at any rate, praying together for the brutal repression of their oponents.

nothing is worse for the left than winning. that's when the totalitarian personality emerges, proportioned to one's certainty, which is supplemented by the certainty of everyone else. pretty soon, no one can think at all or behave decently. the screeching elitism and nonstop self-congratulation becomes insufferable, the programs overweening. that's when the bad shit happens: when everyone is slapping each other on the back for their sagaciousness, and can't even hear the objections of their not-of-the-right-sort or not-even-fully-human ignorant opponents. enough unanimity, and the opposition doesn't count, doesn't even exist. since they do exist, they must be destroyed. nothing wrong with that, since we know what's best: for us, and for them.

i say get over it. there was nothing wrong with pointing out that dick cheney was messing about toward a fascist dictatorship. i'd be happy to appear in public with an obama hammer-and-sickle t-shirt, not because i equate bo with stalin, but because i want to help short-circuit the soviet tendency. in a few months he massively increased federal spending and started nationalizing banks and manufacturing and always has a tendency toward redistribution by punitive taxation: marx's recommendations in a nutshell. our education, healthcare, and a variety of other sectors come more and more to be dominated by the state. bo is relatively mellow and democratic, but all these mechanisms he's constructing are liable to abuse by his associates and successors. it is pretty amazing (well, no; it's predictable) how unenthusiastic the left actually is for free speech once they've got the power. insulting obama is not yet a crime, but people act as though it were, and no doubt the hammer-and-sickle motif is...racist, the work of the ignorant and the insane, etc. one starts to characterize dissent - especially as focused on the charismatic chairman - as "dangerous" (earl ofari hutchinson on obama-as-heath). i want to multiply the images, just so that when folks like that start thinking about how this can be repressed, they'll be overwhelmed by the task, just to keep alive an american dissenting tradition. that people reject and protest against and confront their legislators about the healthcare proposals is greeted with hysterical condemnation: "violent mobs," "fascists," "racists," etc. who doesn't want to repress violent racist fascist mobs? never mind that the evidence that these people are violent racist fascist mobs is that they are asking questions in town halls. the response is a premonition of left totalitarianism.

it's not hard to guess that at some point russia is going to be a bigger problem than iran or pakistan. obviously, the russian security services have gone further than anyone else with cyber-warfare. one might remember  this, for example, and a wave of crashes coincided with the russian attack on georgia last year. i'll just repeat. it's an inyourface authoritarian regime. it leveled chechnya in a useless genocide, in an attempt to regain the pride of empire. its submarines are cruising around the east coast of the u.s. everyone is making nicenice - albeit with an oddly fixed smile, but there are liable to be ever-more pointed confrontations. indeed the cyber-attacks are likely to be the node: if they ever actually interrupt communications or commerce in a substantial way, people with power will be screeching. that they'd bring down twitter etc to stop a single blogger is a very bad sign for the future; no doubt they could justify something like that six times a day every day, and of course it shows you just what putin thinks of free speech, not that anyone should have had any doubts. the center of the nightmare, of course, is how heavily armed they are.

for reasons a trifle elusive, i've always hated meryl streep. i guess i feel like it's not exactly watching a great actor, or it is, but also someone who, at every moment, is saying "look at me, the great ack-tor." one more accent would kill me. but i do appreciate the fact that she's now making movies that i wouldn't see even if she wasn't in them, movies about, you know, abba or julia child. this relieves me not of my dislike, but of my bad conscience about it.

i just heard a dude on msnbc call healthcare protestors "fascists." actually, i'd like to see everyone ditch the nazi rhetoric. it's too wide of the mark with regard to the left even to really piss them off. (limbaugh is of course echoing the slightly-more credible liberal fascists, by jonah goldberg.) "socialism" is a much better accusation, and the relation of the national socialist party to anything we might regard as socialism is ultimately minimal, though complex. limbaugh should be throwing down stalin, it seems to me. and i really don't see how you get fascism out of an objection to a "public option" in health insurance.

it's not that i think no one should ever be conected to fascism; i did that all the time with the bush administration. it's just that i don't see the justice of it here, either way.

so again, the aproach is: if you object to a healthcare bill, you're a racist. paul krugman:

But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

let me try to say what the objection is. it's not about any particular provision of the healthcare plan(s) - though there are objections to some - it's about a suspicion, an anxiety, about the growth of federal-government power, particularly sensitive here because it reaches into your body. i assert that this worry is extremely rational and characteristically american. now it may be that the present situation is unsatisfactory. it may be that the government is already all over your healthcare. it may be that private insurance companies are no more, or even less, benevolent or responsive in this regard, etc. but you should see this as a libertarian backlash against the ever-increasing federal power, of which we're always the potential victims as well as beneficiaries. this backlash will have many modes and moments, and i will more or less enthuse about them all.

