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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 1468
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, September 23, 2005 - 01:20 pm: | 
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ZNet | Vision & Strategy
“Texas Style:” Drunk On Imperialism in Postmodern America
Why the Young Don’t Care Anymore
by Sarah Wash; September 21, 2005
It seems that, as a generation, we twentysomethings have a lot in common with our president.
On a recent Saturday night, my friend and I attended a birthday party at a bump’n’grind/cowboy bar in northeast Minneapolis. Neither of us felt inclined to go - it’s not really our scene - but the birthday girl was the babymamma of a good friend’s brother and, social ties being what they are, we were somewhat obligated. Already on the financial skids, we paid an unexpected cover charge for the privilege of skirting around - and I apologize for my sizeist-sounding comment in advance - the widest asses I’d ever seen in hot pants, jiggling around the dance floor. “Texas style,” I commented to my friend, referring to the 1990 David Lynch film Wild at Heart.
Our other friends impersonated cheerful cavorting in the cowboy section, where the sound system patched together a strained concoction of new wave and acid rock. Not one of us was particularly concerned about the NPR report that estimated some 5,000 dead by the time the Katrina catastrophe is somewhat stabilized, nor were we terribly mindful of the thousands of dead American soldiers in this latest installment of the world police plan, much less the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties. It was Saturday night, after all - why should we care? During my years as a political organizer, the last thing my fellow activists talked about at the bar was politics. But the truth is that most of my peers have never even been to an antiwar protest since the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001.
What’s my evidence for this? Let’s look at the numbers for a moment. The first Minneapolis antiwar protest against the Afghanistan bombing drew about 500 people. After our leader Paul Wellstone died in 2002, about 10,000 attended the anti-Iraq war protest at the Minnesota state capitol - about half of them people of our parents’ generation with signs saying “Remember Vietnam.” People came by the busload from all over the state. All told, that’s about five thousand young people out of a population of several million. Nationwide, the numbers were similar, according to the size and political importance of the city: D.C., 200,000; San Fransisco, 75,000; Seattle, 8,000; Denver, 6,000; with numbers similar to the latter in Denver, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, and Augusta. All told, that’s a little over 300,000 people across the country. As a basis for comparison, on November 15, 1969, close to a million protesters, most of them under thirty, gathered at the Washington Monument. And there were over one million in Florence, Italy on November 9, 2002. To date, no single US protest against the Iraq War has exceeded 500,000.
Still, it’s not the protests that matter. It’s an overall sense of concern that’s missing - a feeling of responsibility for being the pampered children of the world’s richest country that leads people to research and pass along information, talk about what’s going on in the world - to do something. For example, today the only overtly political music is marginalized. The popular music today has more to do with what’s called “expressive individualism” than anything at issue in the world that surrounds it. Chuck D. is one of the musicians who’s commented on the lack of politically engaged young people. He cites MTV brainwashing as the reason for our overall unconcern. Maybe so, to a certain extent, but none of my peers watch MTV. They listen to alternative radio and read alternative magazines. And from what I can surmise, they think of political involvement as a lifestyle choice, a scene. Sorry, Iraqi citizens. They’re just not that into you.
One possibility I’ve often heard cited is that we youngsters are not being drafted, and that should a draft start, we’d be fighting the war quicker than anything, which may be why it’s so important for the Bush administration to use the “all-volunteer army.” Since the rank-and-file is currently composed of the poorest people, or so the line goes, the youth of the elite see no reason to concern themselves as activists. The problem with that argument is that it wasn’t just the elite who organized the Vietnam antiwar actions - it was mostly college students of all economic backgrounds. Today’s students have just as much time on their hands as did their predecessors, and the latter had the draft deferment throughout most of the war to protect them anyway. Besides, protests and other actions are being organized - the issue at hand, as I said, is the level of participation.
The bare, frightening fact of the matter is that my generation does have a sense that something terrible is happening. A good analogy of the way we think is the issue of smoking. We know it will kill us; we do it anyway. That’s absolute cynicism. We know what’s going on in the world; we’re tired of hearing about it because we know the world is fucked up - heck, we’re all fucked up - and there’s nothing we can do about it.
