4 posts from 2008

What on Earth is wrong with Vegetarians?

First and foremost, meat is delicious! Now that that’s out of the way, let’s consider a few other things.  In my far too frequent encounters of self-styled herbivores, I’m always met with some kind of disdain that as they opine that my delight in the carnal culinary somehow makes me inferior. I often try to bait them with some simplistic, but true, retort that they too participate in the destruction of precious life every time they enjoy a carrot, potato, broccoli, parsnip, or just about any other non-fruit vegetable.

The worldly vegetarian, however, is often prepared for this rebuttal and she takes the bait by trying to reduce my argument to the ridiculous since plants don’t have feeling and don’t feel pain.

But even if I agreed that plants do feel any pain (or the equivalent) I remain unconvinced that the registry of pain onto a nervous system should be the measure of the sanctity of life. Why should it be? The answer is simple… EGOISM. Regardless of how much they claim to care about all life, the measure of preciousness is conveniently, yet completely arbitrarily, mapped onto their own sense of self. Pain is the measure, because humans feel pain. Photosynthesis could just have easily been added to the measure, but that would make eating really hard!

Vegetarians see in the condemned mammal what they fail to see in an exterminated colony of insects which, incidentally, also feel pain. No one has yet to object to me killing a cockroach. But when the animal is all warm and furry and shares a common form with the human. This is not a universal respect for life. It’s hypocrisy! So before you start judging me and praying for my demise, O Ye Vegetarians, consider a fresh and less lemmingly inspired look at your position and the intrinsic hypocrisy therein.  Hitler was a vegetarian too.

As I eat my dinner tonight, I will realize that the cow and the broccoli rabe both sacrificed so that I might be sustained. Having not created a single living thing… ever… this human will pay homage to all of the dead creatures on his plate and respect the fact that all life, with the exception of those noble photosynthesizers, is sustained by death.

NO! Which is probably why it's not called the Fix the Economy Plan. I’m not sure if something called a Stimulus Plan even aspires to be a “fix” for our economy. I also don’t think economies lend themselves to being fixed (which why every attempt, anywhere, always fails). The simple truth is that this “economic slowdown” has been a long time coming. Economists on both sides of the Atlantic have, for decades, implored US Americans to increase their savings rate. Did they? Instead, US Americans have enjoyed an artificially high standard of living backed by an artificially high, overpriced dollar, and the Wal-Mart model which has an immediate effect of spending less and a net effect of spending more.

The citizenry’s high consumption, low savings, and demand for low prices have contributed to a deficit in the balance of trade for EVERY trading partner that we have. This, combined with the milliards of dollars that we have spent in Babylon (spending on global security aside) is a sure-fire way to court an “economic downturn”.

But now, since China has stopped buying all of those bonds and won’t let the Yuan appreciate, it’s gonna be pretty hard/impossible for the dollar (1.58=EUR today) to recover. Stimulus is always good, but US Americans are gonna have to learn to cut back and…SAVE!

re: http://www.alternet.org/story/80583/

I hated coming home from college during the breaks. I mean, I'd experienced all of the excitement that the projects had to offer at the time. Maybe seeing what rural Pennsylvania was like sans student body wasn't such a bad idea and there wasn’t anyone in particular that I really wanted to see at home. But, shit, my money started drying up and a nigga gotta eat, right?

As it turned out, the summer wasn't going to be so bad after all. Plenty of nice girls out wearing hoe-ish outfits; my niggas on the corners: freestylin, bustin' (the dozens). It was actually kinda fly. 

My cousin Joey came through one Wednesday night with his cousin, Tone. I hadn't seen either of them in a serious minute. It was good to see Joey, though. He was telling me that he had just "gotten his act together". He had recently taken his Shahada and converted to Islam, got a promotion to shift manager at the now defunct Sizzler restaurant, and had been awarded partial custody of his daughter. Not the hallmarks of an over-achiever, per se, but he had come a long way and I was proud of him.

I remember coming in late one night, one week and one day after Joey had stopped by. My mother waited up for me to tell me that Joey had been shot. I thought about how much that must have sucked for him, but people get shot all of the time and it's never that big of a deal. "He'll live", I thought. I was almost sure that he would exaggerate the extent of the gunshot wounds and boast about how tough he was. But almost as if in response to my unuttered comment, she followed with, "He was pronounced dead at 2:15 this morning." 

I was stopped in my tracks. I stood frozen in the hallway for a half hour as the conversation that we had had a week prior flashed before me. It was so vivid that I could hear his voice ringing in my ears as if he were right in front of me. Our entire conversation replayed in that moment. I couldn't believe it. I mean, he had just gotten his life together. After having processed it, I went into my room and cried.

