Tag: politics

Broken Frames, Dim Lenses

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Burger King is going back to its former logo. Smart branding move for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the chain’s need to keep differentiating itself from industry leader McDonald’s and perpetual internet-winner Wendy’s.

Here’s what I think is interesting. My kids, who were born well after Burger King dropped its classic branding, have always thought the 1999-2020 BK logo looked like a frying pan full of eggs.

They’re absolutely right. I’d never seen it because I knew what the logo was supposed to be.

Context really matters.

Yes, this is a logo for a giant corporation that sells mostly shitty food, but it’s a good reminder for artists, writers…anyone who is trying to communicate something to someone else.

Is what I have to say clear? Is what I have to say true? How do I know? What contexts have I assumed are understood, shared, taken for granted? What social constructs have I mistaken for objective frames and lenses?

On one hand, “perception is reality” can be a lazy excuse for all kinds of willful ignorance. On the other hand, if the things we have to say matter, it matters enough to do the best we can with them. Perhaps more to the point: we don’t know what we don’t know until we make the decision to learn about the world beyond our native settings.

Would you believe I’d never heard of James Baldwin before college? It’s true, and I went to well-funded public schools (that also happened to be predominantly white, and by a lot). I don’t think we were asked to read anything by Black writers except for (maybe) The Color Purple and a few lines of Langston Hughes. Worse: school kids in the 80s and 90s, at least in my experience, were meant to intuit that anything resembling racial injustice had been conquered by 1970. That’s probably something most of the adults in our lives wanted to believe themselves.

It’s been a long time since I was in school. I don’t know if we do a better job now or not. I do know that budgets in struggling districts continue to be slashed, that music programs are cut, gym programs are cut, the school district I went to is richer now, than ever, and the city schools a mile away have a fraction of those resources. I know that conservatives like to say that in America, we’re granted equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. I know that only half of that statement is true.

I wish I could say that the events of January 6 seemed surreal to me. Sadly, they were predictable (and predicted). What maybe does feel surreal: trying to go about my normal course of business in this moment. Nothing I do seems serious enough, almost everything I do seems very trivial. And I’m a person who benefits from a great deal of privilege. Maybe you are, too. If so, think about your frames and lenses. Think about the fact that there are many things we’re just not seeing. Many points of reference and perspectives we don’t have. Think about how we were taught to take up space, demand attention; think about how the insurrectionists were treated and how they would have been treated had they been mostly brown or Black.

I’m not saying Burger King’s branding language is some kind of metaphor. But there are an effing lot of Burger Kings. There are an effing lot of us (myself included) who need to unlearn an awful lot of shit.

Excerpts from Michelle Obama’s Statement on the Failed Insurrection

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

“Like all of you, I watched as a gang—organized, violent and mad they’d lost an election—laid siege to the United States Capitol,” she continued. “They set up gallows. They proudly waved the traitorous flag of the Confederacy through the halls. They desecrated the center of American government. And once authorities finally gained control of the situation, these rioters and gang members were led out of the building not in handcuffs, but free to carry on with their days.”

“What if these rioters had looked like the folks who go to Ebenezer Baptist Church every Sunday? What would have been different?”

“I think we all know the answer. This summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were an overwhelmingly peaceful movement—our nation’s largest demonstrations ever, bringing together people of every race and class and encouraging millions to re-examine their own assumptions and behavior,” Obama wrote. “And yet, in city after city, day after day, we saw peaceful protestors met with brute force. We saw cracked skulls and mass arrests, law enforcement pepper spraying its way through a peaceful demonstration for a presidential photo op.”

You can read Michelle Obama’s full statement on Instagram.

To Statecraft Embalmed – Marianne Moore

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

An early work, and I love it. “To Statecraft Embalmed” starts with an image that might just as easily refer to a certain (current) political figure:

The only version of the full text I can find online isn’t formatted exactly how piece is presented in her Collected Works, a volume I seem to have misplaced precisely as I sat down to write this post.

The whole thing reads to me as uncanny prophesy, hard plumage and all.

The Quotable Eugene Victor Debs

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.

A great refusal of the cult of personality by someone who could have exploited it.

You might recall that Debs ran for President of the United States 5 times, the fifth from jail.  This is from his statement to the Court upon being convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I listened to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free institutions…

Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change—but if possible by peaceable and orderly means…

Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day, and from that time until now my heart has been with the working class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go to prison…

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men…

It Bears Repeating

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

Heroes and Villains: Brian Wilson, Donald Trump

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

I just watched the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors for Brian Wilson. For reasons that are easy to guess — his life story, his genius, his music — I am sobbing.  For other things, too: for him, for us; in gratitude, in fear.

A decade later, neither the country nor the world look anything like they did even in the nadir of the Bush administration. 

Honoring Brian, Art Garfunkel said: “I love rock and roll.  It’s just so joyous and life affirming.  And this is a great moment for me to honor my colleague, a fountainhead of that joy, Brian Wilson. To me, rock and roll is our great American invention.  And the fact that you, Brian, are one of its architects makes me proud of who we are as a country.”  Garfunkel talked about Brian’s “California roots, which to me, always represented the kindness and sweetness of America.”  He called Brian Wilson “rock music’s gentlest revolutionary.”

A few days ago, I read a brilliant piece by writer Gerald Weaver about Donald Trump and the failure of language.

Our innocence, our sweetness, the basic goodness of the premise for this country is the promise of a nation held together not by blood or iron but by consensus on revolutionary claims about the dignity of all people.

I’m not stupid.  I know we have never actually lived up to those ideals.  For centuries, we have systemically disenfranchised our own people.  For decades, we have instigated proxy wars.  For decades, we have have encouraged every kind of inequality.

But we’ve also held onto hope.  We’ve also given a damn about what America is supposed to be and mean. 

Condemning the tear gassing of assylum-seaking migrants at the southern border this week, Beto O’Rourke said, “It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her 4-month-old son to come here. It should tell us something about our country that we only respond to this desperate need once she is at our border. So far, in this administration, that response has included taking kids from their parents, locking them up in cages, and now tear gassing them at the border.”

Now the news that Donald Trump is authorizing lethal force.

I think I was four when Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault.  He opened something else on Fox News’ The Five (I do not watch it). 

“This tear gas choked me. We treat these people — these economic refugees — as if they’re zombies from ‘The Walking Dead.’ We arrested 42 people; eight of them were women with children. We have to deal with this problem humanely and with compassion. These are not invaders. Stop using these military analogies. This is absolutely painful to watch…We are a nation of immigrants. These are desperate people. They walked 2,000 miles. Why? Because they want to rape your daughter or steal your lunch? No. Because they want a job! . . . We suspend our humanity when it comes to this issue. And I fear that it is because they look different than the mainstream.”

Of course Greg Gutfeld cut him off when he pointed out that economic refugees are in many cases fleeing situations our own policies have helped create.  Of course Jesse Waters, Fox’s Chief of Smarm, looked exasperated.

Of course, tonight, I’m crying over Art Garfunkel and Brian Wilson and America.