Strange Doin's in TV Land

I just walked into my media center (!), turned on the tv and saw Don Rickles dressed in a wide-brimmed black southwestern-style Native American hat with fake black hair and long braids in an indescribable woody interior store decorated garishly with Native American clothing and "war bonnets". A few scenes later, Betty White made reference to having lived on a reservation, delivering veiled innuendo about "wild horses".

I can only imagine what cultural madness led up to these strange televisual moments on the TV Land original sitcom, "Hot In Cleveland".

"Hell On Wheels"

AMC has been cutting the edges of television with shows like "Breaking Bad", "Mad Men" and other original programming. This fall has seen the start of the moody macabre "The Walking Dead" and a deftly crafted, but largely disappointing "Hell On Wheels". Their offerings look amazing on the screen, but their edge is getting a bit dulled with the hollow "Hell On Wheels".

Led by a fiendish and historically dramaturgical Colm Meaney, embattled and festering Dominique McElligott, tortured hunk Anson Mount and Common as the more-than-stereotypically-uneloquent Common as the color commentary for the 1865 manifest destiny redux, "Hell On Wheels" is sure to please the audience niche that is hungering for yet another funkified soap opera with just about any backdrop premise to throw sepia-tone televisual paint on.

One will be, as I was, highly disappointed if one is to assume "Hell" will reveal a new way of looking at post-Civil war social politics complete with raiding injuns, who like in most backward depictions of indigenous people, say nothing to each other, relegating them to savagery and no sign of intellect. As the Native American attack on the settlers begins, the man (no, the Native American guy) who would kill McElligott's surveryor-speculator husband hunts the pair down in the woods moving like a caricature of a very graceful C3PO with a tomahawk. This show seems to have nothing new to say and the horrid point is that it simply has a lot of old things to say. HOW comes across as yet another opportunity to have a vehicle to say the word "nigger", run Native peoples through the white privilege lens and give culturally anxious viewers a cathartic opportunity to engage in what Toni Morrison calls "race talk", racial discourse without social decisiveness.

Not that modern television has ever been known to be a largely socially responsible proposition (Kardashians notwithstanding), but HOW has the chance to engage some of the most vexing challenges of past and present USAmerican society. Even though the script feels mature and the cinematography luxurious, the content is horrendously non-functional for anyone other than those committed to 1986 high school text book history, those for whom white privilege goes down like a piece of baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.

So far, just fresh out of episode one, HOW looks like a socio-political dud, even though Common, playing an African ex-slave, freed as it were, gets to slit the throat of a thoroughly unlikable European work gang boss...and with a very big, sharp knife. But that's just really good cherry glaze on a very old and dry cheesecake. If you're looking for a textural duplicate of "There Will Be Blood" (sans the black gold, texas tea) , you're on your way, but the story lacks the pathos and grit to hold enlightened attentions.

But my trusty VCR will be watching it for the next three sundays. Unluckily, I just might have to watch it, too.

http://www.amctv.com/shows/hell-on-wheels

Episode 3: Clearly a teleplay filled to the brim with the warm remembrances of manifest destiny's finest fantasies, HOW continues to disappoint, but never fails to be unsurprising in it's sameness with old high school history text books. HOW continues to break no new ground, but reveals itself to be an eighteen-hundred and something soap opera with a few interesting presentations. Like many non-functional narratives of this ilk, the issues of racism, slavery, anti-indigeny, religious imperialism, etc,... are raised, but never fully expounded upon, as if the wrtiers don't have any political and cultural perspective or they've only read old high school history books or....well....they include no members from indigenous, African, non-christian/monotheistic or female populations. An assumption here is that people steeped in white privilege are again released upon their laptops to write stories about people who are not them, who they do not understand and who they are not qualified to advocate for - if that is even an intention in this time-consuming bit of pre-industrial programming.

A christianized Native man, Joseph Black Moon played by Eddie Spears, agonizes over the revelation that his brother is responsible for shooting an arrow or two into a lone European settler-woman. His noble pastor/minister/tormentor counsels him sternly to sublimate this truth and "tell no one". We later hear an impassioned speech by Colm Meaney's character, Thomas "Doc" Durant, in the canvas chapel about the ultimate righteousness of the christian path and the hopeless nature of the Indian pathology as Spears looks on penitently. HOW drags us through a brickish moment as Common's character, Elam Ferguson, attempts to claim his American dream of equality by seeking to solicit the services of one of the camp prostitutes. He is summarily laughed at by the European men who challenge his presence there and the prostitute who, post-laughter, seems to soften to the suggestion of the intention of possibility of the idea of the struggle for Black liberation - but maybe when everybody's not looking.