The following weeks proved to me that Joey’s death had indeed shaken me at the very core. I mean, I had always heard those wild statistics that said that black men 15-25 were something like 200% more likely to die from handgun violence than the next group in line, but I wasn’t worried all that much. I was “The Scientist”, after all. I was known for being studious and staying out of major trouble. I was sure that as long as avoided trouble, it would avoid me. But Joe’s death had implications in my own life for which I was scarcely prepared.

It assured me that the straight and narrow were unwilling to guarantee my safety. Here was irrefutable evidence that I could do everything right and still be forcefully removed from this plane.

"What happened?”, I responded to my mother's news. She told me that after a heated argument with his daughter's mother, the girl came after him with a fork. In his attempt to defend himself, he accidently struck her child by another man. With no warning to Joey, she called her son’s father to come and rectify that which was clearly a mistake. Approaching Joey’s car without a question or a concern, the angry father fired a shot into the back of Joey's head and another into the chest neck of his passenger. Joe’s friend survived and was pivotal in the conviction of this maniac. But Joey died that night in the Celebrity wagon parked in front of his mother’s West Philadelphia home. I lost a good friend in Joey—one of my favourite cousins. And I also lost the dream of security that I thought protected me from the underbelly of the inner-city. I with that graduate school meant being out of harm’s way, but I know that as long as people in this city recognize my face, I can have the wrath of any demon visited upon me.

Defining hip-hop as a form of art, apart from music 

Defining art:

Isn't hip-hop just a genre of music? The difficulty in defining any form of art is perhaps a function of the problem intrinsic to defining art itself. Regardless of how much we understand its historical beginnings, the days of canonical, academic art but a relic. Post Enlightenment relativism and post Renaissance emotivism have effected a degradation of standards that has rendered both the terminology and criteria by which modern art is described and judged all but arbitrary.

Lest we acquiesce to the meaninglessness and absurdity of this immutable dilemma—defining that for which no standard can exist—it is incumbent upon the freeman to bear the woe and torment of lawlessness and strive to erect at least a point of reference for the many, if not the masses. The palm of society is art itself and its lifeline reveals a gauzy sketch of who we are, who we were, what we’ve done, and maybe even what we’ll do. Yet, even without an Academy protecting the annals of academic rigour and artistic decency, the judgement of art, or any genre therein, may be acutely possible within a community of the willing providing its members can agree, at the very least, on terminology. However, even the pursuit of this small morsel of accordance comes but with its unique set of quandaries.

On Hip-Hop:

Difficulty in defining hip-hop is, inevitably, no different in this respect. Relativism, emotion, and partiality are almost impassible given the novelty of the genre and the paucity of relevant, rigourous study thereof. And again, agreeing on the terminology is but a first step, though an important one, in defining hip-hop. But without a clear starting point, perhaps describing what hip-hop isn’t will assist us in defining what it is.

A paramount question in this task: Is hip-hop music? Without tackling the chore of first defining music, it is, perhaps, easiest to examine some elements common to the constitution of music that hip-hop does not necessarily share. Regardless of what may accompany it, music is always comprised of some type of melody which is produced by various instruments and is described variably by notes, tones, meters and such. Even non-Western music, which can be difficult to describe in Western terms, has its own equivalents by which music is measured. Music without the melody and without instruments is, essentially, nothing (or at the very least no longer able to be considered music).

The same is not true for hip-hop. Although hip-hop is often accompanied by music, if the essentials of music are stripped away, the essence hip-hop still stands. Unaccompanied by any melody at all, hip-hop is still recognizable as such. Ciphering is perhaps the best example of this. In a free-style cipher, the hip-hop artist puts forth only his lyrics without the aid of any musical instruments or melodies and even without singing. I’m talkin’ bout niggas on the corner, gettin it in with no beats and no box. The consummate importance of the lyric to hip-hop is a distinction that separates it from music. Music without lyrics, still continues as such. Hip-hop without lyrics ceases to be. It would be, at most, music and at least, silence.

Notwithstanding its frequent accompaniment by music, hip-hop can always stand without it. This does not mean that the genera are mutually exclusive, but all forms of art can be accompanied by music without being transformed into music. Painting and Sculpture accompanied by music still remain Painting and Sculpture. Poetry accompanied by music is still poetry. With the same regard, hip-hop, accompanied by music is still hip-hop. Hip-hop is not weak nor is it fragile. Its essence does not collapse under the weight of music. It is a new art form—an unique expression of culture coded secretly to be understood universally.