alias Bruce.

Ebola + ISIS = brown fever.

It is time for more people to call it out. Right now in the United States, what whimpers just beneath the surface in everyday sidewalk throngs and crowded bars and restaurants is, "Are they here yet?"

You know: Them. The Africans carrying the Ebola virus. The ISIS operatives ready to transmit beheading videos from American hotel rooms in which they have taken ordinary folks hostage. You know what I'm talking about. You know people are thinking it. You know the volume is building toward a wider shrieking sound.

Days before the stories broke about people presumed African reportedly being shunned in retail establishments and neighborhoods in Dallas amid that city's Ebola panic, I and I know many others, particularly people of color experienced in being profiled, were already muttering to ourselves that it would only be a matter of time before the African profiling started. I considered blogging about it in advance but, again no doubt like many, I didn't want to be among those planting the suggestion to folks who are already too suggestible. That was a silly reservation on my part: it's not as if anything I do on this little blog could alter the motion of American public impulses that are so deeply ingrained and so continually remanufactured. That machinery is built to last, baby.

The same goes for our view of the ISIS conflict. While we Americans worry about being snatched in an alley by an ISIS sleeper cell, the actual cataclysm has now embroiled Turkey as well as Syria and Iraq in real and bloody war and internal insurrection -- including, as I write, violent tumult in Turkey over whether to join the battle for Kobani, a city on the Syrian/Turkish border. If the ISIS juggernaut continues to gamble successfully on the cynicism and patience of Western corporate powers for whom continually decimated nations of color and a fearful American public are just part of the dirty job of managing global capital, then we can expect more howling and jostling here in the Homeland beneath the threatened encroachment of the Black Flag. And we can brace for a lunge into frothing hysteria if any local acts of ISIS-sympathist terror actually take place here.

Meanwhile, we quietly accept that more Americans will die by gunfire per capita than in any other industrialized country, that this month alone 50,000 of us will die of heart disease and another 50,000 of cancer,  and that the corn- and cattle- and chemical-fueled enterprises that underpin our deadly diet continue to enjoy the subsidied, panic-free favors of the state.

Call it Brown Fever. Watch for it in your neighborhood.

The other night, at a jazz gig I played

as a drummer in a hot trio at a tony club, the club owner got very drunk -- something I gather he often does.

In the middle of a set in which we three musicians played our asses off for a packed and appreciative house, the bar owner walked up to the stage and, while everyone watched in shock, he launched into a long, loud, drunken rant about how the band was playing way too loudly and it was screwing up his business and it was all my fault. Me. The drummer. He stood squarely in front of me and my drum set. He shouted in my face that all of the volume problems started with me, and his patrons upstairs needed to make conversation, and the band sounded like a train running through the building, and he was the boss and I had better do something about it.

In a room where the audience had been giddy with our performance, you could suddenly hear a pin drop.

The rest of the details don't matter. Suffice it to say that I was both cool and blindly furious, and the crowd sided with the band, and the drunken club owner ended up making a meaningless apology, and I'll be damned if I'll ever set foot in his cursed little club again.

This is part of the turf that a jazz musician walks: Having the most intense art form that America itself has ever produced relegated to gin mills where people yak and drink too much; having this country's most creative musical intellectuals (and I'm not talking about myself, but about jazz musicians at the very top of the art, who as a threat to white superiority still face a certain stubborn denial and disrespect of their role in the culture) treated as mere entertainers.

Sure, I, or we as a band, may have been playing too loudly for the conversational upstairs crowd who felt our playing through the floor. But what is John Coltrane's music -- we played the seminal "Giant Steps" that night -- doing in a bar where a sloppily wasted white tavern keeper feels entitled to publicly lecture hard-practiced black jazz musicians? Why was the club owner trying to humiliate me when he could easily have avoided the spectacle with a private conversation? And who the hell was he to even play cultural critic in the first place? What is such compositionally and improvisationally brilliant music doing in a speakeasy, anyway? What was I doing there?

That's the problem with being jazz musicians in the United States. We have our hands on something that the dominant culture feels it can't afford to fully recognize: black creativity that is part Beethoven and part shaman. Over the decades, we have cleanly played our hand with our former slavemasters, seen them and raised them, upped the cultural ante on what they feel is their very best, and their response at the table has been a sullen silence, eyes averted, with the occasional self-comforting and inherently racist outburst about our being too primal for their company.

Talk about dysfunction and ingratitude.

This is precisely why Europe and Japan -- having less of a vested interest than America in undervaluing the breakthrough Afri-Euro aesthetic of the Louis Armstrongs and Josephine Bakers and Aimé Cesaires -- remain magnets for black American artists who want to be seen for who we actually are and for what we actually do.

Meanwhile, here on the 2012 American plantation of cultural production, it's still too often pearls before swine. But there is also this: the mere fact that this awful nightclub story isn't my typical experience as a jazz musician, and that the crowd stood with we musicians against the drunken owner, and that jazz and its audiences manage to thrive from corner bars to Lincoln Center, says a lot about the loving indestructibility of music and of humanness in the face of even the most wickedly pervasive machinery.

[2/8/2012 12:30pm EST: I re-edited the final paragraph to better express all that I see and feel here.]

Hi from El Paso, TX.