How on earth did the world’s most pampered youth become so cynical? We haven’t suffered war, famine, or highly contagious disease epidemics. Part of it may be how we understand reality. This is where Chuck D.’s MTV theory comes back into play: everything we think we know, we really know only in sound-bite form. A penny wise, a pound foolish: we know lots of facts, but we don’t really understand any of them. We know about the kids with limbs blown away because we've seen tons of pictures, but we have no context with which to relate, and therefore no ability to feel compassion. All we know is life around us: if not TV, then Internet, movies, radio, magazines, billboards. It’s a sterile life of same-old same-old that leaves us feeling bored, craving either meaning or annihilation. The meaning part is the vulnerable chink in my generations’s cynical armor. The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami says that we’re all hungry for narrative - a good story that gives our existence a sense of explanation. If we need to care about the world, then tell us why. Make us believe. So far, nobody has done that for us. A few people have tried; Murakami and Palahniuk are working on it, and in some cases, they’ve helped to shape concerned minds who seek out ways to make the world better. In the absence of a good story, we’ll take anything we can get or become nihilistic. We become like the character No-Face in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away: we’re living in a place without meaning that makes us feel hollow on the inside, and we’ll consume anything and everything in our path in order to try and fill the void.That brings us back to the bar. Texas style.
It’s almost closing time. A posse of scantily-clad zeppelin-sized revelers drifts past me as the high priestess of shots announces last call. My bleary eyes take in the scene of playful wreckage as everyone starts gathering their things to head home. Hopefully by the time we sober up we’ll still have the ability to take the power back, to stop the war machine before it’s too late.
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Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 205
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 24, 2005 - 12:13 pm: |
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These sound like white folks. What do Black/African American, 20 somethings think..?
LiLi |
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 369
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 24, 2005 - 04:02 pm: |
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My thoughts exactly, LiLi. I meant to ask the exact same thing, posted the exact same way, but I didn't have the time. To me, it's not at all surprising that a bunch of young white folks feel that way; especially after the media coverage and the government's response to Katrina. But as far as young black folks are concern, every young black person I ran into during the aftermath of Katrina was just as charitable and even more outraged than older black folks. The young people in my neighborhood did most of the leg work that was needed for a Katrina fund raiser. And, so far, they've been the ONLY ones I've heard raising hell about it -- wasn't it a young black man (Kenye West) who spoke out about Katrina in the first place ( yes, I'm big upping Kenye West, so what). But my point is that young BLACK folks care and they happen to be the ONLY ones who are speaking out about Katrina. So the question should be - Why the hell don't the thirty somethings and the elders care anymore?
THAT'S THE FUCKIN QUESTION.
Tonya |
Nels
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 82
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 24, 2005 - 05:19 pm: |
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Libralind2 --
It would seem to me that if everything always has to be broken down into black and white to be understood, then those who both need and thrive off of that distinction are the very one's who will most likely never benefit from it. Once the distinction between the “Black man's White” and the “White man's Black” becomes less relevant and less distinct, then the intended message will have greater meaning and garner a larger and more responsive audience of do(ers), and not just say(ers).
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Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 372
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 24, 2005 - 06:17 pm: |
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Nels, sometimes the do(ers) and the say(ers) are the same people, and lets also not forget that when you see things in "black" and "white" - you see the whole picture. No pun intended, but it waaas funnier than a mutha fucker, wasn't it???
LMBAO!
Tonya |
Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 209
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, September 24, 2005 - 10:11 pm: |
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[Responding to orig. post]
yeah,it sounds more like the kids at my school who drink themselves on the floor and throw their parents tuition away. God, the many times I hear "I don't wanna be depressed" or get complete silence when I suggest world issues for topical discussion, ugh.....
Sad how some ppl waste their priviledges.
Well,that ain't me, I'd rather actually MAKE USE of my brain, my creativity and mother's hard earned money.
Btw, I WAS at the first anti-war protest in january 2002. I was in the area for another trip around the same time and took a couple pictures while there! 
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2623
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 - 12:20 am: |
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Scuse me while I step over "Mary Sunshine". snicker-snicker. Now where was I? Oh, yes. It's hard to change a way-of-thinking, ain't it, Li-Li? Nels, we need you around to keep liberating us from our old mind-sets. |
Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 210
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 - 09:32 am: |
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--Scuse me while I step over "Mary Sunshine". snicker-snicker. --
wow, comments like that just take me back to my middle school days.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2626
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 - 12:46 pm: |
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Here's a little smiley for you, Mary, just to make you feel all warm and fuzzy while reminiscing about your middle school days and how faaaaaar you've come since then. Not. |
Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 211
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 - 01:27 pm: |
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After so many decades, you've clearly come pretty far yourself.