Unless this televisual bucket of maple syrup in the mid-February forests of New Hampshire (I had to retool the old tome of molasses in winter as this show is cliche' enough, another cliche would have been too much) finds its reason for living by episode seven, I'm not so sure that HOW has a chance in, well, hell to find, well, a reason for living at all.

Episode #next to last (phew!): Beginning with a melodramatic rout of the "renegades" that were frustrating the efforts of Big Iron to ply its way across the plains, the power of the cinematography and writing starts to pale in the subsequent encore showing of this episode. Backed by an ambiguous soundtrack song, probably felt to be highly clever in post-production, the slick, slo-mo shoot-em-up leaves the band of First nations warriors lying dead strewn across the soon-too-be-exploited earth. Yes, that's probably how, generally, those battles might have gone, but the editorializing of the history seemed to do nothing for viewers in a world challenged by decades of stable stereotypes, narrow-minded history and a currently hidden legacy of continued exploitation of Native American nations across the breadth and depth of Turtle Island.

Deepening the storyline a few inches under the surface, the christianized Black Moon ends up killing his brother, the same person that shot McElligott's character in the shoulder in an earlier episode. Hmmmmm. That one's too easy to return fire on. After a rare scene of inter-generational intimacy in a Native American family, Black Moon returns to the railway encampment to find the minister's daughter waiting for him to return, having done so every night since his departure. It seems AMC is hot on pressing cultural taboo in the sexual realm without having the iron railway...well....balls to fire harder salvoes at the pathology of capitalist manifest destiny and cultural genocide. Black Moon's return gets truly trippy as he begins to share his regret and mourning for the killing of his brother at his own hands - quickly cut short by the kisses of the minister's daughter. Called that one.

On that note, a little earlier, we see Common's character laying in social sin with the Native American prostitute (um.....sin because the European workers at the camp consider all the prostitutes to be their property and privilege - which earned Common an unsuccessful hanging/lynching in the earlier episode...in case you were wondering ) whom he entreats to be his steady girl. Again, this is not an occurrence that would have been unknown to the widening Western swath being ripped into the western plains. The issue that is given rise here is the location of the native American and African ( = post-slavery slaves as per AMC) women. Part of the definition of a stereotype, and particularly cultural (aka racial) ones, is the absence of supporting cultural communities and most often intra-cultural partners. Hell On Wheels is no better than Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show or Friends at deepening the characters of their cultural tokens.

To make matters worse, HOW hit an interestingly dissonant note when it made a rousing event of the successful completion of the first section of the railway. Given the deep pathos and challenging cultural grit that AMC thought they were creating, one might think that the soundtrack and the narrative treatment of that moment might have some of the dark tones that they paint across most of the rest of the series. It was all too easy and exposed the possibly unconscious validation of European cultural and economic exploitation that it seemed their contrived slickitude sought to evade.

Even this"deeply" ( = shallowly as per this writer) into the series, Hell On Wheels continues to disappoint, underwhelm and beg for cultural contrition and gives us nothing more than hell on reels other than the standard, normal machinations of the viral spread of the Machine Nation.

Final Episode: (this is cause for celebration)
Common's "Elam Ferguson" character (remember, Ferguson is a "freed" African who was formerly enslaved): "You told me something once, the only thing that set me free, 'You gotta let go of the past".

This, one of the defining lines of the series, undergirds the larger context of colonial apologetics and denial of modern, current presence of oppressive socio-political systems. It is the perfect, classic white privilege script establishing (over and over, again and again) the abdication of responsibility around the legacy of racism, cultural genocide, enslavement, colonialism and imperialism.

Only seconds later, after the above tidbit of psycho-social wisdom, Ferguson told his fellow African rail worker that he needed to take care of his "own self" as opposed to confirming the request of that worker to have Ferguson's leadership shared in a communal context, providing guidance for the (historically) beleaguered displaced indigenous Africans now turned into day-laborers for land and rail barons. Ferguson walks away from his people and affirms the freedom-making words of the European enslaver, turned foreman (Anson Mount's "Cullen Bohannon" character). This is not a subtle message and it is a common one. This is standard regressive western cinema genre fare. This narrative is directly unusable by a society that is in the need of transformation.