let me start this by saying that we are seeing an actual racist backlash to obama; that's part of the birther thing, for instance. it's like the last dying paroxysm of race, perhaps. but the strategy of connecting every objection to obama's policies to racism and hence discrediting all opposition, first of all, increases rather than solves the racial confrontation. and it's disingenuous; it didn't take a black president to raise objections in 1994. last night olbermann ran through a series of clips of people at town meetings, which he roughly characterized as depictions of racist hate-mongering. there was a woman, for example, saying tearfully "is this america?" well, first of all: no. it isn't. and second, it's a question that might actually be about the provision of healthcare and not about race. but at any rate, if you're going to characterize the opposition to - you know - revisions of the tax code or carbon emissions policies as racist, this is going to be a long, long counter-productive presidency. we used to call this "playing the race card," so when you're marion barry and you just got caught huffing crack in a hotel room with a hooker, you made it all a racist conspiracy.

presume, instead, that there are real objections and answer them. otherwise, people are going to get more and more pissed off that you're not only taking away their country and trying to silence them, you're insulting them.

look. no doubt there are groups who are mobilizing opposition to healthcare reform, for various motives. but let's say 1,500 angry people show up at their congressperson's town hall, yelling 'tyranny' etc. were those people paid? were they flown in from elsewhere? when you talk to them, are they sincere? [i liked what the freedomworks dude (max pappas) said: we're always telling people to come out and protest. it's just that they don't usually show up.] now, you can focus obsessively on every problematic or stupid thing that some one person in that group says. you can call them a mob. you can call them astroturf brownshirts etc. those things will not solve your problem, or even help you to understand what the problem is, or even help you see that you have a problem.

your supposition is that you are, obviously, right, and that anyone who disagrees with you is an evil idiot. you can't even understand the fact that someone disagrees; this appears impossible because of the obvious extreme intelligence you attribute to yourself. so you pretend there are no actual objections, and no actual popular opposition, and no actual argument, only well-educated reasonable elites and ignorant ignoramuses. good luck with that; keep it up and you'll see what an angry mob really is, see first-hand the differences between being hung in effigy and actually being hung, and - most significantly - see what it's like to deserve to be hung.

since they are obviously sincere, and since your position on healthcare is unquestionably and obviously true, they must be the pawns of evil schemers; their view is entirely manipulated, and hence has no credibility; you don't have to grapple with it at all. but when you're sitting there nodding along with obama or paul krugman, or that slavish twit keith olbermann, your view isn't being manipulated. if you had any respect for actual human beings, it might occur to you that rush limbaugh is reflecting more than driving the opinions of his audience. obviously. you might try to sort out objections, which take the form of fundamental questions about the scope and legitimacy of state power over the lives of citizens. instead, top to bottom and side to side, all you do is slander. that's because, i guess, you're so reasonable and informed.

i just want to declare clearly my unremitting opposition to health care. and indeed to health, which i regard as a disease.

i guess the obama-as-heath-as-the-joker poster is the talk of the town. now let me say why, as against kennicott et al, i think it is a strong image.

the first thing to notice is precisely that it is the talk of the town; obviously it has power, or it wouldn't suddenly have been reproduced on every website. the shepard fairey thing kind of snuck up on us; this sucker instantaneously...killed, and will as instantaneously dissipate.

potentially, the power of the shepard fairey obama-hope was in its ironies: i personally did not know whether to read it as inspirational or scary, until fairey made clear that his purpose was purely obamania. how the mighty are fallen: fairey's "obey giant" stuff was notable for its combination of semantic repleteness and simplicity: it kept exceeding your grasp; or it seemed completely arbitrary, but somehow it was a political commentary too, bringing into play socialist realism, graffiti, pop art, etc. it was a propaganda poster. but what could it possibly be propaganda for? it was at play in the field of political aesthetics. then fairey imitated his own style without irony. he started marketing "obey" t-shirts at target. he decided to put his pointedly ambiguous art in the service of actual propaganda: really a bizarre re-appropriation, or a kind of paradigm postmodern moment. and you had to read the previous images differently. the "hope" poster sucked the irony retroctively out of the whole oeuvre.

now that poster has itself been re-appropriated, while being injected with a whole new series of contents: the mega-movie batman, eminem's heath ledger bobblehead [our best writer: "I'll do it --pop and gobble it, start wobblin', stumble, hobble, tumble, slip, trip, then I fall in bed with a bottle of meds and a Heath Ledger bobble head"]., etc: the dementia precisely at the heart of establishment entertainment, including politics. but i would hesitate, in the absence of collateral info, to pronounce clearly on the meaning of the poster, or who put it up and why. it could be - as everyone appears to believe - a straightforwardly anti-obama image. but as kennicott points out, if so it works against itself in a variety of ways.

