Saturday, January 09, 2010

Brothers. Sisters. We Need Some Lovin' Here Today

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great song!

stylisticMF said...

Damn! Marvin Gaye was BEAUTIFUL. Look @ his skin glowing, straight white teeth & soft-looking hair....and all those beautiful black people in the audience. Amazing! The fork as a weapon against Black people was not quite as prominent as it is today.

stylisticMF said...

The video footage of the people in the streets reminds me of happier times, growing up in the midwest. Thanx for posting, DV.

Anonymous said...

Picket lines
and picket signs
Don't punish me
with brutality

- Marvin Gaye

[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. – H.R. Haldeman

How bleak the world must have been for those with political and economic power during the late sixties and early seventies. Order seemed to be unraveling: massive anti-war protests on the Mall; a war effort bogged down and hemorrhaging in the mud of Southeast Asia; economic stagnation and declining profit rates; and, in the cities, skyrocketing crime coupled with some of the most violent riots since the Civil War.

The crisis had two primary fault lines: race and the war. The civil rights movement had radicalized and transmogrified into more militant, nationalist, and explicitly anti-capitalists forms. The Panthers – Black Marxists and fully armed – stormed the California state capitol. In Newark, Watts, and Chicago, Black People shot back at cops and National Guardsmen; in Detroit, African American snipers were joined by transplanted urban “hillbillies.” In New Mexico, armed Chicanos fired on a county court house, trying to kill the sheriff. Chants of “Black Power,” and “Red Power” rose from all quarters. Gay men, routinely pilloried as “sissies,” were knocking out cops during the pitched battles following a police raid on the Stonewall bar in New York City. Meanwhile, women burnt bras and, more importantly, filed suits, protested against discrimination, and won the right to reproductive choice. Not even the US army could be trusted. In January 1968 the American embassy in Saigon came under direct attack. With that the Wall Street Journal called the war doomed; gung-ho officers in the field started getting “fragged” with terrifying regularity, as drug addiction, madness, and open insubordination became the norm among Gis. (In 1970, the military, which suppress news of rebellion in the ranks, gave a official “fragging count” of 363 for that year alone.)

Anonymous said...

Back in the belly of the beast, the Weather Underground was – as Che put it, “wagging the most important struggle of all” – bombing the Pentagon, Congress, IBM, police stations, the headquarters of the New York Department of Corrections, and scores of other targets. By the early seventies a version of this same breakdown had metastasized to the shop floor. Sabotage, drug abuse, and wildcat strikes began biting into Fordist production regimes; costs began to rise as quality and profits slumped. It was not just alienated and pampered white youth who were “dropping out.” America’s whole social fabric seemed to be coming apart. Every structure of authority and obedience was breaking down. Though garnished with youthful nudity and flowers, the crisis of the late sixties and early seventies was more serious than is often acknowledged; the country was in the midst of a haphazard but deadly social revolution.

-Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

Denmark Vesey said...

Cesar! Big Ups

Stylistic MF. That's one hell of an astute point.

Black people before the War of The Fork.

Deep.


That's good posting Gee-Chee.

Right on time. Welcome to the spot.

Big Man said...

Just watched a biography on Marvin Gaye on the American Masters series on PBS. Dude was a troubled man, but he clearly had a gift.