The man pictured above is David St. Germain, who I and most others knew only as Doc. Doc killed himself last week by jumping from the top of the parking garage at Providence Place Mall. He was 43.
Doc had Thanksgiving with my family last year, and I had the pleasure of meeting him on a few other occasions. I last spoke to him one week before his suicide.
Doc was a big man, with a big mouth and a big heart. He spent his time trying as best he could to be a voice for the voiceless. He was led to that calling by his own personal tragedies. Doc's story is not only tragic, but it is tragically American. And it got me to thinking about The System.
People of my parents' generation and political leanings have a certain view of The System that I don't entirely share. In their view, the system is essentially a conspiracy, a vast apparatus of privilege and power that actively deprives their fellow citizens of their due liberty and happiness.
That view of the system never entirely made sense to me. Actively oppressive systems have of coursed existed (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, etc.). But it always seemed to me that the system in this country is not one of oppression, but of neglect. That is the system to which Doc fell victim.
The System in America does not exert its might in actively oppressing people; it simply ignores them. The system here is not vast; it is very small. It is an exclusive club. And if you're not in the system, you're ignored by it. The system in America today does not crush people. To crush someone, you have to give a shit. No, the system here simply ignores people.
Doc was an EMT driver. He was in an accident. He broke his back and his foot was severed and re-attached. Now, you might think that an ambulance driver was an integral enough part of the system that he would be protected by it. And you'd be wrong.
Doc's medical trauma and the bills resulting from it cost him his job and his home. This was a good, intelligent, skilled and employed man who lost everything because of an accident. Something that could happen to me or you at any moment.
We all know that someone with access to the system would not go bankrupt and homeless because of a car crash. These privileged few would simply concentrate on their physical recovery. But neither Doc, nor me, nor you are in that system. And because we're not, we're all one accident away.
The accident left Doc in constant physical anguish. His injuries were the very things for which painkillers were invented. But since Doc was not a member of the system, he had to beg the system for physical relief from his suffering. And the system helped him for a time.
The system gave Doc a "pain contract". Needless to say, members of the system do not have pain contracts imposed on them. Doc violated his "pain contract" when he lost part of a prescription and went for a refill earlier than scheduled.
Because of this violation, the system labeled Doc a drug abuser. And the system was thereafter entirely closed to him. No individual member of the system could legally do anything to ease this man's physical anguish because the system itself had decided that he was an addict looking to leach from the system.
So, in the system's eyes, Doc had committed two mortal sins. He was in an accident. And then he misplaced something. And that was all it took for the system to write him off. In the system's eyes, Doc had nothing to contribute and he had proven himself unworthy of any help because of his sins.
Doc worked, followed the law, served in the medical field, voted, organized, paid his taxes. He was a full-bodied citizen. But that wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to grant him access to the system.
When the system cost Doc his life, it didn't do it with a firing squad. It did it by simply looking the other way. What would it have taken to give Doc the painkillers he needed? A man with so many causes and so many friends would surely not have chosen death if his chronic physical torment had been alleviated. What would it have cost the system to save Doc? Too much, evidently.
Often in the face of tragedy people are driven to exaggerate, to conflate, to romanticize. So let me make these things clear: I did not know Doc very well. I do not pretend to have been a confidante of his or to have had any deep knowledge of his heart or mind. But what I do know down to the marrow of my bones is that what happened to him could happen to any of us.
So what sort of System do we have? It is not a vast apparatus of oppression. It is an exclusive gated community that brutalizes us not by physical force, but by simply locking the gate.
Every one of us, no matter how low, spends money. When we spend money, we pay taxes. When we pay taxes, we are paying into the system. But we are paying to polish the gates, not to have them opened for us.