if i do halloween this year as obama in shoepolish blackface, that is a racist incident. but what does it mean to paint obama white? perhaps this comes from the visual shop at the nation of islam. ledger's joker is an emblem of blackbuster derangement. but obama's personality is extremely the opposite. or maybe that's a diabolocal illusion. a false self, like the forged newspaper announcements of his birth? but maybe not. what would we be saying if we portrayed al gore as heathledgerjoker? would we be wishing he were a bit more unpredictable?

what i believe and hope is that this is a street artist or an art student (fairey was at risd when "andre the giant has a posse" started appearing all over the world). our art student intends all the ambiguities, the seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions, all the layers of reference, precisely the excess to interpretation. and he teaches us that the website can be the inheritor of the sticker and stencil.

the slate series on how america will end is actually pretty fascinating. but what if america was over a while ago? (i think that was from about 2005?)

why has the media ignored the fact that that the pittsburgh gym shooter wrote negatively in his diary about obama? well, perhaps because it appears to be completely irrelevant? why would the huffpost focus on this fact? because, of course, anyone who opposes obama on, say, healthcare, is an insane homicidal maniac (cf. "wing-nut," "angry mob"), which really has been the approach to dealing with the opposition. now, let's say he'd blogged nonstop about how much he loved john kerry or something. would that discredit american liberalism? say his favorite beer was miller. would that discredit miller? what were - i don't know - bernie madoff's politics? and why hasn't the media focused on them? did you know jeffrey dahmer was in favor of universal healthcare? then everyone would be tastier, which is probably why henry waxman is for it too.

i think the left does wrong to go on about the "angry mobs" shouting against healthcare reform. an angry mob is a violent mob. a hungry mob is an angry mob. etc. these folks are just talking back to their legislature. it's democracy, in a perfectly fine old american tradition. that's also why msnbc shouldn't be segueing from healthcare protests to birthers. it's just too tendentious as a strategy of discrediting the popular opposition.

pretty interesting stuff on slate about american secessionist movements and scenarios of the end of the united states. needless to say, i support all secessionist movements of any sort everywhere in the world. indeed, each human body should be a sovereign nation.

probably i've said this before. i think it's excellent that many americans, particularly in the south and in the west short of the pacific coast, are profoundly suspicious of government power and opposed to its expansion. indeed, it's important and refreshing that someone is actually capable even of detecting its increase. i like the fact that people are basically opposed to government health care, whatever may be the complex considerations that should be in play.

but as the birthers etc are showing, this extremely important, and extremely american, suspicion of government power and impulse toward freedom and independence is polluted by racism. this is traditional; one historical example would be "states' rights," a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the constitution and an attempt to decentralize in the face of the world-historical march toward total governmental power. but obviously, the basic idea was to preserve jim crow.

the american traditions of suspicion of government power and racism are only contingently related; indeed they are in tension. if your basic commitment is to freedom and independence, you ought to want the liberaton of everyone. you ought to be for gay marriage, etc. i was just reading in thoreau's correspondence: he was helping the survivors of the john brown group to escape to canada, etc. but of course he has all these same views about the pervasion of state authority.

another way to put this is that the american right is incoherent. if you're in favor of "small government" you can't also be for a series of measures to enforce traditional values or religious values or family values as you understand them. you've got to let people go.

at any rate, this all makes it difficult to criticize the constant onslaught of governmental powr, for which there is no moral justification. it discredits, indeed, the whole notion of freedom and those who advocate anything resembling it. that's a sad historical contingency, one that will end up helping bush/obamism (=squishy totalitarianism) to keep the government growing until there is nothing outside the scope of its power.

you could get a bit of a preview of political aesthetics in the online journal contemporary aesthetics. it's one of the case studies: essentially on black nationalism and twentieth-century popular music. i'm kind of proud of this bit. it's maybe not my best sheer piece of writing, but it draws together the garvey movement, rastafarianism, reggae, the nation of islam, and the history of hip hop in a way that's only made possible by recent research by people like like jeff chang and helene lee, and which i think sheds light on the history both of political movements and music.

my fizzy factory fizzled!

i wonder why obama hasn't provided documentation to prove that he is a member of the species homo sapiens, and not an android, a chicken, an ipod, a lawn jockey, or a space alien. though it's not explicit in the constitution, surely the founders of our great nation never intended our great nation - or indeed the united states of america - to be ruled by non-humans. there's only one way to prove that barack obama is a a member of our glorious species, nature's crowning glory and end: he must submit to dissection by far-right biologists.

(from the latimes, which claims to be "sorting out the facts," but doesn't at all.)

"Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction politically mean-spirited and dangerous. Hutchinson is challenging the group to come forward." yeah extremely. but not as dangerous as the shepard fairey "hope" poster.

i'm kind of hoping that north korea grabs bill clinton and puts him on trial for espionage. i always wanted to do that, but never had the guts.

"before starting enbrol, your doctor should check you for tuberculosis." maybe he should check himself before you start it, too.