Teaching Their Parents Well.

Marching For Their Lives: The huge achievement of the young organisers behind March For Our Lives is to have recognised in the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its political enablers, the same malign constellation of social and economic forces responsible for visiting the Vietnam conflict upon American youth fifty years earlier. The same glorification of physical force that gave rise to such obscene military expressions as “body count” and “search and destroy mission”, is today locked and loaded into the political Right’s fanatical reverence for the Second Amendment.

AS I WATCHED HUNDREDS-OF-THOUSANDS of young Americans marching for their lives on Saturday 24 March, these were the words in my head.

And you, of tender years,
Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

Teach your parents well,
Their children’s hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you’ll know by.

Yes, I know, the song “Teach Your Children” is nearly 50 years old. Even so, there’s something so bitter-sweet about Graham Nash’s composition; something so touchingly intergenerational and solidaristic; that the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young hit simply took up residence in my skull and refused to leave.

 Released in 1970, on the CSNY album Deja Vu, the song climbed to No. 16 on Billboard’s Pop Singles Chart. Tellingly, the social and political context of “Teach Your Children” was every bit as polarised as that into which the March For Our Lives organisers decanted so many young Americans last weekend.

In the same month that the song was released, May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University had opened fire on unarmed students protesting President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, killing four and wounding nine. CSNY band-member, Neil Young, upon learning of the so-called “Kent State Massacre”, sat down and composed “Ohio” which was recorded and pressed with record speed to come out just days after the release of “Teach Your Children”.

From both an emotional and a political standpoint, the two compositions could hardly have been further apart. Nash’s “Teach Your Children” speaks tenderly to the shared hopes and fears of young and old alike, and to the need for honest communication between the generation of “parents”, who had grown up during the Great Depression and World War II, and their post-war baby-boom “children” (the oldest of whom were then in their early-20s). Young’s song, by contrast, is a raw and angry cry of protest, capturing perfectly the shock and horror of witnessing “Amerika” – “The Establishment” – literally turning its guns on its own children.

Tin Soldiers and Nixon coming,

We’re finally on our own.

This summer I hear the drumming,

Four dead in Ohio

 The huge achievement of the young organisers behind March For Our Lives is to have recognised in the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its political enablers, the same malign constellation of social and economic forces responsible for visiting the Vietnam conflict upon American youth fifty years earlier.

The same glorification of physical force that gave rise to such obscene military expressions as “body count” and “search and destroy mission”, is today locked and loaded into the political Right’s fanatical reverence for the Second Amendment.

The same authoritarian, quasi-fascist, worship of toughness which mandated full-scale war in Indochina, manifests itself today in the compulsive need of all those Americans who cannot cope with difference to amass deadly “defensive” arsenals of semi-automatic weapons and handguns.

And just as the 1969 My Lai Massacre made clear what happens when young men are encouraged to believe that the hearts and minds of civilian populations are best won by pumping them full of lead; the deadly, twenty-year epidemic of US school shootings has demonstrated the horrific consequences of arming the narcissism and nihilism of alienated and aggrieved young men at home.

The assignment which today’s young anti-violence activists have taken on is, however, a much tougher one than the anti-war crusade of their parents’ generation. The decision to fight “international communism” in Vietnam was strategically and politically motivated. As such, it could be reversed and the war it propagated brought to an end. America’s gun culture is a considerably more intractable phenomenon. Born out of White America’s deeply-entrenched fear and hatred of “the other”, it can only be successfully overcome by completing the cultural revolution begun in the 1960s.

This is a very big ask for 15-20-year-olds. In a very real sense, the political history of the United States since the end of the 1970s has been the history of the American Right’s unceasing effort to halt and roll-back the kinder, gentler America that Graham Nash, and thousands like him, were attempting to sing into existence in the 60s and 70s.

But, if the mission confronting this new generation of activists is enormous, it is not impossible. Crucial to its success will be the extent to which today’s young activists are able to teach their parents well. And that can only mean persuading them to confront the truth about what’s wrong: about what’s always been wrong; with American society.

