IT'S UNCOMFORTABLE WHEN RACISM & BIGOTRY GET UNCOVERED-- BUT IGNORING THE PROBLEMS IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A CURE-- MELLENCAMP'S "JENA" HAS SOME NON-FANS
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Last week DWT presented listeners with the first opportunity to hear John Mellencamp's powerful new song, "Jena." Now it's available on YouTube and people are starting to see it all over the world-- much to the despair of the white Jena power structure. Take a look:
The images are very strong and very disturbing-- and not exactly what southern conservatives and racists want the world to see. Jena Mayor Murphy R. McMillin called Mellencamp's video inflammatory, "so inflammatory, so defamatory, that a line has been crossed and enough is enough."
Enough was enough in 1865. It is no wonder that a society which has failed to take the Civil War to heart would be angry about Mellencamp's condemnation of racism and bigotry.
UPDATE: KKK MEMBERS WON'T BE BUYING ANY MELLENCAMP T-SHIRTS EITHER
The Chicago Tribune reported a couple weeks ago that the KKK and other white supremacist groups had come to Jena-- and that the mayor-- the one who thought Mellencamp's song was "over the line"-- didn't have any problem with that. Support from all the regular kooks and nuts, from David Duke to the guy with no teeth at the gas station, started flooding in.
First a neo-Nazi Web site posted the names, addresses and phone numbers of some of the six black teenagers and their families at the center of the Jena 6 case and urged followers to find them and "drag them out of the house," prompting an investigation by the FBI.
Then the leader of a white supremacist group in Mississippi published interviews that he conducted with the mayor of Jena and the white teenager who was attacked and beaten, allegedly by the six black youths. In those interviews, the mayor, Murphy McMillin, praised efforts by pro-white groups to organize counterdemonstrations; the teenager, Justin Barker, urged white readers to "realize what is going on, speak up and speak their mind."
Mellencamp's newest musical critic has been on the same note since then, insisting, rather incredulously, that portraying Jena as racist is unfair. When interviewed by a proudly racist group from Mississippi, Mayor McMillin said, " I am not endorsing any demonstrations, but I do appreciate what you are trying to do. Your moral support means a lot."
Labels: Jena, John Mellencamp, Louisiana, racism
posted by DownWithTyranny @ 12:15 PM
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5 Comments:
Mellencamp's my new hero. Go Johnny go!
I still can't get my head around anyone hanging a noose in a tree in this country, knowing what it means. George Allen, stupid high school kids, any of them.
It's 2007, thirty-five years after I was first told, "Don't correct the old folks, honey, it's dying out with them and they're too old to change. Just focus on Sesame Street. Sesame Street is how it is today." My parents couldn't conceive of going backwards from the civil rights movement, only forward.
What makes someone want to keep that toxin alive in them? What is their major malfunction?
Great song. Good hook.
Just to add a bit of complication to the Jena story: There is, in addition to the racism, high school cliquishness. I doubt there's a high school in the land where kids don't eat in groups and where there isn't also a "pecking order" between the groups. So, given the fact of a social hierarchy, it's no surprise in this country that race gets overlaid on the whole thing.
That said, racism is racism, and there's no other way to interpret a noose hanging in a tree.
It is time for the next great rising up.
What makes someone want to keep that toxin alive in them?
Got a hot news flash for you, soyinkafan. Out of five decades of extremely personal experience.
You're not going to like it any better than I did, I promise you.
Some mental diseases are both contagious, and, unless the chains of infection are forcibly broken, effectively hereditary.
That toxin never dies. Why keep it around? Because it provides power. It establishes tribal identity. And for those who truly wield power and influence, it gives poor white people someone to hate and blame while they work for your for slave wages and thank you for it.
Hell is filling up with racists, but we're adding layers as fast as we can build them. But you know how these FEMA contractors are - as soon as we open up a new layer, it's one headache after another, roofs leaking feces when they're supposed to leak urine, and vice versa.
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