THE NOTION OF PC

I began to write this in 2015, now, ten years later, it seems we are on a great dismantling of portions of the secular morality of politcal correctness and identity politics, which, when i first heard the words used in the 1970s, i took it to mean that whatever your politics and tastes are, you will deem it politically correct. I was dead wrong, in the sense that from that time on, it would evolve into a morality for the educated secular professional.

The very name of the movement, woeke, actually gave their enemies the name, their own,  to defeat by 2025. Factually, weeks after the woke movement began Obama amde a point og publicly standing solidly against, obviously, creating unnecessary division being 

“I’m not a racist, I’m a sociologist.” Intellectually, X-rated, at times, since screens and filters, are not applied, and might upset you.

Up until the nineties, generally speaking, although the seeds were planted and were growing, to be liberal seemed more about curiosity and an open mind, until now, when it has become synonymous with secular rules concerning our our social behaviour.

The last stand for reality based satire and comedy was Tough Crowd on ABC in late 2004, that “evolved” into Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect show, that, in turn was soon booted off, to cable. Too bad Colin Quin didn’t also survive like Maher, on cable, because it was the last time we would see honest comedy, or, at least comedy that was like going out to abar or living room with your friends.

The secular morality of our times is political correctness. Both religious and secular talk down, ironically,  to the most ethical of people, the experienced, living out here on the free range of ideas, that are only constricted post facto, after experience, and outside the realm of non-assimilation culture.

As American, in varying degrees, we all live in our own worlds. I guess extreme individualism, ironically, within a mass society and much freedom, let’s this happen. Living in our own world, what a goal. We got it bad?

You like and want isms? You always forget about ageism. Is that because PC and IP modes of existence are inherently for younger and more inexperienced people? Not into isms, i am into what is, and what should never be, based on what is, and nothing with politics in their namem could really interest me.

Also, all black lives matter, not just the ones who run and resist cops, or, even just stand there with an innocent BB gun. So, addressing black youth in particular and those in the life, why you killing your fellow black folk? And, yes, there are stupid-ass cops who kill out of racism and/or stupidity.

As a professional, i always, when pulled over by a cop, place both my hands on the steering wheel, and kiss the cop’s ass. If, in a war zone, to survive, stealth is the only choice.

All black lives matter, not just the ones who run or resist cops, or, even just stand there with an innocent BB gun, which, in the eyes of a young cop is just an excuse, but, alos, for really doing nothing wrong, and a cop got stupid. So, addressing black youth in particular and those in the life, why you killing your fellow black folk? Addressing the unsegmented all – on paper. BLM is great, but, amongst other things, like real estate purchases, the black victims of black perpatrators, and, there are many, what about them?

I always, when pulled over by a cop, place both my hands on the steering wheel, and kiss the cop’s ass. That’s because i’m professional and on point when it comes to cops.

In 1989 i was 37 years old, and self-cancelled. Since then, i’ve been out on an open range, using my eyes and all the other senses. Always working means little sleep, but when the most politically correct class of people took over everything in my neighborhood, Williamsburg, where i lived most of my life, and, amongst many things the destroyed, was my sleep, for years, by their culture of reinvention, and i still wake in the middle of the night, having to flip more disturbed sleep, by writing.

I self-cancelled in 1989, and, to use an age-old idiom, a long time before the PC and IP set were born. I have other things to compare what goes on with people throughout life. Experience is where it’s at.

While trying to finish this essay over a period of years, because the topic is so asinine, the IP and PC movement was transcended (did i just use an inappropriate term with “trans” in it? Did i harm someone?) by an even more asinine movement called Woke, thus, far into this essay, the notion of woke will be examined in all is disconnection with reality, by living in your own world and thinking trending words or any other performative theatre of the self has substance, or, a basis in reality and human nature.

Thus, by laying out a few of my preferences (prejudices), you can see, it’s what’s real, as in, truth, history and fact, that overrides everything, and, as for the rest, it’s nice to have a purpose in your life, giving it meaning. But truth, here, is something else, in light of one of the most powerful and influential constructions we have, culture.

Not being a cubicle dweller, climate controlled or spending half my life in front of a screen, I do not live symbolically I live really, without filters, except for a class filter. Class being the most significant factor in the social/cultural scene. I don’t see what I believe, but, believe what I see to a large degree. And seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and being is direct unfiltered, unregulated experience, a glorious kind of objectivity. Truth is a lone pursuit since social filters like phoniness, indirectness, duplicity and happy-talk obscure the pure view that requires no human help or team effort.

Correcting applies and implies an inborn priggishness broadcast by secular pontifs and a morality proving the gap between reality and intentions and the absurdity of living  in your own, possibly too educated mind.

Fact – Obama, weeks after the latest buzzword emerged, woke, he publicly said it was a waste of time. Fact – some Hispanics/Latinos created their buzzwords for themselves which were Latina, Latino and Latin X. According to recent Pew Research Center data, only around 4% of Hispanic people use the term “Latinx” to describe themselves; meaning a very small percentage of Hispanic people utilize this term.

Common sense born from reality will tell you that emphasizing differences politically ad infintum may result in the opposite effect, and, if not accepted on a realistic level, pushing it more will only leave you out in a democracy with its pesky majority rules clause. I suppose we could have the Disjointed States of America instead.

This absurdity can’t go on forever, and one day you might get an ass-kicking from the very real people you seem to know so much about on the judgement level, or, maybe a philosophical knock-out by someone on your level, but, self-educated, but rarely spent a day in any institution or corporation, but spent a life in the cities and on their streets, or, even in nature as long as it had a terrible element to it.

If, finally, there was some consensus, which there always has been, that there are better ways, particularly considering how everything has changed so quickly. Sure, we’re always gonna have problems, but, for instance how many Black and women billionaires were there 25 years ago?

Of course, i cop to the dictum, we ain’t there yet. Forget the yet with regards to human nature, but also what I’m saying is that it’s not a matter of progress or long-standing inborn American problems being solved once and for all, but, the social economics has changed so drastically that you could now transcend long-standing social limitations. In other words, shit has gotten so crazy, and the amount of money people can make, no matter who they are, doesn’t solve racism, but you could bypass it and then laugh at it with the power, comfort and privilege of money that could come from anywhere, including politics, sports, Taylor, art, literature, sciences, and religion, or, if its your choice, devote your life and business documenting racism and hatred, and, the country has become crazy enough, that some people could make good money in the business side of racism.

Written between 2014 and 2019, it was years of trying to overcome the block to finishing, probably because the block consists of innate essential basic common sense, that collides with some form of ideology, politics or religion, as it does here. It’s also reactionary on my part, having been a victim of PC’s soft brutality, although, not many times, since i’m entirely reclusive to that segment of the world who push PC mores and values,  because of their very real unawareness and lack of mindfulness, that they think that they have somehow overcome by ideologies. That’s why, that the few times i’ve had contact, it was actually devastating. PC combined with gossip, what is that? It’s my fault. I wasn’t raised that way and have had no contact in this creepy, disconnected area, so i haven’t the skills to deal with it, thus, i can hardly overcome the ennui of trying to finally write about it in order to forget about it, while living in the open range of thought and action that i created, smack dab in the middle of the flow of life, particularly in the city where i live.

I say that after Mr. Obama was elected president, not just by 13% of the population, but by an extremely broad-base, including millions who would then become the most loyal of Trump followers, some things ended, although I am the minority here. Do the Jews lament the fact there has never been “one of their own” in the White House? They activate and have gotten to a place of complete financial and cultural independence, intruded occasionally by the white supremacist gunner, but the envy of all that have been so widely oppressed, particularly, Blacks, who have a special relation to the Jewish experience, at least, on the down side. For us, after Obama was elected twice, by mostly white folks (Blacks comprise 13% of Americans), and, although centered in sports and entertainment, the number of Black billionaires, is growing with LeBron James just added, and, while still a player, unlike Mr. Jordan who gained billionaire status after he left sports, things changed. Yeah, sure there’s plenty of racism, less than before, but it don’t matter on this level – it’s always gonna be there because, for some, it’s part of their human nature, and, you can get it on now, in America, with all types of Black-themed and Black genres and sports itself, if you don’t want to be in the exclusively white business worlds. I’ve completely busted my ass every day, my entire life, my work recognized as pretty damn good, yet, after 45 years have gotten nowhere on a success level. So i’m not stickin stuck in the muck, i’m movin on, and do not have much sympathy for folks who are so well-off it ain’t funny, but want more. I don’t count on anything being fair, and, to some degree, it should be fought. It’s a matter of spending time on something like war, love, competition, peace, whether fighting it or promoting it, because, as human nature, it ebbs and flows, but, never goes away.

The uncomfortable truth is that people tire of saturation, whether, you, me or anyone else likes it or not. When there are clear advances made, while, always there remains a lot to be done, that are beginning to mitigate the reasons why affirmative action was established. The supreme court is deciding this as i write.

The world, outside of friends and family,  is mean and filled with prejudice, no doubt. Whattaya gonna do, if ya want to get some place? Overcome it by work and determination, in a place where we have all the freedom in the world and choice. It has happened from Barrack to JZ. And I absolutely know both the difficulty of taking the midnight train and starting with nothing or not taking the midnight train, and living with nothing, while never giving up. I’m now 70 years old and what do I have to blame it on?

“Not standing for the anthem shows a contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life … Which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from … as they became older, they realize that this was youthful folly. And that’s why education is important,” Ginsburg told tv person, Couric, at the time. “I think it’s a terrible thing to do, but I wouldn’t lock a person up for doing it. I would point out how ridiculous it seems to me to do such an act.”

She’s speaking about the knee protests in sports, and a Supreme Court hero of left-minded thinking is defending the right to free speech, while absolutely recognizing that she does not agree with the substance or content, and thinks it’s idiotic and ridiculous. I share a similar stance, but get politically correct eggs tossed at me.

Ms. Ginsberg nails it. Defense of a person’s legal right to free speech, while recognizing her own humanity, taste, preference, prejudice, whatever you want to call it, that her free speech also grants her, to express a comeback on her own thoughts. She puts her life on the line, defending the right to free speech, while disagreeing vehemently and privately with its content.

I feel that way about PC. No doubt you got the right, but, like, Ms. Ginsberg, often completely disagree with the content. Too bad we cannot all grow up, and out of, by experience and open-mindedness, ideologies that define groups by conceptual ability used to point out the perceived discretions by others, not following their secular morality of PC, but might even be, to some degree, on your side in your rush to prove your values at the sake of my character or reputation. Thou shall be cancelled, otherwise.

The hero of the left and the PC, defends the right of someone to say anything, but not the always content of what they are expressing. Pretty basic, and she gets a gold star while RealStill is told to stay after class and be punished by the PC and IP-driven, yet i share very similar views – say what you want, i’ll defend that, but you could definitely be full of shit, and, using free speech, i have the same right to call it out, or as is see it. The PC and IP crowd need to know the truth, many of us, like the icon, you named RGB, are on your side, but we do have big disagreements, while protecting a right to gossip politically, even if people are unfairly targeted or portrayed.

Who would have, even, a person’s own taste and predilections cleansed by a correctness that is a notion and idea based on secular morality and law, legalese, even on constitutional grounds where, even there, amendments clash with themselves, particularly with regards to PC notions, clashing hard with free speech, possibly the most transcendent, and, in your face, of constitutional rights.

Freedom of religion, and freedom of expression, to exaggerate and satirize, would that include the Aztecs, as well as, the Confederate generals? Religious ritualistic homicide, economic or political homicide is what it is, and, of course, is not protected. We do draw lines eventually.

Furthermore, as an example of a basic important simple truth about the conquest of Mexico, it’s true, the Aztecs were nuts, and it’s true, the Spanish inadvertently killed ninety percent of the natives of Mexico with disease, and, that they were nuts with gold and their own religion. Human relations, especially ones where people cannot understand each other, beginning with language are intensely complicated.

After a full year of each side trying to figure the situation out, in a soft “kidnapping” by Montezuma, the final straw for the Spaniards against the Aztecs, was the natives’ unusual practice of human sacrifice, obviously clashing so well with the beliefs of Catholicism. One of these ritualistic murders became the flashpoint for the initial attack by the Spaniards on the Aztecs, beginning the final war that would make Mexico Spanish. Of the 20 million inhabitants of Central America, in twenty years, only 2 million survived the plagues brought by Europeans particularly smallpox, and that even played a role in the initial conquest of Mexico because many people in the city were suffering from smallpox at the time of the attack by the Spanish and their allies. Have we progressed from 600 years ago on the ways one approaches other cultures? As Americans, yes, but we now are being too sensitive to this view. Remember all the apologizing we did when, in the nineties, the economy began to boom in unprecedented ways? That ended on 9/11, did it not?

Social mores, constraints and law are in effect for obvious reasons. As a human animal, we all have everything in us already, and for a portion of us, regulation, control, and, even, punishment, is necessary, but given the fact that we are still human and not yet, machines, we have our tastes, predilections and preferences, and that’s our business, not government, religion, politics or sudden awakening from a social and historical sleep’s business. But, unfortunately, it is. I’m not an ist expressing my isms. I let nothing lead me by the nose.

Do they want to extend modern workplace regulations to the private parts of people’s lives which is considerable, considering having a life is the goal of practically everyone, and is where most of our time is spent, overshadowing, by far, the work-week of 40 hours or so. That emotion, irrationality and survival instinct, in fact, is what keeps us human, and the key is recognizing that and flipping it into a positive, not its over-regulation and snootiness and against the aphoristic principle that we are all pots with sooty bottoms, which is absolutely true. We build and make things, and that can be done perfectly and last forever, unlike living, which is sloppier, dysfunctional and dependent upon agreement amongst competing groups, and, unless you want to go it alone, where better perfection in living and doing is possible, it’s not pretty and it’s pretty slow getting things done. You might die waiting.

We are still earthly animals, but with a highly complex mind, and the mind is there, amongst many reasons, to lasso that animal energy and make it into positive action, for instance, devoting a life to truth and not comfort which PC culture is completely tied to. 

Ultimately, isn’t it ridiculous to be having to talk, at all, about this obsession with the what-color-you-are, and a culture-as-war mindset. And let’s throw in sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. According to the times, in economics, the heights of existence and all causes, is entrepreneurship with a social bent and the politics of identity and correctness has become the dominant mission in art, culture and sometimes even sports, and, of course, politics, seemingly now attracting the least sophisticated forms of existence into its ranks. On the other side of the battle line, and, in their camp, throwing media barbs, we have those whose response is, to further identity and its political action. And I’m making a distinction between getting laws done and working directly with people in the neighborhoods for change, and a show, and, there’s a lot of show in identity politics, and it’s unrelenting because it filters every thing through that.

This work has been extremely difficult to complete. The words flow easily, but i can’t stand the subject. And now we are faced with, on top of the pure dislike for PC ways, a wokieness that’s worse, and then we get into a phase of hyper-political correctness, as PC, IP and, now, wokeness. Woke was treated negatively, by, initially, for instance, Obama, or, probably anyone older with experience. The initial take, which, to some degree always has been true, is that to be woke is to be not quite fully developed, groggy as you come out of your social slumber. The one thing I can derive from this being woke, is that it is the perfect social outlook for someone who does not have experience, age and wisdom, and this means it will only coagulate around itself, like extreme non-stop identity politics does, and never get anywhere beyond secular professional morality and comfort, that, when aimed at the wrong, target, is brusque, artless and without nuance, at best, and forces me to waste time, here, writing about it.

I wrote this between 2017 and summer of and the winter of 2022. Things are now more touchy than ever, and people touting being aroused out of their own slumber, in a well-meaning, groggy nowness, makes no sense, particularly when I’m supra-aware and alive in worldly experience. Many millions of people are, as we deal with, what academics, artsits and politicians discuss and create culture about, and show.

If you live in a way, unconsciously, getting exposed, as a matter of course, to all the differences life has to offer, all the time, all of your life, it’s no end but just the means for living, and, as lived, becomes no big thing, certainly unlike the big business of identity and correctness politics, crystalized in sports figures taking stands, or kneels, as their first responsibility, often supported by sports companies over sports owners. I have no lawsuits for all the shit i’ve been through, and if you don’t get that, it’s because you have no context skills, only a notion.

Don’t get me wrong, the very first time I heard about the kneeling, my first reaction was a sports figure is thinking? But you know something after three or four times I get it. Think I’m politically incorrect at the moment just look at how it played out historically. Eventually players were allowed, in the NFL, to express themselves. And they did. Sometimes forming a line locking arms etc. And it’s faded a lot. The point was made. It was done in a performance and in front of an audience and we get it. But it will always be a show and once we get it, let’s get on with it.

I also know that, when Tommy Jones, what is in front of his audience, it was more something new and extremely daring. Something that you could pay a huge price for and be exposed to things like failure in your career, alcoholism or whatever. Mr. Jones of course went on to Oberlin College and a very nice career that he recently retired from. Compare that to today when, through lawyers, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in payments, and, that’s my interest – the difference between today and past moments and movements in history. In these times it’s all definitely the capitalistic approach to social problems – money, profits, and you change with the country to hang on to that consumer base.

I found, the hard way, that moving up in your class standing, meant constantly being mildly questioned to being attacked and mocked or questioned about things from my own experience and knowing, by people with no real knowledge or contact with all the folks they are either defending or promoting, by a blanket-attack on all who do not conform to their particular secular opinion-morality. Moving up from a lower class, meeting other professionals in a chosen field, has been covered, most recently, by J.D. Vance, whose rare class-consciousness, centers the views and even the humor of behavior as influenced by poverty, as well as, riches. The PC crowd don’t want to get it since it’s so built-in now that American styled Marxism has completely forgotten about the working-class, replaced by deep concerns of race, gender and sex, which, i suppose many believe is the highest form of living, today, in representing these causes culturally, and to varying degrees, politicizing and socializing things in art and popular entertainment including sports, movies, music and literature, until it’s practically expected, not just with national anthem demonstrations, but, for instance, the Kyrie Irving stance on getting vaccinated, which is a good demonstration of the confusion that granting absurd levels of narcissism and ego to social causes creates. In other words these are capitalistic responses to social responsibility, that can occasionally reach the absurdity of the some of the same people thinking, hey, is the earth flat?

Political correctness comes across as suppositional and symbolic and a morality to match inexperience in the world, where we find ourselves now, whether we like it or not, in the reality of our own world, that we have the freedom to make up, on our own. It’s the culture of reinvention that has dominated for a long time. That fading dimension to our existence, also known as experience, which used to be thought of as vital to knowledge and essential to existing, and, is now overshadowed by the comfort culture in food, drink, art, sports and entertainment, all of which can be “experienced” without ever leaving your home. The virtual has its day over the actual, even as an ideal. It’s done.

Calling on a quote by Mr. Chomski, who, because of the rigor of his intellect, is respected, but also, his American philosophical streak, a  sense of praxis, or, at least, measuring how does all this stand up to reality as a whole. Mr. Chomsky’s chops, is, possibly, I think, respected by the politically correct, many millennials and hipsters, for what it’s worth. I don’t know if respect with praxis in philosophy, qualifies me as American, which is, in fact, what I am, but my preference is, to keep thoughts, post-facto, and to put that thought to either a test or to work, and, consequently, not to stereotype, unlike the PC umbrella of dos and don’ts. At any rate it seems Mr. Chomsky is a bit unimpressed by it all. It reminds me why am I wasting my time, writing this.

“In fact, I think all of this screaming about “Political Correctness” that we hear these days in the elite culture is basically just a tantrum over the fact that it has been impossible to crush all of the dissidence and the activism and the concern that’s developed in the general population in the last thirty years. I mean, it’s not that some of these “P.C.” things they point out aren’t true-yeah, sure, some of them are true. But the real problem is that the huge right-wing effort to retake control of the ideological system didn’t work, and since their mentality is basically totalitarian, any break in their control is considered a huge tragedy: 98 percent control isn’t enough, you have to have 100 percent control; these are totalitarian strains. But they couldn’t get it, especially among the general population. They have not been able to beat back all of the gains of the popular movements since the 1960s, which simply led to a lot of concern about sexism, and racism, and environmental issues, respect for other cultures, and all this other bad stuff. And it’s led to real hysteria among elites, so you get this whole P.C. comedy.” – Noam Chomsky

“The PC Comedy” nice title for a book.

And, before getting into the subject at hand, I’ll briefly explain my take on, what’s become, an equally dominant mode, that even radical whites have flipped into their own, more than, in a long time. That’s right, white identity politics, reactionary as it is, has really risen, even backed by militias and volunteers ready to go to the next level. You never hear of people on the left talking about eminent war to solve political problems but the idea of finally going to war is often discussed by extreme conservatives, who should remember that America’s great #1 home-grown terrorist was Timothy McVeigh, he was so far into the far right, that he actually thought that his bombing 2would spark a rightist revolution, that’s why he was easily caught with no license plates and a 45 automatic on his seat, because he was so convinced that what he was doing was so damn right that it would start the right wing revolution, that only they talk about. Mr. Chomsky is right by saying they don’t want most of the power, but all of it, and the reaction to that, or Trump’s Big Steal, is the liberal’s like moral commentary, without the religion.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND IDENTITY POLITICS

Along with political correctness, its corollary, identity politics, has also grown so much as to become very established, a business and a culture. Ironically fueled by the still strong capitalist economy, alternatives to any so-called dominant culture and even facts, are a free-for-all  on both the left and the right, where political performance art is heralded over just plain hard work. The queens of being famous for nothing, but make-up, plastic surgery and narcissism, now, also free wrongly convicted poor black inmates, and the husband, no doubt a tremendous artist and capitalism-fueled billionaire, as well as, MAGA cap-wearing certified manic/depressive, publicly fawns over the Leader, while being extremely Christian and married into the most secular and materialistic of families. Cultivated individuation in America assures that stereotypes are hard places to fit people in. I have friends in Queens, for instance, and one of their parents is Colombian and the other, Irish. We call him Gringo, more than  his actual name, Mike. It fits. He loves it, and is thoroughly first generation American. Even a parent that is Jewish, and the other Muslim occurs here. Queens is absolutely the most varied population of any place in the world, and this great mix, itself, defies stereotyping, and, will, in the future, as people evolve and grow, defy it even more, not to mention home-grown bi-racial folks who are ever growing, some of whom have broken from just being dominant Black, if one of their parents is Black. to truly mixed in cultural preferences, matching their own genetic mix.

Identity politics began its boost in the 1960s particularly with the black power movement. Since then it’s become a model for many groups. Some of these groups, while stereotyped and discriminated against, relative to slavery and everything Blacks have been through, their problems are not nearly as great. But there must be many here still with big hearts, and these identity groups have growing success.

Academic-informed and scholarly-based racism is a new area where white supremacy has evolved, probably because we have transitioned so seriously into a service economy of educated professionals who can now apply concepts, learned at the university, and update an historic hatred and prejudice by “deconstructing” the state (Bannon) and “reinventing” what they see as a lost American dream and way of life. The right simply got educated and copped the left’s buzz words and concepts for its own. “There are no ideas but in things.” would be the opposing philosophy and as a philosophy it does not free float on puffy concepts that can be copped by anyone and used for their purposes. White identity groups and culture have been around for a long time, but, when they got a not too subtle nod from The Leader, that was new, and it grew until they won elections.

They proved that concepts can be copped for anyone’s purpose, especially in a culture war. I’m reminded of this all the time when Steve Bannon’s pet phrase is “deconstructing the deep state” and all of the Republican postmodernists, act as though it’s all a “narrative” when a lie is thrown out and repeated, for years, if necessary, until people begin to believe it. Bannon, the media guy, who actually made films, is well-versed on conceptual trends, and has bent terms and concepts originally first made by French, and, later American Marxists, and now co-opted for use by the right. Curiously Mr. Bannon, the media guy, actually helped The Huffington Post get their website up and running, before his Breitbart years.

The assholes who were carrying their Home Depot tiki torches at Charlottesville looked to be pretty educated and far less blue-collar than previous manifestations of this weird white identity phenomenon, and all separatists in general. It’s also what Michael Flynn calls his digital army of like-minded computer troops marching to the beat of false info in acts of culture and performance, until, their hoped day of reckoning occurs, that came very close on January 6, 2020, and was most pronounced back with the Oklahoma City domestic terror act, when Timothy McVeigh actually thought his action would spark a right wing revolution in the country. That’s how far gone and how far deep into it these people are. And, also, it’s only the far right that speaks of the impending upcoming civil war, because that’s what they want – only their way in a society based on many ways and equal respect. And it’s only the far right who cannot see themselves as extremist, but actually think of themselves as basic middle of the road Christian Americans. I mean what’s more extreme than thinking a vaccine will make your magnetic or that we did not land on the moon or breaking into the Capitol to hang Pence, bare-chested with a horned head dress as the Q-Shaman?

After all these years all I can say is that, behind all these lofty ideals, plans and world-views is a very basic premise, and that is, people need a purpose while they are alive on earth. One of the most exponentially trending world views is that of identity politics which provides purpose (at the center of identity). But on the right and white identity politics, believing, whole hog, in duty, god and country, makes violent-prone gun-loving extremists, not just another cultural identity in America, but more than a threat, because it’s a certainty now. That’s quite a purpose for anyone.

Leisure time, money, access to guns, the internet of social media has come together to form a new consciousness, that they themselves called the alternative right, updating white supremacy and racism and making it a little more hip. In reality this new consciousness is simply the walking schizophrenia of our times. People are living more and more within their own worlds where they program only the things that reinforce how they feel and think. Living in your own world is an American value and goal whether conscious or not.

On the other side of things, in the liberal world, as PC rose, so did Identity Politics, so much so, we have this. Environmental racism is one of the latest buzzwords that has grown out of our IP/PC axis, to describe the age-old dilemma where the poor, of all stripes, naturally are looking for the cheapest rents that, of course, are always in the most undesirable sections of the city, like being in or next to industry. It could be murder and drugs, as well as, pollution that the poor must deal with too. By using the word poor to describe people it becomes a class thing and not a particular group, but, today, I guess, only “people of color” are perceived as being poor or living in low quality sections of the city. How did D. T. get elected? Using the words of an older black man that attacked me recently for being white while on his sidewalk, all the time yelling, “You one of these white trash people who voted for Trump, aren’t you?” In fact I’m one of these white trash folks, but who doesn’t vote because they are all full of shit. Do you think, especially after Trump, that people who don’t look like me are shy about expressing exactly how they feel about people like me? But it’s also the process and there is no filter in neighborhoods filled with folks who have never had any significant contact with any white people. While the converse is true and the converse being white folks on the other side of the Harlem River Valley, along the Hudson having, perhaps, a little more contact, but it’s still another world, as in the Bronx. Some would argue that is choice, others, oppression and racism, and everything in between.

Political correctness simplifies the extremely complexity of human nature and American urban scene as does identity politics. There was a store in the ghetto called biggies, and its owner installed many murals over the years. Like many of his a “Ay-rab” brothers, he owned a store in the black euro and lived out in the beautiful suburbs. But he was well-loved in the neighborhood because it was really the only place open to get any sort of food, albeit junk food, 24/7. Ironically the entire neighborhood was a fabulous Jewish enclave until the 1940s and the Jewish population moved a little further east into the Glenville neighborhood and peacefully surrendered the entire neighborhood over to the newcomers who happen to be black which it remains today. Fat in these Rust Belt cities a common phrase is, “The Blacks follow the Jews.” and, if you’re PC, you are probably already firing off your wimpy correctness guns and slapping me with your wet noodle ideology, but this phrase is from the perspective of Blacks, appreciate of the lack of prejudice within the Jewish culture that, in many cases, handed over the entire home with the keys to the local black folks who had treated the Jewish people nicely.

Ironically, given the actual long history of the neighborhood, Biggie’s was the setting for numerous murals directly attacking Jews, and testing the limits of free speech to the limit, remembering that he is a “person of color” an immigrant and a minority who has brought his hatred for Jews from Palestine to America, even though his customers really don’t have any problem with Jewish people or “Arabs”generally speaking.

An ultra capitalist society doesn’t care to socialize problems, in any shared responsibility sort of way. In the sense that, right now, it’s up to you to somehow join in with economy and try to get money and and get out. You make the initial push and keep pushing until it finally lets up, and you get out. Do many fail because of handicaps including lack of resources? Yes, but many took chances, to work with what you have and get out, whether it be through, education, politics, art, science and sports, to name a few, and succeeded.

It’s more than possible, don’t make me cite the thousands of examples. Ya gotta overcome, until the time comes, if you want it, and not wait that socialism is established. Myself, I’m not waiting. The world owes me nothing and I know it.

My neighborhood is predominantly Dominican, and, there are folks divided into working the streets, working blue-collar jobs and those who have chosen school and white-collar jobs. I guarantee that the folks in the last two categories will leave the neighborhood, and, if I go to the bank, and talk to the young employees, they all make it very clear that born here, or in the Dominican Republic they want to  move up and out into places like Riverdale in the Bronx and nothing less, because they will also have access to Westchester county and they know that is the promised land.

Of course, in a socialist society there would be legal pressure applied to the situation of the poor, but we ain’t socialist, and the reality is, that I’m not waiting or complaining, and I’ll use the present system to remove myself from a harmful environment, because it’s up to me, in a time when you can, if you really try. I lived most of my life in one of the most polluted urban neighborhoods in the country, and I know so much more than you. The extreme pollution only met mitigation through its links with gentrification The Gowanus being another perfect example of the situation along with  the neighborhoods of Newtown Creek where I spent most of my years. To say poor folks live in the most undesirable sections of cities and towns is a given, because it’s true, unlike the generalization that it’s a “black and brown” situation, which, of course, becomes, at that moment, racial, never escaping the fact that it is, itself, divisive, only because of the way that human nature works, right or wrong, and that the poor, which includes many whites, share many of the same problems, such as money, housing and environment. In the case of bombing cities like New York, for instance, the old Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, they built some of the largest housing projects in New York City in what was known as slum clearance. It was, next to the Bruckner Expressway, and industry, the most undesirable section of Mott Haven. Today in Port Morris which is simply the other side of the Bruckner Expressway within the industrial zone there are now huge condo towers right above the expressway, and across from the projects. Likewise, along East 138th Street, the main drag of Mott Haven there are more condo towers directly across the street from some of the largest projects in the city. To stereotype, these aren’t poor whites, but folks with money that might be white, and, for some reason, will spend big bucks to live in old Mott Haven, with its hub of transportation links, including the Deegan and the Bruckner and numerous subway and public transit lines. The motive to get out of the dreaded Bruckner’s way is still there, but transcended now in a changing disruptive mixed-up world where professionals don’t care anymore about living next to housing projects, expressways or industry.

By the way, I spoke of the Gowanus and Newtown Creek. They were two of the most polluted places I ever shot, and I shot toxic sites on and off for 45 years. Both waterways were bordered by neighborhoods, and in Newtown Creek, it was bordered by many neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens since it was the border between the boroughs. All the neighborhoods are white. I never thought of that, or ever would, until these PC times. That’s not the way I see it, but it’s the way I respond to someone inexperienced.

The point being buzzwords like racist infrastructure are too simplistic, sound good but only fit the IP vision in a hyper changing world, one where a fossil-fueled car is discontinued, the plant shutdown, only to be sold to two electric vehicle manufacturers and the same company that owned the car assembly plant just got done building their largest battery plant to use with their new lines of electric vehicles next door to the plant they sold to the new electric truck maker who then sold a portion of the plant to Foxcom for their electric vehicle plant. Meanwhile millions quit their jobs in the Great Resignation to move on, many as entrepreneurs, never working for companies again. Drivers, for years, being told that in the near future that all truck driving jobs will be done by autonomous vehicles, and their jobs will vanish, are part of this group. Now, with supply chain problems they are begged back with better wages.