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2628
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, September 25, 2005 - 02:31 pm: |
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And don't you forget it, O Ye of limited vision. |
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 208
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 08:38 am: |
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Nels writes:Libralind2 --
It would seem to me that if everything always has to be broken down into black and white to be understood, then those who both need and thrive off of that distinction are the very one's who will most likely never benefit from it. Once the distinction between the “Black man's White” and the “White man's Black” becomes less relevant and less distinct, then the intended message will have greater meaning and garner a larger and more responsive audience of do(ers), and not just say(ers).
LiLi Responds..after she picks herself off the floor from where she fell after reading the above, in shock and says "you are KIDDING...right...???" That is THE most ridiculous comment posted here this year. Even white folks know we are as different as...black and white..so I say "what da hail are you talking about Willis..??". Frankly, I love thinking BLACK...I cant even wrap my brain around "thinking white"..whatever the hail that means. |
Negrological
Newbie Poster
Username: Negrological
Post Number: 3
Registered: 09-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 09:59 am: |
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Black Americans are no better when it comes to political awareness and critical thinking. The people of the United States (across the board) have fallen in love with the American ideology of 'individualism'. And when you fall in love with that ideology you become more accepting of the social status quo. |
Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 212
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 08:15 pm: |
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--And don't you forget it, O Ye of limited vision.--
Wow cynnique!LOL! you don't know a back-handed comment when it's right in front of you.!
I'm saving my breath for someone with SOME foothold left in reality.I'm finished with you. |
Libralind2
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 209
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 10:15 pm: |
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Here is another view of your "20 something white folks":
HIIP HOP FRIDAYS: "KILL WHITEY" ON THE DANCE FLOOR
by Michelle Garcia
The dance floor throbs to the rapid thump-thump of the hip-hop beat. The deejay, Tha Pumpsta, leans against his booth, and a woman slides up from behind, grabs his narrow hips and rubs hard.
Tha Pumpsta hops onto the crowded dance floor of guys in big T-shirts dangling from slight frames and ladies in short skirts and tasseled boots.
"Kill whitey!" yells Tha Pumpsta into the microphone as he bounces to the beat. "What . . .
gonna . . . do dance . . ." he raps to the beat. "Kill whitey!"
The kid by the bar busts out with a break-dancing move. Women drop their booties and the guys slide in close. Tha Pumpsta struts around in an all-white outfit from his headband to his high tops, shouting it again: " Kill whitey!"
Tha Pumpsta, who happens be white, has built a following in the past few years by staging monthly "Kill Whitie" parties in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for large groups of white hipsters. His proclaimed goal, in between spinning booty-bass, Miami-style frenetically danceable hip-hop records that are low on lyrical depth and high on raunchiness, is to "kill the whiteness inside."
What that means, precisely, is debatable, but it has something to do with young white hipsters believing they can shed white privilege by parodying the black hip-hop life. In this way, they hope to escape their uptight conditioning and get in touch with the looser soul within them.
Of course, it also follows a long line of white entertainers, such as Elvis Presley, who sought to be cool by emulating black culture. But in doing so, he pioneered something. These newest hipsters aren't trying to be creative -- just ironic. And some think he might be mocking black people.
‘Poking fun at myself’
"I'm throwing this party, and it's obvious that I'm white and I'm kind of appropriating this culture but in an ironic way," said Tha Pumpsta, whose name is Jeremy Parker. The 25-year-old takes his Pumpsta moniker from his high-top sneakers. "Kinda poking fun at myself and my origins and white people in general," he said.
"I'm trying to kill the whiteness inside," Parker added, although his blue eyes, milk-white skin and blond hair might suggest he has some work ahead of him.
A melanin-lacking hip-hop party might be a fact of demographics in a few corners of the United States. But in New York, where hip-hop was born in black and Latino neighborhoods, the all-white parody of black culture can strike a jarring note.
