"Defining Moments in Black History"

(Reading Between the Lies)
-by dick gregory
2017
Dick gregory is that one friend you have who's probably more brilliant than you, and definitely more crazy. And in his craziness, he occasionally finds his way to a truth more unvarnished and REAL than any you've known.
He's able to see sideways, which even the brightest often fail to do - for example, he sees our domesticated animals/pets as the slaves they are.
Does the manganese in malt liquor make (black) people more prone to violence? Does tap water?? Did "the man" kill michael jackson, and take down tiger woods? Those last two seem hard to give credence, because the power structure worships one thing above all - money. So what percentage would there be in eliminating two of their biggest cash cows? And if tiger was taken down to protect nicklaus's supremacy, why was hank aaron allowed to dethrone babe ruth, in a more racist time, in the preeminent american sport?
But forget the conspiracy stuff (well, no, DON'T). Forget the religious/everything-happens-for-a-reason nonsense. Forget the anti-humyn sexual puritanism. Gregory's take on history is scathing, and far more real than any school textbook. And his honesty can be searing. He understands how slavery's legacy has damaged black people - he doesn't flinch in talking about not being able to see his own wife as beautiful, and how black wimyn are trapped in skin/hair self-loathing, and how the "inferiority" of black men has been made a self-fulfilling prophecy.
His take on john brown might make even a pacifist take up arms.
What was the real reason malcolm, king, and hampton were killed?
His dismissal of lincoln might exasperate you, especially as frederick douglass, who was never afraid to criticize the great emancipator, called him "emphatically the black man's president" (a willingness to send freed slaves back to Africa doesn't sound inherently anti-black to me, either). But you'll be exasperated because you know that even when gregory's wrong, he's right. Forgive the sloppiness of that sentiment - just read the book.

want baby!?!?!

Since returning to a metropolis, i've found myself browsing the Craigslist romance ads once again. After five years in the spiritual wasteland of the southern bible belt, the prospect of progressive big city wimyn digging my free-spirited ways, is a thought that tingles.
So far, the results are less than fulsome. After meeting all the hippies and artists who come to the city's open mics, i'd thought that the rumors of the demise of San Francisco's soul had been premature, but maybe not. The quantity and quality of ads here is bleak compared to NYC. The population difference is enormous, but still...
I came close to responding to an ad this week i had no business answering. I've nearly been obsessing about it, though i was in almost NO way what the womyn asked for. When you're this wounded and intimacy-starved, it gets ever-harder to follow the "appropriate" rules of a dysfunctional society.
This womyn wants babies and a life partner, and she wants 'em now! Her ad was intelligently-written, and her plan concise. A few dates, and GO. She wanted a well-educated engineer type (like herself), significantly older than her 27 years - looks not important. She also happened to be asian, and posted a very sexy picture which is almost surely not her ("almost" being the operative word to my off-balance mind).
She pushed so many of my buttons, it felt like my bleeding reptilian brain went into paralyzed hyperdrive. I wanted to bring all my writer's skill and personal magnetism to bear, to sweep her like she's never been swept. In my heated fantasy, i'd be exactly what she wished...i'd live with her, and waste no time in getting to the best sex of our lives. Let babies come!
Part of this is an unfulfilled lifelong dream of loving an asian womyn completely...and the knowledge that i'm not as young as i look. I'm a generation removed from this womyn, and there's a shallow (DNA-driven?) part of my brain that wants my dream lover to be drippingly fertile.
I would convince her that her engineer wouldn't have the emotional depth to love her and her children as well as i...that genetically, with my IQ and athleticism, her kids wouldn't forgive her for passing me by...that any man she chose under her conditions would feel he was doing her a favor, as opposed to the humble love in which i'd wrap her...i'd tell her that she deserves to wake up every morning and see a miracle, not a "plan"...
Never mind that being a stay-at-home parent would consume my life and probably cripple my artistic dreams.
Never mind that the monogamy she wants is an unnatural, self-destructive relic of a barbarically possessive era of humyn history.
If her ad had been up just a few hours longer, i don't think i'd have been able to hold out.
Would my subconscious have been counting on her to say no? Or was i convinced that there would be some slip between her lip and cup...that perhaps we'd be among the 10% of couples who can't conceive...or that she might get pregnant but miscarry? That someway i'd get the relationship i've longed for, but would ultimately find my freedom intact?
I don't know. I truly don't.
There's a part of me that wants to love a womyn seismically, life-alteringly, even cohabitationally and without end. There's also a part of me that yearns to nurture and love children every day.
But am i so afraid of being alone anymore, that i'd sell my very soul?
Too many feelings, amidst mortality creeping...
Love me, i'm dying here...