Are we spoiled? Racist infrastructure? Tell it to the railroad builders through Indian Territory and the military bases built on their land, or the residents of Love Canal, or Libby Montana which are downright white. Tell the Jews who experienced the the racist infrastructure of Auchwitz, or the millions forced into slave labor in factories in the German war effort, or the residents of Johnstown Pennsylvania who were killed by the thousands, because some infrastructure, a dam, at a private reserve for the rich wasn’t maintained properly. Racist infrastructure sounds good, plays well but what does that have to do with the truth?

Truth which includes the toxic debacles in the Gowanus Canal, Newtown Creek, Dutch Kills and English Kills, by far the most polluted sections of New York, that still exists today, because it was so polluted since 1840. Deeply affecting many neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, that, in this day and age, of identity addictions, if you need that, are all basically, white.

No doubt, taste can obscure the prejudice beneath it, and only intuition and experience can decipher the unsaid, particularly in its own time and place, but intuition ain’t what it used to be, which was fairly correct, and, is now lost, as experience and the world are both bubble-bound, and common sense of no use, in a world that to be correct you have to agree with someone’s politics, that I’m so far from it ain’t funny. I mean I avoid politics and politicians, until Trump. I don’t vote.

The overbearing stereotyping, whether it be with political correctness, identity politics or by any one individual, whose feelings and ideas precede or infiltrate  and dominate the reality of having so many different cups teas to choose from, in the first place, is nonsensical outside its own closed realm. When you age you witness different shifts in mindsets, and, this one, takes a complicated world and simplifies it by using one or two social filters to see, and more importantly, judge their world. I no longer understand mono-culture, especially with a a poly-cultural view.

For the first time in history we have a country whose culture incorporates respect, universally, to all groups and individuals, who are all deemed equal. Perhaps to create order in the first country comprised of the most disparate immigrant populations of all time. The order is, no one is above anyone, and all are equal. Lately hard to live by, with the pure concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively few, and, after thousands of years of groups bound by appearances and shared ethnicity, tribes and nations, it could take some time to work out that genetically coded stuff from our past, that actually stretches back 6 million years with evolution. Most all our enemies are countries with strong-arm leaders, heading populations that are, in fact, more mono-culture than our nation of folks that don’t look and act, so much, alike, but are encouraged to become more individualized, appreciative of your roots and ethnicity, even rebellious, with multiple group interests vying to have their day.

Instead of basic tribal instincts of sticking to like-looking beings, another culture is born that is its antipode, where, in fact, one could choose to either assimilate into a stew called America, or, identifying and staying pure in your identity group, and playing the part of the mosaics that don’t work, for the assimilation vision, but have equal rights with regards to their ambitions and their own degrees of separateness. It’s a good option. For instance, having the freedom to completely avoid artists, hipsters and the culture of reinvention, has saved my life, and kept it functioning. This taste, and, i’m sure many others, who are persons of the world, not the word, has everything to do with being a human animal and has absolutely nothing to do with the notions of political correctness. Once controlled, that energy from the redirection of our tribal vestiges, left over from our evolving social history, might help us in the flip of our animal nature that makes us coagulate around people who look similar, into something this country invented – welcoming all immigrants from all countries to be part of the mix, that has evolved from a mix into a stew into more of a land of separate identities.

I’ve said history is the theater of the past, if you look at all my work, unintentionally, you’ll find the exact demographic of where I shoot, and in places like Queens, that’s a lot of difference, which makes RealStill, like a photographic Ed Sullivan, who gets to show off all the different things, some hidden, or not known, that the city has to offer.

The ancient city of Rome, was the great manifestation of urban life in Europe and the Mideast, rivaling Asian cities, and the budding cities of Central America and Mexico that, like Rome, had no idea of what was going on beyond their turfs, between the Atlantic, that only the Vikings had entered from the west. In Rome, there were many different types from all over the known world, and an equal number of different cultures, but, there, the pressure was pure assimilation, and any sort of preservation or promotion of an outside culture was looked down on, if it was meant to be equal or better than Rome. For instance, Romans were interested in and welcomed input from around the world with food, but, ultimately, it would come out as Roman. A bit reminiscent of America until the 1950s when a parade of individualism drowned out the idea of assimilation. Romans were fascinated by exotic wild animals, non-native and intriguing, but they were often used as beasts and props in their love of sports theatre. Rome loved to get stuff from all around the world, and then make it Roman.

With regards to sexual culture, the Romans, particularly the elites, were open to both gay and heterosexual relationships and much more, but, only if the relationship was dominated by a Roman native citizen so that their slaves, others’ slaves, and anyone else in a service role for the Rome native, would always show a public face of respect and Roman dignity. But the Romans, did have an open mind with many of the themes that our new PC world is obsessed with, but in a different way, the way of Rome.

Today it seems the ingredients for the old melting pot don’t want to jump in to the pot. And, it seems like every few years more groups become highlighted, celebrated and also eventually legislated. After Donezal, with more and more people revealing themselves in a similar situation, the trans-race category is born and adding another category for those desiring to to be respected in their acquired tastes and desires. Perhaps our near future with A.I., will yield more self-construction opportunities and more groups and categories desiring their human rights. Including the non-human? And if whoever is responsible for sending those objects in the documented footage released by the government, that were cruising at 30,000 miles per hour, shows up, then we will be united like never before, or, like with covid, break apart, at the worst time before a true master species, unconcerned about someone’s earthly roots, struggles, politics and identity, the same way our own machines will, one day, look at us as messy, often idiotic species that makes no sense on the scientific and technical level.

If I am educated, work a good paying professional job in the service sector, and enjoy whatever comforts comes with that, I presume, all this is not as tiresome or confusing to someone who is uneducated, blue-collar and does manual labor, often scraping by. Recognize them as a group correctly, that, when they go home, tired, to be with their families, they might not have the time and leisure to cultivate themselves so extensively, as to be in tune with it all, the IP and PC stuff, can be complicated, particularly when it’s so nonsensical, or becoming so detailed in unheard of ways, until now – transgender bathroom use or which gender to align with in sports. When Ms. Jenner was running for governor, she flipped on her initial transgender stance in regards to sports. Now, in America, groups that make up less than one per cent of the country can receive a lot of national attention, and as a cultural presence. Micro-groups, like the trans-race movement, are on the scene.

Working class people are very busy and with very basic things like rent, food and family. They come home from work tired, many only to do more work, and are not very educated. It’s very difficult to integrate something both highfalutin and foreign, like the word, misogyny, and, after struggling to understand what this word meant, I was surprised that it simply meant that a person an asshole. Of course, today there is a trickle down with the old French structuralist buzzwords like significant other, popularized by shows like Oprah, and now even the homeless can speak in the buzzwords of our times – “I’m a manic/depressive with no significant other and tremendous dysfunctional social handicaps, addicted to narcotics, alcohol and junk food.”

Of course, we should respect all that deserve it, and that only lies in someone’s character, and, although it’s difficult as hell, it includes my friends, blue-collar, and Trump cultists, who, unfortunately,  can be friends that would do anything for you, but got sucked into the thrill of having someone, like a president, actually care about you. To be into Trump, not always a character flaw, but it can be, not in the case of those I know, but it’s more the psychology of the attraction to conspiracies and comforting lies to soothe your Republican extremism that you mistake for normal righteousness.                         

The country is ground-breaking on the level of people from, not just, all over the world, but, all walks of life and classes that can live together, if not in the same neighborhood, but the same country, in relative civil harmony, and respect for individuals and group rights in a fairly civil environment of freedom of almost any kind of speech, and freedom to protest any thing that you want. Excluding the Trump years, when the shit hit the fan.

A lot of the overt felonies of robbery, burglary, drugs, sex and murder occur in the lower classes from various mixtures of greed, impulsiveness and poverty. Equal amounts of crime with the upper classes, complicated by access to resources like the best lawyers, and the nature of the crimes are “white-collar” stealing money either in a grey area or conscious criminal behavior.

Uneducated working folks, a few steps above the ghetto, obviously have a much different culture that reflects that. But it doesn’t have to be that stagnant, especially, when there is, relatively speaking, mobility in America, that is unprecedented, no matter who you are. J. D. Vance is the latest to highlight the difference amongst classes of people in our, mobile, not politically correct, country. It does happen. Shawn Carter came right out of the Brooklyn projects and was a pretty big heroin dealer, just before getting out that scene and making more dough than ever, talking with folks from Warren Buffet to Obama, while making major business moves. A couple of years ago I ran into a music video of Beyoncé and Jay Z inside the Louvre in Paris dancing around and singing, rapping with the Mona Lisa. That’s incredible. Lately JZ has been copping the Basquait look. He (Basquait) was biracial, like Halle Berry or Meghan Markle who identify as Black, not true always to the genetics, but definitely true to the value of identity politics and the commitment by Blacks, of all strains, to finally try to cure the wrongs over the years. You know, it’s also the same as Italians, and one of our presidents now is biracial and was raised by his mother yet completely identifies as being Black. That’s the way it is. Are they holding out until things change and its ok culturally to be proud of both sides of your family and demonstrate that biracial decision that your parents’ made?

It is a capitalist country whose government has granted individuals with unheard of freedom and rights. The name of the game, here, now, with capitalism, is brute and even sweet individualism and entrepreneurship, whether you like it or not, as our highest form of living. Whattaya want? Paradise on earth? People can make it out, and, until we have socialism, the ghetto and working-class places will be viewed as stepping stones in a mobile economy and society that is based on capitalism and individual competition. Does socialism want the ghetto to be livable, in the sense that people will stay with their own kind for generations if they don’t have the money, skills and resources to leave? What’s the final goal, everyone lives in a middle-class neighborhood that is completely mixed on ethnic and cultural levels? There are may things in America, and today such neighborhoods exist, some are as mixed as the country itself, and, of course everything in between right up to its antipode, the exclusive white suburb. Queens has people representing every race, culture, religion and nationality, and within that are many mixed neighborhoods as well as, working-class and rich all-white neighborhoods. In America, until socialism begins here, that’s the reality – the ability to choose from a wide variety of places to live. Go to Atlanta and see whole towns of million dollar homes and it’s all majority Black. There’s also Inkwell Beach. While still being an entirely capitalistic country, the atmosphere is, if you don’t like it, work hard, and move on to one of the varied places America has to offer. There are options. There are many neighborhoods of more limited choices, I live in one, but given the overall atmosphere, this still cannot stop you, if you want to move out of the hood. It’s a place of limited choices, thus, you have no choice, if you want to get out, then work your ass off.

A country was founded partly on the idea, that anybody that is here is equal, while, at the same time, allowing for the right to free speech and carrying arms. A built-in explosive situation whether we like it or not, but can also be a coercive control mechanism, like giving everyone a gun to even the field, can, in certain situations, for instance, in the rural west be effective, but not New York City and may other cities which have various degrees of control for a reason.

None of this is new. Rome was a global city of great scale, but, there, the social pressure and culture was the opposite from what ours has become, but used to be, where, all were encouraged to join the ultimate assimilation, that, with all their cultural and ethnic differences, you were ultimately a citizen of a country that was number one, giving a person unprecedented freedom in a big, bad world.world. If you brought a new food or delicacy into Roman life, it would be accepted, then eventually become entirely Cultural differences were Romanized    and things like real distinct ethnic neighborhoods of immigrants, or ethnic pride and celebrations. The idea wasn’t preserving the original purity of the dish, but making it Roman because that meant something. – to be Roman which was a power to have at the time. In Rome working people lived bunched together. They went to public baths, and, for instance, there, the bathrooms were public, with benches of toilets lining the wall and no partitions. When Romans shit they were never more equal, and public, yet still individual, because Roman citizenship allowed great freedom. Thus, one on one comparisons over such a long period of time aren’t real productive, but the comparisons of Rome and America, at its zenith of world power, illuminate each other in interesting ways.

An entire country made up from people from all around the world with equal rights and citizenship is fairly new to even civilization. People were formerly raised, not to rebel, but to conform and, even, fight, on the grounds of their shared ethnicities under one nationality. We live in a country that puts no demands anymore on assimilation. Separatism, is a choice, whose most extreme is represented by the likes of the Black Jews or one of these American Nazi groups. If you respect people to some degree and pay your taxes and do not break the law, you can basically start your own country here, including your own language. Scientology became a nonprofit religious institution, thereby saving it billions of dollars, and, I believe, it started as a “science” – a wack one, and wanted the tax credits and did what it had to do. They’re probably PC too, inviting everyone in their “church” receiving that designation of a religious group from our government, after years of legal action. The government caved into that, and this “religion” got the exemption. Should I respect them, inspired by the constitution’s protection of religion?

I can, at least, understand, how the lower classes, without time or money to be educated, and become enlightened, might not be so up to date or state of the art, like many special interest groups in the name of PC, self-interest and the race industry.

You’re going to tell me that we reach the pinnacle of civilization by replacing actual empathy with a political correctness and loyalty to a particular identity? That this isn’t just a step along the way? That’s it? PC is sold as some sort of inherent open-mindedness, but if actual openness to the world did occur the notion of PC would dissolve. With regards to identity politics does it last forever? In other words you’re going to stay within your own ethnicity and its culture primarily and never assimilate, passing that p.o.v. on through future generations?

While the trend, if you are educated, is to have a human, friendly work place – free snacks, access to great food, playgrounds built into the work place, etc., while the lower classes without college, have a much different comfort level when it comes to work, and that level is non-existent since blue-collar work is synonymous with discomfort and even pain. It’s not all bad pain, but can be both inhuman and mind-numbing, and, i suppose, just like, service economy cubicle jobs, customer service etc.

I don’t need to wake up because I was never asleep in the first place, and always aware and mindful, relative to what a human can be, and, on top of it, living out and not talking about what the politically correct are i guess, trying to reverse, symbolically.

The unwise portion of PC turn off and away from the already fixed idea that all white blue-collared folks are tied to the Trump bunch. I admit 30% of that population is wacked out on Trump and are, in fact, radicals in the worst sense.

Obviously the subject of identity politics deserves books, but it’s all I’ll say, and I’m sure I’ve communicated enough. The subject is political correctness, though, so let’s get it over, so i can go back to being in the only world I care to live in, that of uncategorized, pure difference.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I first heard of political correctness, or cultural hope, with the 1971 “Hillside” Coke commercial, when the Seekers sang about Perfect Harmony, but the first real, very real, demonstration of what’s become PC, for myself, is the case of Joseph Columbo who used political correctness to try to free his people from the gangster stereotype, a hurtful prejudice shaped by a few wayward Italian-Americans, ironically, like Mr. Columbo, who, if anybody should know about the gangster prejudice, it would be him.

Once political correctness solidified by 1980, I initially thought it simply meant that it was what someone, according to their own beliefs, would call their point of view. Not that it was universally right or true. It was simple individual expression with some cockiness – of course, I think it’s correct, why would I act otherwise? But realizing that no human can actually be this correct. Somehow humans are able to be that today – absolutely correct.

Up until, at least 1980, I thought that political correctness was simply your own subjectivity, recognizing that what you believe is correct, which is only what it really is, that is to say, what it thinks it is, and that I’m, correct, and for a large world view of people and society, which actually they know little about, practically speaking.

When it first turned up, Obama was strongly advising against wokeness. If you’ve got mileage, it’s intuitively wrong, not correct. It is what it is, a sudden awakening, attached to the moment, not history – a grogginess, terror, apprehension and starting point of reflexive irrational thought, until calming into a new day with some food and coffee, and, maybe, interacting out in the world and being conscious, of plain old reality and then express your fully conscious self.

Smoking cigarettes, hitchhiking, playing in the streets, smoking and drinking while pregnant, Saturday morning cartoons, tv test patterns. We don’t see this much anymore. Kneepads, helmets and less chances for experiencing the negative aspects of the outdoors is our norm – be smart and safe, don’t take chances.

🔊 You’re woke? From what and where? I ask for our sake, but only if someone like you, judges me without knowing a thing about me. Interacting with someone who sees you as fodder is ridiculous.

It’s their social Prozac, a selective reuptake inhibitor that, cleverly, excludes class, age and experience, while identity politics, gender and race crosses freely through the blood/brain barrier, not empathetic to the aged is like trampling on infants or abusing pets.

Perhaps the educated version of living. As a photographer and writer I don’t have versions, but visions, since versions aren’t necessary where i live and work, and need to keep my head straight.

Enlightened not woke. To be woke is to be caught off guard, in a state of surprise, off balance and groggy. Woke crystallized the PC into its essential lack of common sense, or, to put it in other terms, its disconnection from what’s really out here. In an era of reinvention, where nothing is relative, there is no common sense, if you are a roots and source person actually participating in the world, I know that, if you have to awaken to something, only means that you have been out of touch in the first place.

White privilege, is hard to swallow or make sense of if you happen to be white, poor or working-class. Yeah, there are poor white folks. That’s got a lot to do with the election and continuing problems with the Trump crowd, sometimes referred to as white trash by people they upset. It’s unfortunate that their emotional reaction results in a white identity politics that is quite hostile to anything but itself. White privilege? Not all whites, and don’t be so broad with your buzzwords, since you are committing the same social sins that you are now woke to.

If you can’t join the other or do not know who, of the others, shares your fight, then you are lost, including your woke self. Wokeness is the hyper-correctness that doesn’t permit the deep sleep of reconciliation, and a clearing of accumulated social plaques, that can only occur when disparate groups unite. Applied to the world from an untethered stance where certain pots are not black, but somehow, different, pristine and unused, can only make someone wonder.

Weiss said the Times – which has billed itself as “the newspaper of record” — has become “more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.” It’s hard to deny.

On the other hand, Alice Walker, whose work is so grounded in identity politics has “progressed” to this “The Reptilian space beings whose hybrid (part human, part reptile) descendants make our lives hell in Paradise were blue eyed devils to Malcolm X, the devil himself to my Christian parents, who never talked about eye color, which I think was not only prudent but wise, although they seemed clear enough about his sex, and as demons in many other religions, including the non-religion, Buddhism, where the advice is often to invite them in until they go away. But maybe these were other kinds of demons. Not the ones controlling not just you, but everything.”

I hope this is considered extreme, since it is, and by thinking otherwise, is the danger. You can’t call it misinformation, because it’s too nutty and wack, although

when PC started out, it is a lot different than what it has become, and so is the world.

In fact the idea of political correctness really began in the 60s, but it was an ironic or satirical point of view, meant as self criticism of the lefties, by themselves, to keep themselves in check, and not be too orthodox. It’s definitely evolved into the orthodoxy it originally tried to keep in check, when folks often would use satire and humor to alleviate social pressures and be self-critical, but we are so sensitive now, because we are so polarized ow.

In the corporate realm who doesn’t understand political correctness? When you do business, of course, there are paths to profitability, stability and long-term relationships. This is where, the phrase, never discuss religion or politics, is most fitting. However PC, along with the passing of the Citizens’ United initiative, has given corporate America the way to discuss politics, in a large influential way. Republicans thoroughly supported this bill thinking they are the great champions of business, but it turned out to bite their ass, because so much of the major businesses today, particularly tech, are liberal as hell.

I don’t wanna be all corporate all the time. And why is that? If you don’t know you’re missing something vital. I already dropped out of any institutional or corporate work, even a small company, and struck out on my own by 1980.

PC is too dominant and mainstream, particularly in Arts & Entertainment, where it’s solidly both reactive and become more the thing to do, and has become habitual. It deserves rebellion, if, not for the sake of truth, then because of its rigidity and the staleness of its bubble.

This is the the perspective of a person actually doing, as a matter of course, what this PC culture promotes theoretically. I mean, it’s one thing, if you are a tenured professor, teaching advanced Marxism (the kind with no no class consciousness, just race and gender) living in a nice mid-century modern home, defending obnoxious behavior, as cultural, and any negative reaction being, racist, and it’s another to live in a crowded apartment complex where you can’t sleep, because of the noise, that, is no longer a health problem to some, but a cultural misunderstanding. Which sounds very racist itself.

I bet, for instance, a photographer with such a sensibility would unconsciously, over many years, end up with a only groups of shots – essays and books – that, at the least, innately, reflect the exact demographic of the local city, without ever thinking about it. Identity politics doesn’t do that at all, and has become a standard. But, it, too can saturate. I know far more about Black culture than my supposed, own culture, and, if, you live long enough it can becomes tiresome and boring like anything else, and that is now considered racist, because I have been exposed to too much of something.

A millennial mistake, to take it all literally without having any experience. To judge what came before you, in only your context is absurd. And, especially if you are entitled, with the nerve to view the dues-payers as socially defective. The cliche about learning history so we don’t repeat it, is true only if history is remembered accurately and not part of an ideology, but based on things that actually exist, and, then, proceeds from there.

Political incorrectness used to be a socially accepted form of, what today, would be  up called racism. Because we were actually much more racist in the past as a country?What I mean, is that a country can or should have a safe place to let out social contradictions (Archie Bunker). This was the domain of films and literature or culture in general. Not only can it – mentally and physically – dislodge orthodox sludge and ignite areas of neurons that political orthodoxy never venture into, refreshing perspectives or inviting entry, through subjective experience, into someone else’s ways of thinking. Of course, if done the right way, which is only determined by guts and intuition, it might help, but if your intuition is buried in education and legal language and never going outside, your interpretation would reflect that.

Tough Crowd a cable show from 2002 to 2004 was the last vestige, with the exception of Bill Maher, of a socially acceptable place to let off steam, with a big variety of comedians of many different backgrounds and politics. Speaking of television, but in a time when there were four channels, and, thus, carried some weight, Dick Cavett deftly and successfully had the most disparate of guests, usually always being honest and open and doing it in a civilized way that was entertaining, as much as it was balanced and informative. Even in radical times, (his first show, with multiple guests, to interviews, was on the air form 1968 until 1986) he maintained the ship and proved that even the vehemently opposed can find a sometimes calm way to disagree. But after 2004, the screw would tighten up on humor to be closer to a standard that actually is anti-humor, and has grown enough to be dominant and rigid enough to rebel against, because we all know who we are as humans, and are capable of, and what we all share is that capability and if you deny it then it becomes nonsensical to folks who, closer to the source of things, often with little resources, see it differently. And you don’t have to be less fortunate either, since basic common sense occurs in all class strata. It’s just that the lower classes is where i live, that’s all.

FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH PC

My first real one on one encounter with PC culture occurred in 1980 for the first time because I was moving into I guess you could say, the professional class by wanting to make films. Believe it or not, after my first year of exposure, it was the only time in my life, I felt it necessary to seek any sort of psychiatric help which quickly resulted in realizing that the only person that could ever help me would be myself, or, as Sigmund Freud famously put it, “If I were alive today, even I could not help this person.” But before contact as I came out of the blue-collar world, I could witness the growth of today’s version of PC in the media in particular, and got wacked with it, after living exclusively in a blue-collar environment, and found, years later, it only gets worse, and, by 1989,  the behavior of  liberal hypocrites began to be too much. It never ended, and, after running from them to find a clear spot, my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, they took that after 9/11.

Before that PC meant only probable cause to me, until political correctness became such a thing, and, up until 1980, if i thought of political correctness, it was that it only meant to self-identity your political and social views, innately knowing it was individual and subjective, and was simply saying, as anyone would, that, yes, my ideas and opinions are correct, and this is them, and why would I believe otherwise? Like Sidney Powell finally being forced to admit the truth of her political and social views that turned out to be entirely subjective, so much so, she believes them still even after admitting in court, to squirm out of it, it’s all bull shit.

It seems like it was the famous Coke commercial, “Perfect Harmony” that i became aware of the secular corporate do-gooder notion, and with a product that could make you feel good, at the price of your health, by sucking down an ounce of sugar with each purchase from a company that began as a beverage maker into stimulation, and the happiness that coke created on a dopamine level.

Later, in the 1970s, Joseph Columbo, while one of the top Mafia leaders, actually convinced both the media and the government to stop using the name, “mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra” and he even got Francis Copolla to follow that line in his films. Mr. Columbo bravely fought prejudices against his people, for instance, that people who shared his ethic identity were seen as criminals or part of something called the mafia. He was killed by a man who didn’t just happen to be black, although it wasn’t a racial hit. No hate crime, it was, in fact, a hired hit, perhaps to make it look like an attack on the politically correct, to cover the connection between Joey Gallo and the Black underworld from his years at Attica, and just being a kind of unusual mobster, because of extreme open-mindedness.

Columbo’s assassination, instantly, illustrated basic political manipulation as purported social truth, and exposing the lame suckering that, through its extremeness, marks a part of the PC trend. Mr. Colombo was entirely aware of the manipulation that he had somewhat successfully orchestrated, and that only the truly incorrect, could fix, as the other bosses proved.

I first heard of political correctness, or cultural hope, with the 1971 “Hillside” Coke commercial, when the Seekers sang about Perfect Harmony. But the first real, very real, demonstration of what’s become PC, is Joseph Columbo’s use of political correctness in representing Italian-Americans, so they could be free of the gangster stereotype, a hurtful prejudice shaped on a few wayward Italian-Americans. Folks like Mr. Columbo, who, if anybody should know about the gangster prejudice, he should, and exactly how many are involved.

More importantly, by turning the whole political correctness thing inside out like he did, it’s basic subjective foolishness is revealed. From the self-righteous philosophies right on down to the petty ones, my criticism is what the hell good is it, if you don’t live it, or can’t live it, or if it’s inauthentic.

Speaking of PC and the assassination of Joseph Colombo at the Columbus Day rally in New York City, Joey Gallo had made contact with black gangsters in prison and used that group probably to kill Columbo. The assassin, a black man, was immediately shot to death by some good fellow in the entourage of Columbo. Again, flipping the idea of PC inside out, by virtue of being a straight up gangster, ironically killed by a black man in Columbus Circle on Columbus Day, backed by a guy who had hated Colombo for twenty years, in an ongoing war with him. Gallo was smart, but not smart enough to keep out of Little Italy on his birthday.

By the late seventies PC had solidified into a set of cultural standards, but I still wanted to mistake it for a person’s own personal or individual political or ideological stance as being politically correct, but also simply as representative of an individual’s basic subjective taste in politics  as it plays into the social lives of people. Back in the 1960s, when it came to social and political matters, it was a satirical self-check to keep from becoming too intolerant, orthodox and hypocritical, and that’s where I’m coming from, or, think we should return to, even though I’m wrong.

But by 1980 I had to accept the truth that an entire preordained culture, a secular fundamentalism, based, both in and outside, identity politics of gender, race and sex, was growing until we have what we have today in 2021. It became accepted and became the educated secular morality for educated professionals whose laws were not divine, but civil, with the American Constitution providing the framework for positive legal commandments, which are, in fact, a switch from religious correctness, that relies so much on the negative, both their Christian perception of the world, and for the Christian prescription, under the consequences of eternal hell. If I am a secular educated professional, with spiritual leanings, and do not need God’s law to be ethical, then why not PC? And for that segment that never do or live up to in reality, their brand of ideals, political correctness  makes them critics, but they are watching movies, not the actual world of critical thinkers, who are embedded in the reality of the things that they say concern them. Even the most inexperienced, while irritating, are, still harmless. That’s what makes this hard to finish writing. I’m not sure it’s even worth my time. I think of Mr. Chomsky’s general lack interest in the PC/IP realm of things, and, of course he’s way out of the mainstream, and I’m just worldly, but could be doing better things, particularly with a camera.

And, of course, my own big collision with PC happened when I went from working blue-collar shit jobs to trying to live out a dream and something I was really good at, not photography, but film, but both belonged to the same world on this level. For the first time in my life I was out of a neighborhood or place where, i guess, you’re known, and known to be good people, and, apparently entered a world where certain principles of fact, respect and honor, were tossed for a constant symbolic barrage of gossip used to demonstrate the superiority of, what are, just opinions, using hear-say, of me, in a public setting at work. For honorable people, completely of the world, with no malice, to be used this way is the utmost in humiliation, and it’s also false information. It never let up, and, although i learned over time to react less strongly, I couldn’t live through more than 15 years of it, and, i actually gave up film, and had to kill the thing i loved because, i am simply not built that way.

I was doing great, in my second year of finally doing what i was put on earth to do, and, honestly, it set me back a full year, just trying to figure it out, as i drifted back to the blue-collar life, the neighborhood bars, and dumb job. To talk about somebody negatively in a group and in public as though that person isn’t there, it’s real fucked up and it ain’t the way i was raised, that’s for sure. No one, but, he and i, in that room, knew that the example he was using, was, in fact, myself, and, if you don’t understand my anger, then you’re built for Hollywood, and I don’t eat to know you.

The incident was all about political correctness, the West Coast kind, specifically Los Angeles, as it played out in the Rust Belt, obviously not entirely understood by this person in 1980. Yeah, sure, the rust belt is filled with assholes, but I’m not one of them. And when those on the left can’t except or understand another left point of view, but one only tied to reality, is absurd, but logical given the fact that the American left gave up on the working-class, thirty years ago, and, later, many Democrats would do the same.

The mindset is not always harmless. Why is it that PC people have done me the most harm? It’s the mindset that PC is part of, that gets exposed fully with gentrification. If you are a secular professional, and don’t need any sort of organized or preordained religions to keep, become or stay moral, there is PC if you want it.

The problem is only when you think your beliefs are the only ones that are true. It’s a universal problem with each group and their own values that they, nourish and promote, and, probably should keep in self-check, for themselves to control.

And if that’s too complicated for you, how about, do unto others… that’s the one and only correctness there is, when it comes to living socially and ethically. Everyone is included, including all the individual and group beliefs they want to bring along.

It’s innocent, simply a matter of taste, but gets subject to criticism, even condemnation. But you should only do so with a strong basis, and you don’t have it, although education and the law is on your side. Experience is the most important dimension missing from your perspective. I could never understand it beyond, what I thought was, just your damn beliefs, not a new set of secular commandments, and a narrowness to experience, because, in fact, as the professional and service class, they have a wide educated perspective, and, I guess, being politically correct is part of that.

Sometimes it’s a matter of taste, but more importantly, it’s a matter of experience that evaluates whether something makes sense or not. Preferences, I thought, were entirely human and might face difficulty when trying to democratize, politicize or take them out of the context. There are fair preferences and there are also unfair preferences, and, like Ms. Ginsberg, I might have my own taste and opinion, but we can ever deny the right to express ourselves.

THE NOTION OF PC

“No one is full-blooded.” Dusty Crawford.

Not one person or living thing born on earth has ever asked to be here, and we have no choices until we get here and find out who we are. Today many cement themselves to an identity, in fact it’s kind of a thing to do.

In the late 19th to the early 20th century when Lenin began his rise to power, they say, when the first notion of political correctness was put forth, because the socialists in Russia wanted to use the term against communists, to distinguish socialism, against any sort of socialism, at any cost or orthodoxy. It was a criticism of becoming to orthodox.

Political correctness is a soft worldview, and, ironically, proudly orthodox, when it becomes an all-encompassing secular moral/social view, manifesting itself in shunning, head games and gossip, not confrontation. Other philosophies do not use any filter to view things. It’s antipode, real existentialism, is not a comfort philosophy, but an old and living one, that is the perspective of life, lived fully and externally, having some good old discomfort as one of the many effects of the actual, instead of, by choice, the virtual. Existentialists are known for not being judges or judgmental, and prefer the adage, life is more interesting than is fiction.

Why doesn’t PC culture realize the discrimination and ignorance that senior citizens and very old people have to deal with? It is more of a show and conveniently exclusionary, and, whose roots, as we understand it today, originate in academia, and passed to the educated, and dominates, widely, for instance, in corporate culture, where it has evolved and progressed to such a point today that many corporations are leaders in political correctness and equality.

Corporate correctness knows offending is bad for sales in all those demographics they pay so much to understand, target and market their goods too. While a very few are just plain nuts with Mike Lindel the chairman of the board.

