It's much in keeping with a conversation I had with Somebody's Daughter about the lamentable state of today's youth and the forestalling of the revolution. My hypothesis has recently been that the end of the Cold War seems to have made communism disappear as a theoretical objective on the basis of the failed experiment that was the Soviet Union. This seems crazy to me, since the US has been a failed (though improving) democracy for the last 200 years. I don't really understand how the philosophical ideal gets completely rejected because the practical applications didn't meet the ideal, but that's not the point. The real point is that without the ideal of communism (people should be equal and our human relationships should be based on the recognition of that equality) people have nothing to turn to, no belief structure that provides hope, other than a disturbing, conservative, selfish, inward looking, me-first (or, perhaps worse, "my group" first) mentality. The belief in a greater humanity is seriously lacking.
The poem reminds me of another facet of the problem, which is that to a large extent it would seem that we've replaced revolutionary action with revolutionary posturing - being a revolutionary on television and making public pronouncements is somehow more important than the quiet, private work of taking care of the people around us, in our communities, and the people we encounter in our private lives, even when they are strangers. The revolutionary potential of our personal lives are way more important (which is why I have more respect for SNCC than for MLK or Malcolm), if less celebrated.
Among Scott-Heron's other poems is one called "Brother", which in a similar vein, takes the posturing revolutionaries of the 1960s (this album was released in 1970) to task for the tropes - afro, dashiki, standing on the street-corner proclaiming the revolution, while ignoring the actual needs of the people and moreover, berating those who attempt to get their needs met by "working for the man".
I was talking with another friend, who unfortunately does not blog - or I would send you to her, who was discussing a co-worker. My friend works at a progressive childcare center and her coworker is a two-year teacher who has just recently been turned on to the progressive philosophy of the center and thinks therefore, she knows more than my friend who has 9 years of experience and has been a self-taught progressive educator for 9 years. The coworker makes comments that are rooted in her understanding of the philosophy, but her application of the philosophy to the real world only exposes her ignorance. But the frustrating thing, of course, is that the coworker believes that she is being smart because she knows the lingo. It's the worst brand of political-correctness all over again.
Finally, I should probably warn my fearless readers of a rather controversial poem among this collection called "The Subject was Faggots". On face value it is as bad as it sounds. I did a google search and found some attempts to defend the poem as anti-homophobic based on the single line "Digging what I was digging, as I did" which is actually a misquote (it's really, "sitting on the corner digging all that I did as I did"). The defenses are pretty weak, in total. Perhaps a better defense (because it deals with something more problematic and essential to the poem's core structure) is that the repetition of the word "faggot" is an attempt to de-fang the term, somehow, but contextually that doesn't make a lot of sense. For what it's worth, Scott-Heron appears to have matured and his later work places him squarely in the anti-homophobic camp.
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