A few months ago, 29-year-old Sharda Sekaran was hitting dance spots with friends when she stumbled into a Kill Whitie party. "There was a bunch of white people acting like a raunchy hip-hop video," she said. "I don't get why that wouldn't be a characterization of black people for the entertainment of themselves."
Sekaran, a native New Yorker from a mixed-race family -- part black, part South Asian -- occasionally works as a deejay and knows all about hipster irony. "That doesn't make it any less disturbing," Sekaran said. "Their attitude is, 'It's our privilege to do this because we're in our own little clique, in our own little world.' "
Booty bass is a product of the Miami hip-hop scene that fused throbbing bass with up-tempo dance beats. It was made popular in the 1980s by acts such as 2 Live Crew and 69 Boyz. These days white hipsters embrace the genre, along with many trends of that era, in a city where that strain of hip-hop is considered a foreign creation.
The dance floor at the Williamsburg club is a pastiche of all that was hip and cool in the last 20 years, including faux hawks (mohawks with a buzz on each side), jelly shoes and short shorts.
A few young women have permed-out hair and blue eye shadow a la Pat Benatar and vintage clothes a la "Sixteen Candles." As for the tights and boots combos? Think Madonna version 1.0.
Bianca Casady, a multiply-pierced woman with a scalp divided between long dark hair and a buzz cut, grabs her female friend by the hips and shakes her like a blender. She steps outside, catches some fresh air and talks about the party.
"It's about being nasty, people come to grind on each other," said Casady, 23. "It's like friends being sexual with each other."
Casady was raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., but quickly notes her worldliness by listing the cities where she has lived along the trail to Brooklyn. A regular Kill Whitie partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men "really hard-core." In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that "it's a safe environment to be freaky."
Tha Pumpsta also moved here from somewhere else
-- Cobb County, Ga. He said he admired Martin Luther King Jr. and at age 15, decided to promote racial understanding by printing T-shirts with black and white interlocking fingers. He keeps one of the shirts stuffed in his closet.
Booty bass entered his life in a big way when he wandered into Freaknik, the annual spring break blowout for thousands of African American students. He came to see himself as part of post-racial Generation Y, for whom whiteness was an outmoded, oppressive idea.
In his hipster world, the credo is to use irony to make light of anything "sacred."
So Tha Pumpsta started throwing Kill Whitie parties about four years ago, piggybacking on the hipster colonization of a swath of the Williamsburg neighborhood on the border between the Hasidic Jewish and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. There's nothing subtle about his advertising.
'I can’t help you’
His street flyers come emblazoned with the words "Kill Whitie" across a woman's backside. Another flier offers free admission to anyone with a bucket of fried chicken.
For Veronica Green, who is white, the irony thing just doesn't cut it. She stood outside the club dressed in a flowing orange and yellow summer dress puffing on cigarettes.
"You wouldn't see this in Atlantic City," Green said, scowling at a white crew of hip-hop wannabes. "You have a lot of black bars and white bars and a lot of diversity. Here, it's white kids dancing to hip-hop."
Step back inside the club, and the pace ramps down from an amphetamine-like rate as Tha Pumpsta spins some old school hip-hop and latter-day classics. The dance floor eases into the rap of Brooklyn-born rapper Notorious B.I.G.
So what's the point of all these white hipster kids trying to imitate black hip-hop?
Direct this question to Mark Grubstein, a 36-year-old artist, and he says the Kill Whitie parties speak to something inside of him. "I make art about that, that's my life," he said. "It's based on the idea that things that are funny are the deepest."
He shrugs.
"If you don't see it's funny," he said, "I can't help you."
This article appears in the Washington Post. © 2005 The Washington Post Company
Michelle Garcia
Friday, September 23, 2005
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Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2631
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 11:29 pm: |
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Sorry to say too many young people nowadays are shallow and one-dimensional. They're looking for instant gratification and their only frame of reference is themselves. But these white kids operate from a position of power, having the option of outgrowing their bizarre fads and moving on into the main stream, while black ones get stuck in a hip-hop rut. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 2632
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 11:38 pm: |
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Whose that? Little Mary Sunshine unaware that her "backhanded" comment fell flat?? Talk about someone being deluded. Did I say "limited vision"? I should've said "no vision". But we'll have to forgive her because she has yet to master the fine art of being witty. |
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