"The Greatest Show on Earth"

(The Evidence for Evolution)
-by richard dawkins
2009
As is often the case with dawkins, superlatives can feel like understatement. Brilliant? Yes...in style, authority, and above all, necessity. The only thing this ethologist, biologist, and former Professor for Public Understanding at Oxford is not, is dispassionate. He's given to occasional fits of rhapsodic waxing over the wonders of life and the universe, which make the "miracles" of mythology or religion seem tawdry.
This book joins "The Selfish Gene" and "The Ancestor's Tale" as dawkins' most towering. The only thing that holds this one back are the tangents and specificity (which will delight many who already embrace his points, but might make this too challenging for any believers who are on the fence). When he's at his best, you won't find a science author more readable...but there are times when even I felt bogged down.
That aside, this is the book that will make you say "Why didn't he write this BEFORE all the others?" In retrospect, it was a glaring hole - all his earlier works assume an acceptance of evolution as a viable (indeed, the only viable) way to explain life on Earth. This one drops that assumption, and offers an avalanche of evidence showing that evolution is far more than theory. Indeed, that which doubters would assume is the primary proof, the fossil record, dawkins reveals as almost an afterthought. Driving that point home is the fact that darwin, who made the greatest leap in scientific thinking ever, did so at a time when there was, for all practical purposes, zero fossil record. Natural clocks, geostratification, continental drift, DNA, and embryological evidence are all fleshed out by richard. Most fascinating is the de-pantsing of the argument by apparent design - with such staggeringly complex and graceful life forms as abound on this planet, all "perfectly" fitted to their environment, how could life be anything other than the result of conscious engineering? That illusion only holds up when you look at a lion or humyn from the outside, however. Inside, biology is a tinker toy mess, with all sorts of staggering inefficiencies which could only be a relic of an ancestor radically different.
His foray into the science behind sea mammals who possess land-oriented lungs, is wondrous. Would you care to guess which is the only animal we now think may have left the sea, then returned, then left again? Make up your damned minds, turtles!
With exquisite illustrations to delight the visual learners, this book is a treasure (one, dare i say, beyond measure).

more statutory life...

If you're going to be in NYC between now and July, this statue of me was just installed in an exhibit on bodies, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Existentially, in this world of alienation, it's strange to sometimes let myself think about the five naked statues of me out there somewhere in the world...perfect body molds...
I think about the people i'll never meet who interact with the statues every day. I think about those people, perhaps occasionally wondering who the humyn is whose replicated body they see every day...where does he live, what does he do, what does he think...
Maybe one silly, lonely womyn somewhere in Norway, touches my penis once for luck every morning...
Many people feel such a disconnect from their own bodies...
But i also have eight perfect copies of my body out there in the world, from which i'm disconnected.
Silly, alienated thoughts...

playin' in de-banned

When i was a teen, my comedic hero was george carlin. His messages of anti-hypocrisy and anti-censorship resonated in me with clarion force, and he remains more brilliantly funny than any humyn i've ever heard. In all the subjects he took on, there was only one that made me pause - his contention that you can joke about anything. His example, rape, pushed the limits of my youthful idealism. I did my best to agree with him, even though i couldn't conceive of any context in which i would joke about rape. Over two decades later, i finally caught up. My brother, an ethical vegan, had decided he was going to eat shrimp again. Considering this, i asked whether he was going to take a toothpick and rape them first.
I recently moved to San Francisco, to offer the world my voice as a humorist, essayist, musician, and poet. I chose this city because my views on nature, politics, religion, and sex are so ahead of the curve, that i figured i needed the most famously progressive city in the world.
Within my first month, i got banned at an open mic for performing a piece that was labelled "racist". To say that i was stunned is an understatement - in my writings and personal life, i could roll out a parade of evidence attesting to my anti-racist cred. But i knew my writing could be challenging - indeed, i wouldn't give a spit for it if it weren't. Who said that if art doesn't make you uncomfortable, it's not art? And mark twain said (i paraphrase) that all the protesting, politicking, and proselytizing will never change the world one tiny smidgen as much as laughter.
The piece was one i'd never performed publicly. It's so audacious that when i'd finished writing it, i shook my head in giggling wonderment for a few minutes, not convinced it was even mine. I wasn't sure what it was, except perhaps subversively, ridiculously brilliant. The message was twofold - an indictment of how we let words control our emotions, and a grand attempt to pour humor on something horrible (racism), thereby taking away some of its power. I'd always been offended by the notion of "bad" or "titillating" words that automatically incite a certain feeling in us, regardless of context or intent. An intelligent person controls their words, not the other way around.
My piece centered on "the N word". Comedian/activist dick gregory might give me a dirty look for even uttering a phrase so apologetically wishy washy as "the N word". Whatever words you use, say them or don't, but trust your intent. In my piece, which on the surface has nothing to do with race, i never actually said the word. I walked right up to that hot emotional button, and enacted a dance of humor and freedom, circling the word relentlessly, never touching it, but never backing away. I offered up the piece as one possible anti-racist tool or tactic.
Part of the inspiration had been a dave chapelle sketch, a spoof of "Leave it to Beaver", which was even more in-your-face. If i danced around that six-foot button, dave stood next to it and kept dropping five-pound rocks.
Many in the black community have re-claimed that word, often coarsely...but sometimes eruditely or artistically, and the effort itself has noble parallels. You don't have to go far, especially in this city, to find a homosexual who decided that no one would ever again hurt him with the word "fag". "Cunt" has also been the subject of reclamation and empowerment.
I chose that setting, an anarchist bookstore, as the first and perhaps only place i'd do the piece. I didn't know whether it would accomplish what i wanted it to (or more to the point, i wondered whether only a black person could get away with it). I chose that audience as the most hip and progressive i'd find. I chose a night when there were both white and black in the crowd. I had total faith and fearlessness.
And in that performance, my instinct seemed right on. I knew i had the crowd...i could feel a vibration of uncertainty, but people were smiling and laughing and right there with me. When i finished, the reaction wasn't forced or faint. Over the crowd's applause, a black man in the front row stood up and hugged me (partly, as it turned out, because he wanted to protect me from any possible backlash).
And then when i got home, a text came banning me. I didn't get upset, or protest. If you're going to wear the shoes of a provocateur, you've got to be unafraid to take lumps. I had nothing but faith in the good intentions of the MC who banned me. I chose to believe that everything would work itself out. I didn't even approach people who'd been there to ask, "Were you offended?" When people approached me, i spoke openly. One fellow, not knowing i'd been banned, enthusiastically told me i should do the piece there again.
I realized that were i black, i probably never would have been banned. If so, there was tremendous irony - a non-racist performed an anti-racist piece, inciting another non-racist into a racist act.
Whether my piece was brilliant or crap, is beside the point.
Laughter is healing.
Art is dangerous.
Brilliance and fearlessness are two different things. When you have both, you might change the world.
Or get yourself shot. Could go either way.

