COUMBA GAWLO " TOPMA"

Great love piece by Coumba Gawlo, the Whitney Houston of Senegambia. Listen for the smooth guitar/piano melody and the sabar rhythm....

AMERICA: BY ALLEN GINSBERG

KAYJATTA

November 16, 2011

Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘America’ is a classic protest poem. A political and cultural protest. A protest of racial, ideological and sexuality conflict. It is a classic immigrant poem, characterized by an initial great love for America and then followed by a huge disappointment at the injustice and oppression endemic in American foreign and domestic policy. The poem starts out with the narrator, like a betrayed spouse, expressing his disappointment for getting very little in return after giving all he has got to America. The narrator projects a pacifist view point that questions blind patriotism as in John Okada’s “NO-NO Boy”.  Pacifism was gaining momentum during and after World War II. This is indicated in line 4 and 5 with:

              “America when will we end the human war?

               Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb”

This is clearly and anti-war protest, with the narrator asking when America will be “angelic”, suggesting that war is satanic. In lines 9, 10 and 11, the narrator questions the end to American power and the rise of Asia, China and socialism (Trotskyism-revolution by the workers) as thus:

       “When will you take off your clothes?

         When will you look at yourself through the grave?

        When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?”

This perhaps is a profound expression of the narrator’s disappointment of what America once offered to him as an immigrant and what America now is. This bears some semblance to the sentiments expressed in Claude McKay’s ‘America’, or Antin’s ‘The Promise Land’, or Yezierska’s ‘America and I’ or even Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and Odet’s ‘Waiting for Lefty’ . The draconian American military and corporate power, as illustrated by the atom bomb and Time Magazine and Henry Ford (4th stanza, line 67), is a common source of lamentation.

In the second stanza of the poem, the narrator attempts at reconciliation with America by pointing out their commonalities as the ones “who are perfect not the next world” (line17) and suggests that “There must be some other way to settle this argument” (line 21).

There are several imageries in the third stanza of the poem that lays out the subsurface cultural and political tensions playing out at the time. The “atom bomb” (line5) for example alludes to the divisions over American involvement in World War II and “Burroughs is in Tangiers” (line 22) recalls the exiled William Burroughs and the debate over legalizing drugs, something that Ginsberg favors. The “Wobblies” (line 30) illustrates workers supremacy and Ginsberg’s anti-corporation stance. The narrator’s admission to smoking ‘weed’, “a million genitals” and reading Karl Marx both socially and politically as well as legally controversial at the time points to the cultural tension at play. The references to Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro Boys are critiques of the American legal systems and the institutionalized discrimination.

Ginsberg’s poem is a great indictment of American political, economic, legal, cultural and military powers during and after World War ii.

REFERENCES:

1.      No-NO Boy, John Okada

2.      America, McKay

3.      Waiting for Lefty, Odets

4.      The Promise Land, Antin

5.      John Steinbeck, The Grapes Of Wrath

6.      America and I, Yezierska

7.      Bcwillia.wordpress.com

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                              I HAVE A DREAM: A UTOPIA

KAYJATTA

November 15, 2011

“I Have A Dream”, a historical speech delivered by the revered civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to “dramatize a shameful political and economic condition” (I Have A Dream; 1963)of discrimination and segregation was utopian and remains largely unfulfilled today.  The speech is one of hope and optimism, although a vague one.  The combination of biblical references with images from the natural (physical) environment makes the speech highly impressive and effective. Despite the hope expressed in the speech, there are times when it appears that violence is suggested. For example, when Dr. King stated that “it would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment…”

The optimism in the “I Have A Dream” speech rests on Dr. King’s trust in the ultimate good in (White) people based on the Christian gospel and believe in liberal democratic principles somewhat based on the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Dr. King’s ideology that underpins his speech of 1963 was informed by both theology and politics; an ideology that will be tested by the resilience and persistence of poverty, inequality and injustice for not only the Southern Blacks but also the inner-city Blacks in the north.

Even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, very little has changed for the impoverished urban Blacks, according to Dr. Floyd W. Hayes of John Hopkins’ University. In his speech at the Chicago Festival in 1966, Dr. King described the urban slum as a place to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness, according to Dr. Hayes in his article Discourse: The Political Theology of Martin Luther King Jr. This description of the urban slums in America compares fittingly to the Russian immigrant, Yezierska’s descriptions in his work ‘America and I’. This further indicates that despite the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which were modest steps towards race equality; poverty, injustice, and segregation were evolving into a more recalcitrant and resistant strain.

Dr. King’s attempt to win the sensibilities of White Americans and his projection of Blacks as the “moral conscience” of America is also earlier observed in Booker T. Washington, a strategy often described by more-pragmatic activists like W.E.B. Dubois as elitist. Hence Dr. King’s hope for an America where prosperity, equality and justice for all prevails was not felt by the majority of Blacks then and now.  Perhaps Dr. King over-estimated the goodness in men; human nature might after all be a complex combination of both good and bad and in a fiercely competitive capitalist economy like America; equality, justice and prosperity for all may remain an illusion.

The continued deterioration of the economic and social condition of the Blacks well after King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech and the passage of both Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, both in the South and the North, led to an erosion of faith in Dr. King’s dream of America. This despair resulted in the emergence of several more-militant splinter nationalist groups and leaders such as Nation of Islam Minister, Malcolm X. Malcolm X, a firebrand ultra-nationalist ridiculed Dr. King’s integrationist approach as elitist and used the house-nigger versus field nigger analogy (The Autobiography of Malcolm X; 1965), and looked outside the prevailing white establishment for radical solutions for separation; just falling short of Marcus Garvey’s call for repatriation. Perhaps Malcolm X could have been influenced by the writings of the Caribbean revolutionary, Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon; 1961) as compared to Dr. King’s more ‘Ghandi-ist’ approach.

