A More Perfect Communism

 

Yesterday I was in a serious motorcycle accident coming down Kaiminani at about 5 AM. My front tire suddenly lost air, handle bars twisted sharply to the left, and over and down, and over I went, followed my the longest skid of my life.

X-rays and Catscans later revealed the worst of my injury was a break in my left leg, the side of the body that took most of the fall.

But I am already getting ahead of myself. This story isn't really about me.

Laying there dazed in the middle of the street, one car drove around and passed me and continued down the hill. Another car heading up the hill, pulled to the side to see if I was alright. I heard him call 911, give his name and number, and he said he'd try to stay but he was late for work.

As I crawled to the side of the street, this good Samaritan picked up my motorcycle - this is when we noted the front tire was airless and flat, and he engaged in some small talk until the paramedics arrived, followed by the police.

Routine questions were asked. I was put in the back of the ambulance. One of the officers was to arrange for a tow with my AAA card. I was off to the Kona Community Hospital.

You may not have noticed in that briefest rendition are examples of communism, and I want you to think about them, appreciate them, and strive to better them. The alternative is at the end of this story.

Communism, you say incredulously? Where are the Reds?

A lot of nonsense still fills the heads of the pioneer West about communism, even though we ask for it everyday in all kinds of subtle but obvious ways.

The good Samaritan. I did not have to hire anyone to stop and help. It was not part of his job: the fact he was anxious about being late for his job tells me he's not even a middle-management type, just a wage-slaving Joe like most of us. So without reward, he reached out.

The paramedics came. They never asked for my insurance or asked for a fee to begin care. I was on the ground. My first thought when I stopped skidding after the crash was who would feed my cat -- but I did not tell them this since they might think I had a head injury. They did their jobs. They followed their training. This is what we call a Public Service.

Public Services are services open to all. Our public schools. Our fire departments. These are also public services. No administrator stops to ask for a fee or to see if your monthly subscription is in good standing before the child is admitted to class or, worse, the fire in your house is put out.

As a nurse later put it to me in the ER "our job is to revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." Period.

Public Services are examples of communism.

The Police. I have to distinguish them from the other services because their function has earned mixed grades over time. The police were started explicitly to deal with poor people and the threat they posed to the Establishment. While much of the role of the police has not changed much over the last few hundred years, as public servants they can and do strive to achieve this end.

But police are a public service and also examples of communism. Armies are examples of communism, too. But they were designed to break things and kill people.

So just because communism is good doesn't mean everything it produces is good.

The Community Hospital, where I was taken by ambulance. Yes, that, too, is communism.

I know this pioneer country is full of myths and people who strive to fulfill those myths, who not only hate communism but also hate "government" - which I am arguing is communism to the extent it organizes public institutions to serve the public broadly or in target communities. These pioneer types want you to believe that all it takes is you and your sturdy bootstraps

But look what happens after a natural disaster. Nothing makes an anticommunist more communist than when a wildfire is about the burn down his precious home and the fire department show up and, without question, "revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." Those fire fighters follow their training and extinguish that fire.

We all paid into the pot for the service; we all benefit. That is communism.

When was the last time you heard someone ask how much money the fire department made in the last fiscal quarter? The police? The ambulances? Your schools?

But my story took a rather sour turn. No it wasn't the trauma suffered on my torso or my broken left leg. It was my motorcycle.

AAA would not retrieve my bike, so unbeknownst to me - I was in an ambulance - the police officer called their outside-contracted tow service to collect it.

A friend took me to this dump site where my bike was being held not 8 hours after my initial accident, and I was presented with a bill for over $400 to claim my motorcycle.

Ladies and gentlemen, comrades and co-conspirators: this is an example of capitalism. Unadorned, unromanticized capitalism.

The proponents of capitalism obfuscate it in all kinds of distracting ways: like cowboys on their horses, ranchers, tales of upward class mobility, and lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The bottom line about capitalism is it seeks to maximize its wealth in return for as little loss as possible. Just so, for towing my bike a few miles and housing it for a few hours at most, these people were able to extort $400 from me.

Capitalism extorts as much labor as it can, on or off the books, for as little compensation it can spend. That is why the old economists, the radicals, and even at one time the Republican Party called this wage-slavery.

