Lord. How Long. How Long. In the UK Too

     . . . . In an entry Elsewheres, I concluded with "Lord. How long. How Long."  To my astonishment, people asked what that means.   

  . . . . People with a religious background or any experience of protestant, Jewish, African American recognize it immediately.  It's part of US literary tradition by now, in many parts, even recognized within canon.  This is the rhetorical Introduction and Refrain of passionate lamentation over inexplicable suffering and oppression, begging an explanation from God,  of Why, Lord? why at all? Why to me? to us? and for how long, Lord, will you allow this to go on?

Versions of "How Long" are everywhere in the Old Testament, whether in the Book of Habakkuk or the Psalms. It is in protestant hymns and prayers, it is naturally, particularly prevalent in African American religious tradition, whatever the mode of expression, and beyond that has been heard even in pop music made by African Americans and covered by whites, yea, even in the UK -- even when the lamentation is about another band member playing off on the side in secret with another band, as with Ace's one hit wonder.*

So, yes, among the lamentation of African Americans -- and British people of color too, who are at least as religious out of the protestant traditions as in the US, to speak "Lord. How long. How long,' as a response to a white guy doing absolutely nothing for racial justice except to say, ya! go risk your life and health -- go go go! and then demand cookies from god himself (who he is currently referring to as karma points!) for typing that in the comfort of his comfy home and bank account, far far far away from anything remotely threatening, whether the pandemic, eviction, or police brutality, is something very many people immediately 'get', so to speak.

But not this tone deaf white guy -- who also poo pooed  Covid-19 as a cozy disaster that would over in two weeks. Thus, this traditional African American expression in prayer, in sermon-oratory -- see Dr. Martin Luther King

and music, secular and popular, and has been since the early days of slavery -- is appropriate.  How long, Lord, must we put up with clueless complacent white guys  typing clueless, complacent words, and then demanding a reward?

* Another example of how African American traditions get reworked into commentary upon what is happening right this minute can be heard in the soundtracks to both Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Spike Lee's imminent release, Da 5 Bloods, which comments on our conditions both back in political and film history -- Vietnam -- and that history commenting on contemporary events.

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The BLM Protest movement is indeed global. The monument to African slave trader, Edward Colston, in Bristol, on which Bristol's modern fortune was founded, was pulled down. The protest in London by the US embassy is enormous!

https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2020-06-07/thousands-attend-black-lives-matter-protest-in-bristol/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-britain/thousands-join-black-lives-matter-protest-outside-u-s-embassy-in-london-idUSKBN23E0A3?

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-07/more-black-lives-matter-protests-to-take-place-across-the-uk-on-sunday/

With horses featuring in stories about the clashes between cops both here 

and the UK, with the horses and the cops in armor, while a pandemic rages, I have no trouble re-visioning the uprisings in the 14th century in England,

particularly the largest, longest one, the Watt Tyler Revolt, or, the Peasants' Uprising, against Richard II -- particularly directed at his uncle, Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt -- whose newly built palace, reputed to be the most exquisite in Europe, was not looted, it was destroyed, deliberately, every part of it, from marble wall facings to the smallest bibelot,  ground to shards and dust, and then burned.  That's how tired the people were of waiting for justice, dignity and food for So Long. 

So. Long.  So. Very. Long.

Back in Tour State

So dehydrated when we left the store. Jittery from all the talking, all the emotion. Hungry, not having eaten since lunch. We didn't get to the restaurant until some time after 10 PM. (Our dear, extremely patient friends, hanging about, waiting, until the last book was signed, the last exchange of thoughts and ideas took place.)  We didn't get home until long after midnight as the trains running between where we are and Harlem don't run so often, particularly after midnight.  So, since one wishes to sleep, one didn't eat much at all, hoping to fuel up at brekkie.