Please look to the post below to play the music to accompany these lyrics
Some of the smartest dummies
Can't read the language of Egyptian mummies
Plant a flag on the moon
And can't find food for the starving tummies
Pay no mind to the youths
'Cause it's not like the future depends on it
Save the animals in the zoo
'Cause them chimpanzees, them-a make big money
This is how the media pillages:
On the TV the picture is
Savages in villages
And the scientists still can't explain the pyramids, huh
Evangelists making a living on the videos of ribs of the little kids
Stereotyping the image of the images
And this is what the image is:
You buy-a khaki pants
All of a sudden you'sa Indiana Jones
And a-thief out gold and a-thief out scrolls and even the buried bones
Some of the worst paparazzis I have seen and have ever known
Put the worst on display so the world can see
And that's all that we're ever shown
So the ones in the west will never move east
And feel dem could be at home
Dem get tricked by the beast
But where a-dem goin' flee when the monster is fully grown?
Solomonic lineage what dem still can't defeat and dem could never clone
My spiritual DNA that print in my soul and I will forever own
Lord
Huh, we born not knowing, or are we born knowing all?
We growing wiser, or are we just growing tall?
Can you read thoughts? Can you read palms?
Huh, can you predict the future? Can you see storrrrrrrrrrrms coming?
The Earth was flat, if you went too far you would fall off
Now the Earth is round, if the shape change again, everybody gonna start laugh
The average man can't prove of most of the things that he chooses to speak of
And still won't research and find out the root of the truth that you seek of
Scholars teach in universities and claim that they're smart and cunning
Tell dem find a cure when we sneeze and that's when their nose starts running
And the rich get stitched up when we get cut
Betta heal dem broken bones in the bush with the wet mud
Can you read signs? Can you read stars?
Can you make peace? Can you fight war?
Can you milk cows even though you drive cars, huh?
Can you survive against all odds now?
NAS:
Who wrote the Bible? Who wrote the Koran?
And was it a lightning storm that gave birth to the Earth?
And then dinosaurs were born.....damn
Who made up words? Who made up numbers?
And what kind of spell is mankind under?
Everything on the planet
We preserve it and can it
Microwave it and try it
No matter what we'll survive it
What's hu? What's man? What's human?
Anything along the land, we consumin', eatin', deletin', ruin
Tryin' to get paper, gotta have land, gotta have acres
So I sit back like Jack Nicholson, watch niggas play the game like the Lakers
In a world of 52 fakers, gypsies, seances, mystical prayers
You superstitious?
Throw salt over your shoulder, make a wish for the day 'cause
Like somebody got a doll of me
Stickin' needles in my arteries
But I can't feel it
Sometimes it's like "pardon me, but I got a real big spirit"
I feel this...I'm fearless
Don't you try to grab a hold of my soul
It's like a military soldier, since 7 years old
I held real dead bodies in my arms
Felt their bodies turn cold
Why we born in the first place if this is how we gotta go?
Damn
This marks just the 2nd time I've seen fit to print a song's lyrics as a blog entry in its own right (the 1st being "Passing Through" by Leonard Cohen).
The Distant Relatives album by Nas and Damien Marley is one of the best albums in the history of hip-hop, hands down. No matter how you slice it, this is desert island album.
While Marley the Younger has a thick accent and a rapid-fire delivery that may make his words hard to decipher for the first time listener, this song is a triumph among triumphs, the greatest song on a great album, a classic among classics.
Click the link below to listen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhcPPfJKs8I
Americans in their early 30's are the first generation raised in the hip-hop era. For my cohorts in this generation, we understand that this saga comes complete with mystery, martyrs, and murder.
But on some other level, we all ignore the absolute absurdity of this founding myth. Put simply, What The F***. How did these two poets become so self-absorbed that they literally got each other murdered? It's ridiculous. Nothing more.
Did John Lennon fans murder Bob Dylan in 1966? No.
Did Al Pacino fans murder Robert Deniro in 1976? No.
Did Lionel Richie fans murder Michael Jackson in 1986? No.
But Biggie and Tupac, and the people who surrounded them, were so self-absorbed, so narcissistic, that they took the idea of art imitating life and raised it to the tenth degree.
The photograph above says alot about these men, boys really, who both died before their 26th birthdays. Look how young they look, but also look at how desperate they each are to appear hard, heartless, menacing. Each without a father, a lost boy playing tough.
What is the legacy of these men? The conventional wisdom among hip-hop fans is that Biggie and Tupac are the 2 greatest rappers of all time, or at least in the top 5.