Capitalism does demand performance, but not "our job is to revive the patient until we cannot revive the patient." No. It demands to know how much more you earned this quarter from last. It asks how did you minimize your costs.

Remember, they are authorized, outside contractors with the Hawaii police. In fact, I did call the police. I felt I was being extorted, and this was a scam. True to their history as defenders of the Establishment against the poor, the police officer arrived sharply dressed, polite, and in total collusion with the impound lot.

"IF I saw some criminal activity here ..." he said to me.

"If? ... Really?"

But that was that.

What it comes down to is which kind of society you want to cultivate for yourselves, your neighbors, your children, and so on.

I have drawn two sharp visions. These are real-life stories. Now our pioneer establishment must exist on the myth that only one story is tenable, the capitalist one. But they rarely show you its brutality and tell you that humans are naturally selfish creatures. This is nonsense.

Clearly, a good Samaritan and public services are as equally possible as that car that left me in the middle of the street to pull myself up by my bootstraps and police-authorized extortionists demanding much from you for little in return.

For my part, I am a communist, and only want to cultivate and perfect such a society for everyone.

The Counter Narrative to the Refugee Crisis

Resist this constant narrative about "refugees." Usually when US media stick to a singular message, I can simply go to the Guardian UK, Le Monde, El Pais, or other European media to get an alternative view. In this case, all the usual suspects - US, UK, Germany, France, and of course NATO - are complicit in perpetrating their customary war crimes - customary in the history of imperialism, that is. So it's not only valuable to question the message but also look outside to Russian, Cuban, and Indian media, or the truly dissident media within the empires, for another angle.

What is being driven into our heads as a refugee crisis, who will take the refugees, how many will they take, the plight of the refugees, the angst of such leaders as British prime minister David Cameron, who is said to be restricted by a British electorate leery of immigration, or of German chancellor Angela Merkel, who is described as facing down the skeptics in her ruling coalition - all this, all this rhetoric, misses some obvious points right in front of us.

One obvious fact is this refugee crisis is the result of a massive arms build up by the imperial powers in Western Asia over oil.

The other has to do with the economic state of Europe.

The West was literally built by its access into the global South via forced labor camps [plantations] and resource theft to fuel the industrial revolution. As these resources diminish, the need to secure access becomes more critical: hence, the massive tonnage of weaponry being used in the region, something almost never talked about, and where these weapons come from; hence in what Western commentators call generations of peacetime since the end of World War II. we have actually seen an almost constant, sustained imperial war on the global South.

The masses of people of the global South have simply gotten in the way of easy access to this shrinking, global oil supply. People are a threat because they pose potential forces of resistance, violent and nonviolent, revolutionary or not revolutionary.

The Cherokee got in the way, so they had to be made into refugees. East African tribes are in the way, so they are made into refugees. And in the closest analogy to our present situation, the Vietnamese peasants got in the way, so defoliants were used to drive masses of potential revolutionaries from the countryside where they were self-sufficient and  into the cities where they would become solely dependent on the US-backed dictatorship.

And then there is Europe itself.

What is puzzling about this refugee narrative is everyone seems to assume, and the refugees are made to assume, there is a home for them in Europe. I don't know what psychotic one must take to believe this: Europe, which has done so poorly in assimilating its colonial Asians, Africans, Arabs is presumed today to have a home for these hundreds of thousands of refugees, when just one Brazilian laborer could be assumed to be an Arab terrorist and chased by plainclothes secret service agents and shot multiple times in the London tube [subway].

Europe, which has deeper problems which connect directly to capitalism, is supposed to have economies to absorb these hundred of thousands of people.

Even without these refugees, with every advancement in Europe and growth in the British FTSE or German banks, comes deeper unemployment among its own peoples. This phenomenon is certainly true of the US and the rest of the industrialized world, guided by a command economy directed by bankers and financiers. Rising markets seem in competition with rising surplus laborers for whom there is no work and moves to lessen social supports.

Europe is in a crisis, and we see this most clearly in the southern regions and Ireland.