The owner of the Washington Redskins, swears that, over his dead body, he will rename the team, then, the Supreme Court agrees with him, but, later, FedEx calls the owner to remind him that they are corporate partners in the Washington team’s business, and, suddenly, there are changes. Same thing with the Cleveland Indians who who clearly saw the writing  on the wall and began to slowly pull out chief wahoo beginning in 2014, with the really bad publicity that came with some ugly encounters at the annual opening day protests, always peaceful, but can be ugly with confrontation. Slow-movers, but the complete elimination of the Indians name finally happened and they are no longer associated with Indian mascot culture. I understand the problem with the chief, I might be a little more liberal with use of the word Indian but what do I know? Anyways the big push to eliminate the logo came in 2014 with a confrontation that went viral and did not look good for the corporate team.

In the Indians’ case, a big push came from the commissioner who had directly expressed concern for the logo and felt uncomfortable having the all-star game held in the city of Cleveland. And, then, things changed, through the power of business, and good business people always see the writing on the wall, and then they act.

After the commissioner of baseball had problems with the mascot, and threatened to pull out the All-Star game, things begin to change in Cleveland, and five years after the shot was taken, the logo and the name has completely changed to the Guardians. As of 2021 this sort of thing is done for, and, over time, the Chief Wahoo ea will fade out.

All this happened, beginning on the grass roots level, for forty years, with things finally beginning to change when corporate and league management got involved. In Cleveland the protests ran every year since the 1970s. The protestors were peaceful and simply showed signs and chanted, while getting a steady 🔊 barrage of insults as fans walked into, at the time, the largest stadium in baseball, well before expensive tickets and good food became a staple, in a gentrified downtown. This was Cleveland Municipal Stadium and the blue-collar folks could easily afford a game, beer and dogs. This was their black palace and it was a much tougher town, and they came every year, some got old, and saw the day that the logo fell. And it dissolved on the principle that it was just good business because the times changed and, in a way, caught up to, what only a handful of varied people thought about, and acted on, that finally materialized.

The Citizens United campaign resulted in corporations acting like, and having the same rights as citizens, with regards to their views. The Republicans, probably thinking they are the party of business and enterprise, didn’t realize that the near future’s richest people would be fabulously liberal. Bezos might be very anti-union, but remains strongly liberal. Cook, Zuckerberg and, Musk, in his own category, are other examples that even the likes of Thiel and the Koch brothers, have to deal with politically. After some time, corporations are now getting bitten in the ass from their newly found right to express political opinions and profit. For instance when a brand name, synonymous with America and patriotism, decides to run a campaign to appeal to the trans audience.

The tide finally shifted, and it was pressure from above with a good business sense, aware that flipping something, would be morally good business, and profitable in a world heading in that direction. Today the trend is to have companies that are “sustainable” on many levels, that contribute a portion of their profits to some cause,  and internally promote what is the crown jewel of political correctness – diversity. Is it now, a majority view, or close, as the educated professional and service class has become, by far, the dominant work force? The new morality, is, for the first time not tied to religion or even god, but a set of principles for living the secular life. And the statistics back this up, even as someone like D. T. reaches his zenith, the secular and non-denominational have edged out folks with religious affiliations for the first time in the country, and things continue to grow in this direction. Thank God.

Look at the richest Americans in 1900 during another time of unprecedented wealth. I wouldn’t call them politically correct, fair, or, socially conscious. Promoting gay and women’s rights, would be unheard of, and women get the right to vote in the 1920s. Bill Gates, somehow becomes one of the big corporate targets for the weird-right, a badge of his brand of liberal politics. Aside from being anti-union, Bezos would make the flinty Baptist, John D Rockefeller, flip. Getting caught with sending non-secure texts with content that would astonish the Gilded Age upper crust. Cooke and Carnegie, Gates and Morgan? These are much different times for the richest, including, their numbers, now, there is the billionaire class, now close to 3000 strong. When asked on national television, Tim Cook Side by far that his proudest thing is homosexuality, but not the head of the worlds most profitable and biggest corporation. Obviously in a period of 120 years things have really changed at the top of American finance and industry. Anti-union Bezos really had a field day with Covid has his giant Internet store blew up and speaking of blowing up, the guy is blasting in the space on his own rocket ship and developing those ships to carry folks who are rich into space and get their mind blown.

Unlike the first gilded age, many of the richest men in the world are also intensely liberal. Bezos might be anti-union, but that’s about it with the affinities to the richest men that came before – Rockefeller, Carnegie or Morgan. Musk, in his own world and category, laughs all the way to the bank, while Gates and Zuckerberg are PC as hell. There still remains plenty of support for the right from the likes of Goya and Fox, and that’s what is expected in a democracy with free speech and many points of view. No one group wins, for long, at least, and policy and direction are in a constant state of tension, never entirely resolved, unless, the few times the country become united by war, a hockey championship, an assassination or simply by virtue of witnessing someone doing something human, rare and great outside of the almighty buck, such as the folks who sacrifice, do good, even when no one is looking, for the sake of it, or try to accomplish something difficult to help or simply to do it without thought or witness.

Things were sped up and instigated by the events in the summer of 2020 when the undeniable visual effects of police brutality could no longer be ignored, when almost everybody came together, who wasn’t a Trumper, to do something about it. And things happened out of unity. That doesn’t change, even if everyone is living in their own cosmos – uniting aides change.

TASTE

My taste in pictures obviously, favors realism as a basis. Naturally, the world and reality has everything in it good and bad including hate and love. Will those who work and live in an entirely controlled environment, will they extend their political correctness into my taste as an artist because I don’t filter out what’s real and often, bad? It took years for museums to bring in color photography and street photography, but was heavily embraced and, pretty swiftly dismissed, with some exceptions. Obviously tastes are real and they change, sometimes with the seasons, for real reasons.

Wendy Williams, Kardashians, Taylor Swift and all the rest, I know nothing about, and would not want to be around them. Is that sexist? There’s plenty of men too. What about this guy, Trump? I dislike that man far more than any celebrity. “Gumpy Valentine and Gordon “Documentary Buddha” Quinn are two more excuses for men. These are white men, and i do not like them, but their racial, ethnic, sexual or religious subjectivities are useless in that loathing. It’s their lack of character, experience and maturity. It’s a simple point, not to rate people at all, let alone for anything, but character, as well as, the distance between their words and actions.

Is it the politicization of taste? Most likely to some degree, but that can only be evaluated in the moment, and, I think, we have reached a point of impossibility, and the drowning of the truth, because, to experience, is being completely replaced by something else that desires no actual contact, especially if that means discomfort, yet judges the folks who enjoy contact, and might base their philosophies, first on that thing.

Political correctness is a softer worldview for comfort culture enthusiasts and service sector employees. It’s antipode, existentialism, is a discomfort philosophy, whose graveness is put up with, to get somewhere, that can only be done by veracious behavior and, by its nature, can also easily become joyous animation, and pretty much its own reward. Other than that, I’m too busy, and, by my own nature, just don’t care about what folks think, more and more, as the world becomes disconnected from itself and its own reinvention takes precedent.

De gustiness non est disputandum. Taste. Yes, for instance, if I was in a movie theatre, and people around me were causing enough of a disturbance so that I could not understand the dialogue of the movie, the first thing I would do, before even turning my head, is being aware of my irritated, angry and frustrated reaction at spending hard-earned money on something both important and entertaining, and then address the situation. If the theater were not sold out, I would just move away, like I always do. If not then I would look at the person and ask them, to cool it. How that becomes an example of racism is just someone’s else’s story, their perspective dropped on my life through gossip in a public situation doing his supposed job, that, i guess, included being an uninformed social judge, and confident my offense was worth open gossip drenched put-down. I don’t look at dumb shit like a persons collar when they are doing something that is, throughout time, socially irritating, And, because I am right, I act. The same film scholar just before this was walking through in the editing room with his companion and I was present and was told a great story and let out one of my notorious goofy gregarious laughs, and they both shot glances at me like they wanted to kill me. I mean, give me a break, the mother who raised me devoted her entire life to the civil right moment and I live in your “black and brown” hood, and in a swamp with friends that are all different colors unlike the people who criticize me both openly and cowardly through gossip, just because they want to demonstrate their superiority. It’s hard to take when the Republican talk about the elitist intellectuals because I like intellectuals and, unfortunately, the Republicans have a point. It does get ridiculous. They, the PC, are elitist. The thought of a person’s culture or race I only think of when put into a reaction mode, and the key to life is don’t react, but act. PC could get ya killed out here where folks don’t live symbolic lives. In order to prove their beliefs. He and his partner were from California amf he took a job in the budding Rust Belt, and, to stereotype them, they wers the typical liberal California bleeding hears whose empathy is reserved for a downtrodden mass, that they never had any real contact, and i’m not talking about the entertainment industry that is a bubble equal to universities.

Many and certain things transcend whatever birth differences you want to come up with, simply because of the universal shared nature of humans, animals and plants, that, somehow a group becomes the majority culture, and, dominates, unfairly, a minority one, that is absurdly less powerful, and fights back.

If, today, I remark that I do not like tattoos, that’s, then, sexist? There was a woman who lived next door to me and managed, briefly, the biggest hipster dive bar in Williamsburg, that ran over us, wrecking the block with their noise and commotion. She would, of course, dress in full hipster fashion. And her boss, Ben Shih, dressed the same. I didn’t like it. They both had tattoos. If they had any respect for other people, at all, is the only thing that ever concerns me, and, like I said i disliked their tattoos, particularly hers. She had, all over herself, black branches of large black thorns, that went from her fingers, up the arms, and over, what appeared to be most of her body. She looked terrible, to me, with black gnarly thorns, and, separately from my taste, was ruining my life with the loudest hipster dirt-bag joint in Williamsburg. Literally, wrecking my home life with a noisy hipster dive bar. She was fucking disgusting. So what? I was the same to her, perhaps. Who cares? The only way to care is to give it gravity by attaching it to religious morality or constitutional morality, or whatever you learned in a lot of schooling, and thought was right or worthy, and, of course, she and he were fabulously PC. It was a notorious hipster shithole and that’s also the description of many hipsters themselves.

As stated the godless politically correct have done more damage than anyone, to a lot of us, and when confronted always cited legality, that, was always on his side. Funny, he happened to be a lawyer.

PC borders special interest and victim ideology, and the self-made person, challenged deeply by whatever life throws at them, cannot see any common sense or ultimate truth to PC values and notions, simply because of the reality they have to deal with. Is not theirs.

Where is the line drawn for the correct ones? To exaggerate should we continue to let cultures sacrifice people to their gods in their own religious ceremonies? Certainly if they were sacrificing animals, then they would be in real trouble and that would never be permitted today. If the Towers on 9/11 were filled with peoples’ pets, our response would have been far more deadly, in fact, an armageddon would have been released. Speaking of the role of taste, what about humor and having a sense of it, like when W. C. Fields, was accepted in his time, and greatly appreciated by succeeding generations until this era of cleansing that is so severe it includes all sins, in all times, no exceptions. I grew up with the Three Stooges, and have always liked them as low art. One day my dentist pointed out that he did not care for them because they were so violent, yet, he is against a lot of PC himself. One can never stereotype an American. Ever since he said that my appreciation of the Stooges is a bit diminished.

The Victoria’s Secret’s revamping in 2020, means that if you start off sexist, but generally accepted, and the political/social climate flips, then you can restore your customer base and be politically correct. Now sexy women are independent powerful women, both at work and at play. But it’s just an update because they were getting away with a lot for many PC years. I mean the year that Taylor Swift was with them in her underwear not only was she completely out of place just according to her physical features but I thought – “Jesus, this is fascist. Well, to each their own, except if you happen to be PC in which case it’s a little bit your business. Here’s a forgotten path builder, as far away from entertainment and sex appeal you can get.

I guarantee if the notion of PC grows, than their opponents, the former moral majority et al, will be signing up for deconstruction courses, and coagulating around their own identity politics, more than they have already done with the likes of the pardoned ones such as Bannon playing the hero. Democrats would do themselves a favor by stepping far from the nonsense liberalism, just as Republicans should keep away from the Punk Right super-group of Gosher, Greene, Gaetz and Boebert. The Democrats could gain back the hard-won common sense folks with staying away with too progressive ideas that just don’t make any sense to them. But what does it matter anyway? By now, much of the American working-class is locked in the cult of Trump, and that brand of, i wouldn’t call it nonsense, so much as, complete bull shit, has taken over at least 30% of the country.

Verifying the false validity of conceptual models, not that they always claim that, but simply that thought based on thought or about thought is an infinite source for the business of conceptual thinking, but if you are looking for praxis or simply the ability to live it – the philosophy, might be for you has a saying, “there are no ideas but in things.” But this is not how we live today or certainly in the future, where a virtual presence is good enough, and veracity is no longer a problem, and tragedy is controlled by levels of comfort, while authenticity dissolves.

DNA & CULTURE

As this essay got further into the notion of PC, I mentioned Dusty Crawford and he is known to be the purest of Indians with the longest lineage ever recorded through his DNA.

Dusty has 78% of his dna matched to his tribe, but also had 9.8 percent European, 5.3 percent East Asian (mostly Japanese and Southern Han Chinese), 2 percent South Asian (Sri Lankan Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati Indian and Bengali) and .2 percent African (Mende in Sierra Leone and African Caribbean). Dusty’s dna could be traced back 55 generations, which is the longest on record, and with all that experience and history, he knows that, “No one is full-blooded.” Dusty Crawford. A Jewish and Irish family had daughters that were accidentally switched after their births at a hospital. They both grew up in the wrong family and never found out until they were 60 years old. When you have an Irish Catholic that was raised Jewish and you had a Jewish girl that was raised Irish Catholic, and they grow up with 100% of the culture, religion and nationality that they were raised with, even though, genetically, they are not correct in the least, it says a lot. 100%, James as the parents that raised them, and seemingly authentic but not really genuine on a dna level. It’s the power of culture, and, to what extent, and the degree, one is caught up in their desired culture, whether born into or not,  and, simply,  how you’re raised.

Your DNA might not be close to even 60% of your desired ethnicity, but that’s a testimony to the power of culture, ideas and ideology, even over the cold and bare authenticity of something scientifically proven. Does dna testing support the tenents of identity politics in life or does it prove that most of us are mixed, rarely pure? A white PC person of today could well have had slaveowners in their ancestry, which is the big mistake or risk that celebrities take when they go on the gates show. To publicly find out that, perhaps, or, at least proven definitively by DNA, that your great great great great grandfather raped slaves, would be fatal you would think. In the converse, a woman that makes Black-themed films might fined that direct descendants were well-know and white. They owned many slaves, I mean, many and a lot of slaves,.

The film director was very surprised to find out that, in fact, she had quite a bit of white ancestry, let alone slaves, really taken aback. Hey, what’s wrong with being white? I know more about it than you. The moment of truth when you find out exactly how much of each ethnicity you really are, for her, it was nerve-racking, and she was very happy to find that she indeed had at least, a slim majority of African DNA. But it was close, a close second to the dreaded white designation. She’s right, in the sense that slave-owners should be dreaded, but the absolute great majority of “white folks” even when slavery was an established institution in business and politics, never participated in that business, and worked for the people who were making the real money, like slave-holders and plantation owners.

There have also been famous white people who had not just slaveowners, but rapists in their family line on the show. I am an honorable person and with news like that to make things fair I would either kill myself or devote my entire life to a website of truth.

Thinking back on the girls mistakenly switched at birth, one grew up Jewish, the other Catholic, but it was not in their dna, at all. Politics, like history is on such a stage and activism is has never been more alive, like in the arts and sports, but often as a mass of individuals and individual voices.

A comfortable level of chromosomal evidence confirming their political/ethnic/national identities is only met with, at least 50.00001% of a person’s dna? Within any particular identity group this might be important, but, outside of that, mixing it up if you will, I’m coming to the realization that you are one of billions, that exist today, and the billions that have already passed. Back then there was more racial, ethnic and national purity, although not always completely so. As the world and its interconnections multiply, it’s obvious what the future will continue to bring, particularly with human, animal and plant extinctions ongoing, and that’s blending, mixes and also those that want none of it, who have the option of living with their kind.

In both Italian and Black culture children are raised as such in mixed marriages. Thus, a person who has very mixed DNA is still completely often raised within a single culture, or favors one over the other.

DNA testing can prove the mix or not (not often) of nationalities in an individual. The famed back and forth between Elizabeth Warren and Trump on her ancestry claims, and her proof through testing that 6 – 10 generations ago there was an Indian in her family was quite the show. But the only question I would have is what kind of relationship was it? Marriage, cohabitation or rape? And the ultimate question about America’s race obsession is that becoming an obsession it proves nothing. And talk about living in the past, a wasted show and performance by by both Trump and her, but it did say a lot – why would someone claim native ancestry? The answer to that lies in the psychology of political correctness, just as the nature of lying about an election lies in the psychology of facism and having everything given to you.

The case of the Catholic and Irish girls mixed at birth and raised, wrongly, by families with completely dissimilar cultures is something real to think about, as well. What I’m doing is putting culture and science against each other on a major social thing. The purpose, through that collision, is to learn something outside of stereotypes, without taking sides.`

Instead of simply seeking our degree of racial/ethnic purity, what about the another angle – we’re mostly all mixes of multiple groups, in varying degrees which would imply that ultimately racial purity, and or identity politics is a subjective or cultural argument that doesn’t use science. “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., the tribe’s secretary of state. “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.” Simply mixing subjectivity, your politics, science, and, ancestry in relation to these elements, becomes fantasy or comfort for individuals with no authentic links, perhaps, beyond what’s in their minds or desires.

The Blackfoot American Indian with the “purest” dna going back to 55 generations, Dusty Crawford, is a person i trust on this subject.

Chicago, 1982. Are Indians good for business? Not anymore. But, the historical connection, of Indians to tobacco remains.

IDENTIY & STEREOTYPES

Stereotypes, it is part of human nature, but not mine, although I have them too, and, they can be used for all different types of purposes from humor to hate, by all different types of people. And there are living stereotypes that we usually associate with somebody who’s been drinking a little too much from their own culture cup. But, I tell you, when you get out there and in there where novel things can happen, in time, place and chance, there’s a lot of originality that, you’ll never see or experience because you spent an entire life within a controlled environment from where it’s easy to judge and feel comfortable in your supra -truth.

PC has limited sense when you are in the mix.

Political correctness is good with identity politics. IP can be exclusive by nature depending on its level of saturation and displeasure with the idea of assimilation or getting near an enemy of a particular culture, nationality, race, religion or political group, that just does’t get it. Cultural affirmative action even attempts to correct what’s impossible – the past. Cultural IP is a vocation and business and it’s not necessary to leave and make a living outside of your interests, in the business realm of identity politics, selling cultural products.                                      

You can record the past, and, if done accurately, it might help prevent something, but it can definitely document something for all time. You would think that an art institution and business that flouts free-thinking and openness, and, now, inclusiveness, is actually contradicting itself in a way that only institutional thinking can, when it continually undermines the power inherent in realism, in favor of further questioning of it, which is my taste since my work has nothing to do with my relationship to representation, or representation’s relationship to anything.

In 2021 they took Robert Lee’s statue, melted it down and the metal will be distributed to artists, many i’m sure, will produce race-themed art, Teddy Roosevelt’s statue will be on loan to his archives in North Dakota. I’m fine with all this. I went to the Historical Society’s Museum on freelance photo jobs, and never, like most, even took notice of the statue, but, having seen it now, i think Roosevelt, himself, would find it weird and out of touch. And the reason i prefer to be fine with this and try to ignore it, is because it’s so low on the ways in which change can happen. One way to change people is to alienate them, confront them and torch their old and tired ways, that can’t help but produce a change, more division, and pulling things further apart. But when it comes to statues, including Fearless Girl, i don’t care, one way or the other.

Schopenhauer’s delineation of ego and compassion are words understood for good reason, but life changed, at least for some. But no one expected that protected and promoted individuation would reach a level where compassion collapsed into itself as self-love and, a live-in-you-own-world sort of living, formerly only enjoyed and reserved for the royalty and the already privileged very few. They finally found the way to thwart human tragedy by piling on the comforts, that are dreams come really true in our second gilded age. Today, reality television stars, real estate mogul scum, genius rappers and anyone with the right ambition and talent might get the latest version of their Dream, to live in a world of one’s making and in a nation where the neurotic fantasy, supercharged reinvention, is made possible by things like money. Now seeing the details of Jesse Smollett hoax including masturbating with his alleged attackers, doing coke, and smoking weed with them, etc., and I realize, yes, supreme narcissists, particularly actors, or the master, D. T., are impossible with unrealistic needs. But you must be a better actor to pull it off.

Identity politics played out in art and entertainment can be interesting and vital to a point, that is to say, after the point is made, but what’s next? There is a business of racism, and identity culture, and don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t take away from anybody’s commitment to justice or the facts of prejudice, but, it, exists, and, in cold terms, it’s a cultural, legal and a political business. Most Blacks are completely aware and actively always advocating for fairness, done by, for instance making all your cultural products both IP-made and themed. A friend of mine’s wife makes custom carved chess sets with famous Black figures through history. Don’t be offended, be critical and think, because there are people who are known for the cultural products with an identity base, in music, film, book publishing, media commentary and art, to name a few, and the business has grown so great, as to never require one leaves the world of identity when it becomes all you do, all you are interested in, and all you produce. If you’re offended by that, I was once in the film business, where many people eat, sleep and drink film, and nothing else. They are married or live with another person employed in film, they watch movies every week and they work many hours in the industry.

If PC values excludes whites, by calling them innately and falsely superior, as a blanket stereotype, then you’re again paying homage to just another stereotype. Amongst the white glob are those without education in the lower classes, who, like everyone else, earn their way, but that way of life and, thus, their way of looking at things is so different, and different in the way, that can’t be helped. “Dead white men” is a saying for knee-jerked opinions that only duplicate the problem that is so concerning.

The big white stereotype, the perception of a mass of people as a white cohesive glob of Caucasian self-interest, and not people from dozens of different nationalities and religions, with all types of skin shades and differences amongst themselves. Perhaps that’s a faded version but it’s the world in which i come from and live, and, in it there aren’t any generational protestants or, I guess you can call them, natives. Besides, if you want to get scientific, most likely, I could have DNA from the African continent, who knows? We should have all the Proud Boys, their leader is Hispanic, and white power groups have their dna analyzed to see how much of the folks that they hate, that they are intimately related to, over the history of “mankind” which is a long time. Enjoy purity? Move to Hungary, Japan, Korea or New Guinea. Crave diversity in America? Move to California, Texas, New Jersey or New York. Crave sameness? Move to Ohio, Utah, Wyoming, Vermont, Maine or West Virginia. At least until the focus of this country’s economics and politics shifts from individual action and choices available, to community action, choosing to make the working-class or slum neighborhoods you’re from, or living in, a better place to try to escape from in the first place.

The amount of white stereotyping is through the roof and competes with other prejudices, but, since, especially the last twenty years, when “the white male” became the innate target according to our human nature because, technically, “the whites” are dominant, and the notion took off, beginning in the biggest bubble of all bubbles, the university. But it’s really 30% of them who are afraid of losing their perceived birthright and their version of the country, not understanding or accepting that the country allows for versions. It’s known as democracy, you know, where everyone brings a narrative from their home to Washington to promote their self-interests.

Historically and technically, the place was made, for better or worse, by European business men who, yes, became the lineage for the majority they began as. But they left a door open for change, particularly making America a haven for immigrants, arriving here for a myriad of reasons, the majority of which begins with money, but can also involve political or religious oppression.

There are cultural differences, whites as the majority might react differently when they come up against social problems. And the same applies to Jews and Asians. Like i’ve said, socialism isn’t here, so I don’t expect the government to help me either make my neighborhood more livable for myself and all the generations that follow, or, keep me employed. For one thing i don’t have kids and never will, but, also, the west Bronx, in spite of all of its “hoodness” is still part of a country known for its mobile ways. In the west Bronx ethnicities are a revolving door, where many end up going north to Westchester County or east to Jersey. Relatively speaking, American urban history is short and it’s very well documented right from its beginnings and i know it’s up to me, if i do not like my living conditions and environment, it’s up to me, alone to move. I’m not gonna ask for anything, because I’m not gonna get it and i don’t want to get it that way anyways, and history proves that.

The American hillbilly phenomenon, perhaps in the extreme, also has something to say, like young Blacks flipping the n-word, and also owning it, while the Appalachians don’t care so much about owning anything, but really enjoy humor, and what it alleviates. If any group or anyone defies political correctness it’s American Appalachians, who put it in your face, as they, themselves, laugh at themselves and the stereotypes that has led to a whole category of jokes and put-downs and calling themselves by the so-called slurs, the way the Irish might gladly call themselves a Mick and laugh at the Notre Dame mascot. Not all, but definitely in the blue-collar ranks, fortifying the lost importance of class and the monster growth of the service sector and higher education.

Aside from the big white glob stereotype, in many ways i really don’t care what you might think of mine or anyone’s nationality, gender etc. We, as a country, are in a time of multiple simultaneous reactions to the status quo, all of which are based with an identity to a particular cause, or group particularly revolving around gender, race and sex. Individual groups separately pushing their causes with more emerging is our present history, because that’s the mode today for change. One thing, i’m not all that impressed by my own culture, and, in may ways could care less. My family came here, from elsewhere, and I was born here, thus I am American. That’s my nationality. No one who ever lived had a say as to their parents’ decision that resulted in a baby.  Regardless of my own indifference to what’s suppose to be my identity, I view most all cultures as interesting, more so than “mine” and as, at least equals. I was  born here, not my decision, but that makes me American and that is both my nationality and culture. Brother and parents came in a different path, and, being born in America, if I had a choice in the matter, that still would have been my choice. Some cultures from the past and present need banishment, not death and murder, unless they refuse to stop raping girls or sacrificing humans, like Montezuma or Koresh, but the walking schizophrenics of our time – the conspiracists and politically misanthropic – need to be, I don’t know, controlled. Perhaps stopping the section 230 loophole might help. Their arrival at the Capitol both as rioters and members, is a significant shift away from any idea I use to have about public service where those with any good character are fleeing so that the nuts, wackos and walking schizos can take their place.

The contemporary American flavor of Marxism forgot the actual working-class long ago, replaced by race or gender concerns but not age or class, and mixed into and mixed-up as the the capitalist version of socialism, just as, in the inverse, China has mixed communism with capitalism which is  equally thought-disruptive and weird, and their version of political correctness will silence any critic immediately, whether it be their best tennis player and star, or the person who runs the largest company in China.

Nowhere near the ethnic cohesion of China, ours is, it could be argued, or viewed by China, as falling apart, chaotic and antagonistic, yet our economic positions within America have united us in the past, but not now. Nevertheless poor is poor. Please look at what the working broke of all stripes endure, and then form a post-facto opinion. Then you’ll understand why the uneducated poor, many white, don’t, in the least, feel that privileged. They’re not applying to Yale, or aspiring to be a partner in a law firm, produce movies, trade stocks and work at high pay service industry jobs. Their sights are set lower from the get-go.

I know people, one photographer, who does great work and tons of it and he really deserve success and never gets it. What are you supposed to blame it on? He must still do his work and won’t let anything interfere, comfort is of no concern, there is work to do. We all have different reactions to unfairness and failure.

Is it the politicization of taste? It is if the victim has no malice, and if the victim is a better human on the level of integrity and living it, then the woke folks who can’t understand an ally when they see one, trying to prove something in their version of soft activism.

A class thing, but not so much on a money level, but as a professional class, consisting of many different people from different cultures, but united by the fact that they are the service economy professionals, and might have the values of our institutions beginning with education and carried through to working for companies, and being in business, in a time when the values of political correctness are built into all companies. Some of the largest employers and companies are headed by very liberal people like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey and Bezos. American “Marxists” jettisoned the working-class long ago, in favor of race, gender and whatever new political identities might arise with “trans-race” being the latest.

Educated professionals who are probably more secular, by virtue of that, when it comes to actual contact with the reality that they are so concerned about, it’s not their thing. Obviously the business and corporate environment, by nature, is about control, and selling things to the widest demographic. Identifying with modern standards, the same ones as the corporation, company or institution they might work for, makes sense, don’t get me wrong, but political correctness can be another form of prejudice, and specifically i’m speaking about ignoring context in favor of demonstrating your political philosophy. They, the PC, don’t do context. Before judging make sure the person your words are directed at, is in a fuller context, and go beyond yourself, and get somewhere beyond stereotyping, which is the exact thing that upsets you, and, if you cannot understand me, because it’s beyond you, I don’t want to hear about it. I got work to do.

That’s gonna be a hard pill to swallow without being able to understand that it’s a point of view that comes directly from the world. I find that people who are deeply into political correctness are professional and secular citizens, and not any one culture or ethnicity, but a class of professionals. They have their culture and the lower classes have theirs and to each their own. But PC’s stereotyping, doesn’t see it that way, and they can come off as culture police, making you feel like you might be sent to the department of corrections. Hell, you might be an original leftie yourself, and, thus, seeing through all this, which makes the charges even more lame and dangerous, but that’s the situation in the world we just made, it’s turned inside out and we have to somehow get used to it, because it doesn’t sound like it’s going to go away, or, even, go well.

The dream of identity can come true, and if you don’t believe in God or organized morality then perhaps the dream of identity provides moral high ground and meaning in your life, while there still remains the segment within IP/PC culture, that worships as part as an established organized religion, but with not anywhere near the mixing of politics and morality the Christian nationalists espouse, who, are actually worse than the PC crowd i mildly criticize and thoroughly analyze here.

Trump turbo-charged it all, and what occurred was that everything sped up in the culture wars. White folks, less than a third, coalesced with their Leader, and ignited white identity politics. Of course, the irony is that they are the top dogs, but not when it comes to the lower classes where everybody is more equal because, in our great country, true freedom takes a lot of money and a little freedom just takes some money. Certainly O.J. and Michael Jackson proved the “equalizing” force of  lots of dough, if you’re born minority. In a weird, anything can happen mobile society and economy, it doesn’t mean you’re chained completely, and many have proven there’s a way out and up.

What occurred is, simply, whites used the model of identity and built their own religious, anti-secular, soon-to-be-a-minority ideology of economic or Christian nationalism that unites a certain percentage of people by giving them an identity, a purpose and a cause, with none other than God and country, backing and guiding the entire affair. And, truthfully, everyone, including myself, needs a purpose in life, and I see that as the basis of all points of view including my own. But your purpose in life, backed by an ideology isn’t necessarily true, simply because it feels right to you or me, but we all need a purpose to keep straight, and correct in our personal mission which begins, not with truth, but the fact that humans need a purpose and something to do before their deaths.

In a time of identity politics, probably the time of identity politics, ideology has its limits, that lie beyond itself. When white folks get together and mimic an established ideology of identity politics, both as an in-your-face statement, and their own sense of a cultural purpose, it’s a choice, but it’s also a reaction. Unfortunately it’s become the dominant one, that, whether they, myself or anyone else likes it or not, divides. White identity politics is reactionary in ways not at all like the Civil Rights Movement was a reaction to being treated like an asshole, that is to say, someone whose rights get stripped, and theirs is a unity to also prevent, in the future, anymore rights stripping.