El Paso, ranked the safest city for its size (about 700K) in the U.S., is directly across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico's deadliest city, where there were 3,000 murders in 2010. This is the bridge where pedestrians walk across to Juarez. Someone was shot here two nights ago. (I'm here to give a talk, BTW.)

 


People park here to walk across the bridge (in background) to Juarez. Many also work in El Paso and live in Juarez. A woman from Juarez told me that the state of terror there (routine execution of families and children; on a single day, 6 kids between 8 and 16 were shot) continues because the Mexican government is in bed with drug gangs and can't or won't intervene in any real way.

 

The difference between the tourist zone (note slick building in background) and the section proximate to Juarez is striking. A half-mile from this sign, everything is different.

This is a half-mile from that arrow sign on the same street. See what I mean? An interesting thing is that everyone here stands and waits for "walk" signs, even if there's no traffic. I wonder if cops use jaywalking... or maybe it's more innocent than that.

 

Speaks for itself, baby!

"We want other governments to

get the word out that people should not simply show up at the South Pole." – A State Department official on the prospect of tourists and adventurers making their own journeys to honor the arrivals 100 years ago of Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen. (New York Times, 1/16/11)

I wasn't planning on making the trip, but this pretty much guarantees that people will.

Train of Thought.

As the price of gasoline drops from the unbelievable to the unaffordable, and as Barack Obama grapples with trying to turn government in the general direction of the public interest while John McCain pretends to do so, here are some figures concerning the most efficient form of transportation -- rail -- that are worth thinking about:

Percentage of transportation project costs for which Federal support dollars are available to states:

Air: 90%
Highway: 80%
Rail: 0%

–From Maryland Secretary of Transportation John D. Porcari, speaking on NPR station WYPR-FM, 9/3/2008

See You in a Week.

I'll be in a no-blog zone until early August, when I'll return with news of Emmett Till, the Race and Reconciliation conference, and more. Have a good week.  -Bruce.

Fireworks.

NEW YORK – The July 4 fireworks here last night were a blast, even in the rain. The photos I took, looking from Brooklyn toward the East River, all ended up being so out of focus that I can't post them. Dang. But the scene was pretty much what you see in the 2007 AP photo above. (That's the Empire State Building with the blue-lit spire.) It will be a far better day when we're staging pyrotechnic celebrations for something much more like democracy, but right now even what a friend of mine calls our current "jingoistic, imperialist crapola holiday" can't take the fun out of a blazing canopy of fireworks over the Manhattan skyline.

Meanwhile, a firestorm is brewing in New York and elsewhere among some progressive Obama supporters over his latest and most alarming slide toward the "center" (read: right), that being Obama's recent reversal to support legal immunity for phone companies who compromise customer privacy at the behest of government so-called "anti-terror" requests for personal data.

You'll recall that Verizon and others took heavy public heat two years ago for caving to behind-the-scenes Bush Administration demands for large amounts of customer information, as clear a case of unconstitutional corporate cowardice as you'll ever see. Supporting legal immunity for such practices -- in effect saying "even when government crosses the line and violates the constitutional rights of innocents it's excusable for the sake of the War On Terror" -- was something Obama opposed until, suddenly, now facing a campaign against a Republican, he flipped and supported it. A roar of protest rose up on the left, and Democrats.com has launched a campaign for Obama supporters to place their contributions in escrow until the candidate "lives up to his promise to deliver 'change we can believe in.'"

I don't like it, this ever-squishier, ever-less-principled Obama we're getting. It's the part of his persona I mistrust the most: the part of him (and his campaign) that does not seem to understand the difference between principled compromise and expedient pandering. It is also a recipe for disaffection in the Democratic base that, if it continues, could affect voter turnout and aid McCain. This kind of weather-vane political twirling helped to beat Kerry, it beat Hillary Clinton, and it could beat Obama. One friend of mine suggests that Obama's plan is to make all the concessions he needs to get elected, and to then rear up and implement his intended progressive agenda once he's in office. I don't buy it. I have yet to see a presidential contender sell his or her principles on the campaign trail and then buy them back in the White House.

I'd say it's time for progressives to start emailing, speaking up, picketing, and otherwise making noise that might help to save Obama from himself. One way is to keep your money in your pocket and to pass his campaign a note saying he'll get your cash when he keeps his promises.

White Settlement, USA.

If you find it impossible to believe that there is an annual "Miss White Settlement" pageant, go here.

There's more. It turns out there is a City of White Settlement, Texas, for which the pageant is named. According to the city's official website, White Settlement is "nestled in 5 square miles bounded by IH30, Loop 820 West, and the Joint Naval Air Station (formerly Carswell Air Force Base)," and has a long-standing multi-ethnic "sense of community."

In 2005 there was a referendum on a proposal to change the name from White Settlement to West Settlement. The proposal was defeated by a vote of 2,388 to 219.

A look at the photo gallery of past Miss White Settlements, including Miss White Settlement 2001 Cindy Elizondo (pictured), makes the town's name that much more interesting.

For the musically-inclined, the story also has a coda: Ms. Elizondo's uniquely enthusiastic performance of Chopin's Scherzo No. 1 in B Minor, given during the Miss Texas 2000 pageant in which she was named fourth runner-up. I think her version of Chopin is kind of cool, actually – it's as if she's trying to channel Anthony Braxton.

Thanks to pianist and cultural excavator Brian Soule for the tip.