What is to be done with several hundred thousand refugees, regardless of their technological skills, when Europe cannot absorb its own into its narrowing economy? This is why the poorer EU countries are loudest in their resistance to accept these people.

Neoliberalism is supposed despite the evidence to the contrary right in front of us to solve every problem and put a chicken in every pot. These are lies. Vicious, imperial lies.

The Campaign of Kim Davis

As incredible as it might seem, it should not surprise you that some circles of so-called radical thinkers - mostly white, as far as I can tell - have made Kim Davis a cause close to their hearts.

We follow our white allies into deeper pits when even elected public servants who refuse to follow the law - particularly in regards to civil rights - are worthy of defense. I'm reading the strangest interpretations of Marxism applied to Davis. I see her given that militant-era right to with hold her labor that our labor force sorely needs to revive. I read that she has free-speech rights and this judge is abridging these rights, that her action in denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples was non-violent, so why feed the prison system with her body.

I have come to suspect their usefulness as allies. Now I wonder about their sanity.

Kim Davis is on a campaign. It is a political campaign. It has very little to do with Christianity since this country is not really a Christian country: she believes she is defending the settler state, and that the settler state is founded on the contrived unit of a nuclear family of heterosexuals. Her campaign is no more religious and no different than that of the Israelis who defend their settler state under the thin guise of Judaism. The Davis campaign is to use her occupation of a political office to stop a decided civil right.

She is not worth my sympathies or my defense. She's certainly not worthy that I draw from my radical anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-police state readings to defend her.
I will never defend the rights of Nazi camp guards over the captive Jews, gypsies, and queers.

If the job for which she was elected no longer meets her standards, and she wants to fuck white Jesus as her fifth husband, she was free to quit her job before being sent to jail.

She refuses to do so because she may not be the last Confederate widow, but she is one of many. Again, she is on a campaign much like any of her peers in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Israel, or Northern and Southern Rhodesia.

What Davis is oblivious to is that these same-sex couples clamoring at her office door for marriage licenses are more her allies than her foes. They want their place in the settler state; they don't want to interrogate it, dismantle it, revolt it into the rubbish bin of history. Same-sex marriage is more her ally than knows, and its adherents are more likely to kneel at the tomb of the same white Jesus she claims to hold so close to her bosom.

They will not be interrogating how our national institutions created the so-called Appalachian region, with its abject poverty of white people. The coal mines. The sabotage against union organizing.

What I expect is happening for these fake radicals may seem ripped from the pages of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing: it is that these white radicals cannot stomach seeing a white woman punished the way Africans, First Nations, and Arabs are routinely treated without the meandering outcries of these same radicals.

Ali Amin, aged 17, has just been sent to prison for 11 years, and I hear nothing from these tongue-twisters about free speech or needlessly filling our prisons. Nothing.

As far as I'm concerned, if this circle of white radicalism can defend Davis, they can defend the settler state, and they are no ally of mine.

Brief Thoughts on the Imprisonment of Ali Shukri Amin at 17

 

Seventeen year old Ali Shukri Amin has just been sentenced to 11 years in prison, as an adult, for "supporting" ISIS. I listened twice to the news story this morning on NPR. A US Attorney made a point of going in person to the studio to be interviewed, which alerts me that the Feds are intent on making a grand example of this young man. The Feds are making the rounds to massage the reporters.

I listened carefully to the interview. The reporter asked a few times about this "support," and I leaned in. I don't understand how having a Twitter account [with 4,000+ followers] supporting the ISIS mission or helping a friend go to Syria or even encouraging others warrants a terror charge and an 11-year sentence in a white-settler country where the Klan thrives, in the open, in most states, and its former Grand Wizard, David Duke, walks freely and commentates in his reactionary fashion about US politics.

Looking further into this case, it is reported that Amin is an honor student at his high school, described various times as un-assimilated among his peers, which is code to many of us peoples of color. He immersed himself in the internet and online discussions. It is not surprising, however it happened, that such a person in such a country, would begin to look to the lands of his ancestors for the spiritual nourishment denied him by being "un-assimilated."

In any case, Amin's parents, concerned for him, elicited the help of a local imam to counsel the boy.

