Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: iPoem 11: Is It a New Day Today?

America Tikdem: America First! The refrain of the Fascista! 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 20, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

Dear friends

We began the last century with the end of the old order of empires, imperial state, and the rise of the nation state, its new dominion. The nation state, as fascist or democratic, and two world wars were fought to establish liberal democracy over autocratic rule.

That fight has not ended. The rallying cry for the fascists was anti-bolshevism. The rallying cry of the anti-fascists was the rule of the people, in French le peuple, the working classes, the ordinary people, the 3d estate, the people of "power to the people"—and that got perverted into autocracy with the vangardism of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Their day fell, both the ussr and Maoism fell as communist states, and were eventually overtaken by the same thing that turned 1950s capitalist democracies into new forms, and that was the production and distribution models of global capitalism, neoliberal capitalism.

Those structures are not going to go away but they carry a cost. If the Chinese were able to develop production enormously, it was built on cheap labor, and the early days of slave labor are disappearing, only to recur elsewhere in poorer countries. Workers still count, still vote, still have interests. And at times those interests seem to require populist leaders, like peron or Mussolini or hitler, or trump. As always their appeal is grounded in ultranationalism.

A communist would call the conjuncture now a contradiction between the means of production and distribution and the autocractic states; the former seems to me generative of unjust distributions of wealth, override the "people's" rights, but accelerate production and distribution enormously. I read one-eighth of all American workers worked at some point for macdonald's. I don't much like their food; it is the people's food, however, and no one will get rid of them. On the other hand, who wants to remain a servant of macdonald's? globalization can't remain static; it faces the hatreds engendered by the nationalists who pile their miseries onto immigrants, even when they are the children of immigrants.

 

My fear is that this conflict can be very violent. The people uprising today are slaughtered by the autocratic regimes, as in Syria. They rule by fear. Globalization does not rule by fear, but by the interests of buyers and sellers, of people who produce and those who consume. Meanwhile jammah tries to hold on to yesterday while tomorrow gathers on his border. He tries to build a wall to hold out the foreigners, the foreign soldiers, the foreign workers, the foreigners, while admitting other foreigners to his beaches for sun and sex. His wall gets higher and higher, until it topples over. How many die in its rubble? Who would have thought the cities where civilization began, mosel, felluja, would be turned to rubble?

 

Tomorrow is for my grandchildren. I hope it isn't soiled by the rubble of the autocrats and their appeals to hatred.

So much for today

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

 

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 19 January 2017 at 21:00
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Adeshina Afolayan <shina73_1999@yahoo.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: iPoem 11: Is It a New Day Today?

 

Once upon a time in Apartheid South Africa:

MZWAKHE MBULI - The Day Shall Dawn

On Friday, 20 January 2017 00:51:07 UTC+1, Adeshina Afolayan wrote:

Is It a New Day Today?

 

Is it a new day today

in Trump's America?

 

I was told the "people"

have spoken, with

Democracy's permission

but have we been heard?

What happens to all the votes

of those other people?

What about all the acrimonies,

bigotry and racial slurs?

 

Is this a new day today,

that stirs my simmering fear

and the naive questions

from those children whose

innocence time is about

to rupture?

 

What message should we

send back to King, Jr.?

Well...bigotry won Georgia

and Mississippi is still sweltering!

 

How do we interpret

the white stares that isolate

me immediately I step

into Walmart?

Or the special treatment

Any time I'm at the airport?

 

Is it a new day today

in God's own land,

or even God himself is afraid?

Have we finally crossed the

boundary that separates

dream from nightmare?

Is the cock crowing a new day

to correct the blasphemous

darkening of the White House?

 

Is it a new day today

in the migrant's land

where audacity dares?

Does Liberty still hold the beacon

to yonder lands of the hopeful

and the scared?

 

Divided we stand:

racism's logic reigns!

Fear is now inaugurated

White has triumphed

All things non-white cower

 

Black, White, Brown

We all are humanity!

 

We will all earnestly

stand together, heart to heart

in all our broken places

we will climb the walls and

scale the bigoted breaches

we will breach nightmare's

ramparts, and overthrow fear!

 

We all are humanity!

 

 

 

Adeshina Afolayan, PhD
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan

+23480-3928-8429

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