Personally I feel that their rapping skills are almost beside the point. They were both great. And we'll never know how great they could have been. To put it in perspective, Lil' Wayne is older than either Biggie or Tupac ever lived to be. And Lil' Wayne is still Lil'.
But why did these men die? They fell victim in large part to their own words, in which they wrote and spoke about black-on-black murder as inevitable, necessary, and not necessarily negative.
But they also died because nobody went to bat for them.
Tupac was shot on the strip in Las Vegas, in front of Circus Circus after a Mike Tyson fight. This is the equivalent of being murdered in Times Square on New Year's Eve. But no witnesses came forward.
Hundreds of people must have seen the person who murdered Tupac Shakur, but his murder is unsolved.
Biggie was murdered 6 months later in Los Angeles, also on a public street in front of dozens of witnesses. His murder is also unsolved.
This is not a romantic founding myth. These murders were not random. They were not inevitable. They were the avoidable byproduct of the very messages that these men were famous for articulating.
Rap aficionados wonder what these men would have become. We'll never know. All we'll ever know is that these men were murdered, and the code they lived by guaranteed that nobody came forward to punish their killers.
What the F***.
"Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it". One of those rare cliche aphorisms that's actually concretely and practically useful in every day life.
All of us presumably have experienced a situation in which we desperately sought to escape what we had previously prized. Perhaps we pursued a romance which ended in ruin. Perhaps we prized a job that ultimately claimed our soul.
Like most, though not all, human experiences, being careful what you wish for applies on both micro and macro levels; it is as true for the individual as it is for the group.
Societies, just like individual people, wish for things. Sometimes they get them. And sometimes they wish they hadn't.
Here's an example from World War II, a chapter that even students of that conflict often don't know about. First, an exercise in counter-intuition: what ethnic group suffered the largest scale ethnic cleansing in history, meaning a forced migration from their home of birth?
The Germans. True. As brutally and ruthlessly as Germans uprooted and sometimes exterminated whole tribes of people during the war, the biggest forced migration of a single people happened after the war. And it happened to the Germans.
In a way they could not have foreseen, the Germans got exactly what they wished for: an ethnically segregated Europe.
The Germans (or the Nazis, at least) wished for ethnically pure nations. A biological and physical impossibility, of course, but that's neither here nor there. We often wish for absurdities, do we not?
During the war, the Germans spent a lot of money and men and material killing people and blowing stuff up. Such is the stuff of war. But they spent even MORE money and men and material moving people around Europe, trying in vain to segregate ethnic groups.
Non-Germans were driven out of Germany and German-occupied territories. The goal was a purely German superstate at the heart of Europe with the "lesser races" penned into their own nation-sized ghettos on the periphery.
The Germans lost, as we all know. What most of us don't know is what happened to Germans living in other European nations after the war. They were expelled. All of them.
To be clear, these were not Germans who settled in places only after the German army kicked out the natives. The large majority of Germans driven from their homes had lived in those nations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc.) for generations.
These people had no part in the sickness that took over Germany; they didn't even live there. But, by virtue of their German blood, they paid for the sins of the Nazis. Thus, it was innocent Germans who were presumed guilty by their very DNA, falling victim to the very ideology that their fellow Germans had foisted upon Europe.
So the Germans got what they wished for: they got an all-German Germany. But it was not an all-powerful superstate spanning the continent; it was a shattered and impoverished rump of its former self, filled with wretched emigrants, and held guilty of the greatest crime in history. But at least they got what they wished for.
What are some examples of this dynamic at play closer to home? One strikes me right away. China.
For decades our government has wished for a non-Communist China at peace with its neighbors and not seeking to spread communist revolution. We have that. But we're not exactly thrilled with it, are we?
Our government got what it wished for in that regard, but now we're paranoid and intimidated by our own wishes having been fulfilled.
How do we know what to wish for? It strikes me that the first step is assessing our motives. Why do we wish for this thing? Is it for the good of the greatest number of people? Or is it for our own self-gratification? These things occasionally coincide. But not often.
If we're wishing for something, we need only be careful if our motives are compromised. I wish people were more careful about what they wished for.