The big difference is that I did not need to arise at a ridiculous hour, scramble desperately for caffeine of whatever kind and quality, pack and drive for hours to do it all over again tomorrow, or rather, yes, this is also how it goes, today. With a pod cast, radio interview, something else also today before hitting the main event. Feeling sick and sore until the adrenaline kicks in.

Those morning-after sensations out of the way  (it's currently quite cold here, with some snow predicted, which promotes the soreness), the event was fabulous.

The place was packed out. People brought in Slave Coasts they'd already been reading to be signed. There were friends there -- who didn't bring their books to be signed because we've already signed them. And friends of the friends.   Importantly, for the store and publisher, the stacks of TASCs sold through. Quite a few African American history teachers, yay! And many others of all kinds of people.

As per usual at such events, the real stars were those who attended and asked questions, made comments and observations in the q&a, during the signing, and the general mill-around at the end, while the employees patiently wait for the last lingerers to leave, and they too can find dinner and home.. Having one's work come back at oneself this way is indescribably valuable. These are important teaching moments for us. These audiences already, in one way and another, know all what's in the book.

It felt so -- well, we were starting it -- i.e. touring to get the word of TASC out -- all over again and I wasn't quite sure where / when I was.

The community couldn't have been more welcoming, more appreciative, more humbling than it was. Harlem. Malcolm X Blvd. The AME Church around the corner. African American history all around us. NYC African American history.

This is a local audience that gets to know about things first and foremost by word-of-mouth.

What was clear from talking with so many of them after the presentation that someone else they know had already known of the book / read the book and told them they had to read it too. It's exactly like what happened and continues to happen with The World That Made New Orleans, which is then, hopefully, will keep going for years to come.

Walking into Revolution Bookstore last night and seeing title after title of all the books we've read and admired published on slavery and U.S. History in the last 5 years, and TASC prominently among them -- that was an experience.

We got asked about reparations, in a lengthy, well-thought out, sensible, well-informed historically, inquiry by a young African American man. As with some other matters that come up in non-academic venues where the audience is predominately a community audience, this is the kind of question one should expect. There are also questions that can at times indicate a divide, to a degree, between a sense that too much attention is being given to 'feminist' issues of slavery and breeding and not enough to what these horrors have done to the black man.

However, it remains abundantly clear, that in these local, non-academic contexts, the community itself understands the antebellum south, and then the neo-slavery of Jim Crow, was a police state, the plantations, whether worked by slave labor or sharecropped labor, were vast prisons.

The communities know all too well from long family experience, what slavery,  Jim Crow, and now this latest incarnation of it in the police-prison industrial system, has done to the black family.  They know how this has systematically denied them from the moment of Africans setting foot on this continent, the means by which to strengthen the family, expand the family network into other areas of wealth and influence, aggregate personal and family wealth, while white families were able to do the opposite, and at the expense of the African American family.

This, which make no mistake, allowed the slave-owning class, which was the sole political class of the south, who made secession and rebellion, to get back on their economic and political high horses within a generation -- if not even within a year or two after their defeat in the War of Southern Aggression.

These are burning questions in communities all across the USA -- what are we going to do to change this?  What can we do?  How do we get to an equal playing field when we've been denied even the right to have a father for our children?  How indeed, when for hundreds of years we were denied even the right to have our own children, when we want them, and to keep them once we had them?

I do not have the answers.  I hope this nation can come up with some, and soon. Really good answers, for the sake of the nation, and most of all, for the sake of the continuity of this planet as a place that is good for plants, small animals and children.

Continuum - Season 3

As of last night's dinner-preparation hour I'm nearly half way through watching Continuum's third season.

Season 3's plot lines and the characters themselves are complicated.  Part of the complication involves Alec Sadler, one of the three principal characters, being present as two; i.e. one from the timeline (I think ...) we've been in since the beginning of the show, and the other from another timeline branch, and they're existing simultaneously in the same timeline -- though I'm not entirely clear whether this timeline is the series' original timeline.  I may have forgotten some essentials from watching seasosn 2 last year at this time.

