MLK Day; xposted from Facebook

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 21:30:36 GMT

I usually post a bunch of subversive MLK quotes on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but tomorrow is the first day of school so I'll leave it at this: During his life, King was despised by at least a plurality of white Americans and hounded by the US government; the FBI tried to manipulate him into committing suicide.

King believed that racism in the US was inextricably tied to capitalism. He wrote that racism would never end unless capitalism and imperialism ended as well. Before he died, he was starting to organize people based on both race and class, without reducing racism to classism. Towards the end of his life, he was also developing a more nuanced perspective on violence; for him, nonviolence was a tactic, not a moral precept. And that's why white people killed him.

Or in the words of Boots Riley of The Coup: "MLK took half a pill, procrastinated / Once he took a whole pill, they assassinated him" (from "Ass-Breath Killers")

PS: while it predates a lot of King's most radical views, Letter from Birmingham Jail clearly shows the path for getting there, and today is a good day to re-read it.

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xpost from tim_plays: "Beans Tomorrow"

Sat, 16 May 2015 16:57:31 GMT

This morning I got inspired by mountain_goats yelling at scotte_allen and wrote a song. Scott E. Allen is the mendacious assclown who introduced a bill into the Wisconsin state legislature barring SNAP recipients from using food stamps to pay for dried beans, as well as any other foods he doesn't think are "healthy". (I don't know where he received his doctorate in nutrition.)

Sure, calling politicians "assclowns" doesn't solve any problems, but trying to control what poor people put in their bodies doesn't either. And the latter is pretty fucking personal to me, since I grew up on, and ate food by virtue of, public assistance from birth to age 16.

There are only so many synonyms for "assclown", though, so after joining in the Twitter yelling for a bit, I thought about the bigger picture and wrote this song.

Grazing yogurt pretzels
From the bins at Stop & Shop
I wonder if the creeping feeling's
ever gonna stop
Iran-Contra on TV
every single day
I don't know what's happening but
I know I'm gonna pay
( Read more... )

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Tim's journal

MLK Day; xposted from Facebook

xpost from tim_plays: "Beans Tomorrow"