The Politicization of Stupidity (text by Roger Deff, tr. Dan Hanrahan)

Via a couple of serendipitous FB connections, in recent years I've made the acquaintance of a group of poets & musicians from Belo Horizonte, Brazil whose work ignites my imagination and inspires me greatly. One such artist is the remarkable MC, Roger Deff. I was introduced to his music through the poet and translator Leo Gonçalves and immediately connected to his poetry, the atypical accompanying beats/sounds by artists like Barulhista and the images of the streets & skies, BH street art & the poignant portraits of the residents of Belo Horizonte in Deff's music videos... Today I came upon a brief reflection by RD on FB on the "politicization of stupidity" in Brazil. It sounded all too similar to what we face here in the US in the waning days of Trumplandia. So, I got R. Deff's permission to translate it and I share it below. We are not alone in the struggle against this weaponized idiocy! Enjoy...

"One of the most maddening things to contend with these days is the politicization of stupidity. People have taken to labeling the most idiotic traits – denialism, selfishness, ignorance and the lack of basic common sense – as not just opinion (which was already a stretch), but as “political stances.” People defend with tooth and nail positions that are both irresponsible and idiotic - when what is at stake are people’s lives. In the past, I believed that this was only a question of people being ill-informed, but it is more than that. Beyond the kingdom of disinformation - in a world ruled by algorithms, where reason can rapidly recede, among people lacking the capacity to process complex ideas (reality is only simple in the confines of our heads) - there is the question of one’s personal character. To say that (Brazilian soccer star) Neymar and people who act like him or who see themselves represented in his blasé attitude of “fuck it” are just stupid is not the whole picture. There is also a lack of ethics to consider. To see such idiocy among those in power is quite serious – but it all begins, or ends, in those who feel themselves represented in such leaders. And that is what scares me most… because such people are not an exception among us. -- Roger Deff, tr. Dan Hanrahan

Never, Aye-ayes

 

Never

Oaks hoarding acorns

Rivers hoarding stones

Clouds hoarding raindrops

Flowers hoarding scents

We are among & within

The night moths flying

With giant-eyed wings

The frogs that chorus

the moonrise

I saw Jeremiah after the storm

After his motorbike propelled him

Into the concrete pylon

He was passing into

Something different

Transforming to be able to

Transmit into the next space

Only as an other

Could he even get there

While he was here

He was as much of Earth

As are ants anteaters aphids

Arachnids antelope anemones

Apes albatrosses angelfish and aye-ayes

Louise Bourgeois, Brooklyn, Stone

Back in the late 90's, I was visiting my friend Joe Kutchera one spring in Brooklyn. As we were heading up the dirty, pale blue, converted-factory stairway to the loft he shared with his jeweler roommate, he indicated a large pair of sliding doors. "That's Louise Bourgeois' studio," he said. All I knew about Louise Bourgeois is that she was a sculptor who made big objects that were odd and alluring, but that I didn't think I understood. I was able to get on my tiptoes and peer through a dusty, rectangular window to see inside. It was an open space, with New York City, factory-floor-afternoon light spilling in from outside. There were tools of various shapes and sizes scattered around and I noticed the piece she must have been working on at the time. It was a perfect, polished sphere made of a pale stone, that stood about 6-feet high. I concluded that she was working on the sculpture of a massive eyeball, but again, I felt I didn't understand why.

I noticed this morning that the Jewish Museum is hosting a retrospective of Louise Bourgeois' work that will open in April 2021. It made me remember that moment in Brooklyn of perhaps 22 years ago. I think now I understand why she was making a great sphere eyeball out of pale stone in her Brooklyn studio. Perhaps it is for the same reason that anybody journeys out to the margins, between what is and what is not, to listen and see and commune and finally to bring back something they have made. They do this – form giant round stones, transmit a trumpet through a wah-wah pedal, cast great pulsating color fields upon a stretched canvas or form baroque, crystal staircases and chandeliers of church organ melody -- so that someone may see/hear/smell/touch/taste - experience it and remember and tell you about it one day.

The Great and the Terrible in 1970s Pop Rock

There's something uncanny about a lot of 1970s pop and rock -- it walks the line so treacherously between being really terrible and really great. I was just watching an episode of "Daryl's House," where Daryl Hall hosted the Rockford, Illinois band Cheap Trick at his digs in Millford, New York. This was the heaviest rock Daryl Hall has likely ever played -- guitars, distortion, train engine drumming and vocals that test the gonads.