The imam, it is now reported, is an FBI informant. From there and from that, things went predictably downhill to this then-16 year old kid having the weight of his mosque [headed by the informant], the FBI, and the Federal courts upon him.

Who could take that pressure without folding, which is what Amin did, in exchange for a lighter indictment? He's written a pitiful letter to the court, worthy of a Soviet-era apology.

The case of Ali Amin, and the resources put towards punishing this boy reveals how far, how wide, how deep the US plays its role in the imperial wars on Western Asia (aka, the Middle East). They have plucked a mere child from the soil, who fired no weapons, dropped no cluster munitions.

Since the US has shown itself to be that desperate, I reiterate the hopelessness of its cause. It must know how badly it's losing.

This is not a source of joy but of alarm. Europe and its spawn have shown themselves to be capable of the most brutal genocides to prop up its culture.

Meanwhile, it is not Amin but Kim Davis, the jailed public official in Kentucky, who has become a Cause for a strange circle of white leftist radicals who are disturbed that her "free-speech rights" have been violated; that, recalling the more militant trades-unionism, she has a "right to with hold her labor;" and somehow they allege Marx is spinning in his grave at her ill-treatment and the prison-industrial complex.

Strange things are coming from their mouths.

It is always revealing - as if we need more evidence - what our so-called white allies select as their causes, and those things they pretend not to see at all.

What have you done to Celia?

Coming this Fall 2015. To Telemundo. Hold your breath. Given the clips I've just watched, I already have reservations about "Celia," a multi-episode series of her life. Anyone who knows me well knows I DREAM about Celia Cruz. I have all her recordings. Read about her and read her "autobiography," which must be put in quotations as it has proven to be as reliable as Katharine Hepburn's ME: Stories of My Life - something disseminated from the old PR departments of MGM.

Telemundo's choice of the title role, a Puerto Rican actress of a certain light hue, shows me we've not come far since that Latino comedian made a vile, racist remark about Michelle Obama looking like a monkey. "Latin America," to use that erroneous term for the moment, is more color struck, more obsessed with the brown-bag tests than their counterparts among the Yankees. Ok, they are equally obsessed. They are all cut from the same cultural cloth that is racist Europe.

From the clips, the Cuban revolutionaries look like fanatics; but no hint in the preview that Celia herself was a fellow-traveler of the communists and twice during the 1950's was barred from entering the US with her band for being so [as US State Dept documents released after her death revealed].

I wonder why the long-planned project between Whoopi Goldberg, a feeble mind but decent actress, Cristina Saralegui, and her husband could never be greenlit. Goldberg is not conventionally Latino but she has the coloring and the African body to contrast the actress Telemundo has chosen. Just over 10 years after La Reina's death, it is jarring to see a lighter-skinned, Vogue-bodied woman portray a particular AFRICAN. The light-skinned Puerto Rican plays the younger Celia, while Cuban singer, Aymée Nuviola, another African of Cuban nationality, is reported to play the role of Celia later in life. Nuviola is a force of Nature as a musician in her own right. She would not have had a voice dub her singing parts, and as a sonera - improviser - she is in a league of her own. Yet it will be jarring to see even her play the role of a dark-skinned African in a racist Spanish society.

Haila Mompié, a dark-skinned African singer of Cuban nationality, would have been a wise choice as the young Celia. Haila, as she is known professionally, even produced a tribute CD to Celia in Cuba [that could not attribute itself to Celia]. It is a beautiful rendition of Celia's classics. Like Goldberg, she seems not to have been an obvious choice.

But this is why the term Latin America needs, at minimum, unpacking. In white hands, it pretends to be many things, but never African. It lauds in romantic tones the indigenous communities it continues to exterminate. It holds up Spain or Portugal as Mother Countries, or views a British-German woman as their queen, when its populations are in no way British, German, Spaniard, or Portuguese: its rulers have been.

It is just as if we called Algeria French or Rhodesia British, when 80%-90% of its populations were African in the lands of their ancestors. We really must stop and look at these crimes.

I have been unpacking the Latin American/Caribbean region. Like historian Ali Mazrui, I would consider much of the Caribbean literal extensions of Africa, due solely to Europe intervention in the kidnapping of Africans and the total extermination of the native populations; and the region's whitened minority populations, recent imports to stave off another Haitian revolt and solidify white supremacy, a European counter-measure.