NO EXPERIENCE, NO CLASS, NO BEEN-AROUND

PC eliminates the most important factor in life, beyond experiencing things. Money, who has it and how much, is bypassed. Anything pertaining to the class status of the uneducated worker isn’t considered, and the working-class is composed of all nations, cultures and religions who happen to dwell below the middle genus. That doesn’t mean the solid middle genus is not varied, but the working folks, get nailed, without any nuance or grain of salt, quickly. They would be wiped off the map for politically incorrect behavior in the professional and service realms of the economy. I’m talking about city living in a place such as NYC, mingling at work in our neighborhoods, etc., and are exposed to a level of cultural difference that is both raw and prevalent, while listening to a chorus of PC-mongers whose work and home life has literally none of that due to their class, what that buys and also what that excludes. Exclusion, is just often unconscious, in their quest for a comfortable and long life. PC divides out the blue-collar worker, who can have tremendous contact with different folks and experience, but they aren’t at all part of the left’s picture much anymore. If you stopped school, to work, at eighteen, you completely miss out on the major “issues” or trends, and, there is now the association with the Leader, that they mostly brought upon themselves, being reactionary and plain fed up, but also fed with lies and hate in a supposed culture war, that only Republicans take as a step to real war, that betrays the ant-democratic basis for their rhetoric.

EMPATHY

Take for instance Mr. Zuckerberg who is fabulously liberal, of course, and, he has a platform, that he, until 2020, takes no responsibility for, with section 230 allowing that, and this has significantly changed the world with regards to Miss Information. This platform has more participants that anything seen in the history of the world. It gathers tremendous amounts of data, sells it and doesn’t have be responsible for any content, until recently.

No one refers to newspapers as dead trees anymore, which was the techies version of social and environmental good, hiding the larger problem of mass increases of electrical consumption by them and their billions of users, and electrical devices during the coal era, continuing with bitcoin mining, adding more to climate mayhem than anyone, or all the cardboard that Amazon uses that makes the dead trees buzzword/sales pitch fall flat on its face.

“Greenridge Generation runs a once-mothballed plant near the shore of Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes region to produce about 44 megawatts to run 15,300 computer servers, plus additional electricity it sends into the state’s power grid. The megawatts dedicated to Bitcoin might be enough electricity to power more than 35,000 homes.”

To their credit they now, as the richest companies in America, take it very seriously, the trees thing, that is. They are the most progressive companies when it comes to green energy, but, like section 230, they got away with too much in the beginning, in order to establish themselves, and provide revenue that they deftly avoid paying the government with zero federal taxes even though the government was so generous with them.  But what else is new? Underneath them are far less progressive digital entrepreneurs as well. The point is tech dominates the economy and comprises a large segment of service workers who were practically born into the current stream of interpreting data about the world, but not experiencing it, are pretty secular and are decent people on the level of being genteel, but PC.

Tech, even using its own scientific techniques to examine itself, is, technically, one of the least empathetic of all professions. Their sympathies lie low or non-existent, as proven by science itself, that said that they simply had a very low capacity for empathy. Trumpism is all about discarding empathy as a hinderance. And he attacked empathy three times in his “convention” speech on the grounds of the White House. It’s very easy to be empathetic if you have a lot of experience in the world and you know what things are like, but looking at a screen you know closer to nothing than something, really,  in a relatively speaking way and the fact that there is a good chance that you would act on that and affect my experience of life, and unnecessarily disrupt it, sucks. I cite the modern form of the original sin of the politically correct professional liberal, and their gentrification, that stems from the colonial attitude.

I say “original sin” as, the same group of folks, use it continually to describe slavery in America’s early years. 

But critically examine the clever phrase that slavery is America’s version of original sin. Sounds good, but break it down, and there is a lot of information to fill this space. I would say this, though, the phrase implies eternal guilt for European derived Americans. But only if you wanted it to be, or, if the shoe fits, which it does not for myself.

The secular version of morals, Political Correctness, is, like the Bible, that there is actually a shared, eternal, black mark on white America, for, even, events that occurred hundreds of years ago, before my brith, which, like every living things, i has no choice, particularly with regards to these descriptive trends of groups and sub-groups, constantly being updated, that simply embracing all life, dissolves.

We give reparations to Natives, Blacks and women, and that would amount to the assets of the entire country.

Neither provincialism nor colonialism are fully open-minded, but have elements of it, of course. I think the tech segment has little the appreciation for empathy, by virtue of the fact that they are out of it on the reality spectrum of life, by their nature, or involvement with virtuality and that these are not like nursing, or any service workers, again, who have real contact. With folks. Of course, contact can produce the opposite of empathy, especially when people only get hit-up by these classes, for their modest well-kept properties to reinvent a former working-class stronghold into their own.We’re not gonna sympathize with that., or those people who it.

The people who made sophisticated screen technology, won’t let their children use the devices, that they engineered, and are very critical of its negative effects, at an early age which says a lot about them and the ways they’d not put their money where their morals are, but just sell it to others outside their family.

In spite of this, i’m assuming, more clinical folks – scientists, engineers and techies, by their nature, show physical stunting of the neural empathy network, frontal operculum, medial prefrontal cortex and the middle cingulate cortex. Scientists, however, do stand above psychopaths on the low end of the empathy curve. The  artist was supposed to sometimes provide the antithesis to that but it’s only different in the sense that the profound sensitivity today is turned to the self, but not always, and not the outside world. A morality to match based, not on the Bible, but the American constitution, Section 230 and a love for the purely technical, which I have experienced as well, and can be a nice meditative, lost-in-my-work experience, unlike using a technology as a medium for unfiltered contact with anything in the world of things and real folks. A dirty and messy life having to deal with and capture all the difference and indifference, beauty, ugliness, drama and banality that can exist in a largely uncontrolled environment. The final product is the soulful embrace to the outside world, doing it and not talking about or criticizing it from the shelter of PC, tech, finance and the art world.

CORPORATE PC

Why are corporations the most politically correct? The first thing that comes to mind is, unlike the small independent shop, these are world corporations with a commitment to profits, that can’t afford to alienate any segment of its potential base of consumers. Nike takes a pro-athlete stance, where would its sales go if it came out, like Goya, as a fan of all things, Trump? Cheap canned food, widely distributed versus the world’s elite athletes? Congress cannot force Facebook to make sure some truth is told, but when major corporations like Coca-Cola begin to pull ads over giving somebody a platform for hatred, misinformation and stupidity, something happens.

Whether it be the whole knee thing, or the final abandonment of American Indian imagery in sports, it has been led by the threat of certain corporations, some of whom have money in the team itself, and even after every owner, corporate folks themselves, swear they will never change anything, only to cave when the larger corporation or institution threatens their profits – FedEx and the Redskins and the baseball commissioner and the Indians. It began on the streets at the stadiums in annual protests, like in Cleveland, that goes back to the 1970s, and is forgotten by today’s heroics, but is what i keep advocating, that disparate people interested in truth can do something about it, and, although so much attention is given to recent activism by prominent sports figures, its history is a bunch of anonymous people from all walks of life, in all conditions, every year promoting an idea, that was paid for by themselves, where they had to walk the line in front of wild 1970s blue-collar sport fans throwing insults and threats for folks like my immigrant Mother who came to America, saw things with fresh eyes and tried to activate a more equitable vision.

No one embraces the ethics of diversity more, for example, than Nike and Apple, who, while raking in billions, support difference and different ways of thinking. I remember that terrible use of Martin Luther King in promoting Apple as a firm that thinks differently and ethically, and, I guess, if you buy the products, you do too? I’m sure MLK’s trust benefited nicely and then had more opportunity to spread and preserve Reverend King’s legacy. But there’s a lot of us who go the hard way, pay for it with their own labor and, some don’t even attach their real names in their accomplishments. There lies the truth, not a truth, personal truth, version or PR job, but the actual thing.

However, it seems, a bakery or individually owned business, might take a chance, not on discrimination, but freedom of speech. I am alluding to the court decision that a business owner has the right to refuse service if they do not agree ideologically with any part of the service requested. It demonstrates how spheres of individual freedoms can contradict one another when freedom of religion, freedom of speech and basic civil rights come in contact with one another. Citizens United assured that American corporations can be involved politically on the level of a simple individual citizen, with the exception they are armed with billions of dollars, and, curiously, the American Constitution has ruled that very small and individual businesses have the right to refuse a customer if, in fact, it clashes with their religious views. A case for political correctness is at the center, and we are left with a message that, what use to be subjective, individual, personal and natural reactions to many things – taste or preference – is now attached to some political morality, that, calls out folks for not following, not criminal or civil law, but the constitution, according to a segment of the population that is uniquely liberal. Do people hide behind their personal preferences, and deliver actual prejudice? Yes. But its determination takes an in-your-gut response to understand, because it can be fine-lined, and one’s experiences will always, to varying degrees, color preferences, taste, as well as, outright prejudice. It also can be blunt right up front and in your face, but there is also a grey area, where I live and most do, and we take offense at references that make us out to be prejudicial assholes, when we live this dream of diversity, knowledge and respect, like on the old show Tough Crowd.

An individually owned bakery is not a large corporation whose profit margins and requirements are much different than Nike or Facebook. Have you ever seen a country where individuals, single individuals, have such power and considerable rights? It’s almost as if the final goal in America is to live in a world of your own making, and the purpose of the government is to make sure that you are protected, with maybe a little digital clocking from the Patriot Act thrown in over us.

Who is more PC than the art world, not just now? Tom Wolfe skewered the world of Leonard Bernstein, during a time when Black Panthers, and, even Joey Gallo would find acceptance in art and entertainment. If that isn’t enough, a more direct example is the building of Lincoln Center when the neighborhoods that preceded it, needed demolition. And then, of course, Mr. Bernstein, a really interesting man, goes on with the great West Side Story, which, of course, we all love. We ask that people be real with their remembrances, because you can’t change the past. Plus I want to continue to enjoy the work of Leonard Bernstein, and his great personality. Having gone through it, I have a stupid desire to make sure that the world knows what it’s like to give up your beloved home for the arts, or, the arts crowd.In our times of reinvention, the remake of West Side Story makes sure to add the theme of gentrification of the neighborhood. That’s my kind of PC, just document and record something that affected our lives deeply and negatively. We do not want reparations for our displacement, just a honest remembrance. So that we understand that the gang turf wars are for nothing because no turf lasts in a mobile capitalist country like our own. The message is – don’t like it, then take what’s offered and work your way out which is what the country’s economic system demands, whether you like it or not.

MISC.

I’ve been writing this thing for four years and because of the subject matter I have a tremendous block to it. It’s called pain avoidance. As a result I got fed up with my self-blocking and, although it should be written better, just to end it, I stuffed some, miscellaneous thoughts here, again, based on reality, not hope.

The first time I heard the word, misogyny was plain bizarre for a person, who, up until then, was a laborer, but one with tremendous experience in the world from  a young age. But I was about to have experiences that I never came across before and many of those experiences revolved around political correctness. Misogyny? It sounded really bad, as if the offender was massaging the sexism right into his victim, and this designation sounded like every secular social scientist was combining psychiatry with sociology, to identify the sexual monsters who pick on only females.

Sexual orientation? What about those not interested in sexual relationships or relationships in general? Could we start injecting IP into asexual people so we can be equal to the heterosexual, trans and gays? And how about a special IP designation to atheists, on a practical level, probably the most ethical of citizens. Ethics is a big and includes the way we judge and view the world morally.

I’ve suffered from the overbearing stereotyping of the women that are into isms before reality, it’s not funny. It’s harmful and distracting like anything, for me, that’s not true, and misandry is alive and well in the arts and culture.

Thomas Roma and Chuck Close got caught, in a profession that historically might be a good place to explore your “sexuality” in an atmosphere where you  have the freedom of ultimate expression. How many times do I have to hear that art is the place that people who happen to be dysfunctional or are completely unique can feel at home? Sex and drugs? Art? There’s plenty of evidence, look, for instance, at Warhol’s single gunshot wound, inflicted by Valerie Solanans who was known for her radical (psychotic) take on men and feminism with her book Scum Manifesto, and other literary works where her gross sexism was on full display. She shot three times, and amazing us with the damage that one bullet did to the master. Kind of weird that one of the great havens for the best and most interesting dysfunctional Americans is also one of the great promoters of PC and IP culture. Of course identity politics has grown into a significant group of artists the same way appropriation via Warhol has taken off.

The last big Warhol discovery, Basquait, killed himself with drugs, in a time when the art scene was awash in intoxicating substances, that came on the scene in the 1960s, and by the time of the Williamsburg art scene, which I witnessed entirely, including the L.E.S., for many, particularly the ones that became “names” from all that schmoozing, was all about first, getting high, then the art. The most well-known people from that scene, and I knew them, needed drugs and booze to function the same way that schmoozing can replace art in the hustle of art-egos.

The art and entertainment world, has such a secretive swampy history with the big bucks and social elites at the top. Its “employees” that I witnessed in Williamsburg, Tribeca, Soho and the L.E.S, schmoozing and partying their asses and talents off, so much so that the schmooze and its purpose, self-promotion, in a who-you-know, time and place business, that grew into the art itself. It’s the art of the schmooze, combined with dopamine enhancements brought on by the happiness of booze, drugs and sex. These male middle class white artists got a pass, like rappers, because “social acceptable” bad behavior is associated with the arts and sort of accepted or put up with, at least until Close and Roma got caught doing the things that so many had gotten way with. It’s like the Catholic church’s problem with the priesthood being a haven for sexual freaks for so long until the covers got pulled.

There have been many Black male rappers whose image of women is actually despicable, but get a pass, especially in rap’s early years. It wasn’t until the 1990s that women got into it as an audience, as it grew with money and power, and much of the music world fell into a new genre. But, the fact is, it was the n-word, hos and bitches rhymes, that dominated along with whatever rhymes with money.

JZ, not in my rap collection going back to the Last Poets, and before, with boastings, but his heroes are, like Kool G Rap. Shawn Carter sold large quantities of heroin in the projects where he lived and grew up. He was a supplier, and came extremely close to getting knocked by the NYPD and DEA, but narrowly escaped into a bigger game, rap. Today he’s worth a billion because, he may have 99 problems, you know, but a bitch ain’t one, and, the music industry is in love with money, where many rappers find this, their love song. He and his wife Beyonce now dance and sing around the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in their music videos and complain to companies that they don’t see enough black folks there working, while a bunch of white dudes got cancelled and sent to prison for sexual violations with women, from mindless flirting to rape, even R.Kelly, escaping conviction for so many years, got nailed. Black men and middle-class white artist got a pass for a long time.

For a few, fight the power, is their calling, while most just want power for themselves.

Louis Armstrong, in the sixties, been a kind of fade, since, by the 1960s, politics, black identity and progress in Civil Rights, took center stage. Not known for its objectivity combined with empathy and an open mind to history and the world, the surge in politics also made some folks criticize Mr. Armstrong, and his connection to the status quo and the government – promoting American Music throughout the world. I’ll tell you what, if enjoy and still, listen to both Miles and Mr. Armstrong and enjoy and experience their music equally, and, never get over-impressed with what’s on a musician’s mind, since it’s mostly their business, it’s fair.

Mr. Armstrong is as loved as ever and his musical reputation sterling. Thank god, he never got cancelled, while Mile had some negative habits, harmin his music, he had to overcome.

New York has more hate crimes than any other city. In the last three years and hate crimes against Asians have skyrocketed. Most of them had surveillance footage or citizen video footage of the attacks, and 95% of them were black on Asian encounters, but this is never spoken anymore, but they do let the camera speak.

With regards to IP, if that’s what’s wanted, a place where tribes are maintained, and needed defense, and self-interests are promoted so be it, but in matters that need the attention of a nation like untamed police brutality, viruses or wars, lest we all die, we come together, or should. But with karma dead, the social contract tore up and tragedy cured by absurd comfort and distraction, good luck.

The elimination of tragedy from life by access to previously unheard of comforts that were previously only for the ruthless or royalty, but are now accessible to anyone with money is something new, done on this level. We have the rise of pure commercial entertainment (culture without knowledge, particularly tragic knowledge), and also used as the dominant form of expression, even in our politics, a shopping cure for what ails both the individual and the country even in war, making the ubiquitous American happy ending as a national goal, and there you have it. Tragedy, is also not healthy, and happiness is. The only thing needed to be managed is maybe a brute soullessness, but with the senses clogged by unmediated comfort, and constant social/technical disruptions, it’s difficult to get a clear view of what that is anymore if entrenched in the culture of comfort. Soul can’t be constructed, bought or be experienced virtually and remains my guide.

Speaking of having soul and a soul, when it comes to reparations for slavery, I’m not sure how to figure historic indebtedness on an accounting level, but if you really want to correct that vision, start with the Indians. Realizing that past history is done and cannot be changed or affected by what goes on “there” which is the stage of our memory and its documentation.

Political correctness, is a secular morality that stereotypes, from within the genus, middle-class. But as an American, ultimately, after appreciating and respecting every other, i want unity and purpose, not, ultimately, although entirely legal, the creation of many separate worlds. Not even everything in moderation, be into your thing, especially if its social and historical and related to your ancestry and history, but when it come to those things that will kill us all unless we act as a whole, then it’s time for some identity moderation. I understand the function of Identity Politics and Political Correctness, to finally make things fair and equitable, and that it still grows since the 1960s and has become the purpose behind a lot of art and culture, now being included. I would like to say, in moderation, bur the historical reality calls for an intensity that simultaneously might also isolate itself or wear on folks, by its own exclusiveness, and, in the case of PC, its inherent snootiness and disconnection from any class lower than theirs, while ignoring age and experience as teachers, mitigators and allies, in favor of self-righteousness.                               

LAST

I am politically incorrect. I see PC itself as an oxymoron, and do not subscribe to any politics or correctness, let alone its linking  in snootiness. The only authority figure I recognize was my father. Philosophically, I don’t vote for humans and find all politicians compromised and just simply, by the nature of their vocation, liars. The way I practice truth, it’s philosophically active and prefers the mind as it reciprocates with the world, not preordained generalities, let alone any sort of secular authority that I’m supposed to bow to, especially politics or its discourse. All is after the fact as far as what I have to say about things, the only authority figure I recognized was my father and, if life is better than art, than it certainly is better than politics, a place becoming the home, of all things, the fringe and mentally ill.

Meanwhile, in the economy, always running independent of the politicians who take credit for it, there is much money to be made in all the disruption. As Facebook faces, finally, more and more negative scrutiny by our politicians, who use it, nothing happens, except the share price continues to rise and the company reaches, now, into some sort of meta-verse. Most Republicans think that we are on the verge of socialism, when socialism is a fringe element within the Democratic Party, and, in fact the Democratic leadership and most Democrats are rich as hell. They trade stocks and have real estate investments, who are we kidding? Recently Nancy Pelosi voted against a rule that would prevent members of Congress and the Senate from trading stocks. I wonder why?

The great existential themes, suffering and struggle, have made up life, and its redemption, if you have discipline and functionality. But unheard of wealth, prosperity combined with protected individual freedoms, has quite naturally resulted in extreme comfort, subjectivity and attention to the self, and fulfillment of the great dream, not to have just the money, but what can be bought with it – living in a world of your making, the American dream, today. After all if one person can make more than many countries, then America is really something. He can “retire” into his big rocket ship or hang with the new wife. Replacing significance with trivia and actual or intrinsic worth with market, commodity or investment value, has made tragedy unnecessary, by simple switching out to an unbreakable bubble of personal subjectivity, and, combined with, formerly unheard of wealth, with the exception of the first gilded age, this is the time of excesses, that has even reached into elected office making government now a vestige for buffoons more than ever.

Slapped around by Correctness on the one hand and walled off with identity politics on the other, and neither getting/forgetting that there is an incorrectness, or even, philosophically, a negative dialectic that  penetrates, evaluates and then, discards, for what it is – soulless, unrealistic, unthought principles that are an institutional mindset, coloring everyone with the same politics of generalities while having just a little experience in things. That are part of a far wider and bigger world or real difference. Politics, the meeting of groups to gain power, not truth, over one another, is not the right moniker for a notion purportedly for all people, and calling itself correct. Again, I view truth, that is never a plot for someone’s  particular goals, but should be, I know it’s not, something that both unites and sets us free.

Institutional thinking closes out free thought simply by its unnatural nature, not grounded in reality outside of institutional control. Individual independent thinking has its problems and limitations. Politics is an institution. Correctness is someone’s judgement based, if not on religion, then on both institutional and legal norms. Institutional thinking has its department of morality and it is secular, legal and politically correct. Medicine has so much legalese and economics running through it, that it’s not health care but health business and can be downright anti-human, but it’s medicine on a grand scale and has to cover itself on all sorts of legal and financial matters, and that’s what it feels like when criticized for your incorrect position, when the critic has no idea of anything beyond this sort of institutional/personal/legal thinking amounting to a PC perspective on things from far beyond their realm and every day experiences.

What is bull shit today? When i hear another’s “narrative” I know that word means it’s only someone’s liverwurst. In today’s parlance, here’s the narrative of gentrification – it’s painful for the people who have lived there, but, ultimately, the neighborhood will become much better. With the new folks it’s a different culture, one that cannot be afforded, let alone, be understood by those it replaced. They were completed screwed, disrespected and treated like complete assholes. I should know, I went through 10 years of harassment in my home, until I was illegally pushed out by the billionaire mayor’s push for rezoning, that transformed Williamsburg into what it never was.

Displacement is another thing, like PC, that’s incomprehensible, to the innocent working-class who feel bombarded by weird stuff that is initially confusing, like the word, misogynist, that, when translated for the working-class becomes easily understood when you just say that they are an asshole. Then we get it, because we all agree, but don’t use the same language. But I tell ya, when you lose your home, neighborhood and base of operations, to the same people who claim to respect all, except, white working-class and poor, who, they think, are not as smart as them, particularly these fucking leftovers from another century that we occasionally see around the freshly gentrified sections of Brooklyn.

Been living and feeling another fact – the most politically correct people on the planet, are, in fact, relatively speaking, the ones who have caused the most damage to my life, particularly the group of professionals in art, media and entertainment, from first contact, and, once you factor in gentrification, the taking of my home and base of operations, to go along with regularly being treated like an asshole “professionally” too often, that’s a big problem. When I first got started, I knew so little about arts and entertainment, I actually thought, just like any other job, you could, through simple hard work and being talented, after paying a certain amount of dues, have a job, that would, at least, pay the bills. I found an exoplanet that made business moves in a completely different realm, and, also, the gossip was through the roof. Now, there I was, trying to base something, in art and entertainment, on the truth and the truth of the situation of getting there, made it necessary to cut out. I mean before, even my home was taken from me – the place I love – by the people who happened to be politically correct, my experience of them, as I simply tried to practice my calling, and make a living at it, was stupid and weirdly unethical. A business? It’s entirely transactional, but is based on an ethic I don’t get. That’s why I became adept at so many things, in order to pay for the this whole affair, including saving tons of money by living in cheap, polluted slum conditions and plowing it into work, and providing the key to all creativity – time, whose availability is limited only by money. And part of the money that I invested back into my work was used to document the most polluted waterway and neighborhoods in all of New York City, and one of the worst in America, that was, at times, the worst of American pollution during the industrial revolution and for 100 years after. Not that I would ever think about it much, but the whole place from its start through today is entirely white, if that sort of stuff is important or, even, impotent to you.

As stated, the only time I’ve ever  sought psychiatric care, was from first contact with the arts and entertainment crowd, particularly their political correctness, that yielded a paper sword, and beat me with wet noodles of gossip until it sickened me, about fifteen years, until I sought permanent shelter from the ideological beasts that wouldn’t know what to do with themselves in my clear spot, the open range where there are no transaction. While in exile from this first contact I quickly learned, really quickly, that, that was it, that actually happened, that’s how people really are, and you better get used to it if you want to make money, be seen, be shown or make it in this business. I was never able to do that.

PC people i have encountered have done me the most harm. Again, the point is the politically correct have done tremendous harm to my life, more than the people who are supposed to be my enemies, the far right. And the people just mentioned don’t live or work in Williamsburg or even New York City any more, but they did get a chance to leave their mark, alter and disrupt it before their departure. I was there all along, before they were born, and I didn’t want to leave what was my home. But I was illegally displaced, and the ones who made it happen were all PC as hell, and ruined the place, then split, because they were complete losers, and, unlike the neighborhood it replaced, what they made amounted to nothing, except our destruction and enticing more of the same with more money to invade, until there was nothing left from 150 years of blu-collar, ethnic cultures living separately and equally in Williamsburg, where they still live separately but not equally any more. Do you know what these good people call the remaining neighborhood people that are left in Williamsburg? They call them leftovers. Leftovers aren’t in your dictionary of groups to be respected and never slurred? Please add that, and also add old people to your list of groups to be extra-respected. I would say add the white working-class, but even I know that so many of them blew it with becoming cult members in D. T.’s idea of what the country is and should be.

Doing no wrong, for Jesus, Buddha and now the American constitution and its the politically correct all possessing a superior or supra-truth, that, just like the Evangelicals, makes them think they are both right and moral. It’s not so much that slavery is America’s original sin, but, colonialism, and its mindset that won’t die which was such an aide to slavery.

For them it was the time to unfold my ambitions on my journey, if not of truth, but comfort and style that i will work hard to achieve, and, according to the legal language made up by those like us, and that we hire, we are, if not straight-up legit, we are legal, because we made it that way. I got the impression that you were in it for yourself and it’s every man for himself, as long as it’s barely legal. Walking the line. Taking our homes. That’s so unlike us.

Now there is a greater chance that you will go to jail because you’ve raped or urinated on women, and, at least, now, you won’t work in America again. But we got our lives and homes cancelled, by the same woke PC view, that will exclude, if their desires and ambitions have to be met, and they do it to whites who don’t have their resources, and, of course, it falls on who has money who does not, and PC views, just like IP views, make it seem like every person of no-color is rich or middle-class, and is part of the cohesive glob-white majority made up of all religions, many skin shades, not just the NYC big three – Jews, Irish and Italians – but, Romanians, Slovenians, Croations, Hungarians, Polish, Spaniards, Russians, and you get the picture. Yeah, essentially European, but this continent isn’t one country like Australia. I’m not talking about generational Protestants or Evangelicals, or, what you might call native whites. Talk to the American Jews about oppression and prejudice stretching back a thousand years, culminating, in modern times with the Holocaust, when the architecture, infrastructure and the entire culture was racist – both things and people. On the right the weirdos compare wearing of masks as Nazi mandates and on the left the weirdos call the Cross Bronx Expressway, racist infrastructure. I notice that the Jews don’t bitch and gripe much about such things. They do keep moving up and getting it on, in their generally well-run and functional culture. Many old American cities like Cleveland, Detroit or St. Louis had enormous Jewish populations that do not even exist today, because, of all initially urban dwellers, the Jews move on and up better than the rest, and strive to separate themselves from the prejudices and and limitations of the city ghettoes where they all started, and that they left through their own hard work and success. The Bronx was more than half Jewish in 1960. They weren’t rich. They were poor, working class and middle-class and are the model for any group that wants to get somewhere and out of, particularly a place like the west Bronx. Cross Bronx Expressway a problem? No one’s holding a gun to your head to stay in a place where the chances exist that someone will hold a gun to your head one day, no matter what you do.

I recently looked at am apartment that hangs over the CBE at University Avenue that was my first choice, but lost out in a bidding war. I live in a very loud hood, and, it’s right above the Deegan Expressway so the Cross-Bronx hood, would be better, in a better building. Racist infrastructure? Hemming people in by skin color? As spoken by folks who never been here? Are buildings and apartments going abandoned there? God no, the Bronx has been booming since 2010. If i would have snagged the place i could have walked out to the CBE to continue my ten year documentation of it, and the neighborhoods it slices through. It’s bizarre ot hear so many speak pof these places wehen they do not know hat they are talking about.

Robert Moses took out some sections of various Bronx neighborhoods to build a necessary expressway in eminent domain. Where I’m from in Brooklyn, when they built the BQE, three blocks from my house, they took out large sections of 20 neighborhoods, and in my own, the BQE also took out our beloved church, the centerpiece of our neighborhood, our Lady of Mount Carmel, which was a cathedral size piece of architectural beauty. One thing that we did get was easy access to the BQE, always being fair and real, because it’s RealStill. We never bitched about prejudice against the Italians, but what we did gripe about was the fact that when the BQE swung around Brooklyn Heights, the fanciest section of Brooklyn, it was buried into a wall so nobody could see it, while in the remaining neighborhoods all working class and poor, they made the BQE elevated and quite visible, tearing out thousands of homes of only working-class folk, majority white, although theere Black neighborhoods as well, along this route the highway took. We were criticizing infrastructure on a class level, that is to say, the more money you have the more you will be respected, not race, religion, gender or any other groups that divided their pie in sections according to ones identity and slows us down because disparate unity gets things done in a democracy. Not back then, and for a long time until the recent past, when “people of color” and the “black and brown” is all we hear today. My neighborhood was horribly gentrified, with mass evictions, into the trendiest and one of the most well-off places in NYC, and i never heard a peep out of the eco-friendly, spotless, politically correct who advocate for clean and safe streets, as to doing something about the BQE, that is conveniently located with access, to drive you nice cars to shop, visit friends or go upstate to your getaway. And, of course, there wasn’t a peep out of this politically correct people when they took our homes. I repeat they took our homes and there were many more homes than what Robert Moses took out to build the Cross Bronx Expressway. But they probably loved it when Pete Buttigieg declared the BQE as racist infrastructure, as i cough, to release the pollutants from my lungs, having lived in the Bronx and Brooklyn for most of my life next to enormous expressways, not to mention that the old Brooklyn neighborhood was, by far, the most polluted section of NYC, and that did negatively effect my health, lasting until i die. I have the medical records and the symptoms to prove –  migraine headaches, wheezing, naseau and assorted health problems from all the racist infrastructure including the worst polluting factories in America in the places that i have lived that were both white, the no-color stereotype, and  “black and brown” although i wouldn’t refer to them that way.

With bile duct cancer, even after they go in and remove a third of a liver, the gall baladder and bile ducts, you usually die, there is no cure. They make seven holes and incisions, one of the side holes is used to pump in CO 2 to creat an airspace so that the surgeon can maneuver, the one in navel is for taking out the severed organs for biopsies, placed in na baggie while still inside of you. Of course, other holes and incisions are used for cameras and tools.

In the neighborhood where i lived the longest by far, and was eventually forced out of, all the men from my block and the blocks around me, got cancer in their late sixties to early seventies. This place happened to be in the most polluted section of New York, by far. You name it on a toxic and noxious level we had it, so much so, it oozed out of the ground that was saturated with 175 years of the black arts, the dirtiest of all the indusries were at home here.

Mr. Buttigieg, like so many with PC or IP views, is so young and inexperienced, as to not remember something called leaded gas. After they built the BQE in Brooklyn in the 1950s, by 1986, they were finding elevated lead levels in all the neighborhoods, except fancy Brooklyn Heights where the expressway is hidden. But it was the Italians who were suffering the most because of their fondness for gardens and growing tomatoes, that had extremely dangerous levels of lead that had accumulated over the years in the soil. That tradition had to be shutdown when so many Italian families and anyone who had vegetable gardens, had so much exposure, back in the day when, after finding this out, folks just shrugged – another day in Brooklyn where only money protects you from living in such neighborhoods, where the love of your neighborhood, friends and family, is the precedent that you follow to your grave, like i intended to do in that neighborhood, until the politically correct well-off spawn of their PC parents, arrived and i got kicked out along with so many of my friends. I lasted about the longest of my people that got screwed by the  new people coming in from all over the world and America, and that ten year battle turned out to be a waste of time and only devastated my health permanently. 

No one can kid me on this PC/IP bull shit when it goes too far, for the simple fact that i lived it, and it’s killin me.

Extreme PC is a force of educated gossipers, who live in bubbles they can’t perceive as bubbles because that’s where they are. The worst gossipers are the radical right, and relatively speaking they make the liberal PC left look fairly harmless. Reputation-ruining gossip like killing babies and drinking their blood is a social gossip that is extreme to the limit, embarrassing and really, just plain sick.

