But I suspect underneath procrastination lies a deeper fear or three:

“Stop! Who would cross the bridge of death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see…”

Fear the First: I was recently diagnosed with autism, almost exactly five years after being diagnosed with ADHD (Summer 2021). The umbrella term “neurodivergent” fits the descriptor for all of the above. And of course diagnostic language is imprecise, unfinished, evolving, to some extent artificial. Though bottom line: it does help having more ways to accurately describe my own lived experience.

Whatever terms you want to use, I’ve always had trouble with beginnings and endings, with transitions from one task to another, one routine, one state of being, one phase of life to another.

[***Tangent*** My repetition of “one, one, one, one” brings to mind hearing Dua Lipa’s 2018 breakout hit “One Kiss” on the car radio the other day. Which is a song about beginnings, about anticipation, desire, uncertainty. I hadn’t heard it in a while and I guess the song stuck (it is after all an “ear-worm”). There’s a lovely coincidence between the song’s speaker imagining a future relationship with their possible (?) beloved, who they’re speaking to (or imagining themselves speaking to). A beloved who coincidentally mirrors the mass market listener encountering Dua Lipa for the first time on this track (as I did), thus beginning my “relationship” to her as an artist (and maybe yours as well, Dear Reader). Perhaps the song being written in a minor key speaks to the underlying ambivalence of such a conflation (love, sex, desire mutated into capitalist exchange, the transformation of art into mere commodity)…

Great track tho! 😊

one kiss is all it takes / falling in love with me

possibilities / i look like all you need

Which reminds me of Jericho Brown’s poem “Crossing” from his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Tradition. A poem whose ending (“I’m the one who leaps”) for me invokes Frantz Fanon’s conception of “the leap,” as articulated in Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs):

“The real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”

“Je dois me rappeler constamment que le vrai saut consiste à introduire l’invention dans l’existence. Dans le monde où je voyage, je suis en train de me créer sans fin.”

Crossing
by Jericho Brown

The water is one thing, and one thing for miles.
The water is one thing, making this bridge
Built over the water another. Walk it
Early, walk it back when the day goes dim, everyone
Rising just to find a way toward rest again.
We work, start on one side of the day
Like a planet’s only sun, our eyes straight
Until the flame sinks. The flame sinks. Thank God
I’m different. I’ve figured and counted. I’m not crossing
To cross back. I’m set
On something vast. It reaches
Long as the sea. I’m more than a conqueror, bigger
Than bravery. I don’t march. I’m the one who leaps.

***End Tangent***]

Back to the “frame story” (as it were) of this post:

I have the tendency to hyper-focus (that tangent into Dua Lipa, Jericho Brown, Frantz Fanon and a little Marxist art criticism being Exhibit A), to “miss the forest for the trees,” though my capacity for pattern recognition is also quite extensive, if I do say so myself.

Fear the Second: There’s an element of betrayal in what I want to say next in Studying Up. Of course, to betray something(s) or someone(s) that have harmed me, and many others, can also be understood as an act of loyalty. To all those harmed by such actions and ideas. Including myself.

In the words of the late great Noel Ignatiev (and title of his posthumously collected essays): “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

And yet, it is hard to feel like I am betraying an old teacher (I am thinking of a specific person/persons, though I guess the same could be said of “whiteness” as itself an “old teacher”), even if that teacher has harmed me.

As discussed in previous posts such as:

There is still gratitude for what I’ve learned from them, for better and for worse. There is the recognition of their humanness, fallibility, belief in their own good intentions, righteousness even.

And also the fear of betraying their trust.

Not to mention the implicit threats against doing so.

So I return, once again, in this (“hypertext biomythography”) to Audre Lorde, and her injunction: “Your silence will not protect you.”

That it is taking me so long to exorcise these demons speaks, I think, to the power that these experiences have had over me. Even as I’ve sought to escape them. I still am.

Fear the Third: There is the difficulty of saying it. The difficulty of breaking a silence. And the complexity of how to explain what is so difficult to explain. Something that, in part, cannot be explained, could only be experienced. Yet, all I can do is say what I know. And hope there are ears to hear and eyes to see.

So I will begin (next time 😂). While in the first year of Studying Up, I succeeded in posting regularly, and then intermittently (we will call all that the project’s Part I: April 2025-March 2026)… I do not have a schedule or timeline for Part II (July 2026-???). We’ll have to play it by ear. I’m simply writing this post as an intention, and a statement of fact.

I will leave you with a poem by another (much better) teacher of mine, Vievee Francis, who I met while living in Detroit. I can honestly say Vievee changed my life, and my relationship to poetry (as she has done for an entire generation of her students). Receiving this kind of mentorship from her and the (many) others who have taught me over the (many) years since I left home has done a great deal to heal the wounds left by earlier teachers who were not so kind.

As Vievee writes in this ever powerful, harrowing, and necessary poem:

“Out of memory the thread of truth.”