Just as I would look at other parts of the Latin American region as categorical First Nations, indigenous, despite the European governments and landowners in power.

Here I go further: brainwashed and white-washed peoples of the region, including Africans who should know better, might argue they are "all Cuban. Just Cuban," or, "just Mexican," "Brazilian," and so forth and so on, despite what their own racist governments do in practice: and I do include the Cuban revolution here. For a country overwhelmingly African, the absence of African leadership is telling.

Nationality has replaced religion as an opiate of the African masses in the diaspora: false flags and passports, when our condition is predictable and indices common from New York City to the southern tip of Brazil, and then some. Since our services were rendered useless at the end of chattel slavery, our presence has been a constant problem best solved by national campaigns to shoot us, lock us up, malign us at every turn in the popular press. Most attempts to actualize us, show our history, or condition, are silenced. That is why I believe Goldberg's project was vetoed and no one ever seriously considered Haila to play Celia.

Looking at the previews of "Celia," our masters really haven't come far from those times of the 40's, 50's and into the 1960's when African musicians could not be shown on their own record albums nor plays on mainstream - read, white - radio stations. They needed the likes of Pat Boone and Elvis to cover African music, and thus, stars were made and talent erased. "Celia" is on a long continuum of propaganda to erase Africa and its gifts.

On Prisons

 

With Obama being the first sitting president to visit a prison to talk about mass incarceration we must be careful how he and the white press - for that is whom he is really speaking for - confine the discussion why the United States is purportedly the biggest prison population in the world

The Establishment is a odd mix in and of itself, so it is redundant to note a figure like Newt Gingrich on the so-called Right and a personage like Van Jones on the so-called Left finding common cause around this issue of our prisons. We are assaulted with this narrative that "all sides" have come together and agree that the US prison population is a problem in need of resolution.

The Establishment always agree. There is nothing extraordinary here. What is extraordinary is the level of gullibility among some viewers.

The Establishment agree on a defense budget. The Establishment agree that Israel is "our" friend. When Rep Barbara Lee [D-Calif] voted to send more weapons of death to Israel after that white-settler state had killed a few thousand Palestinians in Gaza, she was acting as part of the Establishment. 

 

She not only had none of her leftist flourishes to offer as excuse but she also notably went into hiding from the left-wing press.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders votes to support Israel, and he has been heckled at events for doing so, to which he gets irate and flustered.

So, if anything, the Establishment agreeing on anything should not warm your heart but arouse you to pay closer attention, which is what I'm doing now.

 

The gullible eat the shit in their words and don't watch how these people in government vote.

If you believe the narrative coming out you'd think the country had stumbled mistakenly into this predicament of a swelling prison system. You'd think that it was the consequence of a competitive party system trying to better their opponent on getting tough on crime.

The subtext of this is supposed to convey they it was never intended to lock these masses of African, First Nation, and poor white people up for prolonged sentences: it was just a mistake.

So given this official narrative, that racist Arkansian, Bill Clinton, can credibly come out as offer his regret for signing Omnibus Crime Bills, sending tens of thousands into the dungeons.

What's a prison population for? I'm less interested that ours in the US is the biggest, because prisons function the same whether in the UK, China, France, or Equatorial Guinea.

Prisons house human beings the system cannot absorb.

Parts of the US and all of Australia were started as Convict Colonies, and this fact gives us a sense of prisons and what we really need to do to abolish them.

Britain sent the refuse of capitalism outside its borders. They had already filled up the system within its borders. Refuse of capitalism? Yes. In seeking primarily to maximize profit - not save the world or turn lights on, but rather make money - capitalism wants to deal with as few workers as possible and pay them as cheaply as it can manage. The technology sphere in the hands of capitalism will aid capitalism by finding ways to make workers - human beings - more and more superfluous. Refuse.

Technology is not in itself an evil. Writers who should have known better theorized technology would come to make our lives easier, would create a leisure class. These writers were living in a fantasy world and seemed unaffected by the sober writings that ran almost since the beginning of the so-called Industrial Age right up to, say, Huey Newton's discourses in the 1970's.

