Cobb

There is no such ferment today, and most African Americans wear blackness like an old suit. People consider themselves 'naturually black' and black can be anything anybody African American wants it to be, generally posed in defensive terms. But I say there is nothing natural about blackness and anybody who says so is ignorant, lazy or both.

yes!

If you're not in the intellectual elite, there's nothing about blackness you know worth knowing. OK? Blackness is no longer a revolutionary concept, it is a commodified consumer good.

no! ):

The world is no longer interested in the plight of the American Negro.

in our haste to embrace gluttony, we relinquished control of the brand.

It's about moving up.

Matthew 13:3-23
(3) And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow;
(4) And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up:
(5) Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:
(6) And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.
(7) And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:
(8) But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.
(9) Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.
(10) And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
(11) He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
(12) For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
(13) Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
(14) And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive:
(15) For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I
(16) But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.
(17) For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.
(18) Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.
(19) When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the way side.
(20) But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it;
(21) Yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.
(22) He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.
(23) But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

some will continue to desire and amass power, wealth and influence.

as with the goal of moving up, what does this mean in this context? Black people are now concentrated around the urban rail hub in KCMO and KCK - but don't control the land. Exponentially more power would accrue to a cohort which consolidated its ownership and control of THIS LAND on the banks of the fairly feeble and low-ebb looking muddy Mizou river..., where the overworked land yields a richer harvest of meth mouths than of produce..,

The Old School can be said to be a faction in an African American Culture War.

The struggle is with deductively fixated hegemonic tendencies. The struggle is to become a more fully thing-fixated rather than label-fixated domain specialist Cobb.

Unlike mathematics where we can start with any old axioms we like and explore the consequences of those axioms, in socio-chemistry there is a truth which the labels either do or do not reflect. So logic chopping definitions are wholly inappropriate in socio-chemistry. Yet in the deductively-fixated society in which the alchemical socio-chemistry of blackness is embedded, such logic chopping is seen as real, where what is actually happening is that we are psychological insurgents in an imperially aggressive war of memetic occupation and aggression. You know, propaganda works because it does something real to your nervous system. The power of the big lie is after all no greater than the extent to which we submit passively to Pavlovian conditioning.

Sometimes I worry about you brah, your sojourn amongst the thorns is constantly trying your resolve...,

I want people to leave blackness alone. It cannot bear any more overloading with meaning, especially since it has been so commodified.

Taking a page from the Wu Manual, here I stand on the steps of the temple, looking out over the courtyard - daring any and all moneychangers to step to the abyssal depths of blackness I wield more deftly than Bruce Lee - or if you prefer Jet Li - whooping gangs of soldiers in their very own dojo...,

Hi Michael Bowen, I was looking for an email address on your blog, but didn't see one. Nice blog! Especially like the graphic at the top, of the city skyline, and you--very cool. I just wanted to thank you for mentioning me in a previous post (I was google-searching my own name ;-) ) --regarding my debacle with KCRW. Ugh! Work politics are a fact of life, but this was laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. Thankfully I was able to walk away from that awful situation because of an art sideline that is making -just enough- $$. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks.
Cindi Burkey

Yeah I gotta get with the Wu. I have gone too long without any of their beats on my hard drive. You have given me something to do today.

Hey Cindi. Going to the wall is always worth it, even if it doesn't pay. (cobb@visioncircle.org)

Now to the construction of blackness and greed. My first soundbite is, what is to be said about the perverse materiality of rap that hasn't been said? There's greed for ya.

As for memetic occupation, it is inevitable. It is the path of a country determined to keep a minimum wage and artificially high labor costs. We outsource menial labor. All of our sowers and reapers are illiterate peasants. The American body politic is not illiterate peasants, they are proles in thrall to the upscale. We have all determined that what pays is marketing and design and white collar professional college educated work. Every gripe about our public school system is that it doesn't deliver kids ready for university - or rather I should say 'guarantee'. Fine. The point here is that America's wealth owes to the creation of memetic products, and its security owes to our financial supremacy and our ability to imagine. So the question is more properly how do we generate a critical facility to imagine the right things rather than veer off into the airy fairy.

It is right and proper to keep substantially martial and militant vibes in the American memosphere. That keeps us from being dainty. It reminds us of death, destruction and the need to capture and hold land. Without this anchor to blood and guts reality we float off into pointless existential casuistry. That is what I hear in a great deal of the post-sixties rehash of the meaning of the sixties. Blackness only *signifies* conflict, but most of the conflict it signifies is studio gangsta, which is actually little more than the decadence that surplus wealth affords. Every snarl Ice Cube makes is the currency of fakery. And people who get weary of it take Zoloft.

As a conservative I rail against wishful thinking and do not accept the inevitability of progress. I want to be involved in the claw and scrape of wealth acquisition and not debates about self-esteem and existential destiny. I don't want to negotiate afro-futurist modalities, I want to save 20 bucks by shopping at Walmart. I don't want to assess the prospects of a new Afrocentrism, nor consider the legacy of slavery. I want to understand whether or not to put Google in my 527 portfolio.

The four tenets of Black Nationalism of the sort my family was engaged were Law, Liberty, Love and Land. Where's the Land? How do we get it? That's what I'm talking about.

"I want people to leave blackness alone. It cannot bear any more overloading with meaning, especially since it has been so commodified."

OK. But how would you go about actualizing that dream?

I think the more (pointless) battles we have in the style of 'is xxx really black', the more we get to specifics. Then people are going to have to go the history books.