It must be said that guitarist and songwriter Rick Nielsen learned his Beatles lessons well. He could write a punchy chorus and he gave the band's best songs odd, little touches that adorn the tunes like the extra twirl of a vine or placement of a small metallic bug in the ironwork on the façade of a building. I'm thinking of the peculiar, ringing open chord that launches their teen anthem "Surrender" or the key-threatening B major to G major chords Nielsen plays in the pre-chorus to "I Want You to Want Me."

But Cheap Trick, being titans of 70s pop rock, also had some overcooked numbers in their repertoire and they played one on "Daryl's House" -- the hangover-inducing, "Heaven Tonight." Heavy, brooding and apparently drug-addled, it is a song that wears its Abbey Road influence on its sleeve. Though Cheap Trick is far from a prog band, the song showcases the most maddening feature of prog rock: an attempt at being deep and portentous that sounds somewhat ridiculous. The song's brush with The Terrible is reached in the chorus, when a group of rough and tumble guys chant, in falsetto, the coke-on-the-mirror line, "Do you want to go to heaven tonight?" It can fill a listener with despair.

Hearing the song today brought me back to an emotional experience I felt constantly growing up in the 70s: ambivalence. I loved and I hated that song by… Elton John, Jim Croce, Don McLean, The Commodores, Pat Benatar. I loved and I hated being at school – seeing friends and seeing girls was great, but I felt so restless there. Even my feelings toward my parents veered from affection to bewilderment. “Playing with those felt puppets you made was fun, Mom!” But who are you? Your old life with nine sisters in Boston is unknowable to me. “Playing catch on the sidewalk was great, Dad.” But I have no idea what you do all day after you leave the house and I don’t understand how somebody could smoke cigars.

Like many Gen Xers, my folks grew up poor in the city and rose into the middle class, riding the wave of the postwar boom economy. This meant that while I grew up in a bucolic suburb (fortunately for me, one that was home to eclectic and eccentric University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee professors and their families and within biking distance of the Milwaukee’s arty East Side), the urban village where my Irish Portuguese parents grew up in Boston felt like something from a different land and century to me. A sense of dislocation and rootlessness can take hold among children in such a family. This feeling can even extend to the suburban landscape. Ambivalence can arise with a fierce love for the extant wilderness that hangs on in the area existing alongside a revulsion at much of the bland conformity that defines the pavement and the manicured lawns.

Many artists of my generation, famous or simply loved and appreciated within their local scene, are already gone - the bewilderment, the malaise, and perhaps the ambivalence of their youth never resolved and they succumbed to suicide or drug addiction. I am grateful to have made it to age 53 where I find I’m able to sit back and enjoy Cheap Trick or Elton John without feeling pulled down by the aura of excess that tainted their music for me when I was a boy. We were born into landscapes defined by confusion, forged by markets. Good music, friendship, love and beautiful verse remain for those of us lucky enough to continue on.

We and Us: Then/Now

Science is continually adjusting the date of the first appearance of Homosapien sapiens on this planet. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, current consensus among paleontologists points to our emergence 315,000 years ago. A pretty long time back. First indications of agriculture (the start of the "Neolithic Revolution") appear 10,000 years ago in the the valleys around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (Mesopotamia), located in current day Iraq, Kuwait, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, and regions along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders.

The storage of surplus grain that begins with the Neolithic Revolution makes possible extreme social hierarchy and leads to what is sometimes referred to as the "Neolithic Package": the emergence of individual human ownership of land (private property), diets greatly reduced in their nutritional value, empires and armies, bureaucracy, *extreme* divisions of labor (my great aunt spent a couple of decades in a factory in Boston sitting in a clear plastic booth, tying ribbons onto candy boxes, for example), individualized competition replacing the sharing of resources, the formation of mass society (typically, hunter gatherer existence occurs in band society of not more than 150 people living together), the monetization of practically everything and a tragic distancing or estrangement from the web of life of the planet and the reciprocity that defines it.