And it seems that HOW's last word about Native people is that the unprodigal son of the native nation gets to dance with the now mad, homicidal preacher's daughter? It was entirely anti-climactic to have the last episode provide this narrative coda for what could have been a promising presence of characters indigenous to Turtle Island - the christianized Native American man gets to embody genocidal complicity, removal, assimilation and the payoff of self-hatred in his intimate dance with the European daughter of the decidedly pathologically unstable preacher.

Hell On Wheels has been nothing if not simply a story about European colonialism on Turtle Island with African and Native Americans as backdrop. This is nothing at all new and that is a shame as it makes HOW a nice-looking social wast of time and a pat retelling of retrograde narratives that steep us further into the status quo.

Worse yet, Hell On Wheels has been re-upped for yet another most likely horrendously laborious season in the fall of 2012. AND...then there's the encore presentation immediately after the final episode - just in case you hadn't seen how bad the show was the first time around.

~~~~~~

In the larger context, western movies can be generally read as a stable and recurrent narrative of colonial retrenchment and apologetics, marked by deep and clear dismissals of the stories and realities of the oppressed, particularly Native Americans, First Nations peoples, the first and best residents of Turtle Island. The dismissals and disrespect, though, are generously shared with African characters, African peoples when they do appear in these narratives. How generous are our colonial "masters".

The amazingly crafted and enlightening documentary, "Reel Injun", makes it clear that the portrayals of Native American peoples have been largely problematic, narrowly drawn, misleading, disempowering, distracting, while sometimes transforming and recently being formulated and expressed by more and more Native American peoples. One of the troubling points the documentary illuminates is how the visual portrayals have all been lumped under the guise of the Plains nations. The clothing that the characters are wearing functionally strips Native peoples of their real identity as everyone is seen wearing buckskins, headbands and war bonnets. It is said that this is tantamount to stripping all Turtle Islanders of their identity, the ultimate act of colonization.

"Bonanza", one of the most popular and lasting stories of colonialism and settler-colonialism, is a perfect example of this oppressive and dismissive narrative. Peppered with the presence of the doting Chinese Hop Sing (and other odd and sundry Asian characters), random and noble mercurial Africans (with varying relationships to freedom and enslavement) and an unending passel of Banocs (the bad bad guys), Paiutes, "injuns" and half-breeds as the whipping boys and objectifying girls of the redemptive and de facto systems of manifest destiny.

One could spend pages upon pages upon pages describing the repetitive nature of the "injun" caricature and the other attacks on indigenous and disenfranchised peoples, but the wider story is one of disempowerment and resignation for the viewer.  Ward Churchill (...) has pointed out how the temporal balkanization of Turtle Island's indigenous peoples has created a surreality that exists only in the late 19th century, relegating Native culture and waning power figuratively and literally in the past, Hollywood never committing itself to more revolutionary, redemptive, complex or current portrayals and storylines.  There is no American Indian Movement, no Native American scholarship, no linguistic and cultural restoration, no burgeoning cultural art, no reconciliation and recovery from the brutal horror of christian missionary boarding schools, no Winona LaDukes or Wilma Mankillers, No Gitz CrazyBoys or John Mohawks, no Vine Deloria, Jr.s, no UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, no indigenist politics, no dry native humor.

This only serves to submerge the very functional life of Turtle Island indigeny, any chance for substantive political alliance (as there is no one to ally with or any reason to do so in the first place) and to give the de facto nod to any and all political and economic attacks on land, natural resources and cultural sovereignty.  What a better way to continue the Peabody Coal rape of Navajo and Hopi land than to convince the settler-colonial populace that the Navajo and Hopi losses were inevitable anyway (indeed, has anyone ever SEEN a Navajo or a Hopi?).  What a better way to assure that the resistance to Tar Sands oil extraction will be minimal and lacking in sustained resolve.  What a better way to continue the trend of biopiracy, theft and continued possession of cultural artifacts ( http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ indigenous_peoples_ literature/message/19495 ) and distract the larger world community from caring about the abuse of Native peoples during the 2008 Olympics in Canada or the rampant disappearances of Native and aboriginal women.

The western movie genre represents, in general and in effect, an outmoded, racist, colonial/imperialist set of oppressive narratives that serve no better purpose than to continue the hundreds of years old genocidal story of settler-colonial European holocaust meted out upon the once multitudinous peoples of Turtle Island, of Amerique.  To continue to rehash this terroristic and now tragically tiresome stereotypical story is but a nod to continued cultural destruction.