I’m not a political or social robot, and any politics entwined with morality, and the self-interests of groups or individuals, is just someone’s “narrative” and I mix reality with intelligence and ethics not politics.

“By any means necessary.” is language tied to a specific man, his struggles and his movement. The Leader, D. J. Trump, and his cult proved that they will not stop either, even in the face of an expensive, time-consuming verified and proven common sense truth, they will march on, with their belief, that violence is necessary to make right what they see as wrong.  Indeed, by any means pessary is interchangeable, beyond its root etymology, with all extremists. Trump’s attack dogs – Jordan, Greene, Goshen, Gaetz, et al, have money, the Christian god and the stupidity to try, by that creed, to remake the country founded on the biggest lie ever told.

Trump and Jesse Smollett co-opted the clenched fist power salute, and, in the case of Trump, his clenched fist is combined with the sound of the Y.M.C.A.’s Macho Man as the Leader of the whites. Do Don Lemmon and Mr. Smollett scratch their heads? Many of us see the flip and reinvention cultures as bewildering, in the same way that crypto and NFT investing is. We prefer authenticity and some form of genuineness, and, as with RealStill, authenticity.Kyrie Irving, a smart player, has too much narcissism to notice the problem, but it’s someone like Smollett who really seemed built for this. Events, staged by Smollett, as it all turned out, proved that his acting chops failed him where he thought, narcissistically, i fool myself and certainly can fool others, similar to Trump’s reaction to losing an election in all his lame-duck disgrace that he cannot sense. It’s method acting applied to politics, and the audience believes it because the Leader believes it, which, if you’re in a cult, makes sense.

Yeah, great, years after post-modernism, concepts, by nature free-floating, like deconstruction, are now used by far-right Republicans who sound like left-wing anarchist punk-rockers from the late seventies and eighties, with their themes of hatred with social control, and revolution. The clenched fist is now used by, of all people, Donald Trump, as well as Jessie Smollett, who paid people to smear him with Trump’s ideology. I know it as something related to Black power from the sixties, and definitely appropriated during Trump’s era during the Leader’s first and only election victory. I also know that narcissists, are deeply insecure and in need for outsized attention, and are addicted to lying. It’s too steep a price to compromise truth. Tommie Jones was no narcissist. He could have really been attacked when he came back home from the Olympics and was not rewarded like what might happen in the time of the flip and reinvention.

The only similar image in my mind, but that had both power and truth, is, in fact, that of Tommie Jones’ clenched fist at the Olympics. It was done in a time where that could lead to his assassination or, at least being ostracized which I’m sure he experienced in many forms. Fortunately he had a great career in health and sports at Oberlin College. That’s a democracy when a respectful person still always has a place to go, even when shunned by others.

I’m sure Mr. Smollett is PC, and, it certainly doesn’t take narcissism to be that, and, both Trump and Smollett, even though, opposites politically, share the desire for acting ability to shore up character deficiencies, falsehoods and former mistakes that are thoroughly documented and don’t fool anyone but fans.

Now is not the time to be extreme, and it’s always time to be truthful and honest, one would think, especially during an unprecedented era of lies. Politics as a replacement or influence on our morality, experience and reality is opposed by something that begins with actual contact with, what it is they are softly defending or advocating for.

We ask our Department of Corrections only to be ethically correct first, which would weigh things, not judge them. It would then cover all your bases. It’s not a game for me so i don’t have bases or ambitious goals, just episodic experiences without a human”narrative” attached to it and can’t help but be opposed to asshole gossipers, opinions and deep subjectivity when leveled against any entities not quite comprehensible. For instance white folks who are not PC at all and never will be, by virtue of the fact that they are actually in the mix every day of their lives, and all their ideas or notions only begins there, and politics got nuthin to do with it.

Both Bill Maher and Noam Chomsky are correct, it is the comedy of PC.

Racist infrastructure? Inside my base and best memories, as well as, the place that I have lived, by far, the longest, every one I knew there, the originals, and all men, all died of cancer. Not the people that moved there and transformed it, but the folks who actually were there and were from there, all died of cancer.

On the level of two centuries of both transportation and industrial pollution, the worst America has ever seen, the CBE ain’t shit when it comes to the Brooklyn and Queens border neighborhoods.

THE NEVER-ENDING EPILOGUE OF REAL-LIFE

PC is simplistic. Photography can have the social power to make that clear.

In 2014 during opening day in Cleveland at the annual chief wahoo protest, a confrontation between the protesters and Indian and Native American and a man named Pedro who had hated himself and dressed himself as a Native American chief much like the Lakota used to dress, but highly exaggerated, almost weird and frightful. Bob Roche the Native American did what he always does which is basically keep his composure and just to talk in a very logical way about the way the team mascot portrays Native Americans, while Pedro, being a typical fan and a big one at that, was reactive with emotion and anger about defending his right to dress this way and for the team to use chief wahoo as its mascot, because, according to its opinion, like many fans, chief wahoo and the name Indians actually honors the Native Americans.

Unfortunately for Pedro, pictures of a consultation went viral, and, I believe, was the point at which everything changed. How could the owner possibly denied us now yes, not just Cleveland Pizza, but people from all over the world commented. A picture doesn’t tell a story when it’s powerful, it creates change in limited circumstances, but it does happen.

Unfortunately I wasn’t in Cleveland 2014, because the junk yards out by Citi Field in Queens was being shut down and I had been shooting it for years and 2014 was a very important year is that battle and project. But I certainly came back in 2015 and found a very changed Pedro. He was no longer wearing the make-up, but he was wearing his bronx-inspired homemade baseball fan shirt, nad, this year he had come to his beloved stadium on opening day on a different mission.

To interject, the combination of objectivity and empathy, I think, is very useful. I had been friends with Mr. Roche, over the years, and became friendly with Pedro beginning in 2015. It’s not a photo opportunity for me, I don’t shoot it, run, and, then, post it. I come back all the time and I get to know people. The politically correct would have judged him right off the media coverage, stereotyping a human, who, like them is more than that – complex and from a really different background, that ironically began in the Bronx, growing up across from Yankees Stadium in a Puerto Rican family, already American citizens, but arriving in New York to start a new life. The ironies are abundant, Pedro, himself, is considered one of the two big minorities and the Yankees are the dreaded enemies of the Cleveland franchise, and now Pedro. relocated to Painseville Ohio, is one of the biggest “tribe” fans in existence. From Puerto Rico to the Bronx to Ohio, what does that tell you about home, tribes, ancestors, race, nationalities, human nature and loyalties?

Pedro is working-class. on top of it, and is not up on the latest Marxist-inspired concerns outside his world. Can you imagine going viral in a negative way? The same people that you know and know you look at you differently and people from around the world can use you for whatever cause, purpose or, just pure entertainment value, they have in mind while stripping you of any humanity or motivations, or, even canceling you entirely, as in, “You’re fired.”

I understand the Wahoo caricature thing, and the name controversy. As old as i am, a friend’s son informed me that in fact the word Indian takes back to Columbus when he arrived and declared the West Indies. Honestly I’m 🔊 not really that offended by the word, Indians, a word we’ve all used our entire lives and that’s changed for the first time, and, like many people who are not Native American, I was always both curious and fascinated, like millions throughout the world, about all Native Americans including living ones, like Dusty Crawford. RGB may have even agreed with that, while absolutely defending anyone’s right to speak freely at the same time. The old Supreme Court that already sided with the owner of the Washington Redskins as to his right to use that name according to his own will, but, of course, it was a larger American corporation, FedEx, that pressured the owner into actually and finally changing the name forever. This, he swore over his dead body, would never happen. FedEx, has the naming rights to the stadium and is part owner of the team. Enough said. The Supreme Court talks but money rules.

The owner of the team didn’t cave into the protestors, Native Americans or concerned citizens of the city. as much as to the almighty dollar and being a smart and successful owner. and, as the times changed through division and polarization, ride that wave. Ironically, the more Trump and his cult railed against things, the more the chances rose with,hise disruptions, that more people would flip against him, in the same way his antics made the New York Times grow with readers and profits, or BLM, getting a reactionary response in the Blue Lives Matter movement within white identity politics. I don’t think it’s the right time for any extremism that divides more and more by its nature. The reason why it’s time for moderation is that we are at the crossroads where, by applying more heat, the already prepared for civil war Republicans will make their move. They already did on Januar 6th. When the Riechstag burned in Germany, Hitler, who stoked it, convinced the Chancellor that only he could fix things, and the Thug got his absolute power.

The protest against the logo began in the 1970s and it took almost 50 years for something that began with a small group, relatively speaking, to put its wish into effect, that occurred in one of the greatest years of turmoil in American history where American sports corporations, after the Citizens United bill passed, got deeply involved in social ills, such as Nike with Colin Kerpaernick or FedEx wanting to play it safe with the name, Redskins, and ditch it.

The lone guy with the sign who came out in 2021 to say that the owner caved in, 🔊 mourning the loss of the now racist logo, is completely covered by our constitution, and has rights equal to any protest group or individual. He lives in a country, if you have the time, where things can begin with an individual, catch on and even lead to change. This country can be complicated, wild and unpredictable, especially with extreme free speech and section 230. Free speech is for all. Unlike many countries, a person can say whatever they want about whatever they want and whoever they want and not suffer any consequences at all. Likewise you can get government grants, bartend and put yourself into a university, graduate with a law degree and try to make this country socialist or more capitalist or have more plastic surgery options at lower prices, run for office, sit on your ass, whatever. Have ya noticed? We’re a circus of a country, distinguished from other circuses like Iraq or Russia by our inborn entertainment value and love of 🔊 politics as performance art and symbolic combat.

The politically correct and those into identity politics are a portion of the people that make this country what it is. Political correctness is a secular morality that simplifies an extremely complex world and country, often relying on preordained stereotypes that get us nowhere and can deeply offend, even those, who could help whatever it is they are defending and advocating. A poor Puerto Rican guy from the Bronx and now a working class guy in Northeast Ohio whose hero is Larry Doby, becomes an oppressor, or, at least symbol of the oppression in a world where communication can instantly race around the world if found to be interesting and fitting into today’s culture wars. In other words the world is complicated and mixed with twists and turns, and the PC view oversimplifies while making sense to secular and professional service workers.

The human animal cannot be simplified unless isolated, Too much a social animal, human interaction is complicated with it’s human nature and its goals often at odds. We are mixes for the most part, in varying degrees of different races, nationalities and cultures or headed that way. All potential for both the negative and positive exists within us in varying degrees, often depending on our circumstances. Our technologies increase exponentially until we feel that they will one day rule us, as we play catch-up, constantly with the ever-changing economics of profit. Political correctness reduces a lot into labels and their own self-made stereotypes, and calls it progress.

My view is simple. I would prefer to operate in a grey area, and not see things as just black and white. In other words see the universal in the particular and vice versa, and not the disunited states of self-interest and identity politics itself, implies just that.

If you need a Name, try, the late Tod Gitlin, who never left his views that strictly gender and race concerns aren’t Marxist concerns

In a very negative sense what could be more American than racism? For the first time in history a country is created that welcomes everybody from around the planet. It’s the first country entirely made up of people that are seriously from, elsewhere, and, who are only required to respect the law and other folks, aren’t required t assimilate, and, if chosen, can fold themselves up into the culture they come from, or exist in the world of their making in a country with a lot of, relatively speaking, freedom.

Combined that with our unfettered freedom of speech, along with the unbelievable section 230 update, and “opposing” groups work, without any requirement to tell the truth, although some do, just, express their sef-interest, can create quite a volatile and potentially chaotic country.

There’s a whole lot of things peculiar to this country, identity politics and political correctness, that have evolved out of the unique situation of being the country made up of so many others, that have made America home, no assimilation required. If upset about conditions, then free speech will protect you, and, American opportunity could provide you the means to effectively act upon your desire or a filter of preordained correctness, but it’s too limiting. I might use a polarizer to eliminate reflections but reality is left alone. The reality I am picturing, simply from the view of accuracy, isn’t to be messed with or filtered. Accuracy and expression, big deal, that’s what I’m adding to the mix, but it’s got nothing to do with my favorite ideological concerns.

The A.P.A. oath:

I do most solemnly promise and swear that I will always, to the utmost of my ability, labor, plead and wage a continuous warfare against ignorance and fanaticism; that I will use my utmost power to strike the shackles and chains of blind obedience to the Roman Catholic church from the hampered and bound consciences of a priest-ridden and church-oppressed people; that I will never allow any one, a member of the Roman Catholic church, to become a member of this order, I knowing him to be such; that I will use my influence to promote the interest of all Protestants everywhere in the world that I may be; that I will not employ a Roman Catholic in any capacity if I can procure the services of a Protestant.

I furthermore promise and swear that I will not aid in building or maintaining, by my resources, any Roman Catholic church or institution of their sect or creed whatsoever, but will do all in my power to retard and break down the power of the Pope, in this country or any other; that I will not enter into any controversy with a Roman Catholic upon the subject of this order, nor will I enter into any agreement with a Roman Catholic to strike or create a disturbance whereby the Catholic employes may undermine and substitute their Protestant co-workers; that in all grievances I will seek only Protestants and counsel with them to the exclusion of all Roman Catholics, and will not make known to them anything of any nature matured at such conferences.

I furthermore promise and swear that I will not countenance the nomination, in any caucus or convention, of a Roman Catholic for any office in the gift of the American people, and that I will not vote for, or counsel others to vote for, any Roman Catholic, but will vote only for a Protestant, so far as may lie in my power. Should there be two Roman Catholics on opposite tickets, I will erase the name on the ticket I vote; that I will at all times endeavor to place the political positions of this government in the hands of Protestants, to the entire exclusion of the Roman Catholic church, of the members thereof, and the mandate of the Pope.

To all of which I do most solemnly promise and swear, so help me God. Amen.

NEOLOGISMS

Starting with and winding down this essay, it’s appropriate and logical to think and consider American Indians. And no Indian embodies the history of natives to America, than “Dusty”Crawford, whose native ancestry can traced to an astonishing 55 generations back from his Blackfoot Native heritage. Ponder his lineage and also the physical presence of his dna, distinct from any sort of cultural presence, is it not? And just as vital? Perhaps more vital?

Notice the misnomer, that I recently learned at my ripe age, Indian comes from a mistake Columbus made, and, at the same time, America is derived from Amerigo, a Florentine, who made a couple of trips to the west.

The one thing that bothers me about the word, Indian, is, that, when you got to search using the word, you often get  results about the Indians of southwest Asia. But not much else bothers me, about the name. It’s really academic, and it’s not my place. But you may or may not, have reservations about the use of the word, Indian. If American Indians and Native Americans, want to come up with a consensus name, that would be ideal. The consensus name for white folks is whites, likewise, with blacks, so what about reds. That’s to be left up to the descendants of the original people whose ancestors travelled from another continent, themselves, or, so we think. Red doesn’t sound right, hopefully, you get the point, while respectfully, keeping Asians out of it. I don’t care, firstly, about colors, then fashion, culture or style. I do look at what’s human in you, and whatever that is, it’s what we all share as humans.

Not one living thing has ever had a choice as to who, when, why, and where they are born. Not one living creature has any say in who they are, before they are, and the motivations for bringing them into this world.

There are words, and then there’s deeds, and to unite both isn’t an objective, it’s just what I do.

Indian and Native American, with regards to this land, I would deem the original people. Like Europeans, they came from across a sea but, perhaps,  also a land bridge, on the western edge of the country, and like all people, they conquered and took over territory from each other for at least 33,000 years, in South America, and 15,000 years ago in the north where a warm climate made the land bridge from Asia into what is now Alaska, possible. And that is is only what’s been found and dated, and the chances are good there is a longer history of the earliest inhabitants.

It really was the New World for many cultures that came to, what came to be called, America, from the east or west, and a portion of them, forced here through the slave industry. Slaves were, in fact a common widespread business practiced by any culture of any importance and power. Native Americans were very much known for their practices of kidnapping, and even assimilation into their victims, including many whites, individual tribes.

And to be honest, Native Americans make a lot of their connection to the Asian and Pacific countries they may have migrated from, it’s curious, that by the time of Columbus, they had no beasts of burden, no fire arms, let alone cannon, or ability to navigate and sail anywhere in the world.

With regards to our present state of hyper-political correctness, the buck stops here with the history of American Indians. It’s the undisputed documented nature of it, they got here first, but no matter who we’re talking about, better tech, bigger numbers and wealth rules, and Americans stole the country. I temper it with the fact most dynasties and tribes also did that, the Aztecs or Mayans being perfect examples. As tragic as the Inca genocide by Spaniards was, the Incas themselves, a minority, had ruled by terror, violence and being an advanced civilization with better tech.

When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the who-got-fucked-over the most IP hierarchy, it goes Native Americans, Blacks and Jews, with all other groups, while disrespected for certain times in history, generally, aren’t that, relatively speaking, oppressed, as Indians, Blacks Jews, and LGBTQ segment of the population, although a lot of it is simple name-calling, and events like the war in Ukraine makes it all, relatively speaking, not too much of a moral wrong, then having your home, family, city, country, and, possibly yourself blown into oblivion.

Meanwhile the Big Slap grabs all the attention for a full week, in the midst of the Putin slap of missiles and bombs, and for no good reason whatsoever. What we did find is that Ukrainian Lives Matter, now, more than ever.

I just learned in 2021 that the word Indian is a misnomer perpetrated by Christopher Columbus, when he mistook the natives in the Caribbean as people from India, while native American, evolved out of the correction to history, after, of course, the conquering, then with the fruits of that, and the notion of evening things up, after the fact, much of it symbolic. It’s documentation that finally put an end to a lot of unfairness, since absolute evidence is so hard to dispute, at least, up until, the internet, when the notion of Christian Nationalism, being a patriot or entrepreneur is the highest form of living. But documentation from Wounded Knee back to the arrival of Europeans is extensive, and that indisputable information has changed things. It took a while, but no one makes movies involving Indians in the old stenotypes, and let’s remember that there were a lot of crude pro-Indians films made by Hollywood.

I like the word, Indian, in spite of its original mistaken source, and, native as well, except for its jingoistic aspect. I fully examined the name, including its epistemology which I didn’t know, and, after knowing that, could care less. I’m not in academics, on television, in government or any institution.  Its useless, beyond trying to correct history, and that’s useless too. It’s a debate, an opinion-vetting, but life and the world marches on. I don’t want to miss anything that language-ophaloskepsis might distract from, especially when its backed by the righteous emotions of correcting, tied to repayment, for a whole bunch of things we had nothing to do with. My family got here after WWII, we have no choice in our births, race, etc., making it guilt by association, that like in the Guston case, is wrong, by virtue of  hypersensitivity and privilege, but also too much identity politics by everyone with a political or social identity.

Take “I’m an Indian” by Fannie Bryce or Ehel Merman, you could choose to listen to it and, on a bunch of different levels, one is, the pure ridiculousness of it, especially when reality and the truth and history are added. But the distance between truth and representation here doesn’t bother me to the point of activism or anything else, since it’s so obviously out of wack and started as entertainment. It’s stupid innocence is just interesting and a curiosity, in the context of our times, not a call to arms or enough for the cancelling, by cultural association. Some deserve the prison they got, like Weinstein, but many, like comedians, particularly stand-ups, are being taken too seriously, when they were formerly be allowed to take chance, and help blow off steam on shit we all care about. Andrew “Dice” Clay went too far, but, really, even he never got officially cancelled in retrospect. Cancelling was when your audience fell off, because they didn’t like you, now it’s jail time.

Like I said when truth and re[presentation are so ridiculously far apart. I laugh at it, criticize it, but, when the PC and IP crowd instructs me on the reality I experience and know better than anyone, they got nuthin to say, to me, but being insulting and distracting.

I don’t feel motivated to correct anything from the past, because I’m pretty much securely well-informed, but, most importantly, I’m in love with life, and that, is nothing but hard work. I also like, a lot, history.

Native American? America is derived from Amerigo Vespucci, thus, within the realm of PC and IP, and, according to their own predilections and preferences, American is probably worse than the word, Indian, given it’s derived from an Italian’s first name. I, happen, to not care about such minutiae. One reason amongst thousands is, until America is conquered, and, perhaps, even then, it will retain its name in some form. Named after a Florentine who made a couple of trips west, just after Columbus, the entire northern and southern hemispheres are considered America, and within are some of the top countries in the world.

I can live with that, right or wrong because I have better things to do than detailing the world in neologistic, linguistic etymological terms, which seems distinctly academic, or, at least an exercise in someone’s advanced education and book knowledge. Bubble-wrapped, protected inside, but with a plastic foggy view.

I like the great outdoors. I like to live completely outside institutions for good reason. It’s hard to do, of course, considering, in old age, the institution of medicine is all ya got.

WORDS

Is Native American any better? America was derived from the last name of an Italian man. And why all this overeducated debate on the history and etymology of language?

I’m ok with Indians and Native Americans. My aim isn’t to play word games or investigate etymological history, but tell it like it is, activate, get it on. Like I said, if Natives want to provide the world with what their preference is, I will follow it.

Semantics. Between Native Americans and Indians there’s  no consensus on what’s “correct” amongst and within any modern tribes. Many Indians are ok with one or both names, while others are not, but that’s the way all groups in the overall population feel. PC folks love that word, diversity, but, only by their terms, and not the diversity that exists, not just within groups, but individuals.

It’s simple to understand the problems associated with the meaning and the history behind the words, but the ultimate fact is, to rectify things we need to live in the actual world which teaches succinctly not theoretically, what’s acceptable, and can be accomplished. I mean, outside of having to invent another new name to describe a certain group, and then the subgroups, and what their preferences are (Latin X, Latino, Latina, Hispanic, Spanish, etc) it’s too complicated to adapt, and integrate it into life. Indian and Native American I can live with to describe what are, in fact, the natives, or first people to cultivate and live on this continent, the Natives. But it’s still all talk.

I’m stupid enough not to know that there is a movement to gender neutral terms. so that there’s so much detail to the IP industry, to become useless. I mean, to introduce yourself as, for instance, as a Latina-Afro queer, whatever…well, it just proves that being human, the way to unity, is not what people represent today, it’s their individual identities and myths.

However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term. Take Latin X, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center

More Neologisms, I’m sure it’s increased to 10% by 2022.

Even the more substantive debates about using imagery for sports teams is about language, however it’s a convulsive language of big money and sports, butting heads with grass roots people of all stripes. In Cleveland small protests began every opening day for the Indians baseball team, in the 1970s and by 2022 the logo was gone, and, the name, Indians. Many were anti-logo (Chief Wahoo), but pro-Indians as the name of the team, and, I think, that’s a nice middle ground, but ownership went further and did a complete revamp. Says a lot about the power gained by identity politics and political correctness.

In Cleveland, it began small, on the streets, outside the stadiums, and took fifty years, but it did happen.

The NAACP and the AIM are worthy now, still relevant, and active with other priorities, over language, like action, for instance? The language changes but not the mission, or the conditions that required the mission in the first place. I’ll take active character, thus tested, over just about anything, groovy, whether academic language or media buzzwords.

There’s also the animal rights activists and new categories like “trans-race.” The culture war industry that has built up since the 1980s, and has become an institution, business, school and profession also fuels it.

But I gotta go to work. All the semantic detail, and the reduction of too much, to racism. Mine might not be activism but it is activation because a curiosity about the truth motivates me to go beyond the screen and office and to have physical contact while everyone else is talking about it and watching it. I would rather be over-lived than over-informed.

The detail of the language and word etymology has gotten too deep and distracting, as the circus of semantics can only breed more debates. It’s the way it is.

Look at language in action, where Hillbillies, Gays and Blacks do flip the stereotype and end up in control, by flipping the n-word, or q-word, that is now acceptable. Likewise colored became to be considered derogatory, long ago, but people of color is trending now. I’m not living and working to solve something by semantics. The truth of things takes work (opera est veritate) as does it’s purpose, the overcoming, by activation and proof, of falsehood by participation and only judging things in a relative way within the actual flow of life and our world. I’m interested in experiencing, so the evaluating comes naturally.

The conservative contingent of Hollywood, most personified, in the old days by John Wayne, or, with living/aging star actors, like James Caan, James Woods, John Voight – have seemed very absent from the Oscar action. The winner for best song in 1997 would never make it into my rap collection, let alone as the top movie song of the year, but, could it be that the Oscars can be political?

I, along with all, whether we wanted to or not, saw the 2022 Slap Happy Oscars, that replaced the very real war in Ukraine for a week in media, and if that’s all I saw of the Oscars, it would make you think that Hollywood and the Oscars are Black affairs. The production was done, for the first time, by a Black producer.

Earlier Halle Berry said it was heartbreaking there were no Black women nominated for best actress. Later Will Smith would win best actor and Arian Debose would win best supporting actress.

After everything is put down and recorded, what is there left to do, but do? I think that the effort does, through undeniable proof, help to illuminate what is both hidden and taken for granted but can never completely eliminate something that is part of a family of things that humanity just cannot overcome, by its inborn nature, its history and the simple fact that, unfortunately, we’ll always have people like Putin. When Brando sent an American Indian to speak up about the depiction of natives in Hollywood, there was an explosion, on both sides, and it is the very nature of shock performance activism. It’s said that it took six people the whole John Wayne back from walking out on the stage during that event, and, on the other hand, people like Carol O’Connor were very happy with the situation and felt that it was entirely called for.

It’s the human circus that I document but don’t necessarily flip out about. Carol O’Connor’s most famous character was the the-quintessential racist, Archie Bunker, but was nothing at all like the character. He was wildly affirmative of Brando’s move at the Oscars, plus, Mr. O’Connor just simply didn’t attend the Oscars because it’s obviously impossible to call one thing the best in such a big and diverse world.

Native American? America is derived from Amerigo Vespucci, thus, within the realm of PC and IP, and, according to their own predilections and preferences, America is probably worse than the word, Indian. But, until America is conquered, and even them, it probably will retain its name. This, now, top power in the world, was named after a Florentine who made a couple of trips west, just after Columbus, and, today, not just this country, but the entire hemisphere is considered America.

Why is Native American any better? America was derived from the last name of an Italian man. And why all this overeducated debate on the history and etymology of language? Like say, I got better things to do.

WORDS & NAMES

As PC and IP strategies evolve we, naturally, get more language, detail and minutiae that’s supposed to enlighten us, which it might do, but it also alienates, creating formation reactions like white identity politics. Unrelenting IP activism alienates and inspires, but within, and as a cause, it’s all good, but there is human nature and formation reactions like white identity politics.

Some of it is simply a matter of simulacra and its degree. Simply put if you work physically and have contact with people and the world on that level there is no simulacra. Coupled with increased education, time spent in front of a screen and in controlled environments, PC judgments are made, relatively speaking, inside and not out here, where there’s no control, it just is. Testing their notions “out here” never happens because for many there is no longer an “out there” or you are afraid or simply it’s not your thing in the first place. There is the in here, where it’s comfortable and untested, where clever, nice-sounding notions aren’t challenged by the ugliness and beauty of human nature and reality that could guide notions by the actions of living where the dead are greatly influenced by the experience of things.

The past ain’t never over, but it cannot be altered. My preferred democracy would also give the dead, who were righteous, their vote. Maybe we could learn something, like losing that sense of history and freshness in semantics, where, by nature there can be no consensus. That’s also called assimilation and unity.

You know how the right wing characterizes all Democrats? They call them Marxists. I read Karl Marx and I never remember coming across his concern for political correctness, identity politics, gender or race. It was the working-class, was it not?

Perhaps you can’t notice it’s academic, in an era when education has taken over. Yet, as a proud as the working-class has become under Trump’s populism, it would be hard to find any blue-collar person who doesn’t want to send their children to college. Things have changed. Much of what I say is just a calling out of simulacra, and, of course, that can only be done with what is authentic.

Woke? White privilege? You can also concentrate on the flipside of the old, long gone Hollywood version of Indians. I have, as a balancing reaction, to the blanket judgement that it’s all racist in old Hollywood noticed how many pro-Indian films there were and the many films that tried to get it right, within the parameters of a love story being mixed in, and jumbling historic details. Don’t the films of the last 40 years, about Native themes, pride themselves on both historical accuracy and complete sympathy to the facts, on the Indian’s side?

For a very long time no one makes stupid, slanted, prejudiced movies with Indians and Indian themes – Geronimo, Thunderheart, Last of the Mohicans, Dances With Wolves, Jeremiah Johnson, Pow Wow Highway, Skins, Billy Jack. Both racist and sympathetic views of Natives exist and have existed, but, even in the old days – Seminole, Tomahawk, Broken Arrow, Reprisal!, and now, films like Thunderheart and Walter Hill’s Geronimo, are sympathetic and accurate depictions made by non-Indian directors. The closest you get to the old ways are in well-made movies that exaggerate on the romantic level. I mean, Last of the Mohicans is a terrific film, I don’t demand that it be filmed in New York, and not Georgia, or, that you could hit a man with an unrifled musket at one thousand yards. It’s a movie first, and entertainment its mission, and it’s really something that, it can respect and honor the Natives.

Now Spike Lee openly says that John Ford was racist, in an interview where the Times reporter was in love with him, where he also tried to slip in recognizing his own genius, for all his films, even for his worst and most uneven films, like his frat movie, where his obvious subjectivity is so strong, he can’t recognize that the minutiae of his biographical life is only interesting to those seeped in the milieu, since it wasn’t created in a universally, catholic way to accomplish that. Man, when Mr. Lee gets down to some real personal stuff, it’s middle-class and frat boy, trivial, unimportant and done badly. I suppose that make me a racist to the subjectivity squads, but, then, my production company, RealStill, is the exact opposite of 40 Acres and a Mule, the ultimate symbol of reparations/PC/IP culture as opposed to the flat-out openness and universal, all-encompassing nature of what’s real, translation, truth. Ford was actually sympathetic in many ways to natives, and his big sin was always using Navajos to play Cheyennes, or having a Navajos were the outfits of the Lakota, far too the north and on the Plains into Canada.

Again, many want to get lost in language and details, and, more, importantly, judge past history by today’s standards. It’s like looking down on New Orleans because it was built in a flood zone, even though it was built when there were no computers or weather forecasting or documentation of weather events from years past. It reminds me of the old stupid saying dead trees by the tech people which was their way of saying that technology in the future would be so environmentally friendly. Sure, like one transaction with cryptocurrency spews a half a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, from its reliance on the block-chain of computers consuming enormous loads of electricity. Important political figures, including a vice-president, president would settle battles based on honor and ideals, with duels, that were completely illegal in every state, and, with thousands of other examples, about the huge difference between then and now, there now exists a great quest to “right the past.” Check out Ben Franklin’s sexual exploits, including sex clubs and prostitutes. Now there’s a founding father, like many he owned slaves, like none, he evolved into America’s first abolitionist. Some people grow, some people decay, 

Mr. Lee always seemed to be a bit nerdy, a basketball-loving square, married to a lawyer and wellness entrepreneur that has enough class not to talk publicly about things like vagina restoration, hair loss and open sex in a marriage, on public media. They get credit for that, as one of America’s Black yuppie class. With the naming his production company from the start, Mr. Lee has stayed true to his mission, cause and goals, using a camera and sound. From the get-go, we always knew where he was going with film. I can comment about difference, not value. Of course we all express as individuals, and, two ways, amongst many, is to not take the apriori approach, and include everything, especially different folks, and not to stay within a mono-cultural point of view. Culture, the most powerful of forces, obviously can be used for anything, but not here, where it’s seen for what it is, because non-apriori views are in effect.