Despite, Dr. King’s lofty dream of equality, liberal democracy, and the general goodness of mankind to do the right thing, poverty, inequality, and injustice remains rooted in American society today.

REFERENCES:

1.      Discourse: The Political Theology Of Martin Luther King Jr.; Floyd W. Hayes, 2011

2.      I Have A Dream, Dr. Martin Luther  King Jr.; 1965

3.      The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965

Watch Rick Perry's Campaign End Before Your Eyes

KAYJATTA

Watch Rick Perry's Campaign End Before Your Eyes

KAYJATTA

KAYJATTA

November 2, 2011

HIRABAYASHI V. UNITED STATES: 320 U.S. 81 (1943)

CASE FACTS:

On December 7, 1941 the Japanese Navy attacked the United States naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in two successive waves. 2,402 Americans were killed and 1,282 were wounded.

Public opinion about Japanese Americans started to deteriorate shortly afterwards because of concern about what was referred to as the “Fifth Column “activity derived from the 1936-1939 Spanish civil war and also depicted in playwright and novelist Hemmingway’s play of a similar name suggesting internal collaboration with external enemy forces. This raised questions about the loyalty of Japanese Americans to the United States despite government dismissal of potential threats from Japanese Americans. This situation appears similar to the situation of Muslims and Muslim-Americans in the U.S. following September 11, 2001.

Then on February 19, 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order 9066 giving permission to the head of the military to confine and exclude certain groups of people without regards to citizenship or ancestry from military installations, mainly on the West Coast because of its vulnerability to invasion and attack at the time. Some 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in ten (10) different camps.

The implementation of this Executive Order evolved from the initial imposition of curfew upon aliens of Japanese descent as well as Japanese Americans, to confinement of Japanese and Japanese Americans to military facilities, and later rounding up Japanese and Japanese Americans in detention centers that were interchangeably called “relocation centers”, “internment camps”, and “concentration camps”.

Gordon K. Hirabayashi, who was a student at the University of Washington, refused to register for evacuation and thereby was accused of violating the Executive curfew order and the Congressional statute that followed designating the violation of military orders. Both violations were misdemeanors. Hirabayashi argued that the indictment should be dismissed because he was an American citizen, born in Seattle in 1918 that at no time had borne allegiance to Japan and had never been to Japan.

CASE HISTORY:

The case of Hirabayashi v. United States reached the Supreme Court from the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit where the defendant’s conviction from the district court was upheld. The court held that the application of curfews against members of a minority group was constitutional during a war time with a country that the group originated.

The Supreme Court also upheld the curfew order in Hirabayashi and its companion case (Korematsu v. United States). However, several years later in 1986 and 1987, Hirabayashi’s case would be overturned by the U.S. District Court in Seattle and the Federal Appeals Court.

SUPREME COURT DECISION:

The Supreme Court indicated that where the sentences of a defendant were to run concurrently, it would be necessary to consider the validity of the sentence on both charges  (counts) if the sentence on one of the charges is sustainable

Chief Justice Stone delivered the opinion of the court. The decision addressed two main issues or charges:

1.       Whether the restrictions of the Executive Order and the subsequent Congressional statute violate the rights of Japanese Americans?

2.       Whether the restrictions of the Executive Order and the subsequent Congressional statute unconstitutionally discriminated against citizens of Japanese origin?

The Supreme Court held that the Executive Order was a in the interest of public safety, a “protective measure necessary to meet the threats of sabotage and espionage” (P. 320 U.S. 95). The Court also held that the curfew order did not unconstitutionally discriminate against citizens of Japanese origin, P. 320 U.S. 101. Chief Stone also cite the landmark case of McCullough v. Maryland to support his position.

Justice Douglas, in concurrence argues that after Pearl Harbor, the threat of Japanese invasion was real and the threat of aliens and citizens of Japanese origin in military installation is a legitimate concern. He challenged the substantial evidence rule, saying that peacetime procedures do not necessarily fit wartime needs. Justice Douglas raised doubts that the court is competent to review the case, further arguing that the court is dealing with loyalty, not assimilation; but then loyalty is matter of mind and of heart, and not of race yet guilt is personal. He argued that detention for reasonable cause is one thing, and detention for ancestry is another thing all together.

Justice Murphy also concurred. A concurrent opinion is one that agrees with the majority opinion but uses different reasons or reasoning. He cited United States v. Macintosh (283 U.S. 605, 283 U.S. 622)  arguing  on the basis of the “Necessary and Proper” clause of the constitution that the executive and congress are empowered to exercise control over persons and property  even though such may not be permissible in normal times. However, Murphy lamented that the guarantees of the Bill of Rights cannot be suspended by the mere existence of war, and the executive and congressional war powers is subject to constitutional limitations. He questioned the wisdom of restricting substantially the personal liberty of citizens of United States based on the accident of ancestry (Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 274 U.S. 372).

Justice Rutledge also concurred. He raised doubts about the wide range of power vested in military commanders such General De Witt even during an emergency. While he agrees that the generals must have discretion in conducting their operations, they would not go unchecked and there would be boundaries beyond which they cannot go.

It is however interesting that one of the justices dissented in this case. The lack of a dissent goes to underscore American nationalism during a time of crisis. Notwithstanding, the large number of concurrent opinions perhaps sets this case on the path to a later reversal. Dissenting and concurrent opinions are often useful in shaping future majority opinions.