I thought we knew better than that.  Maybe due to the wild and almost ubiquitous popularity and pathological persistence of the western genre and narrative accoutrement, we simply are no better than that.  After all, old movies and many new ones make good money for already rich media conglomerates. Genocidal holocaust, a la USAmerican settler-colonial propagandistic television and cinema, is alive and well on our screens and in our politically immature hearts.

Spoiler Alert on Season 2 due to start its ride into brimstone on August 12, 2012:
Read everything above this Spoiler Alert.

Is it racism, prejudice or just funny?

I have numerous issues with Scooby Do, believe it or not, but overt moments like this are easier to target as problematic. Just like Harry Potter's narratives, if Scooby was not so popular, my concern would not be so immediate. Any time we see problematic, racist, sexist, heterosexist, anti-indigenous and other kinds of undesirable narratives and semiotic elements in popular media products, we should be highly concerned and willing to engage the outcomes, if not the producers.

And another thing - "LOL racism"?!? The outcomes here are not so cryptic or complex. The thesis of my Masters research paper gains steam here.

Biased Portrayals in Children's TV Persist

Today, on "THIS is for Kids" on WHDH's "THIS" digital channel, I watched a cartoon that featured a European cowboy in Africa, blue gendered gorillas and a Tarzan character with glasses. The female gorilla was amorously chasing the cowboy for some reason (I missed the beginning), then was convinced to wed the male gorilla, presided over by the Tarzan-type character. Some of the action took place in a hut that was perched on the branch of a tree. Just like the more recent Disney version of Tarzan, there were no African people present at all. This absence of Africans in Africa was echoed in a recent past episode of Gadget Boy on the same channel.

The next cartoon featured a caveperson (male) who dressed up as a female dinosaur to lure a tyrannosaurus into a tar pit. He threw a handkerchief on the ground with expectation that the tyrannosaurus would see it and fall in the tar pit in the process. When the rex saw the caveperson, he went cartoonishly ga-ga, with eyes bulging, banging its tail on its head and demonstrably drooling. The rex "fell in love" (clearly only lust) with the caveperson and the narrative continued on portraying the caveperson as a captive housewife, unable to leave the house and placating the husband rex by dusting the house after he got angry at the "wife" for daring to want to escape. The caveperson was scheming to get ouf of the house while the rex sat in an easy chair reading the newspaper and only got free after the rex saw another character it felt attracted to.

(more on this soon)

To Be 'connected" or Not To Be...

"In a world where a good number of us think being connected means having our cell phones, BlackBerries, and iPhones charged, it is likely that we forget about and become disconnected from our immediate environment beyond the technology at our fingertips." - "Red Alert" Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge", Daniel R. Wildcat, pg. 61

"working very hard on a pretty little song of love"

This line and these lyrics are from a song on Hugh Masekela's "Black to the Future" cd/release. Though the lyrics are beautiful and intention and clearly positive in nature, I am most engaged by that line, "working very hard". I feel that phrase very deeply as I attempt to look out of the confines of a limiting and myopic dominant cultural context through filters of confusion, illusion and delusion to a future now of enlightened human community engaged in its own process of spiritual, emotional and socio-politcal validation as empowered beings on an earth spoilt by a temporary, but fundamental break from sanity. I can relate to the writer's suggestion that these beautiful, necessary and essential projections are difficult, that there is hard work involved in the process, not only of the song, but the living out of that content and context of love and harmony.

One might even suggest that these lyrics represent a "pie in the sky" attitude, an air of ungrounded liberalism and a negative connection to "idealism' (I love/hate how capitalist corporatocracy jerks its knee to the very idea of ideals!). If we are to look even a breath beyond the re-grounding of indigenous social and spiritual strength on the earth, the inevitable destruction of rampant patriarchy, sexism, heterosexism, racism, classism and machine-culture (and the inevitable failure of the "inevitability of 'the singularity'"), we would be able to see the harmony, peace and love that this song projects and that each of us has the ability to envision even from within some of our most limiting and limited perspectives. Even the seemingly insane assertions of the recent failed rapture predictions seem to be born of a deep desire to be in a state of harmony, peace and love with the god and saved-ones of their narrow-minded choosings.

How that played or plays out is not so important in this moment as this one phrase that speaks to me, speaks to us of sweat, of toil and frustration, even in the midst of the sonic and reverberant beauty of the song as moves through the air and into my water-based being. It is very telling that even this song is difficult, that coming up with one that the "whole wide world" could sing is a difficult proposition.