Capitalism has made people refuse to a system that has no use for them. It makes sense that one of the earliest populations to be affected by this in the US white settlement were freed Africans.

Since the slave system was demolished, the main problem this white-settler nation has had is what to do with Africans. It has been a running, enduring, persistent problem only solved by - that's correct - mass incarceration.

Discussion about the crimes committed is important because they are clearly racial in nature: in other words, they were crafted to target specific populations. But this present hand-wringing that maybe the sentences for this or that were too excessive or why or why not to mandatory minimums or we need to rethink how many strikes a convict might get is a big distraction from the Plot.

Capitalism wants a smooth, green golf course, and these surplus workers are weeds. It doesn't matter to the Establishment if it can get away with shooting them, gassing them, spraying Round-Up on them, lynching them, pulling them out by their roots, whatever.

It's important the prison problem be framed this way for two apparent reasons:

One, it points to the obvious solution, and it is not getting rid of three-strikes laws but a system that is profit-centered in the first place.

Two, it's important to look at the obvious solution because the Establishment will not come to this solution itself. I would not expect them to. So what are they going to do? What are they up to?

Another recent hand-wringing might give us a worrying clue.

Remember when that same phony Left-Right coalition lamented an over-extended military? They meant personnel, not weapons of death. They targeted personnel and bases, not missiles and cluster-bombs. At any rate, what was the result of this draw-down of the military? It was private contractors. It was a means for the government to lower government expenditures.

Private contractors, who replaced government employees, were like temps: they weren't government employees, not military service people, so any extraneous costs - like long-term medical - were eliminated.

The mission of empire never, ever changed. It has not changed. As with this post-Industrial move to privatize our public schools, local and state government, and right up to what I see as a move to make a great leap forward to privatize the prison system.

This is where we are headed.

Maintaining a large and, in my opinion, naturally revolutionary cadre, of prisoners has become a cost the austerity government does not want to bear. That is why the current preoccupation with our prisons, which is not about prisoners, never about workers.

That is why you will never hear as a cause for incarceration the de-industrialization of the country in favor of cheaper labor abroad and how this would naturally devastate an urban or rural community. The Establishment don't want you connecting any dots.

In the same vein, the Establishment for all its current bluster is not about to release this cadre - which I emphasize is probably the most revolutionary we have, less wedded to a bourgeois system and without bourgeois aspirations - into the streets. They are about to hand the prison system over to the same companies running our charter schools.

Dickens cannot be far behind.

The Greek Referendum

I'm holding my breath on this mistaken referendum in Greece. But I never take my eyes off the evil-doings of Western finance in every part of the world, especially resource-rich, yet impoverished Africa.

Greece was imposed with a Danish monarchy as the Ottoman Empire began its decline. The present Greek king, who is not Greek, is, as he should be, at home in London. Exiled. Yet he still maintains fantasies of returning to his "homeland" where he is not wanted.

Prince Philip, the British queen's husband, was supposedly a Greek prince. The former queen of Spain, Sofia, wife of the also unwanted Juan Carlos, was also a Greek princess. Juan Carlos was imposed on the Spanish people by Franco, and SYRIZA's counterpart in Spain, PODEMOS, wants to exile its monarchy too. In any case, neither Philip nor Sofia have an ounce of Greek blood but come from Denmark and Germany - Germany, which used to be called the stud farm for Europe's royals [because Europe had so recklessly intermarried, spawning some bizarre characters it needed to find some fresh, white blood].

During World War II German NAZI occupation, resistance movements spring up all over Europe. Perhaps the weakest of these, but most celebrated today, was in France. Why? Because the French loved Hitler and Nazism. But since Hitler lost, the ridiculed French resistance has become legendary.

Not so in Greece. The Greek Resistance was large and deep. It was so anti-fascist, so well organized, so well disciplined, so strong, so believing in civil society and democracy, so socialist and so deeply anti-colonial that it had to be liquidated by the British and a military government imposed, along with sustaining the Danish royals.

The Greek Resistance fighters caught on to this quickly and planned to euthanize Churchill as the sick dog he was.