Forty years of right-wing counter-revolution has left its mark on the Baby-Boomers. For too many of them it proved a lot easier (and much more profitable) to give up the fight for a kinder, gentler America. For those “of tender years”, the trick will be to convince their parents and grandparents that the March For Our Lives is a march for their lives too.

Gotta get down to it

Soldiers are cutting us down

Should have been done long ago.

What if you knew her

And found her dead on the ground?

How can you run when you know?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 27 March 2018.

Something In America's Air.

False Flags: Violence in America is not something which comes from outside. Violence dwells at the heart of American society and culture: it is the constantly beating organ which pumps its deadly and destructive energy into America’s arms and legs; into its brain and hands; into its trigger-finger.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT the way a bowl of fruit goes bad? All those apples, pears, oranges and mandarins may have been picked together, transported together, displayed together and sold together; but they do not go bad together. There is always one that goes bad before the others. Looking at each item of fruit, as you fill the bowl, it is practically impossible to identify which one that might be. But, give it sufficient time, and the right conditions, and that piece of fruit will make itself known to you.

Stephen Paddock’s brothers certainly hadn’t picked their murderous sibling as a bad apple. They simply had no idea he was capable of unleashing horror from the thirty-second floor of Las Vegas’s Mandalay Hotel – or why? One of them told reporters that hearing of his brother’s deadly attack on concert-goers was like being struck by an asteroid.

And that’s the way the rest of America will attempt to make sense of this latest mass shooting. Paddock’s crime will be characterised as something entirely exogenous to the daily rhythms of American life: something which, like a wayward piece of space rock, arrives unheralded, and unstoppable, from somewhere beyond this world.

Except that violence in America is not something which comes from outside. Violence dwells at the heart of American society and culture: it is the constantly beating organ which pumps its deadly and destructive energy into America’s arms and legs; into its brain and hands; into its trigger-finger.

Violence has been fundamental to American history. Whether it be the genocide basic to colonial America’s birth; or the indentured servitude and slavery which underpinned its economic expansion; violence has always been absolutely central to the American project.

Perhaps the easiest way to drive this point home to New Zealanders is to ask them to think about Australia. Why did Great Britain send forth its convict ships to Tasmania and Botany Bay in the late 1780s? What could possibly have spurred the British to such a colossal investment of men and resources downunder?

In the most simple and brutal terms, Australia was Great Britain’s response to the loss of its American colonies. Until the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776, Great Britain’s North American colonies fulfilled a role very similar to that which would, a decade or so later, be assigned to its Australian possessions: a vast wilderness into which His Majesty’s excess and most troublesome subjects – men and women – could be decanted. Throughout the eighteenth century, white indentured servants (persons legally bonded to their wealthy masters for a punitive period of time) vastly outnumbered African slaves.

Even after the American colonies won their independence, the stigma of indentured servitude and the rigid class hierarchy it did so much to engender and entrench, remained a constant of American social relations. The fledgling United States’ republican ideology may have attributed the individual’s position in American society to his or her own efforts, but the violence meted out by those ranked above, to those ranked below, was the glue which held American society together. Men were superior to women. Wealthy whites were superior to poor whites. Americans descended from the English and the Scots were superior to immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Ireland and Europe. All whites were superior to all blacks. The only good Indian was a dead one.

It was an economic and social hierarchy constructed out of, and maintained by, a brutal combination of legal, cultural and physical violence. That it drove American history forward cannot be doubted. Certainly, America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, apprehended its moral legacy. Speculating in his Second Inaugural Address whether America would remain riven by the “scourge of war” until “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”.

Science tells us that what rots the fruit in the bowl is the effect of microscopic organisms that float in the air all around us. All it takes is a particularly forceful bruise, or tiny cut, to begin the process. The spores of violence, likewise, float in the cultural air Americans breathe. Inevitably, her most damaged citizens; the United States’ rotten fruit, will make themselves known.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 October 2017.

Expressions Of Hatred.