Postscript: Four months later, i was unbanned...but not because of any conviction on the part of the MC, i fear. He's trying to re-establish goodwill in the artistic community, after two subsequent bannings have caused a backlash. I don't know whether i'll return, especially since it's conditional on my not making anyone uncomfortable. It's sad, as i'm quite sure that he believes in (and indeed practices himself) the disturbing imperative of art.

strobel fleece prize

My sister and i were talking the other day, and the author lee strobel came up. He writes defense-of-faith books. I love my sister, but she's a devout believer - perhaps even a fundamentalist. I came THIS close to saying what i think - if strobel's the smartest thinker christianity can muster, then they are in deep fucking doo-doo. When i read one of his books, i kept waiting for a single point of logic...for one single shred of critical thinking that would get a community college student something higher than a "C". I gutted out three excruciating chapters.
But i didn't tell her that, because it feels almost cruel to pick on something so patently indefensible. It feels almost sadistic to point out to basically well-meaning people that over 99% of their fellowship are obviously what could only charitably be called bullshit christians...people who put in the lip service, but if challenged to live their lives in accordance with their savior's words, they would show you the door (and then lock it). Despite all the towns filled with churches filled with people filled with open wallets, religion holds zero sway in this country in any matter of importance. Zero. What, i'm going to kick a believer when they're down? Our government, our economics, our mores...the decisions that steer this country, in terms of what we do with our resources, how we treat each other, and how we interact with our global neighbors, have nothing to do with any spiritual agenda. Jesus' sufferings may have your lips, but santa's toys have your heart. Over 99% of all "believers" hold two concepts more dear, more high, and more sacred than anything else - materialism and individualism. And in the service of those values, they know that the separation of church and state is an absolute MUST, otherwise we'll be as pathetic as the amish (which they are, except in the one or two ways they're not). And even though they disparage it, believers know they need REAL fucking science on their side.
Maybe there is a god. By definition, nobody can know, and people like strobel are either fools or charlatans (at that level of popularity, you'd be smart to bet on the second). There is zero scientific evidence to support faith, and an avalanche of psychological evidence explaining why some people believe (or claim to believe, which may be the majority demographic).
If you truly need to believe, then do it. If it makes you a better person, i'll cheer. But DO NOT talk about it. Just go about your business, and keep your yap shut. At this point in humyn history, religion is FAR too dangerous a toy. For anyone.
I would say wait until humynity has grown up before trying religion again...though at that point, of course, no one will want to.
But i didn't say any of those things to her.
Deep down, it was a compliment to her that i even wanted to...a sign of how comfortable i feel around her...i want to be myself entirely, which is a rather sacred gift.
But i didn't. Love only goes so far in this broken, dissembling world, before good intentions crumble into contentious hurtfulness.
Ah well.
I love you all.