The first Black produced Oscars? And we get the Big Slap? After cataloging and documenting all the facts and events that demonstrate racism and hatred, and proving its existence through time, what is left? It’s still going to be up to individuals to decide whether the information they receive is good for them, true or can be used by them. Obviously, hatred, for whatever reason, is part of human nature and, while recording all the episodes of discrimination and prejudice does help to document and bring people to realizations they otherwise wouldn’t understand. After all is said, and done, it’s time to get it on – actualization, for me, not activism.

My interests are history, experience, soul and transcendence that occurs because it’s done in an open range and that’s why I prefer source material and its experience as a form of knowledge, amongst other things.

Going back to the beginning of this book, and reinforcing the notion that I wasted valuable time here, by writing about PC, I remember paying attention, in a real way, not symbolic, to what Noam Chomsky and Ruth Ginsburg, have to say. Chomsky isn’t impressed with PC, it’s merely some background distraction for him, and Ms. Ginsberg will defend the right to express, while being privately repulsed by the content of some free speech and expression, that she is vigorously defending the right to do so, like taking a knee, even a respectable knee. The hero of the left found that to be disgusting, and more than that. Who needs waking?

It bored Mr. Chomsky, and, as for Ms. Ginsburg, her private reaction to one of the most activist and symbolic gestures within the realm of contemporary political correctness and identity politics, taking a knee, was that she found it stupid and repulsive.

The PC crowd is interested in the history of words and phrases, usually the race, religion, gender and ethnicity of the people who came up with them. I would ask them to look at the words, political correctness, that began long ago during the Russian Revolution after 1917, when it was meant as a gentle warning of becoming too orthodox in your political beliefs. The early lefties in America, during the 1960s, also had a similar take on the two words as a satirical check on becoming to divorced from reality.

Of course, today that isn’t so much of a choice anymore since everyone is born into and grows up with all the devices and media that money can buy. Actual contact, often with the very things the politically correct is so committed to, is not widely practiced, but I guaranteed the division in vision with the two approaches  are real.

Play, shame, cancel, and even coming up with more language about the same old thing like doxing, gaslighting and other buzzwords that I don’t know or care what they mean, because they are more new words about the same old things.

We’ve updated the old ways of public vengeance like tarring and feathering wearing the dunce cap, the Crucifixions, perp walks, which are extremely public, demonstrative and theatrical, and there is also the sex offender registry.

Making everything about race, today, is a mistake. All should and can agree, it’s fundamental, and universal there are many isms, and many named and unnamed dangers in this world and to find that all the problems of this country and the world are ultimately about one thing? It’s a bit too special interest, sometimes pure bubble-think and a philosophy for those with limited experience and unusual sensitivities who don’t get out much, as in out and really experiencing all of life in a democracy, beyond their interests. Tell it to the Ukraines who fight, not in a race war, but a war against the world’s biggest living asshole, and genuine moron, Vladimir Putin.

Too woke

Guston is the perfect example how truth, contact, or context, is the only way to evaluate motivations. The guy, denounced pure abstract expressionism which he was on top of, ends up using hooded klan figures in his paintings, and people need to work on that today? His show was postponed because of the typical knee-jerk viral internet response, holding up his show, while they are pacified, and guided through what they forgot, that he had the guts to turn his back on pure abstract Expressionism, do more figurative work and address hatred. Since he was Jewish and his family came from Odessa to escape the Nazis, etc., does that sober you up from woke intoxication.

If i find museums uninteresting and useless, the reasons can be found could be found in this quote, “A revamping of the display of some 19th and 20th century European art is intended to encourage visitors to explore issues of race and gender.” Like I say, it’s now all seen through the filter of race and sex for many secular moralists. People try to bring small ponies on to airplanes as their dysfunction animals.

RealStill and many others, get mistook, and its all over the inexperience and emotions of folks who don’t have the chops to begin with, to decipher things on many levels. Often these have been very intelligent and accomplished folks, although, usually in the realm of some bubble – academic, medicine and law – in an institutional setting. The gain of being and living in the actual world, especially dealing with these themes, is that they get evaluated in the field, and it’s not one of dreams.

Look at the movie, The Bible: In The Beginning. I love John Huston’s films. He made everything from small independent films to Hollywood big-budget movies, but that ’s not the point, which is he made them all pretty damn good, with some, like, The Asphalt Jungle, being in the highest ranks of movie-making. But he also made The Bible: In the beginning, which should only be seen for the entertainment value of being so separate from history, reality and religion, which normally he is out front of, more than any director. And Huston actually narrates the film as God. Adam and Eve are the stunningly beautiful, young, blonde, waspy Europeans who are playing the original couple in the northern Africa. Its completely ridiculous, but I don’t want to erase it from film history because of this, and there is the element of play as in playing. Let it stand as an example, and let that be the punishment for getting it wrong, but to be banned? Like Huston, overall, the finest of directors, who also made The Battle of San Pietro and Let there Be light, as well as, Wise Blood, a critique of religion, God and Christ, is like no other. He paid the price with his honest war documentaries, but went on to make the ridiculous Bible movie. To work in Italy? To make money, pay off favors? I don’t think one of the most worldly of Hollywood directors would have God in his heart, and, somehow lost it, on authenticity,.

And if you want to be serious, there’s plenty of actual tyrants. For instance, go, volunteer for the front lines in Ukraine and understand what the other enemies of other folks, who have done no wrong and what they go through. Hatred can be based on anything, with religion, color and greed. In hell on earth hell, Black young Americans are killing each other for fifty years over colors, perceived insults, money or and women. And they do this a lot, far less than white gangsters, who, by the way, invented the gangster life. For all you PC etymologists, and neologistic-inclined, the first use and invention of the word, gangster, came from a journalist in Columbus, Ohio over 125 years ago.

Mesoamerica was a densely populated advanced civilization that, without beasts of burden built cities, larger than London, developed huge tracts of agriculture and were experts in the sky, stars, sun and moon. At the time of the Arrival of Cortes there were 20 million mesoamericans in what is now Central America and five years later, perhaps, 5 million were left. During this time the average natural-born genocide rates by disease, mostly small pox, was around 90%.

On the cultural level, mitigate your accumulation of only racist people by concentrating on the flipside of the old, long gone Hollywood version of Indians. Check out films like Seminole, Broken Arrow, Tomahawk, Sitting Bull, Apache, the Searchers, Reprisal!, Westward Ho, the Wagons, Run of the Arrow, A Distant Trumpet, Hombre, Soldier Blue and Little Big Man.

At the beginning and here at the end, it’s still a waste of my limited time. I could have been out there, like I normally am, putting into practice all the ethics, knowledge and experience that I have gained, and creating objects – the photograph, text or sounds, from that contact. I am not putting on a show, or consciously trying to change much, especially in the past, thinking about effecting things or not, because it’s useless, as is trying to impress anyone with a fine knowledge of epistemology as it links to someone’s beliefs, because I believe what I see and don’t see what I believe.

If my specialty in media, academics, politics or religion, is identity, race or gender, as a professional, you have a tendency to eat, drink and sleep it as was well as do it, and be the expert.

It’s just that I have a preference for another type of approach, because I think it’s more worthwhile, and that’s not to filter so much, in order to see as much as I can, clearly.

When I was a filmmaker, it was normal to eat, sleep and drink films, to be an expert, but, I quickly realized that took too much time from contact and filming the world. And as far as credibility, there’s but one way to go, no matter what, and that’s authenticity, and that’s experience.

No matter if it’s CNN or Fox News, when their commentators come on remotely from their offices or their homes, it’s always in front of their libraries, which always have the books that are written by the expert, facing the camera. While the person speaks of his specialty I like to scan his library behind him or her, and it always is a complete collection of books on the topics of their specialty with no other points of view.

Within my base and best memories, the place that I have lived, by far, the longest, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there, every one I knew that was male, all from there, died of cancer. Around their 60s and 70s, just like myself. Not the people that moved there and transformed it, but the folks who actually were there always. The men, all of them, died of cancer. None qualified as victims of environmental racism. Now, at the same age, when they realized they had end-stage cancers, it’s my turn, and, I’m not particularly mad or upset, let alone hateful for that weird, but it’s the same wonder I have with institutions and the media, which is their distance from reality and the truth, and telling me and others about what we experience every day of our lives.

Soul, transcendence, it’s just what’s meaningful to us, IP and PC have their purpose wrapped up in special interest and, politics while both IP and PC, literally have it as half their moniker.

The one thing shared with PC and IP is meaning, and its importance. But ours is not attached to identity or politics exclusively, because that’s a part of the mix.

And I equate politics with lies and liars, who shift with the winds, and I distrust, inherently, the word, politics of all sorts.

Living deep in Williamsburg, I learned the hard way that colonial attitudes don’t die, but evolve. Ambitious people go out and make a ton of money in, for instance, real estate, and, after doing so, give part of their new found wealth to correct the past, an impossible task, but’s it’s the capitalistic way of social change. Today all companies that have emerged in the last twenty years, give great importance to purpose, a cause, whether, environmental, combatting racism, education or poverty. Even really old line companies, like Sherman-Willliams, rolling in the dough, have committed money to lead paint removal programs in a city that leads the nation for lead contamination, where they are headquartered.

Neologistic branding decisions as with Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, even, Eskimo Pie, are primarily business decisions, like any company, for instance Victoria’s Secret. This is really getting down to the etymological nitty-gritty, where no sentiment, or nostalgic tickle, will be tolerated, on any level, for the sake of ending racism, or some cause, not to mention, you wouldn’t want to run the risk of being cancelled, and, most importantly, be profitable. No money there. Who wouldn’t agree with that? It’s not like corporations strictly follow the  profits, right? I guess that’s why the no-profit Spokane Indians are really unconcerned about the team’s name, which, weirdly, the city itself, is named after the Spokane Indians who had three tribes living on the plateau where the city is now located. It’s kind of like saying the Cherokee Indians, so there is a kind of accuracy there, and, although the three tribes have split up into separate reservations in Idaho, the name, Spokane, is theirs, as the first people on the plateau.

A recent quote reflecting the tremendous concern and sensitivities, that the media and arts institutions have finally come around to. “When the exhibition staff is entirely white, you’re not actually understanding how people perceive the work,” she said. “I’m a white woman of privilege. Just because I have a degree in art history doesn’t mean my feelings matter more or less than those of our wonderful security officers.” Really? Why, then, have I, of all people, never been treated this way? I came to museums with great pictures of the slum and working-class neighborhoods and people that surrounded the institutions, they just didn’t get it. That being inclusion, which is the rage today. This was the 1980s.

I am a white male heterosexual oppressor, first, not being human.

In the newspaper for Fordham University, “DeBose is the first openly queer Afro Latina to win an acting Oscar, and she delivered an emotional and powerful speech about the importance of embracing your identity.” 

I agree with whatever and whoever you are, it’s just that you or your admirers and fans, don’t have to pronounce it, that which I can clearly see and sense already. I know the highest form of existence in the arts is PC, IP and the the “cause.” And the worst moral mistake you can make is either sexism, racism or some ism. I always see anyone, first, as human, whether my encounter is negative or positive. We are equal in all ways, on the days of our births, one things we share equally, is nothing living has ever had its choice to life. We are dropped here, and, then, have to figure our ways and what gives us meaning, to go on, and, then, become subject to human nature, or, just, nature, which we rose from, and is ever-evolving, and that contains, hate, as well as love, chaos, as well as, order, and so we can change, and learn the things we never knew in our innocence.

Growing up, assimilation and unity versus identity and separation was the way. I can also ensure you, that first-generation folks want nothing more than to be American like no others, and have an acute appreciation for being here as Americans, and, sometimes a deep hurt that, that now we are too divided.

Maybe you’ve been here too long for too many generations, and, perhaps, take our civic gifts for granted. On the other hand, when it comes to getting fucked over, whether it be slavery or any other illegal displacement, it creates a big memory, and, when it comes to Black folks, in many ways they are more American than many, having been here since the very beginning of the country, with as long a lineage as you can get for being someone who came here from the east, some against their will, and creating culture that is at the center of many American arts, music, dance, literature, sports, politics and much more. These accomplishments speak louder than gestures and words, as real comparisons are made to the accomplishments of other groups, and, it’s clear that Blacks are in the forefront. But also, ironically, are in the lead for killing themselves, very often senselessly, and that’s purely on them. Black lives matter here as well, but, not really, as we have seen, and when Eric Adams made the point, as an ex-cop and tireless defender of Blacks, that Black lives matter, of course, but not just the victims of racism, for instance the 16 year old girl, an honor student, on her way home, in the afternoon is shot dead from a nearby shooter who can’t hit his target, rival gangbangers. And, all you know that this ain’t nuthin, that is, compared to the savagery, brutality and stupidity, that can get far worse than this, and is so widespread it’s ridiculous. If Chicago was the only example of this, than it’s enough, but we’re so numb and accepting of it all, it continues.

END

The country has gone cuckoo, the toothpaste is outta the tube, it won’t go back, and that’s sort of at the bottom of this waste of time – the hopelessness and impossibility of this walking schizophrenia of America now, and the uselessness, even in critique, of this weirdness.

Look how far we have come since 1970.

We’re not against any folks, myself, I’m a photographer, why would I want to limit my range? Not mentioning that a lot of things just ain’t in me. It’s just the endless neologisms, detail and continual division, for whatever reason. Using the word, non-binary, it’s an example of constantly drumming up new language for an existing language, much of it already fit, and with no need for an update. It’s like Hollywood remakes made for each succeeding generation adorned with their concerns. It’s still the same work, the same theme. I suggest to get out, be original, and cool it with the name game.

I know, quite well, “black and brown” people – ghetto, blue-collar and middle-class – that support and love Trump, and any more of my Spanish friends. Neologistic stereotypes do not ring true in reality a lot of the times. Friends in Queens have mind-boggling mixtures of  ethnic, racial and religious identities, all genetic, as well as, cultural, plus, those being more purely ethnic, all of whom, arrive from each country from around the world. Their individual predilections, are unpredictable and nothing, but human. There’s the drone view, very informative, and the street view, also loaded with answers to questions that some have forgotten to ask, and ways to evaluate your notions against what’s goin on.

So don’t listen to me.

Identity strengthening is the impressionism, cubism, appropriation, deconstruction  and repurposing of this era. But, like deconstruction, what’s left from a desublimated form? After documenting and listing every act of prejudice against Black folks, what’s left? Movie on, oct course.

Similar to deconstruction’s effect – what’s left for use in a desublimated form? Now what? After documenting every every act of prejudice and racism and hatred which, like war, will exist, what is left to do? Is it the end and no the means in the race business that has emerged from the reality of racism.

If you’re part of what I’m talking about you have no ears nor eyes for it, and, if you’re not, you already know. That’s part of the uselessness of writing about all this, because there is so much subjectivity in PC and IP modes of thought.

But, again, don’t pay attention to me. Talk to Dusty, or, the Irish-Catholic and Jewish girls that were mistakenly given to the wrong families and grew up entirely, on a cultural level, foreign to their own dna.

Black, White, yellow, brown? I don’t give a shit about color, except for variety being the spice of life. I don’t need curing or being woke, I been working diligently with very little sleep, accomplishing, without fanfare, all the crap you spout that I already know by heart, and, daily, sublimate into actual work, while you go to work in an office, have a comfortable life, but don’t live it in any way, shape or form.

A week after a racist asshole killed Blacks in Buffalo, a wacked out Hispanic kid in Texas goes into a classroom and kills 21 people, and there’s more to come in a flood of mass shootings. On one level hatred, is hatred, and the individual targets for that hate are just predilections. The problem is mental illness and hate that takes different forms.

Ending on  a positive note, we can rectify the past and history without reparations, revenge and constant debate.

We’ve seen how Native folks are no longer treated with such inaccuracy and prejudice on the cultural level, and, also, in life. Continued rectification is occurring by renaming our military bases that have been honoring, an enemy of America, the Confederacy. We’ve seen sports franchises finally cave in on the use of Native imagery and labeling.

The other profound misuse, that dies’t get any play, but is one of the most obvious and stupid depictions, is Jesus Christ presented as if he’s from Germany, with brown straight hair and blue eyes and very handsome, instead of a native Northern African or the middle east, with a handsomeness that has the appropriate genetic features.

I dislike the word, correctness, however I have devoted my life to accuracy. Weird, in art, to have accuracy as a value, but it’s a fact that backs up what I’m saying here. Do it accurately with great soul and depth, and you won’t worry about cancellation or being shamed for your secular sinning, and, beat the pants off those that think they are always correct. I rectify by being accurate, and not correct, which carries with it, this secular moralizing, but rectification works better.

It’s my opinion or slant that the great Americans are personified by Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, the early Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and, of course, Uncas, the son of Chingachgook, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Satchel Paige, August Wilson, Howlin and Muddy, Curtis Mayfield, Chesley Sullenberger and a whole lot more, one of which, Jimi Hendrix is outstanding. It’s clear, we are a human first, and, in that way, we will be equal, and might accomplish something together, by first recognizing what’s in common and what’s not. By the way, all the above mentioned heroes were men.

And, the best summation I’ve heard so far is Lincoln’s, when he said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This best expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, there is no democracy.”

There’s our self-given, and our god given morality, which both are probably from the same source. The commandments of PC are, Thou shalt not be sexist or racist, and, today, amongst their believers, these offenses are the most grievous, to the point of convictions and punishment.  In the house of corrections.

Like cameras that are pointed at one’s self, instead of the outside world around us, we can’t be part of it, and push assimilation and unity while maintaining our cultural differences and honoring each group’s history, not as an end but a start and means to accomplish something. We are to be condemned for this – assimilation and unity? By folks who just woke, are unbeknownst to themselves, are confused, groggy and out of it, from their limited young positions in life.

Spike Lee repeatedly asked his neighborhood folks to wake up and get a job, like him, in his Do the Right Thing, and it will always begin there. No matter how bad or tragic the situation is, your reaction to it, will determine your place in the world. So you fight. You can burn down the pizzeria, but you still gotta go to work the next day, do it yourself and pull your way out, or, if you stay, it’s all the same. It will always begin with you and that’s the best argument to the call to quit your bitchin, and finding targets because hatred and bull shit is a fact of life.

I have worked every minute that I am awake as long as I remember, and, of course, don’t do a thing unless it’s top-notch, and I’m still where I was fifty years ago on a success or financial gain level, having to always pay my own way for the accumulation of a tremendous amount of worthy work, that’s only headed to the landfill. If that happens, then it would have been better to pleasure myself and strive for comfort, rather than bust my ass, which is what good or great work requires. Pure selflessness, in the selfie era cannot be understood, and, the need to achieve name-status to have the work live on.

Culture is, no doubt, a player, in the formation of people’s minds, and, while more powerful, it’s still not a primary source, like family, environment and experience, and belies the physical evidence beginning with a person’s dna. But culture is more powerful in people’s lives in America, and some, or lot of it, is from culture wars that begin  in the 1980s.

I say that after Mr. Obama was elected president, not just by 13% of the population, but by an extremely broad-base, including millions who would become the most loyal of Trump followers, some things ended, although I am the minority here. Do the Jews lament the fact there has never been “one of their own” in the White House? They activate and have gotten to a place of complete financial and cultural independence, intruded occasionally by the white supremacist gunner, but the envy of all that have been so widely oppressed, particularly, Blacks, who have a special relation to the Jewish experience, at least, on the down side. For us, after Obama was elected twice, by mostly white folks (Blacks comprise 13% of Americans), and, although centered in sports and entertainment, the number of Black billionaires, is growing with LeBron James just added, and, while still a player, unlike Mr. Jordan who gained billionaire status after he left sports. Yeah, sure there’s plenty of racism, less then before, but it don’t matter on this level – it’s always gonna be there because, for some, it’s part of their human nature, and, you can get it on now, in America, with all types of Black-themed and Black genres and sports itself, if you don’t want to be in the exclusively white business worlds. I’ve completely busted my ass every day, my entire life, my work recognized as pretty damn good, yet, after 45 years have gotten nowhere on a success level. So i’m not stickin stuck in the muck, i’m movin on, and do not have much sympathy for folks who are so well-off it ain’t funny – but, want more. I don’t count on anything being fair, and, to some degree, what’s wrong, should be fought. It’s a matter of spending time on something like war, love, compassion, peace, aggression – whether fighting it or promoting it, because, as human nature, it ebbs and flows, but, never goes away.

Speaking of physical evidence, If someone wore blackface, stupidly, as a teen, their shamed horribly. Likewise any sort of sexism at any age in anyone’s past is given enormous weight.  JZ and Fitty Cent have a past that, certainly, and Fittty is pretty open about, that is, selling heavy drugs, the most addicting, to their own poor-ass people. I think Black men do, occasionally, get a glaring pass from both the IP and PC sensitive crowds. Also ask what the more demure, Asians, have to say about this.

Read beween the lines for what’s obvious. When cops pull me over, i put both hands on the steering wheel and kiss their ass, knowing if i run or make any furtive move, i risk injury and death, and that furtive move after resisting will allow the cops to beat the case if charged. Speaking of cops, Mayor Eric Adams, a person drenched and identity politics and commitment to fellow blacks, commented about Black Lives Matter, saying, it’s not just the ones who get shot by police, but what is so obvious and is avoided, is the fact that all Black Lives Matter, including those victims innocently living their lives, who, then, become, tragically, victims of black on black crime.

When all the jerks in society, are finally nailed, and they have no way out, they say forgive me I made bad choices, but not before they riot, get busted and look at some corrections time. Donald Trump is a bad choice too, they confess. After some years of The Leader, all of them have come out, boldly carrying their assault rifles in the state houses during covid and screaming bloody murder in the faces of the State Highway Patrol. While, most others would have been arrested, at least, for disorderly for doing stupid dangerous shit. Culminating in the patriotic orgasm of 1/6, they coagulated, self-identified themselves with their own selfies, and, came out of their racist closets. They have been identified, as a group, a big one, and, man, do they push their politics, just like the PC crowd, as a moral imperative.

What is the PC/IP crowd paying attention to presently? The latest, searched-for, manufactured PC concern is gas stoves, but, at least, it’s something that folks in all classes share. Speaking of the classes, if you’re really broke, you would have to use wood as a fuel to cook your food, and the amount of carcinogens in that wood are through the roof. Remember all the photos of cities in the 20s and 30s that were covered in soot? Can you imagine entire cities filled with homes and apartments that were all heated with boilers with coal, burned hyper-locally in each dwelling? And we have progressed to more micro pollution sources, meanwhile myself and every male member of my neighborhood fought a terminal battle with cancers, particularly the lungs, liver and pancreas. All of which proved fatal where I come from. Well, so much for clever, trending phrases like environmental racism.

Tell me we haven’t changed, as a society, as flipped as a society? Gas stoves are to be banned? On-line gambling, high school sports players can sell themselves? Jim Thorpe, now forgiven, and the Mafia not, but it would really make their head turn if they were around today, also remembering, one of the first uses a political correctness as, we know it today, was put into affect in the 70s by the mafia boss, Joseph Columbo, ironically,  murdered on Columbus Day in front of America’s most important statue commemorating the explorer that was so lost that he thought he had traveled to India. He made the interesting mistake of naming natives, Indians, and, it stuck. Now no one can get a consensus as to what a correct term would be for Native Americans. I may have just said it, but, like abortion, that ain’t up to me, but there is no consensus amongst the victims. That’s secular morality, and, by nature it’s disorganized compared to the religious institutions, because the secular don’t congregate, except at their most important service, their jobs.

The labor scene, particularly since the Trump, years, has changed dramatically. When General Motors closed its Cruze plant in Lordstown, Ohio, it wasn’t at all like previous decades, when large corporations would give 90 days notice, and, like, a lightning strike, shut a plant down, but, never reopen, and, most likely, move to Mexico. Immediately after the Cruz plant closed, it was bought and reopened by an American electric truck manufacturer, Rivian. Later, Foxcom, from China would also come in to the plant and start to build their vehicles. Ironically, compared to past history, General Motors builds their largest battery plant in America, right next-door to their old Cruz gas engine  plant, now converted to electric vehicles, like most GM vehicles will soon be. Thus, one of GM’s last gas combustion car plants, Lordstown, after closure, turned more than completely around. The closure of the Cruz plant, does not fit, at all, into the labor history of the past, so, it’s not tragic. Sad, but with jobs available everywhere, unlike the past downturns then closure, it’s not like the past, that RealStill has been living since 1978, when all this decline in manufacturing began.

To the Woke, here’s one you missed – the television show, Pawn Stars, where, almost all happen to be Black, except the the owner and family, who, guess what, are Jews. Many of their customers, are very often, disrespectful, loudmouth, obnoxious, rude and disgraceful, while most of the white customers are reasonable and friendly, at worst, disgruntled if they don’t get their price. Blacks are kicked out of the store, left and right, and, it’s quite the spectacle, and, completely at the heart of the show’s success. I mean, it’s more real since it’s televisions, jewelry, or, things like stripper poles or some old wine-making apparatus, etc. It’s the biggest down and dirty pawn shop in Detroit, so what do you expect?

It’s because they’re selling products, and, like Lizard Lick Towing, and a variety of Hillbilly shows on cable, confrontation and violence sells, not to mention Hillbillies like seniors are openly discriminated against, and, like Pawn Stars, it’s missed because it’s convenient to do so, and obviously the PC person is, to stereotype them, a service worker, and not blue-collar nor slum, thus, they don’t watch the shows of the lower classes, the folks that are often the target of PC word battles. I can’t watch those shows much, but I will indulge in the Detroit pawn scene, since it’s so close to what I sometimes deal with on a daily basis. But you could never find a show that paints Blacks more as loud-mouth, disrespectful idiots. I don’t care myself, I’m really busy, so I have priorities, but, I can tell you, although, I don’t care, Pawn Stars is right up the PC alley. I guess the Woke missed it simply because they do not watch shows that appeal to low income people or ghetto people, of all stripes who share that, and that’s a lot. Poverty can really define you by its limits, that are usually interpreted by those in higher classes as a defect, character flaw, or some moral defect, but, those who experience, know only one way and that’s to burn that negativity in the furnace of doing, to create the light to see it better.

New York State has led the nation in allowing, not huge corporations, but individuals who were busted for marijuana, to receive weed licenses. And, of course, it’s for the people of color that have been abused by the system, but, it leads me to wonder where history is, in all this. Historically, weed was put on the map in the 1960s by white people, that expanded the industry into smuggling  and, finally, probably some of the best and most sophisticated weed growing in the world. Not that I care, but I got sucked into writing this, and I’m into clarity. Outrageous sentences handed out for possession of tiny amounts of weed, let alone pounds. Five years for a marijuana cigarette? 10 years for a dime bag? In Florida, a pack of rolling papers was a felony, and you would have your right to vote stripped away for the rest of your life if found guilty for carrying around paper with glue. I got busted in Florida, another anti-marijuana state, like Texas, where I was confronted with three marijuana felonies – sale, possession and paraphernalia and it set my life back many years. But not in the IP and PC realm, by nature, identifying with or filtering one group, discounting history and it’s a steep discount, one that I could never put up with. I paid the price, and, I know tons of people busted for weed who are white.

It’s also the factor of people getting more sophisticated and careful with the weed operations, and, a white habit of not dealing in the streets, or, in any way, that upsets people to the extent they would contact the police.

Still, ageism, the obvious and ignored deep prejudice against the country’s old ones, some of whom might have good, solid perspectives on this, isn’t heard, because our nation’s history coincides with the birth of Taylor Swift. In the age of living in your own little world and inexperience, while calling for new blood to immediately replace these living, but, old people. After living over 70 years on earth, I don’t think people really wanna hear this shit.

Historically, take a look at poor nations and societies and see how little culture they produce, since survival transcends everything. There is culture, like blues, and its unique perspective, founded, in poverty, where, nevertheless, a lot of beauty and freedom can be derived from it and what’s called oppression as a sad beautiful reaction. Just like art, and all culture, in order for it to blossom and to produce, requires money, as in the money that buys leisure time, that is to be filled by culture. Look at the distance today’s Black pop music  travelled celebrating success and money, love and all the good things in life. Remembering that it wan’t until; the British woke up America to the treasure it had, and, by doing that the Blues players actually became well-known, historically significant and made good money.

Thus, in this somewhat great country of ours, relatively speaking, there is a combination of tremendous freedom and economic opportunity, creating tons of free time, without which we couldn’t have this broad circus of cultural development, habits and tastes, including the culture of gambling, sports, movies, television, literature, art, and gaming?  In rich countries with values like freedom, like ours, the growth of all aspects of culture in the last 20 years is through the roof, allowing entertainment to mix with news and truth, as one of many things that that has gained power. It allows a lot of cultural development affecting all areas of social interaction, and, the number of billionaires attached to the various entertainment venues is considerable, including Kanye, Beyonce, JZ, LeBron et al., know by their first names or some initials, these are companies based on the performance of one individual alone, who is, at the very least, leasing their names, like Trump, let alone producing anything material that can be bought, like music.

Now people will actually introduce themselves identifying their sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender and profession, perhaps adding, single mom status, political and religious affiliation. In my 70 years, people simply introduced themselves by the first and/or last names. Perhaps, like me, we’re just too plain busy in our activation mode, transcending this weird, bizarre self-flattery, that the woke, are too eager to express, through their myriad of social concerns centered on them, mixed with a lack of experience and a whole lot of cam footage. I enjoy living outside myself, even selflessness, or, especially, all truth, and its documentation, and, not simply dwelling in my “own” culture that I happened to be born into, which, actually, I could care less about. Life and its experience is all I care for. So, I like to call out falsehoods and assholes, including the culture that I was born into, with the same gusto., I use to shoot anything.

The fact is no living thing ever had a choice in their birth, and, the forced choice, only becomes, what to do with a life. Since no one is allowed to choose their name or circumstances, I wonder about so much energy and thought and money being put into ancestry and identity, and, to a great degree, I can’t see what it all means. My ancestry, and my historical identity, I remain mostly unconcerned about, and, as someone born in America, although everyone in my family came from another place, I will explore my heritage as an American. I couldn’t decide which country to be born in, but, now that I’m briefly here, in America in a life of my own that I built, I can say definitively, I’m American, over all other considerations, and, I like it. It’s the most widespread and basic form of unity, really ignited, and, seen, in times of war when countries outside ours attack us, but, until the next war, we gouge at ourselves, often rightfully, then it goes to this absurd point…

Everything’s turned into expression, performance, or both, for advocating social concerns, that, are, at heart, becoming more and more atomized, where, real unity to get things done, fails, and narcissism, the main character trait, of a rich, spoiled, even extreme individuality, always remains protected, encouraged and fueled by our own big freedoms.

Styrofoam cups in fences as art, weird, large false eyelashes, the nude-barely there gowns, on the numerous red carpet showings of self-flattery, only in America, baby. Kanye gathers billions in wealth while forcing executives to watch hard-core porn at their meetings, and, then, going pretty much completely over the edge, functioning as, I guess, you could say, a psychotic, specifically manic depressive.

The biggest liar that has ever existed calls his commentary platform, truth social. Or, check out Paula White who is Trumps spiritual advisor, and, tell me she’s not completely nuts in this contemporary sense, so much of this looks like bad versions of 80s performance art done by extremists on the right wing. Where do we draw the line? Obviously we cannot. But bringing donkeys or boa constrictors as sympathy pets on planes, advocating for a new minority under a flag of civil rights, is individuality and coddling that’s gone too far, at the expense of others.

People who are absolutely 100% genetically white, and identify with being black, now, want their group of people to have the same rights and opportunities available to anyone in America. Only in America, baby. Establish yourself as a group, then get on the road to self interest, just pay your taxes and keep your nose clean, and you can start your own world. Hell, this Scientology thing, after years, finally got their tax-free status and they went crazier than Paula White, would have, if, her man, actually got elected. It’s worth billions. Only in America, baby. They never began as religion, but science, but now recognized as a true religion in the tax-free sense, and, they believe such shit as there are 1 billion souls from outer space living in a volcano on earth. Ron Hubbard, it seems, tied his science to religion to avoid taxes.