Bad Boy, R&B Entertainer, Chris Brown. While Brown’s lyrics continue to ooze sadistic violence and hate-filled contempt for women, any expressions of contrition and remorse (especially as the price of entry to this country) should not be taken seriously.

 

HATE, NO LESS THAN LOVE, seeks outward expression. The observation is neither new nor profound, but it’s true. Just consider how much happier and more productive the world would be if only love could be expressed. If hatred’s dreadful energy could be sealed-up completely within the haters themselves – transforming them into tiny black holes of negativity from which nothing hurtful or destructive could ever again escape.

 

Unfortunately, hatred is seldom satisfied with just one victim. Indeed, it is the corrosive effect on the individual human personality that makes hatred’s outward social expression so devastating. One has only to look at the photograph of Adam Lanza, the 20 year-old perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, to see how completely self-hatred can hollow a person out. Behind Lanza’s unnervingly wide eyes there is a terrifying absence. Hatred has created the perfect mechanism for killing 20 children and 7 adults, at point-blank range, with a Bushmaster .223 calibre XM15-E2S rifle.

 

Adam Lanza - A terrifying absence.

 

The expression on the face of Chris Mercer, the 26 year-old responsible for the deaths of 9 students at Umpqua Community College, in the US state of Oregon, just last week, is similarly blank. As if all that was worthwhile in this young man has been utterly consumed, leaving only an all-consuming rage against the god he blamed for his increasing isolation and despair. Neighbours describe Mercer “sitting alone in his room, in the dark, with this little light.” On 1 October 2015 even that little light went out. “Are you a Christian?” Mercer is alleged to have asked his victims – before pulling the trigger of his Taurus .40 calibre pistol.

 

What is it about the United States that generates these mass shootings? Is hatred hollowing-out a whole nation? Will the world soon be faced with an American gaze as blank and pitiless as Lanza’s and Mercer’s. Or, has the United States already reached that point? And, if it has, when did it happen – and why?

 

In her powerful historical anthem, My Country Tis Of Thy People You’re Dying, the Native American songwriter, Buffy Sainte-Marie, refers to “the genocide basic to this country’s birth” – boldly rendering the whole of US history as an exercise in externalised hatred. In similar vein, President Abraham Lincoln, in his second (1865) inaugural address, speculated that the still-raging civil war might represent God’s judgement on the morally flawed American republic:

 

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

 

Not that the massive death-toll of the American Civil War was enough to slake the thirst of American hatred. As the African-American chanteuse, Billie Holiday, revealed in her haunting 1939 recording of Abel Meeropol’s poem, Strange Fruit, that cup was far from empty:

 

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

 

Tragically, all the violence inflicted on African-American men has not prevented them from projecting their anger, hurt and self-loathing onto African-American women. Hatred has a way of sucking-up and kicking-down: celebrating the perpetrators’ violence by encouraging its victims to become victimisers themselves. Usually by unleashing pain and suffering on those even lower-down on the social pecking-order.

 

Chris Maurice Brown was born in Virginia, and raised in a household where this sort of male-on-female domestic violence was commonplace. Sadly, the 26 year-old R&B entertainer has gone on to replicate the dysfunctional behaviour he experienced as a child in his own adult relationships. Even more problematically, he routinely validates the objectification of women, along with the violence it both inspires and excuses, in his music. Brown’s critics have characterised many of the lyrics of his recordings as hate speech against women.

 

Convicted of assaulting his partner, Rihanna, in February 2009, Brown has found it increasingly difficult to perform overseas. His planned 2015 Australasian tour will proceed only if the Australian and New Zealand authorities grant him a special entry visa. New Zealand Campaigners against domestic violence are urging the National Government to keep him out.

 

It is difficult to fault their argument. While Brown’s lyrics continue to ooze sadistic violence and hate-filled contempt for women, any expressions of contrition and remorse (especially as the price of entry to this country) should not be taken seriously.

 

Love expresses itself in forgiveness. Hatred, by contrast, just doubles-down.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press Of Tuesday, 6 October 2015.