This season also began with two of the protagonist-protector from 2077, Kiera Cameron, but immediately one of them is shot dead.  The killed Kiera was the "original" Kiera known from the series's start by her contemporary Vancouver

police force partner and friend, Carlos Fonnegra. That there are / were two Kieras is known to him almost immediately.  He sees this Kiera as different the first one, and isn't sure he either likes or trusts the second one.

Second Kiera doesn't like First Alec or trust him, but seems to like and trust the second one.  Further complications are created by First Alec learning that his first love, Emily, wasn't what he thought she was, while Second Alec, who was the first Alec, traveled back in time a week to save Emily's life, after she's killed in the first timeline. First, now Second Alec, still loves Emily, no matter what.

If others can follow all this with no difficulties they are much better viewers than I am.  In the meantime, as the two Alecs and the Second Kiera dash about, the timelines are getting ever more muddled and history in the past and the future is changing. This further complicates the plots because it's not always easy to distinguish what seem volte faces of characters and their relationships with each other as they seemed previously.

Further we're presented with Kiera's past -- which is still in our future --  beginning when she's still a young girl, and not yet a Protector.  But -- is her time traveling changing her past as well?

Tonight I'll watch the seventh episode (there are thirteen), and will perhaps understand things better.

As well, I am hoping that Alec Sadler, who the series isn't about --

Note: the captions says "the future is in her hands."

it's Kiera's show -- isn't edging the focus from her to himself.  The show couldn't handle two Kieras -- i.e. two supercompetent females leads --  but we have two Alecs, and the Alecs are supergenius-nerds, who are getting at least twice the amount of screen time than previously.

What I'm like most about Continuum, is how well the writers are connecting labor, capitalism, and the corporate state with the police state, in both our present and the future.  Indeed, in Kiera's future, the state has gone full circle in which every person owes a life debt to the state -- which is connected to one's economic status --  which debt gets adjusted in various ways  up and down, including execution when the debt is greater than one's economic value.  This value is assessed by many criteria: treason is of course a debt that merits execution. This sort of conceptualization seems to indicate the writers have carefully read at least the first

sections of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011).

So far though, Continuum's writers haven't overtly connected these conditions to so many jobs being performed by robots and other automation,* though it is implied, whenever there are scenes set in a college or university, and the many public protests included throughout the seasons' episodes.  It's this that makes the over-arching time lines of both "present" and future so plausible in Continuum.

Continuum does seem to be asking the important questions, and further inquires, what are the answers, and how can we get to them?

Alas, so far, there's been no hard announcement there's going to be a season 4 of Continuum, though it was scheduled to be made "early in August."

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*  Just this week: room service and check-in desk will be robots:

the Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, Calif,  ... will begin using an R2D2-esque robot for such trips. Fittingly, Aloft’s parent company, Starwood Hotels, tests the latest technology at the Silicon Valley hotel. Guests can enter their rooms with a smartphone app and bypass the traditional check-in process at the front desk.

So very soon now, not even turning your city, your region into an extractive, toxic tourist playground will provide even the most menial of jobs, that are always touted as "jobs creation," and o so good for the economy.

Disaster Reportage, FEMA Failure, Media Blackout

Reportage from the left is beginning that the regime and FEMA are blacking out access to, reporting and images of the worst areas of devastation -- and FEMA's pathetic, disorganized and inadequate responses.

The first place I saw this was on the LJ "View from A Broad. So I looked up the reports in elsewheres. As well, Liz Henry's blog (her efforts and experience in Texas with the Louisiana evacuees was brilliant and invaluable, as were her constant updates and reports), says the same.

Even scarier Liz reports that what is supposed to be disaster relief is working only as a police dragnet.

In order to flee a hurricane or other disaster you MUST have i.d.

What I take away from it is that the preconditions have now been satisfied for the election to be stolen a third consecutive time. And who's going to stop them? The press? The television? The democrats?

And then everybody will say, well, now we've got to get to work on 2012 . . .