This is pre-Q stuff going back to the 1950s making Ron Hubbard an avantegardist of contemporary bullshit conspiracies.

Castro believed she was a “queer, Muslim, multiethnic woman” because that’s what she said she was. 

Life is a hell of a lot more interesting in all of its variety and experience, compared with creating more institutions that talk about things that do not really involve them, and/or limits, to one culture, their interests.

With the extreme rise of performance art as activism and politics, along with more and more education, the replacement of action by words, demonstrations, shows and performances, is through the roof, so much so, I cannot keep up with the cascade of new words and phrases that describe and define the same old thing, again and again, according to the latest areas of self interest. Although “non-binary” was original. The battleground of grammar wars, where pronouns are charged with political points, or “triggers” and, after hearing it for years now, I still don’t really know what it all means, but I’m sure there’s a word, perhaps, that originated with its object of description, that is even more apt than the newer version, but I have better things to do than these name game distractions, even attempting to write about a subject I hate, writing all this bullshit, it’s such a painful block when it comes to better writing, it’s ridiculous. At least, with this broken wrist, I have the excuse that I cannot get out there and truly activate like I normally do.

Unfortunately, if there is nuthin “wrong” or incorrect about my social outlook, and, don’t want to come up with, yet, new words for it, because I don’t need them, it’s just one way that   you’ve alienated folks who might be on your side, if you are in love with your trendiness, and with clever phrases and words, which, again, describe mostly the same old things, with new phrases and words, for the latest generations, and, nothing is really accomplished except self-identity politics, then, relatively speaking, there’s more important things going on. Busting your balls and chops, is the same as saying gaslighting, doxing, shading and the cascade of clever sayings used to describe the same old thing, that, because, it’s human nature and you’ll never truly get rid of it, can become endless, But how much and what priority over other things in life, like, life, itself, should it be given?

Difficult for unity, with all the separating and judging that takes place with PC and IP culture, and, who, wants to unite with an unrealistic boutique critique of the isms inflicting us socially, that, we all have contact with in our lives, and, as such, don’t need to be lectured.

Know justice know peace. How do you get there? Often, life ain’t fair, part of its nature, and, sometimes people get lucky, live long healthy lives, but the more separatist you are, the more you think that whites had everything given to them, even, broke immigrants from Europe, who, they don’t understand, came here with nuthin, climbed their way up, building their neighborhoods and churches, setting the example of the American way. So whattayagonna do? I’m not gonna waste valuable time on what’s not gonna happen, convincing people they are living eighty years ago and beyond, reciting historic prejudiced built into the system, while all around us, are, now, Blacks making it, in spite of it all.

Self-cancelled in 1989 – inclusion, after advocating for it, with my work up until then, for too many years? Include me out. Well, your senses were finally unclogged and possibly a thing was sensed, but, of course, it’s turned into this institutional wokeness, filling quotas, expectations, institutional academics judging, and, correcting in a secular high court that they also teach.

Politics, i equate with self-interested lies or falsehoods. Correctness with simply somebody else telling me what to do, or how to behave, or, even, dare they, what and how to write, shoot or document.

Political? Correctness? Never been my thing, since I get everything from reality the world and life in action. It’s that simple. The political or the correct is layered on that, without compression, and, many find work there. I don’t. Also, I’m not, or ever have been, into any sort of authority figure, religious nor secular, and PC is a secular morality, one for people with no church attendance, atheists, agnostics and nice moral people who aren’t part of the organized religion aspect of that morality.

I don’t reimagine, making up beautiful buzzwords, but just imagine, and, I ain’t no C.O.

Speaking only about the admirable and

greatness of your culture is your business alone, while mine is to speak and show all sides of humanity. I do believe what I see and do not see what I believe, and, it’s that simple.

We’ve been trained to be unoriginal. Declaring that something like appropriation is this big dominant force in art, which, it is, but, so easy, fun and entertaining. Is it overvaluation? Is art as important as the colors of life itself? “Art is long, and, life is short.” As the saying goes.

When the chips are down, there’s no leisure time and entertainment and art, don’t take a backseat, but are locked in the trunk, hidden in the basement, shipped to relatives out of the country. Perhaps, once the Ukrainian Russian conflict is resolved, then, they, too, can get back to what’s important, culture wars, or, with what they have been through, just celebrate life, itself, that I would think be the most important thing to do.

The most popular media platform in the world is YouTube, by far, and guess what is the most watched YouTube video ever, with 12 billion views? Of course, it’s Baby Shark, more proof that entertainment is, by far, the main interest for much of the world, and, also there is a lot of children. Entertainment is also the base, more often than not, for fact and news. YouTube is, by far, the most viewed – double that of Facebook, twitter, et al, and, it’s a good gauge, a magnet for data and information, about  lot of things. Look, in music, what gets the most views. Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing, the Black Key’s Lonely Boy. This is what most folks are paying attention to. They have hundreds of millions of hits, a bit more than Noam Chomsky, or, RealStill, because that’s what the majority of people want. We’re somewhere else, but it’s not the margins, because all types of folks like the pictures, across classes as well as, all the other secondary stuff, but I have no illusions as to my audience which is a niche at best and quite small.

Culture is so powerful that it can overcome DNA. Now there are genetic white people who identify so much with Black culture that they want to be recognized as such, and, be a true minority, a vey tiny one at that. I guess, it’s Clarence Thomas in reverse. Groups and sub-groups I don’t identify much with.

Culture is so powerful that it can overcome not just DNA, but most trends by its sheer volume, going against a more sensible mainstream, perhaps, but, nevertheless, completely convinced of its righteousness.

New York State has led the nation in allowing, not huge corporations, but individuals who are busted for marijuana, to receive weed licenses. And, of course, it’s for the people of color that have been abused by the system, but, it leads me to wonder where history is going and what it’s place is relative to the woke that emerged from IP, and, before that, PC culture. Historically, weed was put on the map in the 1960s by white people. White people expanded the industry and the growing operations, generally speaking, thus, they often suffered outrageous sentences, that were common at the time. Five years for a joint? 10 years for a dime bag? In Florida, a pack of rolling papers was a felony, and you would have your right to vote stripped away for the rest of your life if found guilty for carrying around paper with glue. This is exactly where white folks, the dominant users and sellers in the business, got decimated, then, got smart, after doing their time, making a promise to never let themselves get busted again while selling weed. I got busted in Florida, another anti-marijuana state, like Texas, where I was confronted with three marijuana felonies at the age of nineteen– sale, possession and paraphernalia. In a deal I pled no contest to one felony, because of a great, connected lawyer, but it set my life back many years. You lose the right to vote in this state as well, and, I hadn’t even voted yet because I was so young. I had friends who did time in Viet Nam, as an alternative to domestic incarceration, even told in the Springsteen song, Born in the U.S.A. IP and PC views, by nature, identifying with one group, discount history itself, which is the wholesome view, or, should be. By focusing on the history of one group always, which is not wholesome, but is exceptionally enlightening, about showing people what it means to be Black. Life, that’s just the way it is. Would you know if you haven’t lived it? Being attracted to a beacon of truth, or going to the source for what’s important, is not trending, instead, forgotten, in the world where disruption, destruction and reinvention as an economic strategy, a philosophy and a real money maker. Disruption became a value. It’s simply a prelude to the flip. It benefits the flipper. When real estate (Williamsburg), finance (crypto) or PC and IP groups begin the flip on some cultural or historic event, count me out.

As more sates legalize, maybe we can finally move away from spending $10 billion annually for law enforcement concerning weed and usually around 847,000 people arrested each year for weed offenses, which, if you combined all the crimes that people are arrested for every year, weed would be, by far, the number one criminal offense. Like so much other big stuff, some filter it through their own identity concerns, resulting impartial truth. But the rest of the world considers us liberal, if not evil, and they haven’t evolved as much, but these countries are like we were before reform after years of crime and punishment, for real.

Mrs. Greiner was given a lot of attention in her tragic dilemma. Our government put a package together where they trade a true scumbag, who, through his sales of firearms, was told that it would kill Americans, exchanged, for a weed offender that, today, in America, we wouldn’t bat an eye at. It’s terrible that Miss Greiner was sentenced to nine years at a Russian penal colony for THC. At the same time, although she says it was a matter of forgetting, to bring THC into a backward regressive country that you are quite familiar with, because of the years playing basketball there, it’s just plain stupid. I know, because I have done many stupid things, that only hurt myself. Either way, through the forgetting or conscious stupidity, it’s still wrong, only as a truly bad move, in a time of war with Ukraine, to chance it. It was a great deal for Mrs. Greiner who, happens to be gay and Black, for all those, that these qualifiers have meaning for, proving that, while racism still, and, probably will, always exist, there are large segments of society that are willing to go to bat, for people and the “who don’t look like me” crowd in a very big way.

Don’t forget about all the fellow Americans that were incarcerated for extremely long sentences that did not reflect the extremely small quantity of cannabis they were caught with, when the weed was illegal. Whites put weed on the map, built the industry, and suffered the most and harshest sentences when the industry took off in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Before the people of color era, there was another long era of cultural upheaval, that was largely brought on by white and Black folks, but in union, and with a lot of other folks during the 1960s.

One second after, Demerius Hamlin had heart failure, the outpouring of love and sympathy was ridiculous and through the roof, and, also marked by a refreshing lack of identity politics and political correctness when people, from all walks of life, reacted with complete sympathy, overlooking absolutely everything that is trending today as far as differences or categories are concerned, going to the heart of the matter. And, now, they say, he’s going to play football again. There’s power in unity in a democracy.

But we probably won’t unite again until an outside aggressor attacks us brutally.

Braddock’s population dropped from 20,000 to 1700 and truly became an American shit-hole of a town, and, with regards to mill towns, I shot them all, over my life, and lived there. Some mill towns don’t lose their citizens, after the mill closes because, besides the pollution, it’s a good place and town, they are from, and love, while others, so polluted and sealed in by industry, gets so abandoned because, once you started working at the steel mill and are earning good money in the 1950s, onward, you got the hell out of there, which cars and freeways made real easy.  Gary Indiana and Braddock Pennsylvania are prime examples of this, where the people work at the mill, and, could easily afford to get the hell out, did. This was true also in the cities that had major steel mills like Chicago, Cleveland or Pittsburgh, when the first one or two generations lived around the mill and, as wages increased over time, did what came natural, get the hell out for a better quieter less polluted place. At the same time, there are many mill towns where the people never left, like Weirton, Steubenville and Mingo Junction, all are surrounded by homes a bit further out, from the center of town, that are really nice and filled with ex-steelworkers, and the ones that still work at what’s left of Weirton Steel, the tin mill. And, after going through the entire birth and death cycle of the mill, new companies are taking over the land that where the mill was, including a 750 million dollar battery plant that should employ 750 people. But, make no mistake about it when union steel workers get a job, after World War II, generally, they get the hell out of being in close proximity to the mill, in Weirton, to the Heights on the sides of the Valley and beyond. There is no doubt that the arrival of large new industries in West Virginia, are partly the result of a large stable labor pool of eager experienced workers loving a chance to stay in their town with a good job. In Braddock’s case the heights, like Rankin, ain’t that much better than devastated Braddock. But simply move a couple miles away from the mill and up in the higher Heights, or hills, and it’s nice. A few other towns remain completely hemmed in by either geography ghetto or industry that, the only way out is to leapfrog completely out of the valley, or, move to the big city, which is always close by. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo or Chicago, all of which, offer a variety of neighborhoods in a variety of circumstances, that you get to choose, and, they are all historic centers where steel mills played an enormous part in their cities’ origins. Cleveland, still has a large integrated steel mill within the city itself. The last big town or city to retain giant basic steel, where it’s made from scratch with iron ore, coal and limestone under very high heat to become iron, later refined by another furnace into steel.

The evidence is all around us. Is it trending? Is there a strong built-up algorithm, on stuff that gets very little hits/attention, and, have you mistaken clicks for action, or, attention, for truth? The toxic spill in East Palestine almost got swept under the rug, like it always does in Ohio and Pennsylvania which are big railroad states.      

East Palestine? Did I first check their skin color, after the train derailed? Like most I care about one thing, there are humans in danger of getting cancer from toxins, like what happened to me, living in the most polluted neighborhood in NYC. It was going to be the typical dumping on a certain class of citizen, until it became politicized, and flipped into an historical event, with over the top attention, with people normally forgotten historically due simply to class.

If you were to look at a racial angle to the story, there is one. The town is largely white. That’s also why Trump went there, and, by that time everything had been politicized to oblivion. Also, reminding us the reaction to PC is not critiques like this, but in the reactionary response by the right whites, who are rallying around their own Identity Politics, and, at the same time, prove that unrealized and unlived concepts on the left or right, are castles in the sky that anyone can set up shop in, no matter their politics. We are dealing with concepts tied to desires, that are free-floating, and, anyone, after learning the lingo, can use for their own ends.

Environmental racism? That buzzword sounds like it really has substance and it has a nice tone to it, and it fits nicely into being woke, but, unfortunately, it’s fragmentary, subjective and in general, not truthful. East Palenstine, that was headed to being ignored, as usual, then, “saved” mostly by people using their disaster for politics. Furthermore, in my documentation of every steel mill town and city in America, with the exception of Granite City, found out that, in fact, that three towns were majority, “people of color” and I’m still not sure I know the meaning of that very popular saying, because it’s all shades if your eyes are wide open and you absorb it all, in both specific and general terms. Places where many lived while the mill was operating, still have many that continue to live there, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Weirton, West Virginia, the south side of Chicago, Steubenville, Ohio, Sharon, PA and even in Youngstown, where a French company is running a large mill where Youngstown Sheet & Tube’s Briar Hill Works once stood. Gary, Braddock and East Chicago, became shit holes. No doubt, good people still lived there who didn’t get out, but let’s not enlarge their possible dilemma or decisions into a generalizations that falls flat on its face once critical thought meets reality.

The people of Weirton and Steubenville stayed and kept the place up, as the mill was torn out of its heart, and, now industries are moving on to the cleared steel mill property, such as the huge battery plant set to employ 750, making a new iron-alloy battery that stores power much longer in Weirton, who looked at the horrific tearing down of their mill, as an opportunity to clear the land in order to lure more plants, not to mention there was no choice in the matter, but hoping the economy would turn around back to manufacturing in places not known for their university and research centers. Even Mingo, that had installed a state of the art electric furnace, just before its closure, has that furnace running again, owned by an Indian company. Across the river in Follansbee, Cleveland Cliffs, shut their coke plant, but the site is highly sought after because, all these clusters of mills, have tremendous transportation links, most importantly, the Ohio River. Further north Warren lost its huge mill, and, has, unfortunately become blighted, remembering the huge steel mill that closed was only the last one in town to shutdown, along with a massive auto parts industry, light bulb manufacturing and much more. It has a demographic, that reflect more of a big city, but it’s still largely, if you’re interested in talking about color, white.

If you go further into the true west, where Blacks are almost non-existent, there are countless toxic waste sites, and towns built on the old black arts of industry, and, if ya wanna talk that color talk, it’s all all white. Butte is a superfund site. The mining companies eventually dug a pit, taking out neighborhoods, even a hunk of downtown, in a very toxic industry, where neighbors, still today, coagulate around the mine head frames, and no one complains. It’s called jobs, the mine, and the fact, that’s what made Butte.

Finally, with regards to the nice-sounding, accusations of “environmental racism” my tendency is to unite not separate in order to accomplish our goals. To these trending labels, as a reaction, i mention, Love Canal, and, most importantly, Times Beach, where the place was entirely abandoned.

Hollywood versions of “inclusiveness” are just that. Little Feather showed it’s still a subjective feast, a show, another Hollywood version of natives, even in protest, because she was virtually, Indian, meaning, in reality, as proved by science, she was Spanish. Demonstrating the power of culture, over what’s true, real and scientifically proven. The power of culture can be overwhelming, it’s really something, and, always works both ways whether it be the culture of MAGA or Wokeness, your dna might be majority white, but you could be raised as Black. Likewise your dna might be all white, and, you identify with Bucks so much, that you self-declare your identity as Black.That’s no different than what the Italians, who, if they marry Irish, will have children that identify with Italian culture. That’s the way it is sometimes. The point being culture can overwhelm all consideration, sometimes, including the scientifically proven truth, depending on your environment.

These are Re-Times – rehab, redevelop, repurpose and reinvent, essentially saying the same old thing in a newer version complete with its own buzzword. To flip something, and to disrupt aids only the flipper. The flip, quick, easy and profitable, the new philosophy. In art, it’s the newer faster version of appropriation, a dominant form of contemporary art, I’m told, now superseded, by changes from the digital age, making, flipping, even easier than appropriation, particularly where every copy can function like an original, unless, of course, you limit their production.

I’ll have to recuse myself, due to possessing the inside truth about what ever I write about or and/or shoot.

Latina, Latin X, gaslighting, doxing, shading, arguments about “pronouns” and I’m confused for a good reason since I cannot locate any of those ideas in reality, but only inside a certain person’s head, and the cultivation of the individual is so pronounced now, I don’t wanna go inside anyone’s head, with all the visual and sonic garbage they have consumed and ere carrying around in their heads. What a fool believes, he sees, is the saying, and it holds for everything, especially the vocabulary of wokeness. Once you align your perception of reality with that of reality then words, are simply, words, still subservient to things, or, should be.

A more apt example for environmental racism would be the building of prisons in brown fields and toxic waste sites instead of in neighborhoods or downtown areas, where they are unwanted. The Rust Belt is, by far, the leader in this real estate practice. Think about it. human beings, no matter who they are, consciously housed in an area that will cause cancer to both black and white, all mostly poor, some dumb. Camp LeJeune is the latest in the long line of deadly places – Love Canal, Libbey Montana, landscapers exposed to Roundup, I view as people, not their group identity. The Rust belt cities and towns need to use their brownfields, only under pressure from neighborhood activists and developers, rather than cap them, open them up as clean space, and let bygones be bygones. Obviously, way out in rural areas is probably your best safest bet.

Obama, from the get-go, has been against the woke thing. It’s called age and experience and it’s a shame you can’t extrapolate things without having those two qualities. Nevertheless both the baby, Musk, and, the man, Obama decry wokeness. Can you understand the huge, serious differences in perspectives, brought on by the social, environmental and intellectual world, they were raised in, their life experiences? And this is precisely what so many people have a problem with, that everybody’s different, and, some have genetic difference built into them, and, we call them biracial. I would remind you that a marriage between an Italian and an Irish could be called the same. Just kidding, while talking about something with no sense of humor.

Recreational marijuana licenses are given as a priority to the “people of color” who got busted for weed in the past. But, of course, the past is the last twenty-five years. If you look at the history of the marijuana industry, and want to get all racial, it was largely created by white men. As the industry began to get off the ground in the 1960s, when drug laws were really extreme, many went to prison a long time for small amounts of weed, people like John Sinclair of the White Panther party, or, many people in Texas, or, other southern states, where five years for a joint was common, and lose their right to vote, for life, for instance, in Florida, where possession of rolling papers carried a one to three year sentence and was a felony. Busted, in Florida, in 1971, I got hit with three felonies, all weed related, including one count of possession of rolling papers. The small sheets of paper with the glue on them carry a 1 to 3 years hard time sentence at Raiford, the state prison, and, you get your voting rights taken away for the rest of your life.

The age old problem and it’s the gulf between knowing by experience, certainty, blood, sweat and tears and, knowing without that. Thus, know justice, know peace, becomes a truer version.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s the Black Panthers had no problem at all with the White Panthers. Back then, even extremists, were into unity, and some joined together with like-minded, regardless of race. Did the Panthers accuse Sinclair and his panthers of cultural appropriation? This was particularly striking in Ann Arbor, where, in the packed Chrysler Arena, musicians, poets and activists like Allen Ginsberg and Bobby Seals, all got together to help John Sinclair who was in prison for two joints, serving two and half years, because he was a political activist. The non-stop, day and night spectacle in the auditorium was one of music and culture in support of a White Panther by many, including the founding Black Panthers, poets, writers and well-known musicians of the time. It was also a kind of incoherent mess, as bands would play one to three songs, then, a radical activist would speak, and on into the night, until John Lennon and Yoko, closed the show along with Ginsberg and all the

Coincidentally, since we weren’t going to Ann Arbor just for the show, although it was very important, we almost missed it, because we got held by the police, questioned by detectives, over a weed deal in our motel room, in which the dealer split with the dough, leaving only one pound, with us in chase. We got out of a conspiracy charge, by being driven to the bus station and signing something about never returning to Ann Arbor again. I wonder, if we were known political activists, if we would have been living in Michigan for a long time.

We waited there awhile, went out a back door, and got to attend the show. Later, when we opened up the brick of weed, it had one ounce industrial nuts buried inside. The moral of the story? In 1971, if you’re gonna get busted for weed, do it in Michigan, if you’re not an activist or a leftie, but never get busted in Florida or Texas, along with about twenty other states, no matter who or what you are.

Cultural appropriation isn’t one thing. It can show respect, be a homage or be a complete rip-off, and, in the art world, ironically, it’s actually considered a movement and strategy, peculiar to the 20th and 21st centuries, like Impressionism, or realism, was in the past. There’s a fine line between correctness in stealing and just, plain stealing. Artists always appropriate appropriately? I wouldn’t let an artist decide anything consequential to society. Let them stay in their own world.

I’m angry, too, about unfairness. That’s what we share. The sting, of which, is, ultimately, the same. So why divide so much?

The source of Kyrie Irving’s immaturity problem is narcissism. To be that into yourself, that you would do this, not out in Utah, but in the Jewish American heartland of Brooklyn, where, huge Jewish neighborhoods abound. In the heartland of Jewish culture, recommending the ideology of the Black Jews, while working in an arena, very close to many Jewish neighborhoods, in fact, huge Jewish neighborhoods, for an owner who is Jewish, in a league, where the president of the NBA is Jewish, while raking in 100 million in salary and endorsements per year, is the outer limits of ego, and it’s comrade, narcissism. Further proven when you don’t take anything else into consideration, except you’re right to pontificate. All the egoists, forget, that, while, they have big numbers of fans, the apathetic, who never even heard of them, or those consciously opposed to their bull shit, outnumber the fans so much, it’s ridiculous. The trade out of Brooklyn proved his apology was fake, and, about the money and winning a championship his way.

As a side note, check the modern characters, mistaking their lack of experience and narcissism as righteous thorns – Irving, Musk, West, et al, giving new meaning to the rich and privileged, and, living in your own world.

Nevertheless, many billionaires, particularly in culture, sports and entertainment, are black, complicating identity politics or political correctness with plain truth. Plain truth turns everything relative, and to be relative, there’s no ego or narcissism, by virtue of the fact, you’re taking everything into consideration.

If, in these times, I have no interest in the movie, Black Panther, it’s because I have no interest in any of these special effects over-the-top comic book movies. I’m a realist.

As far as any and all stereotypes are concerned, experience makes true sense by virtue of the fact that it makes words relative to reality.

Queer was, at one time, an insult, as was the n-word, to some degree, in the Black world. Both hijack a stereotype with an in-your-face flip. But, I don’t know – playing stupid, being ironic, is as close you can get to actually being stupid or ironic.

Columbus was discovered in America on October 12, 1492, by Natives, and the poor guy was lost and thought he was close to India in the Pacific Ocean. He mistakenly referred to the Natives as Indians, and, man, did that name stick. Like I said, anything the Native Americans want, as far as their correct terminology is concerned, about them, in their culture, I’m ready to obey. But, until that day, I’m OK with Indians, in fact, I kind of like it.

No doubt, there’s a lot of racism out there, but, nevertheless, someone like Kanye West can accumulate billions of dollars of worth, publicly, expressing himself, the same way any social, normal functioning psychotic would in America. Today, billionaires, if they get locked out of social media, just create their own or buy somebody else’s platform and run it. With the likes of Musk and West, it’s sort of having a child as the CEO whose comments both embarrass and painfully enlighten. West came close to this with his “slave mentality” comments, that spurred a small Kanye Was Right movement that abruptly ended with Mr. West’s decision to double down on the already flipped and exaggerated, in a month of blabbering and economic self-destruction.

Human beings, perhaps, the most ultra-aware of all living things, can contemplate, even their own demise, in any way they want, whether it be in apocalyptic religious messages or entertainment.

Numerous Black billionaires and an elected Black president might reflect a bit of what Chief Justice O’Day said back when affirmative action got going. She said that, perhaps, in twenty-five years, this will bring about the lack of need for these judgements. And the day is coming, has it not with the Supreme Court after Trump?

For myself, not by way of the Supreme Court, but the election of Barack Obama, and his two terms. Although one will always have to fight racism, the same way myself, or anyone else, has to fight their brand of unfairness that is imparted by brute human nature, the same way crime is fought in a never-ending approach. For myself, the day has happened, because of my position in relationship to what I’m talking about, working for 50 years nonstop, getting nowhere. What, or who, is to blame? And, what good will that do my mission if I dwell too long there, even if it’s in the house of miserable truth? After documentation of unfairness, what’s left? For myself it’s a constant transcendence, and, I just couldn’t stand doing the same thing over and over, or having an innate partial view of the big, bad beautiful world, that I would prefer to dive in to and participate in, so, at least, I would know what I’m talking about.

I have said, after Obama my view changed some what. I don’t want to look at my own life, but when I do, what’s my excuse? I work my ass off every single day my entire life, and, I’ve had enough evaluate it, and, most agree to the work’s degree of competence, it’s worth of recognition amongst the billions of photos shot every year. I ended up far from that, so embarrassed by the art and entertainment world, I simply went back home to my neighborhood and became even more hyper-local, as in, reclusive to art and entertainment. It protected my production. To appropriate blood work, original, simply on that level, is disrespectful as hell. Appropriation, copping something, for your ends, usually by a flip, is is so 1960s. The urinal on a wall was over one hundred years ago. Reinvention, whether in culture, real estate or finance, wrings more use and money from the same old thing. It’s the “art of the deal.”

Growing up we had our conflicts with groups. There were the Italians, although we went to the same high school, grew up in the same time and age, we found our differences. I’m sure you’ll agree that, if I don’t particularly like, let’s say, soul food, as far as taste is concerned, it’s simply just that – taste. Speaking of taste, I ended up eating a lot of Italian food, but also, Thai, which always had a small pre-gentrification presence in the neighborhood that I was kicked out of due to art-fueled gentrification. Yeah, the Italians had a thing about food and eating, beyond satiation and nutrition, reaching into social life like no other culture. That certainly did away with any lingering teen-age problems with Italians.

My pictures absolutely reflect the demographics of any place that I’m shooting, but unconsciously, because of what I see, not what I believe in, that’s life, and, all its variations, largely unfiltered. I never say anything first, but after the fact. First it’s to be celebrated and experienced, finding unity over divisions, and, that’s my business, just as identity politics and political correctness has become some folks’ business, like anything else in business-minded America. I like life, and have been loyal to that, above it all.

I realize, too well, that people have choices and not living in the mix, staying with folks that, at least, look the same, might be your thing, career or main concern, or, just what you prefer and like, and, notice, both Black and white share this. Is there a fine line between preference and prejudice, or is it subjective taste, not politics, or both in varying degrees? Being in the mix, clears that up, as far as intentions are concerned, and understanding things in context.

I don’t shoot black and/or white or whatever, even when I shoot the Bronx, my home. I just shoot the Bronx. Did you think I was talking about my film? I only shoot color.

Sure, it’s a country where, with all these people who are different living together, has a lot of racism, but, it’s also a country that has tremendous amounts of freedom and, individuals can do whatever the hell they please, including going on Alex Jones dressed like an insect, your face and head covered by a zippered black fabric, and extol the virtues of Hitler, accompanied by a white supremacist. A man such as West can accumulate $2 billion worth of wealth in a period of 10 years, and lose most of it because of his mouth, in two months. As Don King would say, “only in America, baby, only in America.”

Embarrassing, this is the only time I could mutter a lot of words in this essay, such as, doxing, shading or gaslighting, the new ways of saying the same old thing, translated to getting your balls busted, or your chops. Pronouns? Non-binary, Latina, Latino, Latin X, so linguistic, complex and trending. Along with doxing, gaslighting, I don’t think I even know what Manscaping is, and, I don’t want to know. I’m still working on the metasexual things, from years ago. I had to look up all these words because, where I come from, nobody uses them. Thankfully I will walk away from them and never use them again. They’re useless where I’m from.

I don’t wanna be grandfathered into this mess, as if the woke, would even consider that, rather then to send me to their Corrections Department, no doubt, as a political prisoner standing, not for personal truth, or that of ancestry, but for universal shared truth, to begin with, and, for the truth of things – guilty.

I don’t see what I believe, and, when I see, what I see, is human, both variations and shared similarities, with no filter. Political correctness and identity politics are cultural. I’m not after culture, but life, that I produce culture from, and can temper it at the same time.

Sununu, try stereotyping his ancestry. These PC models, break down in the larger real world.

“Identifies as non-binary and used pronouns, them and they.” Keep me posted on the latest hybrid pop entertainer’s life, of the self. It’s really important.

Intellectually it’s bizarre, but, from the perspective of actually living out, and then producing ideas post facto, this is no good. It’s morality mixed with self-flattery and that lack of experience and history, evaporates upon maturity, a.k.a., experience, when one earns the ability to compare and evaluate to actually being in the mix over a long time, or, something drastic happens and you reset your priorities.

When I started this miserable task about PC nonsense, years ago, due to my mental block with ridiculous material, that nonsense I was writing about morphed into wokeness. Years ago, when the notion of the woke first came out, Barack Obama clearly and definitively was not into it at all. I agree.

I mentioned a few times throughout this piece, the first time I heard about any sort of political correctness was when Joseph Colombo started his Italian American civil rights organization. But, the first time I got it personally was years later in the late 70s. I was becoming a filmmaker and, was trying to learn, and, put together my first works. Up until this time I was strictly blue collar for many years, and, I finally got around to doing what I always intended to do. Of course, I was naïve, particularly when it came to the fact that it wasn’t really like any other business, and, you never knew what to expect, relative to the world you know.

When I was attacked viciously, based on gossip, in a large social/business setting as if if it was part of the business at hand – filmmaking – insinuating, I was racist, amongst other things. The whole story is another article, but it was enough to make me quit what I was doing – fulfilling the dream of a lifetime – for almost one year, in deep humiliation, but mostly bewilderment as to what had occurred. Clearly, it was gossip, without context, but, I guess that’s the definition of a word and way of doing things completely foreign to the directness of nuthin but reality. Was this the world of art and entertainment? It was, and, over a period fifteen years it never ceased and, eventually, I couldn’t stomach it. Intellectual bullies, their goal might not be to cancel, but they can have the same affect. People declaring themselves Marxists, with no knowledge, understanding or respect for the working-class way of seeing and doing things, are dangerous to us. As proof, and, the story of my life, we would eventually work together and hang out, vindicated, I guess, as always, by just seeing things for what they really are. I’m not like that anymore, in the sense, that once I sense stinging untruth directed at me? I’m out and done, permanently.

Without thinking about it, from the get-go, every place I shoot, the exact demographic is represented. It’s not consciously done, and, that’s part of the point of this. Do it, live, for its sake, and, by doing so, add emotion and physical contact to fact, truth and history, come out of it with an undisputed relic, remembrance and a document. The camera wants contact, the type of which is up to the operator. Self-contact grows, so much, that selfie-related deaths, that, more or less, began around 2011, with drownings, falls, fires and transport-related deaths being the leading reasons, are on the rise drastically. What a way to go, getting too close to the edge for the selfie shot, not the greater good.

