[IMC Bombay] Single Brushstroke judgment

[Mukumbe]

I kind of see Yashodara's point. I think every nation
has to be looked at in a NUANCED way. This war is
sick, the entire history of the American
military-industrial-plantation complex is sick - but
that doesn't mean that little people haven't made big
gains in America and made it inevitable that when the
history of struggles against oppression is written -
the struggles of Black Americans, among others, will
be UP THERE. There are lots and LOTS of people in
America who understand and LIVE the subaltern
experience. The 'polls' put out by the news networks
are totally manipulated and everyone knows that. 

Regrettably, people can be very closed minded
sometimes and want to tar and feather you if you
express admiration for anything American. Well I
refuse to condemn wholesale a country that produced
the blues and jazz and Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison
and Sojourner Truth and Mumia Abu Jamal - need I go
on? And all these people were rebels to the CORE,
that's what makes their work so powerful and exciting.


A country is partly about who rules it and has the
power, but not entirely. In that respect the US has
always been on the wrong side. But very often - SO IS
INDIA. Between the average Indian - with all the
saffron-attitudes, the sick authoritarian family
structure, the color prejudice and caste prejudice,
gender prejudice, cultural chauvanism, the cliquish
exclusiveness of the old money types and ALSO of the
JNU/FTII types - and the average American with their
racism, cultural chauvanism, religious fundamentalism,
'family values' and Muslim-baiting - I DON'T KNOW
WHICH I LIKE BETTER!!

You get my drift - look at things in a nuanced way. A
country is more than the people who have and have
always had power in it. It also has angry, contrary
people who may not win wars or have their votes count
- but neverthless slowly influence the shape of events
with the messages of rebellion coded in their various
expressive efforts - whether its the manic
experimentation of a Thomas Pynchon or the spiritual
intensity of John Coltrane or the oratorical style and
powerful ideas of our Dalit intellectuals. 

So I can't say "America is evil" - but the
military-industrail-plantation-prison complex is.
There are many Americans I love and consider among the
most beautiful people I have ever met for their spirit
and honesty. You don't see them on CNN or Fox, but
they do exist and I loved living there for the
freedoms they won for people like me - freedoms that
as a single woman with no connections or cliques - I
could never EVER have won in India. I know, because I
tried.

The leftie Indian men were the most bigoted about
gender. Check out all the domestic violence and rape
in Kerala. They are also the ones who love to sneer at
everything American. Give me an American leftist any
day. 

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