It's important to remember the context of the creation of this song. Hugh Masekela is the son of indigenous traditions in a nation, not so different from the United States of America in its intentions and historical similiitudes. Hugh Masekela gave and gives voice to a people grounded historically and spiritually and ancestrally in a place upon which a new and destructive paradigm was violently placed, subverting the sovereignty and cultural power of indigenous peoples in a tremendously wide swath of geographic space on a continent upon which this sort of tragedy was not unfamiliar. Hugh Masekela has given voice to a struggle in a place where even the indigenous name of Azania has become unfamiliar and foreign. So we can be clear, even though Hugh Masekela may not be a Zephania Motopeng or Mangaliso Sobukwe or Stephen Biko, that Masekela is aware of the grounded reality of the dire conditions into which his/our people have been thrust by the machinations of settler-colonialism and capitalism on a continent that Kwame Ture had always asserted would have developed beyond the cultural limitations of the capitalist context due to the near universal and deep cultural engagement of communalism and conscious interdependence.

That Masekela's lyrical songwriter is working "very hard" is understandable and behooves us to consider the hard road ahead as we look into a future in which we can joyfully and fatiguedly say good-bye to discrimination, prejudice, known well, all too well, in the Azanian context. When an Azanian says its hard to write a song of love that the whole wide world to sing - believe them. It also brings to the fore a need to respect that forward and positive vision of something beyond the destructive nature of the present ideological and structural regimes that dominate our unconscious and consciousness and clearly make it difficult to even see over those seemingly distant horizons.

There are trees that we are intimately in relationship with that obfuscate our enraptured view of the sacred forest of our human becoming. And that tree, the same tree that breathes out the very oxygen that we (need to) breathe in, is not in and of itself our enemy. It is our temporocentrism and geocentrism that prevents us from seeing beyond, through and in spite of the necessity to live amongst those ideas, beings and people that often seem to be our immediate, persistent and selfishly-defined vexations.

"I’m working very hard on a pretty little song of love

for everybody to sing

a song of love (for everybody)

for the whole wide world to sing

about love and happiness, peace and harmony...

for the children of tomorrow, the fishes in the sea

the birdies in the sky, for the creatures in the forest and the jungle...

good-bye discrimination...let the world be ruled by love and happiness

good-bye prejudice...good-bye"

It is no small thing that an Azanian is "working very hard" to create and sing that universal human song and it is informative that it is coming yet out of the struggle for liberation of an indigenous people.

And there was a universal song sung on the earth before this recent and temporary derailing of the indigenous world. There was a song sung in all of the forests, across all the plains, from each and every mountaintop, across each lake and river and ocean. There were constant, persistent and abiding songs of love and respect sung about the earthly and the spiritual reality of life and the concomitant challenges that that reality daily revealed. There was an indigenous human song that resounded clearly, mirroring the heart beat, the pulse of the Great Mother earth, having been borne of it, in it and in harmony and resonance with it. There is still a song of indigeny that lies within all of us. We are borne of it, in spite of the disrespect of it and with all wondrous and idealist hope and possibility that we can again be in harmony and resonance with it. There is yet a song of love, of peace and harmony that the whole wide world can sing precisely and simply because there was and remains a dwindling connection to a multiplicity of songs of love, peace and harmony that the whole world sang for the children of our Ancestors' tomorrows, for the fishes of the sea, the birds in the sky, the creatures of the forests and the jungles.

We ARE the children of our Ancestors' tomorrows.

When we (re)learn these, our songs of love and harmony once again, we will realize that our children will learn them quite quickly, so much so that we will come to the easy assumption that they already knew them somewhere in their bones, in their DNA. And as we sit with them, beaming with pride at the hope, power and wisdom in their voices, we will come to the understanding that the human Ancestral song in their bones, in their DNA, had to come through us. We will then truly know that we simply forgot to remember the songs still alive in our indigenous human soul, that we are carriers yet and still of those songs of harmony and peace and that they were, are and will remain songs of love.

May we receive sacred assistance from all directions to work very, very hard, again, on these songs, better still, the song of love that the whole wide world can sing.

(posted also as such at http://indigeny-energetics.blogspot.com and on facebook)

Conventions In Alternative Media - Franklin Pierce University-Pierce Arrow blog post

http://piercearrow.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/conventions-in-alternative-media-ukumbwa-sauti/