All of these deleterious changes are accelerated with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. We now live within a global industrial consumer economy that can make the following elements, which are essential to our well-being, difficult to achieve: community or social connectedness; varied physical activity; a healthy diet with sufficient omega-3 consumption; light exposure -- hunter gatherers spend the day outside, where the light is 10 to 20 times stronger than indoor light on a sunny day; sufficient sleep; and anti-ruminative behavior – brooding, a self-recriminating cycle of thoughts can become deadly – pre-civilization modes of living involve many activities that interrupt such thinking. (This list of six elements found in hunter gatherer culture that are key to staving off depression are identified by Dr. Steven Illardi of the University of Kansas).

In addition to the chronic absence of some or most of these daily elements that evolution has made essential to our well-being, we find ourselves in 2020 bewildered by an ever-increasing list of circumstances never before faced by humans. I’m going to list a few of them below, with the goal of suggesting we all cut ourselves some slack when we feel shitty… because we were not designed to deal with this kind of nonsense and nobody reading this created these circumstances…

- Landscapes covered with asphalt and denuded of trees and other friendly species

- The novel idea that you have to pay money to occupy the space where you sleep, prepare your food and hang out

- The lack of knowledge of how to procure food for free and/or the unavailability of such food

- The consequent fact that we have to rent or sell our labor in order to obtain paper coupons that may purchase us the ability to occupy the space where we live and to buy the food that we need for sustenance

- The absence of frequent dance – communal, creative, often ecstatic and with deep roots

- The absence of direct democratic agency over what happens to us and our immediate world; electing representatives to do this, under current circumstances, has become an oxymoron: an unhumorous farce

- As Forrest Palmer has pointed out on recent occasions, the knowledge that the very things we are doing in order to guarantee our individual survival are contributing to the waning of life on this planet; this is extremely hard to “deal with,” nor should it be easy to deal with

- The fact that our perambulations are dominated by an awareness that the 3000-pound steel leviathans known as cars can swerve and eliminate us at any moment

- The absence of the perception of the non-human world as sacred, vibrating with mystery and, oftentimes, love for us

Well, this list could extend quite a ways. It’s time to take a load off and start my vacation.

The idea is that by naming these, we can begin to try to fill in the gaps and return to something less overwhelmingly difficult. Changes can be made now, under current circumstances, and more changes can be realized if we pursue greater social transformation.

(If you think of any other *unprecedented* misery-inducing things that we are all facing currently, feel free to leave them in the comments. I think it is an important thing to do on the road to reclaiming our humanity).

Sun Beast

All them elemental gases bunching up together, swirling amongst each other, something sparks, kaboom, what was dense and intractable scatters across infinity, trailing stars, planets, meteors, all manner of metallic fiber and rocks careening through space, screeching like eagles divebombing their prey, comes one bunch of gases bubbling, breaking, boiling and beaming, radiating, locking certain gigantic stones into its orbit, the sun, seven of the round spinning orbs got nothing going on, only their stark beauty, rings, red dust, pastel blue mass impossible to imagine suspended in the blackness, but there it is, like Christmas ornaments hanging in nothing space, come one round rock unlike the others, maybe an extra dried clove dropped into the gaseous soup and something happened to make water and something happened in the water, a cell, a life, life needing life, needing more life, as if the original bank of swirling elements before the explosion of the condensed elemental milk, maybe had will or consciousness or the ungerminated seed of the light spark that precedes conscious mind, now there is life in the oceans moving around, fish, beasts with rows of teeth like the serrated edge of a saw on a family farm hanging in the old barn moonlight, sun glowing, moon streaming, more movement, plates shift and mountains erupt from the sea like how you imagined it would be if you were an actor in a cop movie projecting your fist through a Hollywood paper wall, it is as if you dropped a penny in a shopping mall fountain and the most beautiful and glorious impossible paradise emerged, “a terra” they say in Portuguese, land, earth, Earth, we came from this place that was shot out of the heavens, this place that made the heavens, how can it be, walking, breathing, thinking, loving, shitting, fighting, yelling, singing, running, dancing, it was all too good to be true, but it was true, it is still true, we are still here, still running, still singing, still chanting into the roar of waterfalls that land in granite canyons carved out of wind and rain, an echo-sound you still can’t identify caroming off of the canyon walls, the cry of a night bird, the cry of a sun beast, it might be be, distant...

Dedicated to fellow travelers David Goldstein & Leo Gonçalves