Playing with hashtags

I'm taking Jill's idea of using hashtags to see if they generate any response. Here's what I'm throwing out now, and I'll see what else I come up with after work:

@GovWalker didn't you tell us a tale,

that no good #jobs would be created by rail?

http://t.co/MdLp232

@reppaulryan why does your budget give us the feeling

that slashing #Medicaid is just economic "faith healing"

If they won't listen sober to #GOP voices,

remember that booze leads to poor choices. http://huff.to/h76fiI

A new twitter experiment

So Jill was kind enough to suggest embedding hash tags in my twitter posts, so I'm going to give that a shot. I'll come up with a series of couplets tomorrow while I'm at work, and toss them out there. If there's some government or corporate entity you want prodded, let me know. I do requests.

Greg suggested hitting up celebs, and I like the idea as well, but I think I want to approach them from another angle. Most of the celebs I'm interested in talking to are people that I ultimately have some respect for, and don't really want to tweak them. I think my general theory is that while Charlie Sheen's been all the rage for the past few months, he's ultimately a distraction from the things that really matter.

Twitter: An Echo Chamber?

So I tried doing a little experiment on Twitter, to see if I could prod at politicians and get some sort of response. The idea was that twitter is about as close as you can come to a form of modern, standardized poetry, if people chose to use it in a poetic sense. Everyone gets 140 characters to compose a little message that gets blasted off for the world to see. Especially "high power" people like politicians who use the service as well. It's got potential, right?

No dice. It seems that people in power are just using the service as a sort of bullhorn. Shout through it, ignore anything that shouts back.

I'll be puttering around with it a little more over the next few weeks. Ideas are welcome.

The Angry Arab News Service

As’ad AbuKhalil isn't a poet himself, but he runs a site over at http://angryarab.net that is a clearinghouse for news and opinions that are rarely ever presented in US owned media. During the uprisings last month in Egypt, he posted extensively on the anti-Mubarak crowd's use of short poetry and song as a tool in their fight against a dictatorial regime.

At the moment, he's covering the current goings-on on Bahrain, Libya, and pretty much the rest of the Middle East, where (often) Western Backed regimes are busily trying to hold onto power, the populace is trying to take power for themselves, and the West is desperately trying to act like they never knew anything about arms shipments or off-shore bank accounts.

It's a good read of news you probably won't get anywhere else with a healthy dose of skepticism and criticism for all sides of the story.

Immortal Technique

For the past three and a half decades, hip-hop has held the lion's share of political speech in poetic form. Old school acts like Public Enemy regularly made social commentary a cornerstone of their lyrics. As the scene developed, and powerful corporate interests in the music industry began to steer what albums hit mainstream markets, political speech took a back seat to record sales.

It's like MK-ULTRA, controlling your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change

They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandana full of glittering, generality
Fighting for freedom and fighting terror, but what's reality?
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

-Lyrics From "The 4th Branch"

Immortal Technique was born in Peru, and raised in New York City. These days he owns his own label because signing to one of the big names would basically put a muzzle on him, whether by edits or economics. Women's Rights, neocolonialism, race relations, the state of the justice system, foreign policy: you name it, and he's rapping about it. The beats are fresh, but the the lyrics are burning.

He's also a rapper who puts his money where his mouth is. Instead of using his proceeds to buy luxury for himself, he's been financing (and personally building) orphanages in Kabul, buying farmland for the poor in Latin America, and personally maintaining outreach programs to prisoners here in the US. When we're considering the generation of culture as a remedy to social ailments, I can hardly think of a better person to showcase on the first day of this search. Give the video a watch. It's well worth it.

A search for poetry in American life

So, we've watched the Middle East basically cascade into revolution, starting in Tunisia, and going on still in places like Lybia, Yemen, Bahrain, and so on. In nearly every case, there have been protesters out on the streets, and some sort of poetic expression is being used to motivate the crowd or capture the moment.

Now take a look at Wisconsin. I'll go ahead and come out to say that my sympathies are with labor on this one. I'm not a fan of union politics subverting the political system though organized strikes and intimidation, but hey, I'm even less of a fan of super-wealthy individuals subverting the political system by throwing money and hiding behind lawyers. Anyway, in this context that is neither here nor there, because what I'd like to focus on is the lack of poetry in the protests in Madison. So far, "Kill the Bill" is about as inspired as it's gotten. A few posters have pictures of Scott Walker dressed up as Hitler. Yes, they get the point across, but they're also terribly ham-handed and tired. The high water mark of cultural generation coming out of this has been a song dedicated to the WI unions by the Dropkick Murphys. (It's an alright tune, but so far, it's hanging out there all by itself.)

Once upon a time, nearly 100 years ago, there was a labor movement in the US called the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. While unions like the AFL were comitted to forming trade unions, the Wobblies were looking for something bigger: general unions. They felt that workers should all stand together instead of forming modern versions of the old guild system. Anyhow, wobblies were not well liked by nearly everybody. They advocated open revolution, even it it was peaceful, and that made the government nervous. They advocated going on strike at every chance they could, and that made business nervous. They wanted all workers to be under a democratic, big-tent union, and that made union bosses nervous. So the thing that wobblies really excelled at was getting thrown in jail and lynched periodically.

And generating culture. Because here's the deal: It turns out that in order to put up with being beaten down, living in hobo jungles, getting tossed into jail for walking down the wrong side of the street, and going hungry more often than not, you have to come up with a way to take the edge off of it. When you get chucked in a cell with three other guys, and you can all sing bawdy union songs to annoy the piss out of the jailers, then it makes the day go by a whole lot faster than sitting on the cot waiting for meal time to roll around. Oppressed people get creative, because that creativity gives meaning to an otherwise bleak existence. I'm willing to bet that if we look at any poetry, music, or art that really moves us, it's because the poet, musician, or artist was in a bad spot and that wicked line of verse or mind-blowing spot of color was the way out.

So, when people say, "Poetry's dead in America," I'm going to say that it's not. It's just off the map in our media-saturated culture. There's a vested interest in keeping people uncreative, and buying the mass-marketed products of creativity so that they get a taste of the real thing without actually engaging in the act themselves. There are still people out there generating legitimate culture for culture's sake, and I'm going to find them.

For the next couple months, I'm going to try to find some part of the underground to shine a light on every day. It might be poetry, it might be art, it might be some sort of thinker. Let's see who's been doing work when no one's been looking.

Now hear this!

Since the major news outlets in the US have given such scant coverage of the actual protesters and their message, I feel compelled to post this video and let them speak for themselves. With all the boogey-men of caliphates, and global socialist insurrections and other nonsense, it becomes very easy to rob the voice from people who've been cut off from the internet and isolated by their own government.