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I thought to myself, This is the result of the new American penchant for talking smack, or "trash talk," as they call it in sports. We have all learned that it's a punishable offence to be dissed by somebody. Instead of "sticks and stones," we have now gone into the machismo mode. Lookin' at somebody wrong in the 'hood has become a killing offence.
My fellow columnist, Kevin Carey, intimated in his ESSAYS ON CULTURE last week, "SILENCE," that we might be a culture in its afternoon. Looking at our "road rage," "air rage" and undifferentiated kinds of rage, Homes, I'm thinking along with the scientists of the Club of Rome that we are more likely closer to our midnight.
If you look at the sewage coming out of American pop culture, from the Queen Latifah and Jerry SpringerCam shows to all these Judge Whomever phenoms, you'll see that we are being conditioned to believe that the person you should be talks smack, trash talks in order to get over in society -- to be Somebody.
Between trying not to be disrespected and trying to get our slice of the gusto, we -- at least here in America, and we are spreading our infection around the world through media like this one, the Web -- we are acting like rats in a cage.
Instead of raging against the machine, against corporate hegemony, low and no wage jobs for people all over the planet, over the commodification of every damned thing, we are raging against each other. We have been divided and thus conquered. We are striking out against people just as pathetic and powerless as ourselves.
Writing this in the G21, though, I am probably preaching to the choir. I'm not tellin' ya'll nothin' you don't already know. You got to feel the symptoms of this raging under your skin. You grasp for what the conservative commentators call "civility" while knowing that what THEY mean is that you should stay in your place, and that makes you mad too. Rage.
Brother killed brother over who would gets the pen to sign the time sheet first. That's just damned silly and wrong. That's modern life in these United States of America. That's our wonderful technological future... "Pissed off androids," as Bustah Rhymes sings.
Then we wonder why the kids think packing heat and cappin' their teachers or the jocks pickin' on 'em or the girls who laughed at them is the way to handle a problem. Ask "Dirty Harry." Rage.
Everybody is a pain-in-the-ass but me.
At some point, we all gottah realize that it can't keep being that way. If it does keep being that way, we can't act "appalled" by little Catholic school girls running from bombs in Belfast or little Palestinean kids catching bullets in the Gaza strip. We can't be surprised that more refugees are walking the earth today than any time since World War II. We can't act surprised, if things keep going this way, that going postal is what people in all walks of life in our industrialized, air-conditioned nightmare have started doing. Word.
The hand on the clock dial is pushing quickly toward midnight, and like Mr. Carey asserted last week, maybe we just need to shut up and listen to our "inner voice" from out of the silence, IF we are still capable of even achieving that kind of thing. Sometimes I wonder if we are. The cacophony is deafening these days. So all we seem to have left, just beneath the skin, is rage. Rage.
Oaktown, 8 September, 2001 - Our Publisher sent me a clip from the New Orleans daily the Times-Picayune about a brother who shot another brother after a dispute about who would sign the time sheets first for their Parks department. Brother followed the other brother to a convenience store, where the last one meant to cash his paycheck, and shot him dead over the dispute.
So, to be the person we wannabe, we get into talking smack. We think that's the way we psyche the other folks around us. But sometimes, like that story from New Orleans, the trash talk goes too far, too far to control, and somebody ends up dead in our agro world.
Rage.
Rage.
That's the sad part of the approaching midnight.
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