Below is a link to a preview video I've made for a course I'll be teaching at The Open Table of Christ this summer. Music is from The Assassination of Jesse James soundtrack.www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdLGH4sClJI
Every now and then I get the urge to re-investigate something I'd previously learned about and assessing how my age and experience has changed my perceptions about a certain static event from the past. In other words, I study things that haven't changed to see how I have changed.
So due to my nerdiness and my curiosity and my belief in the epistemological value of second looks, I found myself working through a 700 page analysis of the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
My previous sense of this case was that, just like the JFK assassination, the actors overshadowed the actions. In other words, the celebrity of the victim or the suspect served to overwhelm physical truths.
There was only one shooter and one gun found in Dallas, but because of JFK's stature, most people intuitively felt it could not possibly be that simple. There was only one person's blood found at the Simpson murder scene, but since O.J. is so nice and so rich and the LAPD is so racist, many people intuitively felt that the evidence must have been planted.
In each of these cases, all of the evidence collected pointed to one, and only one, person. In both cases, as in all cases, some of the evidence didn't make perfect sense. Why was Oswald's last shot so much more accurate than his first? How did O.J. slaughter two people with a knife and leave only and few individual drops of blood?
Some things don't make perfect sense. But that does not mean they are not true. In general, I still feel that this paradigm applies to the O.J. case. If the same evidence was brought against Joe Schmoe, a conviction would have been guaranteed. But that does not mean it would have been just.
There are two questions at play which, due to the nature of our judicial system, must be answered separately.
The first question is "did O.J. do it". The answer, were I forced to make one, is yes.
The second question is "should O.J. have been found not guilty", keeping in mind that "not guilty" is NOT the same as "innocent". The answer to that is yes, he should have been found not guilty.
There are many ways in which the Simpson case was unique. In its simplest terms, O.J. Simpson was the most famous man charged with murder in the history of this country. So what we had was something previously unseen: a man charged with murder who could actually afford the best defense available.
Most people charged with murder are poor. They are given public defenders who lack the time, resources, and expertise to adequately represent their clients even if their clients are entirely innocent.
When most people are charged with murder, the state can bring in an "expert" to explain how the defendant must be guilty. And that's usually more than enough. But O.J. could afford to hire experts of his own. And what did O.J.'s defense discover?
They discovered that the police officer who claimed to have found most of the incriminating evidence was a racist. And not the "I'd rather not live next door to black people" sort of a racist. No, Mark Fuhrman was more of a "the only good nigger is a dead nigger" sort of racist. The type of man that should have spent his life being arrested, not arresting other people.
They also discovered that Fuhrman and his partner knowingly lied to get a search warrant for Simpson's property, claiming he had fled without prior plans. So while O.J. was in Chicago, the LAPD was walking through his house, "finding" evidence.
There are several other such examples from this case. NONE of these things mean that O.J. Simpson did not butcher two people. But these thing DO mean that this man could not be found guilty in a legitimate trial, because the police planted and altered evidence. They framed a guilty man.
So the verdict in this trial was not about Simpson being innocent. It was about punishing the police and the state for their sins.
Black folks were generally elated by the verdict, while white people were generally appalled. Most observers, of course, reached for the simplest explanation for this: people side with their own race.
I don't think that adequately explains the dynamic, though. Black folks were happy with the verdict not because they necessarily identified with O.J. Simpson, who after all surrounded himself primarily with white people (including his murdered wife). If was also not because black folks don't care about white folks being butchered.
No, the reason black folks were happy with this verdict is that it was an affirmation of something that black people have experienced much more than most whites: some police ARE racists. Some police ARE criminals. Some police WILL frame people. Some people WILL beat the shit out of a defenseless man. Some police, in fact, are willing to kill.
The tragedy of this is that a guilty man may very well have gotten away with murder. The other tragedy is that the larger lesson regarding the dark side of police and prosecutors, was lost on most white folks, who still seem pre-programmed to agree with anything the police or the prosecutors say.
The largest tragedy of all, I suppose, is that it took a rich murderer going free to illustrate how easy it would be for the cops to frame a poor innocent man.