Something else out of the same generation, the stabbing death of a Columbia student in Morningside Park, had so much, tragically, to say, about so much, on the flip side of selfie deaths from her generation, and a truly sad event.

Wiki, respectfully neglected to say that she was simply copping a small quantity of weed, and it shows what’s wrong with the stupid ass THC laws, of the recent past, that folks have to wander into this type of situation in order to get their bud, when, today, it’s simply a matter of going to the weed store.

Another Columbia student, who, with her life, proved, weed laws are ridiculous. It’s too complex to say that “people of color” should get first dibs on opening a legal weed store. But I’m not complain’ as I have some better things to do. It’s no big deal to me, but to divide weed busts by color goes against my hard-core experiences. Something’s wrong, and, it’s the usual – race coloring desire. This has nothing to do with that you lady’s murder, but my own experience, getting burned as bad as anyone else in the drug wars, and seeing all this.

You’re simplifying a complex situation, getting more complex, because it’s no longer just Black and white. Biracial folks might identify with both. Our vice-president is Asian and Black, Mr. Obama is African and European. On the other side of things, the Memphis cops that murdered Tyre were all Black. Kanye, Kyrie, Diamond and Silk defy stereotypes. America, it’s not very socialist. In fact, it’s not a socialist country at all. The individual, protected by freedoms, unheard of, in most countries, and non-existent 300 years ago, is the embodiment of the independence and enterprise promoted here.

The wealth, the freedoms and the emphasis of the individual has resulted in a hyper-cultivation of individuality, so much so, we cannot agree about hardly anything anymore, with so many living in their own world. Only an unfair war against us, might do it, like the three weeks we were united after 9/11.

Diamond and Silk. Try to stereotype that. When Silk died her sister, of course, declared a state of conspiracy, instead of the obvious fact, that her sister died of morbid obesity and the problems associated with that, for instance, high blood pressure. Yeah, Diamond and Silk were tremendously weird and appalling, i guess some people like that, and, it’s simply called human nature, that PC, IP, and now woke perspectives, will never overcome wholly, and, lie all human nature, it’s in us all.

The Jesse Smollet Liars’ Hall of Fame is eclipsed by the George Santos Foundation, and it never ends. Stereotype those two.

TOO INDIVIDUAL

I’m finally getting around to talking about what’s been going on for a very long time. More and more, particularly after the pandemic, spend most of their time by themselves, and their devices. Think about it, with the Internet these devices eliminate the human contact of shopping, etc. This is simply living in your own world, and I talk about it all the time, and for many years, it only gets worse.  Two generations have grown up entirely with these devices, and, it really shows. Two generations have grown up entirely with these devices, and, it really shows. Drug and alcohol consumption are falling, and, so is, sex, and, it’s not because of morality, but time spent alone with devices. I wonder if the A.I. companies are factoring that in?

And people comment on things only seen on a screen, and this site is so anti-screen it’s ridiculous, putting clarity first.

Your authentic truth, if it isn’t helping other people, or, says something untruthful about the world I know, I cannot care that much about. Yet you force it.

I never got any actual success throughout my entire life, even though I’m constantly being told that in America, it’s the type of country where perseverance will definitely pay off. This was completely at the center of Mr. Obama’s first election, the man who has been against woke culture from the get-go, but was selling a lot o hope back then. As it is with many successful people, right? But not with the failures, who don’t speak of a perseverance they live every day until they die. I’ve also been told that white people get whatever they want, like a job in fast food.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/31/madison-russo-19-charged-in-gofundme-cancer-scam/

I’m into character, not physical characteristics. Reality, not new buzzwords that describe the same old thing, nor, creating more and more micro-groups, that wave the flag of civil rights, like people who are white genetically, but identify as Black, to name the formalizing of one recent trending phenomenon.

I never thought about my race or race at all, when I moved into any neighborhood. I move there because it is what I can afford, and, if I can’t afford much, then the places I can move to are limited and, of course, are not desirable, but, in fact, the least desirable sections of the city. Too many talk as if Socialism is our standard already, then compare everything to it. We are still solidly capitalistic, in a country that gives citizens the rights to try to change the economic system into socialism or whatever they want. But, it’s not here yet, thus, the standards that we are not living up to, do not exist.

There are many poor blacks, but there are too many Black successes and billionaires today to deny progress has been made. Jim Thorpe got his medals stripped for briefly paying baseball, but because he was broke with a family, like he always was. Twenty years after this death, he gets his medals back. This was a man who hustled and did what he had to do, acting in many movies, half of which were Indian stereotypes, he always took care of his family back home, and his dogs.

I speak of urban neighborhoods, but, when I was younger I lived in a mobile home with two other friends in the true West. We worked together at a pre-cast concrete plant making septic tanks or large sewers. The mobile home was cheap, close to work, and, had a huge egg farm next door. We ate a lot of eggs. All you had to do was remember to wear your shoes in the shower, otherwise you would be electrocuted, something to do with bad electrical grounding.

Americans go nuts over globalists, even though it was the first all-out globalist nation in the sense that huge swaths of every nationality and religions are represented. America traded internationally from the start, it was already being exploited for 175 years, with established trade all over the world, before becoming a country.

Why the hell did I get involved with this mess, writing this, and turn the clock back on everything that I have overcome by connecting with place over time, and, documenting it, putting it on this site, as my last will and testament. And now I, willfully, have stepped into this mess to add my two cents, instead of ignoring it, and giving me more time to create possible better and more works, writing my will or, at least,Writing something more important than this.

Empathy, itself, during these times, is radical. Everyone hypes in these times, particularly those who wanna culture war. Tracy Chapman played for 1988, and, today, she’s out, the present glam-pop mainstream, on steroids, much over the top, all of it entrenched in PC, is all the rage.

Exaggerating to make a point, The House on Politically Incorrect Activities has been updated to cancelling instead of blacklisting, it’s still public, but quicker.

With J. Pinkett and G. Paltrow, who spew, very publicly, topics like their own vaginal rejuvenation experiences, if folks don’t want to look, isn’t that a matter of taste, experience and morals associated with a country of highly cultivated individuality? You want all to agree and get on your bandwagon? In a country where everyone gets to be their own dictator?

The reaction to Biden is clear, good or bad, all say he’s too old. But to say that, by people who wouldn’t say, “You’re too gay, too Black” or “anything” says a lot about the clear prejudice America has for its old people, and, to be honest, since 2022, i think, he is too old, but it’s a shame, as usual the Democrats have no strong opponent to Trump, with the exception of Obama.

For the ism-obsessed, you forgot ageism, and, I try not to notice it, being so busy, but it’s as real as any other pet prejudices, maybe because when you’re old priorities really takes shape, and the lesser or more naive or stupid stuff looks just like that, and every second counts. Who needs the distraction? It’s only entertainment. But I had to live through the art and entertainment crowd taking over my beloved neighborhood, with their philosophy of disruption, ruining my life as my family died and was illegally forced out after a ten year struggle to hold on to my home, where I have lived the longest with an ironclad contract to stay there as long as I wanted. I saw the hipsters, with their parents’ money, and how they acted. These are the highly liberal educated, all of them PC as hell, yet they destroyed the lives of the best hard-working people in New York, in Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

A certain percentage of each group in the the world’s mosaic of nationalities is going to be an asshole. Who knows, it may be equal in percentages across all nationalities and religions. The percentage is much higher amongst the PC, like, woke asses, who destroyed my hood. Or, you could look at the entire population as a whole, and, deduct the percentage of people who are complete assholes. Anyway you look at it, anyway you cut it, it’s just a fact. Prejudice, unfairness and all the things that are negative, but we can’t get rid of, because they’re integrated in part of daily life, can only be fought, but I don’t know if it ever can be controlled. It’s a situation that I want to recognize, but not to become obsessed by it or angered by it, because it’s all transcended by life, and, when life is short, it’s got be lived.

And, we all got anger for what’s been done.

Isn’t it, people of no color when everything is black and white. And, seeing things in black and white, isn’t that an orthodox secular moralism? And isn’t seein things in full color more real than just black and white?

If I am an artist, it’s a source artist, and the only race that I belong to is the human race.

The call to wake up I throw back to the supposed woke, and see where you fit in relation to reality and the world.

In the deep secular, constitutional morality that dominates the IP and PC philosophy, I’ll never be home, the same way, I don’t make my home anywhere, but truth, and in anything authentic, and not another simulacra. That doesn’t mean I don’t back much of what you say, it’s not my thing, which is the source of all things, sort of like the sun. When i say, truth, it’s simple in the sense that you try to sense it all, and not limit your view and experience, but, most importantly there are no filters, maybe a polarizer to reduce reflection, so much, that to put a filter of color before the world, avoiding further conflict, the best i can say, it’s not my thing, to clog any of my senses, obviously, to see things as they are without denying history, but beautifully incorporating it.

It’s human nature. A portion of the of population reacts to, let’s say BLM, and you get the rise of, literally, white identity politics, the Great Replacement et al. It’s important to always act and never react. It might also be important, knowing this, to question the wisdom of stirring the pot for it’s own sake, to see what happens.

While you’re busy demonstrating your identity as a first value, while fighting all the world’s isms, you spout one about, what might be considered a prejudice equal to all your beefs, and this is right out in the open. Considering the prejudice is aimed a huge segment of the population, one that should be revered, makes discrimination based on age, as in, older, a ridiculous, ignored, but widespread view of American society. I know it. When you get old, you ain’t shit to this world, more and more. The wisdom part? I just said, you ain’t shit to the world.

Speaking of longevity, and fact, ask Dusty, with the longest and purest dna of any person or Indian, in America, if that’s your interest. He had an unusually pure lineage to his tribe going back 55 generations, and still, his dna also was made up of 17% of other ethnicities, including European. Like us all. Think and examine the message of his coded dna, the physical basis that links us all, regardless of culture, which, it turns out, culture is one of the most powerful forces in life. Identity, protected by the correction officials, one of the highest, if not the highest of secular morality’s human-made standards, mostly cultural.

No living thing ever had anything to do with their birth. It could have been intentional, random, accidental or forced, but not one of us had a choice in what would be our race, ethnicity, religion, level of talents and pitfalls. That doesn’t let us off the hook. It means that what is entirely up to us, and, what we are responsible for, if we choose, is, what we do and how we spend our time, between birth and death. Nevertheless not one living thing had a choice in their genetic traits or specific cultural scene thay are born into. Today so many people spend their lives buried in examine, documenting, exploring and cherishing their particular past history. Ancestry, not my thing, but character is. So many metrics concerning race, gender and religion that Americans are put through, while other metrics are beginning to take shape.

Anyways, talk to Dusty from Heart Butte, Montana about all this, and, leave me alone.

AFTERWORD

Reactionary politics now reign supreme like they never have before, and there’s the best reason – division and polarization that, when you boil things down are two sides, who cannot compromise, in these times. Never react only act means i won’t vote, but continue acting, as done here on this site and out there in the streets. The present circus of only reaction, can be laid at the feet of the Leader, DT, the walking, talking, non-stop Prince of Chaos.

Always act, never react, and, see clearly without filters, is still the way to go, especially now, in the most reactive, hyperbolic, ridiculous time dominated by disruption, reinvention, but never truth which indicates a source, an end, we all could, then see, for our selves. Everything else is distortion, power and lies. Capish?

Proving, right now, how reactionary it is, I still can’t shut up, even though I hate writing about this, since 2015, it’s endless. It’s reactionary. It’s an echo chamber, where present living conditions, or life, itself, is blocked and vacuumed by filter systems.

 

Cancellation? Too bad we can’t change the past and its history, but many try, by punishing people today. The punishment comes naturally, though, since the sinner, seen as such, even in secular circles, but it can only really result in a permanent state where an individual perpetrator can only be known as a complete asshole, evil scumbag or despicable, which is quite the condemnation, considering many of these types have been dead for centuries.

Hitler went completely unpunished in his life by anyone but himself, and the only thing that can be  accomplished now, is his legacy that, of course, can be manipulated. Truth and fact and human existence, and its nature, being what it is, a certain percentage will actually be taken with Hitler’s legacy, and history, as an admirer, which, considering their numbers, shouldn’t be surprising, but the that’s simply manipulating history, after finally finding someone that makes sense to you, since you’re an equal asshole to Hitler. The great majority will see the truth, though, and make the malcontents considered so weird that their miserable impact be kept to a minimum, not to their free speech, but to any actions they might take from that free speech.

Absolutism with free speech? Giving equal time to ideologues who are so far from reality, let alone the “truth” they speak of, is absurd, That’s stupid speech and harmful, as lies can be and it’s not free, but usually psychotic.

It’s a secular morality, it’s not existential at all, where a situation forces you to define yourself, often through survival in fact, it is a subjective secular morality manifested by service workers

With regards to the urge to cancel, if you are an asshole with regards to history, truth, fact and what’s obvious, then, you’re only possible punishment, and a good one, will be to go down in history, forever as an asshole.

When your ancestors and family dies you really want them to come back, but they really never will. It’s the same with the past, every second that passes, is history. Nothing we can say or do will change it. The only thing that can be done is an accurate remembrance of people and events that will follow their name and legacy eternally.

Ideas based on truth and fact, naturally conflict with filtered or segmented views of any type. Count on it.

Americans keep themselves, and, are kept in, a constant state of reaction, now, more than ever as, politicians or untrained unvetted media idiots, continually bait the public either by outrageous actions, or statements, designed to disrupt and cause only one response, a reaction resulting in votes, profits and viewership, and, after each reaction to another reaction, all truth, or fact, is lost, including the lost source of what you’re talking about in the first place, creating the perfect atmosphere for folks to flip. It’s also is and plays into, repeating a lie for years, before, during and after the falsehood it was based on, until the lie becomes truth. Pretty much a direct correct take on what Steve Bannon and Donald Trump have said years ago.

In the beginning of the culture wars when Jesse Helms declared war on the artist, some reacted. And, some of these reactions are considered big icons of the times. With the trickle down from institutions of art eventually, over the years, I would come to learn about things I would rather not, and don’t need to, and, many of those things pertain to the tastes of the world of art, during the times in which art made it important, not the world. One day I would accidentally run across, in a newspaper, (of course, the free Village Voice) the infamous bullwhip up the ass

shot done by Mapplethorpe that I never heard about, was unaware of, and didn’t need to see it. His in-your-face technique is honestly unfiltered, but, as a viewer, I’m not Jesse Helms. When he wasn’t reacting so much, two of his other main themes were extremely beautiful flowers, and vases, and, extremely well built, nude Black men. Messages from a certain time.

How does that play today? In the sixties and seventies Dali would appear with his leashed pet anteater. How would that play today? Concerned by our present values we project it on the future and the past. But it’s only in the present moment, some of this stuff makes sense, just on a most basic and general level.

Today, with the internet and everything else, there is so much reaction to reaction, that, the source of it all gets completely lost, and, that’s the game plan disruptors love to play.

Applying multiple filters identity, politics and political, correctness, are only two, to the world, is of no interest in the light of, and relative to, a direct clear and unobstructed view, outside and, also, to a lesser extent, inside the viewer for purposes of self-knowledge – balance, knowing your limits and place, and the macro and the micro. When, while being present, recognize we’re one in billions, yet acting with a self-importance reinforced by the group, tribe or simply similar interests, not to mention the mountain of individual motivation that might make you lose sight of the macro in favor of the micro in a mass society that believes only individuality.

The massive expansion, of the business of political correctness and identity politics, beginning in 2004, when Tough Crowd and Politically incorrect” go off mainstream tv, and,  exploding after 2020, like In the sarcastic truths that followed, in podcasts and cable. Like the one that brought down Budweiser, in puddle of light beer, spilt by its own ignorance and ironic dumbness, and letting, ironically, Modelo, become America’s beer.

The university of California Social Research school and Smith College decided to eliminate the word “field” in usage for sports, even in their their use of the word field house. The Cleveland Cavaliers, the first home of LeBron James, considered the greatest, is known as Rocket Mortgage Field House so, I guess, if your a progressive, PC and IP, it’s a double whammy of racism and unchecked insensitive 

capitalism.

Filters of, even, race, sex and religion cannot trump clarity that sees through nothing and everything. Reinforcing that I have a highly developed philosophy that is completely reliant on only the five senses, often synthesized into another type of sense, called, common, or, native.

Have we reached a point, where a few hallmarks of PC, only because they have been in effect for so many years, might have reached the tipping point, where, pure initiative in competition with many initiatives, will only, in the long run, be the healthiest way, because it’s based on success and progress. How much can be debated.

Class, or, money, might be another filter, but it is the fairest and most accurate since it’s our god, from simple survival to the gross unhindered accumulation of wealth. OJ and MJ also proved that and more. In a capitalist nation your amount of freedom or chances against incarceration increases with wealth.

As far as being in the past is concerned, I’m not like the present Supreme Court with their history and tradition clause. I live in the present with knowledge of the past, and the past knowledge is not seen through any sort of filter.

Interpreting the past by eliminating tradition as an equation with history. History alone is fact and truth, but, often, as theater, and, part of that is realizing who and why speaks this theatrical history.

Black hair products products that cause cancer, or obesity rates or tastes, is not a racist comment, but, made by a sociologist.

For instance fat people activism the process by what you wave the flag of civil rights, inappropriately, and out of context because you’re an idiot on a health level.

It’s ok, as long as I have an motional support donkey.

Libby, Montana, Camp Lejeune, Pearl Harbor, Love, Canal, Dora, Pennsylvania, all along the Hackensack River in New Jersey, Cancer Alley with its 800 miles of 200 hundred chemical plants, the toxic 9/11 zone, Newtown Creek, Gowanus Canal, affecting Greenpoint, Willimasburg, Bushwick, Long Island City, Blissville, Laurel Hill and Maspeth A knee-jerk reaction might be to declare them all victims of toxic racism, since they are mostly white. Almost all the Appalachian coal miners, then, would also be consciously oppressed because of their skin color? The Greenpoint oil spill, in my neck of the woods, alone, the worst of the city’s pollution, in an industrial creek with dozens of other pollution hotspots. And don’t forget the unintentional revenge of the indigenous, with giving Europeans both tobacco ans syphlis. Add cancer deaths since 1492 and add to the estimated 25 million who die from the std native to the Americas.. To try to solve these problems with identity, politics and political correctness, due the built-in partial truthfulness, produces just reactions from people that have similar but extremely truthful experiences. In a democracy we can only solve problems if different groups agree and come together for one cause. I’m not sure if democracy is about, one group of people, no matter what the size, or, an entire country of individual groups. United and strengthened by difference, while pursuing one goal, is the only undeniable strategy in a democracy to win.

About 300 years ago, for the first time in history, people began to seriously, expected to accept, whether they liked it or not, people that they may not be familiar with. Bucking, the evolutionary trend, where like stays with like, and, usually fights with those that are different. Instead we live with a multitude of cultures, ironically, in a state of complete freedom of speech and complete freedom to carry firearms. All inside a country, the first of its kind to be inhabited entirely by all the different cultures, races, religions, and whatever. First time in history one could discover the wonders, or be forced to, with democracy, of someone outside your tribe or ethnicity.

Some ethnic groups and identities, you we hear had no heroes growing? Keep it to yourselves. That’s ridiculous in it of itself – hero, the idea – but look at Native Americans and Blacks whose culture is filled with heroes, in all times, and, many of those heroes were the masters of resistance. I don’t give a shit about heroes, or influences, try not to have ‘um, though, just saying, that for need it.

Secular morality, such as PC or IP, says nothing about the world in which I live. It’s superfluous, not necessary, and could even get you killed out here, or, at least, robbed and shunned, where I want to be friends.

It is the United States of individuality?After all the constitution and everything else is designed for the individual, the entrepreneur and the get up off your ass type of person that ha come to be personified as the American path.

Entertaining a different narrative, that of 40 acres and a mule, Spike Lee named his company  and devoted himself to activism and entertainment.

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master this best explains my idea of democracy, whatever difference from this, to the extent of the difference, there is no democracy.” Couldn’t anyone say it better and quicker.

I live with the past clearly, but not in it. I live in the present clearly and in it. I enter the future with my back to it, or, at least, moving forward with an eye on the rear-view and a clear shot of the past.

No matter your politics, this is a hyper capitalist society, in and our present every day state, no matter what, the villain for social injustice is you, because under the laws of capitalism, you must change your own situation because you are an owner in a society of individual owners, who only own themselves. Of course, if we were in a socialist state, and, we had social problems, then the state would have to solve them, “collectively.” The situation we are given, whether it’s true or not to your liking, the opportunity for us to change our situation is only up to one person.

I got out of the hood for the first time in 2024, at 71. The cheapest rents are in least desirable and often worse neighborhoods. Within those neighborhoods in many ways, the situation doesn’t matter, since human beings are so great at cultural transcendence, based on, family,  friends that are tightly knit and indestructible. Except they rent.

I have always rented small apartments in what many people might see as the worst part of American cities. I did this because personally I have no trepidation about these places, but, most importantly, I could work hard and save my money over time. Now, in 2024, after complete forced displacement in 2013 from Brooklyn, to the West Bronx.

This white glob of dozens of nationalities and religions, with shades from bright white to olive and brown, with eyes of multi-colors, and differences as well, seen as “white people” is just accepted by everyone, even though all the considerable differences within a shrinking majority have been ground down to white.

Bill Maher is a great beneficiary of the race, ip and pc industry, and, but earned his more truthfully, as he was far ahead of these times in 1993, and a person that I can agree with in many cases. By the time he broke into the network Big Three late night slot, he would, of course, blow himself up, with certain comments like those about the bravery of Bin Laden, or handicap folks, only because it’s one of the big three networks, and it was bound to happen. But when he did exit, along with another politically incorrect show, Tough Crowd, it marked the deep plunge of non-cable media into PC and IP lands, resulting in the Bud Light debacle. Since then, no mainstream media can handle satirical stances based on truth and reality, under the new secular morality of the service industry workers.

Pollution and even infrastructure is solely aimed at the “people of color” the latest race buzzword I never hear in the neighborhoods, below the middle. Nine fuckin Eleven, when downtown Manhattan and east Brooklyn got coated, all while, the pile smoldered across the River, for months, and was remediated over a long period of time. The air burned your throats and lungs and the smell was noxious, according to the winds. It’s why America was briefly united after 9/11 for maybe three weeks, until groups of special interests set up shop, beginning with the middle and working-class conspiracy theorists.

Over a period of 72 years hearing, over and over, a “people of color” ideology, or “toxic and infrastructure racism” can become tiring, it wears you out, because its stance is filtered and its focus selective which can attract reaction, the opposite of which, is unity for purpose, or, recognizing our similarities over differences.

Tiresome when I lived most of my life in highly polluted and toxic zones, like you wouldn’t believe, but, after having my living organs being irritated by that over many years, so that, by the time I hit 69, with bilary cancer, all this selective victims ideology distracts from life, and, my working to keep that life, as much as possible.

I moved into slum and working-class neighborhoods since it’s not only what i could afford, but it was to save money, while working to get to a healthier place, which finally happened at the age of 71. I got here by struggle and work, particularly since my illegal displacement in 2013 out of Brooklyn, motivated me to make it so that it never could happen again. All it took was  money by constant, non-stop work. Becoming homeless wasn’t about racism, but money and greed, in a capitalist nation, but there I go rapping about dough, the thing that brings rappers and felons to DT, going back to the nineties and his freewheeling wealthy playboy, spoiled, draft-dodging life. The mugshot and assassination performance just sealed that alliance forever.

Money, alone, will set you free.

https://nypost.com/2024/06/15/us-news/100-blocks-by-gowanus-canal-in-nyc-being-tested-for-toxic-vapors/

Identity, if you let it, can get thick. There’s a band of the Cherokee Indians, today, that believe that they are direct descendants of the Jews in the Middle East. Often times during the Gaza protest, sub groups within protesters, Palestinian organizations like the LGBTQ segment, that, would go after LGBTQ folks that were backing Israel. It is a choice. Become an advocate for a special interest or identity, that makes you especially different, and make it your purpose to represent whenever possible.

I fully self-cancelled well before the “Age of Embarrassment” and that was back in 1989, and embarrassing times only grew in our newer climate, going from partial to complete subjectivity.

Are you the new Supreme Court? Are you judging everything by your present life and times according to an edited version of history? You know that you cannot change the past but, you can change the present, possibly effecting the future, but, if you’re into punishment, the only thing you got is the fact that, if a person acted like an asshole, historically, he will be known as an asshole, now and in the future. That is the only punishment that can be given, and, it’s a really good one, making sure all the labor and mayhem brought into the world because of egotistical assholes amounted to nothing for them, and they choke on their own shit, and that their legacy and name will be forever associated with being a true despicable asshole.

The Supreme Court has this history and tradition viewpoint, that, wants to understand things and others, from the standpoint of hundreds of years ago. Which brings us to reparations which wants to do the same. That is to say, reparations for one particular group. I know somebody who is Apache, and, he was basically kidnapped and put in a government school and raised without his culture and religion. He has, what I consider, a great case, not for reparations, but what we know as a lawsuit. I don’t believe in reparations for anyone. I spent a life making things as much as I can, and, as much as I can, is enough.

Not one living thing, had any choice, whatsoever, in their creation. No one effort, except their parents’ decided anything about who they are until, they are born, and, the rest they learn. We talked about this earlier in this essay with people who are switched at birth to the wrong parents, yet, became wholly their parents’ cultures.

We have no say in our conception, and each living thing is born into a species, culture nationality, sex and religion, not of their making, and neither were their parents.

If, unbeknownst to the parents, two infants are switched at birth, one raised Catholic and the other is raised Jewish, most likely, there will never know anything but the truth of how they were raised, until they are informed that a mistake was made when they were born while in the hospital.

Revising history to make up for, or, even a score, may “sound” or feel truthful, but it’s just not. For instance Cleopatra was both Greek but was also absolutely Egyptian in culture. That only changes in her depictions, and what influences that? Perhaps a culture that wants to make up for, what they see as life being unfair, but sacrifice accuracy, that carves the truth from things.

The Egyptians outrage over Netflix’s Cleopatra links earnest identity politics that are trying to cure the history of oppression, equal to imperialism in the damage done to to a culture by how it is inaccurately portrayed in order to fight the culture wars, and the impossible task of “righting” the past. It’s always been who’s doing the righting? And now it’s the virtuous PC culture.

Cleopatra was a Greek, and the last Pharaoh, and Egyptian in every way, but she was the last of the Greek rulers since Alexander 350 years after he took over Egypt, without battles, since their fear of Persians were far worse.

“While some of the reactions have been crudely racist, other criticisms have been motivated by historical grievances and the long-standing Western tradition of separating modern Egyptians from their ancient heritage—whether in the name of imperialist notions of Western civilization or Afrocentrism.Most Egyptians’ objections to the show and the primary reason for frustration in Egypt is not due to racism and is not about Adele James’s being Black, per se. It is about the decision by the makers of the show to challenge historic anti-Black racism in the United States through revisionism of another  people’s own history without caring about how these people might react.”

I always thought, first, of probable cause, when I heard “pc” until the culture wars in the 1980s, which I never paid much attention to. Like the reactive comedy of Andrew Dice Clay did back then. Play his performances from the 1980s, in the context of today’s PC values, and it could make you a believer in PC.

Trump was suckered by Kardashian, into handing out pardons to serious felons who happened to be Black gangsters and entertainers. The great MAGA observation, that only democratic cities have problems, as if cities with majority black populations are going to vote against self interest? Then why, during his pardons spree, the Leader, DT, also pardoned Kanye Kilpatrick from Detroit, who was the most corrupt mayor in America, with the exception of Jimmy Walker of New York. He stole over $400 million, around 2003, when the city was actually turning around, and, the Book Cadillac was due for rehab, as well as the Michigan Central Station, their new downtown stadium was built, Corktown gentrified and many other projects were about to lift the city. One not-so-true idea about Detroit was that its fall was entirely economic, with its ties to the automobile industry, however, Kilpatrick probably brought it down more than that, at a time when it could have overcome things he as robbed the city blind. By the way, he, too, declared himself the first hip-hop mayor, and, that’s why when the defeated Jamal Bowman got in front of a Mott Haven South Bronx crowd, that was quite small, lifted up a chair over his head, and announced that he was the first hip-hop congressional member, it was really a sign of incompetence and chaos, not a shining moment in Black history. Like Columbo, Kilpatrick used the IP mode as a cover and advantage. Black successful rappers, who he emulated as America’s hip hop mayor,  but from the street, aren’t much different, just with less facade as politicians.

Likewise DT is the flipmaster, and the wealthy celebrity, lady’s man and tycoon. Why wouldn’t 50 Cent, Snoop, Ice Cube, let al, love their man for obvious reasons. Kanye just blew it up with his fawning the first year DT was in the White House, where less mentally ill, more street smart, but somewhat sociopathic rappers, didn’t play that game, and was not cool, but loving DT always was. And, after the Mug Shot and assassination attempt – forget about it. Trump seems the ultimate flipper for the billionaire rapper class, he’s one of them.

During the east and west coast rap wars, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton visited Death Row records and Suge Knight, whose crew, at that moment, was busy cleaning up a lot of blood after one of their minions was beaten by sanctioned gang members in one of the recording studios. Standing on the freshly mopped floor, the two Civil Rights leaders were asking Mr. Knight to, at least, tone things down with the east coast feud. As if they didn’t know he was really like Al Capone, if Capone was also a very successful Hollywood film producer, who, given the quantity of media about him,  was provided royalties beyond the profits of the black market, even though both economic engines were inseparable, and actual death, was always on the playlist.

Quoting from one of the strongest figures in Black identity politics, “If Trump were a Black man, he would be Don King.” Sharpton, here, funny and accurate, but can have the typical cultural don’t get it, outside his own, due to an IP block. For instance, condemning Eugene Richard’s dynamite book, Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue, as, naturally, “racist” proving that politicians, left and right, ain’t good at culture, but can destroy it by blanketing it with their beefs, and notions of PC. It is fine, though, to remind people of, who is doing the shooting and who is being shot, and, if he picked it because, first and foremost, they were Black, and you’re wrong, you don’t get cancelled but remembered for a gross inaccuracy towards a journalist, also trying to do something, but with a lens and a different color of skin. Give your take and comment all you want, and be judged by time and what’s actual.

In his Do the Right Thing Spike Lee walks through his neighborhood, repeating, over and over, “Get a job, get a job.” As I walk through my neighborhood, my job to tell people “Read a history book, read a history book.” the Irish were here over 100 years and they also built the place, and you’re not even aware of that, even though you’ve been here for 30 years or more. Also, we don’t even care. In most ways, you can have it.

He also used the phrase “Wake up.” as another theme in the film, and he certainly evolved into a prime minister of being woke as it expanded, until, perhaps hitting a wall when it went too far, playing a major role for the most extreme president to take over.

I choose the present to live in, and, I view history as theater, that we can’t change, except in our depictions of it. I could predict things quite easily, but, I have no idea what’s going to happen. Most importantly I value assimilation to, at least some degree, and a certain amount of unity amongst our continual disagreements. 

In fact and history, the Lakota lands were stolen by the United States, they fought futilely and with absolute bravery culminating in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the annihilation of Custer and his force, then ending 19 years later at Wounded Knee. History, written after the fact, is that fact as a theatre of the past. It comes in varying degrees of accuracy, but usually simply the actual unembellished facts are dramatic and important enough without lying about what happened for whatever reason. The Lakota were defeated, but it’s all documented, and will live on forever in memory as resistance, and their beyond tragic death, as a free and amazing tribe, who knew more about pure freedom, than any American.

Asking and analyzing for that purpose is not a place of hate and division, which I’m fighting, with pictures, words and sarcasm, most importantly, common sense, and, using only five senses with only direct contact with the big wide world.