SYRIZA, that anti-austerity, anti-capitalist political party, must know this history. Taking real power through an election is naive enough and comes with known difficulties: namely, you are given the tools and restrictions of a capitalist state to implement non-capitalist agenda.

But to trust a second referendum tomorrow without European imperialism intervening in the most bloodthirsty way, given the history, makes me hold my breath ...

if Europe will sleep soundly knowing that young Greeks are throwing themselves off ledges to end their suffering, you must know this same Europe will PUSH Africans off the same ledges.

I got your back, Miss Simone

Cautionary Tales are a widely used device in Western art forms to take real or imaginary lives and explain [or imagine] their crash-and-burn demise as a warning to us all: beyond here be dragons. I became aware of the wide use of this device reading Gore Vidal's narratives and counter-narratives about some scholar taking down a militant or - to use Vidal's tongue-in-cheek - "the fags." Oscar Wilde comes to mind as someone scholars kept churning out cautionary tales about sex, and Vidal was ready in the wings to take the muthafucka down. And he did so quite beautifully, which is why I was always riveted to read his prose. I recommend it.

So I approach any biographical work with suspicion: what is the task of the artist or producer?

This suspicion is reflexive if the subject matter is any one of official outcasts of this pretended, wicked white settler society and its false prophet white Jesus.

I only knew some of Nina Simone's music and less of what others might have mentioned in their own works. Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Kwame Ture come immediately to mind. My general impression was here was an articulate, angry voice to articulate the human rights crimes of the United States, when the nation did not welcome neither articulation nor anger. Just compliance.

So even without being an African woman, she came to me as an outcast.

Still, I was eager and anxious to see the documentary about her life, ""What Happened, Miss Simone?" to see if it filled in the many gaps of my knowledge without giving the usual Cautionary Tale.

Gaps were filled. One of Malcolm's daughters articulates what is truly wrong with this Christian country when she says: "Participation in activism during the 60's rendered chaos in any individual's lives. People sacrificed sanity, well being, life. Nina Simone was a free spirit in an era that didn't appreciate a woman's genius. What does that do to a household and a family, not because of [lack of] income but because your soul not being able to do what you need it to do ... "

Nina. Jimmy. Josephine. WEB. Stokely. Geromino. Did these luminaries find the secret to persisting by emigrating and avoiding the academic oblivion and baby talk that other African radicals faced when they stayed here on Turtle Island too long and blended like American cheese into the tasteless casserole that is the United Snakes of America? [Thank you, Nina, for that: I will use it liberally from now on].

Nina escaped to Liberia, is described as being happy, but inexplicably ends up in Europe where she is medicated and given an ultimatum to resume her career. I wanted to hear MORE about those eight years in Liberia!

These, I guess, are the facts, whether I like them or not.

So if there is a Cautionary Tale here is it to not wander too far off the reservation? Simone is described by her contemporaries as "sacrificing" so much to the slave rebellion [aka, civil rights movement]; that she was no longer marketable; that she scared record labels and soured radio stations. I couldn't help thinking the handlers of this project see life as a linear existence, not circuitous, where one body of water meanders to feed another.

In real life, school teachers can become salsa music sensations, Ivy League pre-med students can "drift" into a stellar acting careers, and young, well-married attorneys can become one of the greatest revolutionaries of our time.

Such are the nonlinear trajectories of Celia Cruz, Katharine Hepburn, and Fidel.

The idea that any of them betrayed their destiny or needed medicating to stay the Course would be troublesome.

Nina said and wrote what she meant, how she felt, and what she was inspired to do: and she was crushed at every turn not only by her country's elite but by people who said they were her husband and "brother."

Maybe the first thing revolutionaries must do is kill their friends. If that is too extreme, the words of Jesus rejecting his blood family might substitute as a non-violent mantra.

To do neither is to risk one's sanity.

The Cautionary Tale needs to be coaxed out of this documentary project. On her way through a music career, Eunice Wayans was destined to join Assata in leaving the Black Panthers because they weren't militant enough and taking up arms with the Black Liberation Army. If they had been caught and jailed in New Jersey, they'd have broken each other out, and fled to Cuba. Miss Simone wrote that her husband could not satisfy her sexually: this better course would have given her the orgasms she so craved.