Say It, Say It Anyway You Can

He hit her in the back of the head. Truth—finds its own coarse measure. Not long out of diapers I wore purple hot pants and danced a funky chicken. There was the boogaloo, and my aunt’s red wig that went over her hair. I knew men, even then. I had uncles. And a father. We jumped high in the living room, our lives a quick-step. When I held her in my arms, did I do any good? She was hip, too cool, a Saturday night cigarette, a bone-handled pistol in the panty drawer. Say it louder—I was proud. I held my head up high with my Sally-legged aunt, I kicked my heels and my uncle laughed. He had a western name. This was Texas, a man’s world, but women raised men out of cotton, out of dust. Bred long-horns and bullshit. She could shoot, but she didn’t. She said, “Sing it baby.” Please, please—I got down on my knees and cradled her son’s head in my small arms. Out of memory the thread of truth. A red daisy chain. Blood running down a back. He hit her again. I was wearing my purple hot pants, ones that matched hers. Or I was in my pajamas holding my cousin’s head in my arms, covering his eyes, his mouth, with my flat chest, my fingers in his hair, red as his mother’s. Coarse. As in unrefined. She wore a wig that fell off her head. He screamed, “Fat bitch,” she screamed, “Don’t go,” and let her pony legs go to sticks, thin as a blue-bonnet stem. Texas flower, weed. When I held her in my arms it did no good. When my mother held her in her arms, she did not come back. I said, “Don’t go,” she said, “I’m black—” I sang, “Say it loud,” he said, “Black bitch.” It was a boogaloo, it had been danced before. My uncle laughed his laugh. It fell like a wig to the floor. He threw back his head, conked, slick as the blade of a razor. I’m saying it. Loud, the way truth comes out when it’s been held to your chest, like a little boy’s cries, a boy who will grow into his father’s shoes. Dance of generations. Cotton-eyed marshalls. Green-eyed brown men. She said, “You can’t trust men like that.” Turned me around, said, “Do your dance girl, sing that song.” She could shoot, but didn’t. Someone else did. I’m saying, in a bar, ten years and miles up the road he fell, like a wig hitting the floor. Juke joint. Gin-stomp. James Brown always spinning. Somebody always hitting the floor. He was big stuff in a slim suit. Cool as Saturday night he fell. Hair flawlessly coiled.

——————————

Vievee Francis “The first poet I loved was Robert Browning whom I read at fifteen years old. The second was Ai whose work I read in Ironwood three years later. The work of these poets, despite their being of different backgrounds and from different eras, resonated so much with me. That’s what I wanted, to write something that would touch a reader no matter when it was read or by whom. Like them, I write persona pieces, but lately find it necessary to mine my own life, and in this there is of course the conflation of anxiety and memory, shadow and truth.”

Story reproduced below, originally at: https://religiondispatches.org/2026/03/23/linking-war-iran-end-times-netanyahus-rational-actor-mask-has-fallen

Shortly after the first U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran, a report went viral alleging that a commanding officer had told U.S. troops that this was a war “to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon.” Although the report has been met with some skepticism, it falls within the U.S. military’s well-documented history of religious fanaticism. In Israel, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s long been viewed as a “staunchly secular” politician, raised eyebrows when he linked the War on Iran to the End Times.

Breaking with the dry, analytical security studies discourse he’s relied on for the past 40 years, Netanyahu spoke of a “War of Redemption” (Milḥemet HaTekuma). The Hebrew word Tekuma, תקומה, can also be translated as “Revival,” “Rebirth,” or “Resurrection,” words whose messianic connotations are hard to miss. An astute reader might ask: Didn’t the Israeli government already rename its genocidal war on Gaza the “War of Redemption” back in October 2025? Correct, though now, in a sweeping act of rhetorical “shock and awe,” the latest attacks on Iran and Lebanon are being retroactively folded into this “War of Redemption.”

As Netanyahu and the Zionist Right increasingly argue, it’s all the same war because it’s all “the same foe.” Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, and Iranians are flattened into a single, transhistorical, Jew-hating threat. This is the effect Netanyahu seeks to achieve when he compares Iran to the mythical (Persian) villain Haman, or links all of “Israel’s enemies” to the biblical adversary “Amalek.” Referencing the Prophet Amos (The lion has roared, who will not fear?), Netanyahu declared:

“In Operation Lion’s Roar, we roar: ‘Do not fear, Israel, for are you not a young lion?’ We will stand as one person with one heart, and with God’s help, we will ensure the eternity of Israel.”

For decades, the consensus among Western diplomats, secular Israelis, and American legacy media outlets (although notably not among Palestinians) has been that Netanyahu, while relentlessly cynical and reflexively corrupt, is ultimately a “rational actor”—an MIT and Harvard-educated strategist who wields religious zealotry as a tool for political coalition-building while still operating within the “sober realities” of modern statecraft. In this view, Netanyahu’s alliance with the Religious Right (embodied by his governing coalition with even more extreme figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich) is a marriage of convenience, not an expression of shared (religious) ideology.

But as the region becomes engulfed by a conflagration of increasingly apocalyptic proportions—a regional war with Iran was, until recently, considered to be political and strategic suicide—the narrative of ‘Bibi the Pragmatist’ has become an untenable alibi. Whether Netanyahu personally subscribes to his own millenarian rhetoric is a distinction without a difference. By adopting the discourse and shared goals of the Religious Right, his coalition is guiding the Israeli (and American) state into a logic where catastrophe isn’t a risk to be managed, but a requirement for redemption. Confused? Of course you are. However, as Ben Lorber documented a year ago, Messianic Zionism is no longer a fringe movement but a unified eschatological frame where a new generation of Orthodox Jewish and Christian Zionists have found a seamless theological mesh. Within this worldview, the catastrophic spiritual-political trajectory that emanates from the Palestinian Nakba is reframed as the necessary labor of a new Messianic Age,

The failure of the ‘rational actor’ model

The hope in Washington and Brussels is that, though his allies on the Religious Right may dream of demolishing the Dome of the Rock in order to erect a Third Temple, Netanyahu understands that at some point he’ll run into the red lines of market stability and international law. This assumption is failing in real time. Almost three years into the genocide of Gaza, Israel continues to expand its territorial claims over the West Bank (what the Jewish Right refers to as “Judea and Samaria”), Gaza, and Southern Lebanon.

Having initiated a joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, Netanyahu has not only become arguably one of the world’s most powerful heads of state, but one who is actively seeking to accelerate the end-game of “Judeo-Christian” Zionism. Viewed through this lens, Netanyahu’s actions cease to look like miscalculations or political overreach and start to form a coherent program, albeit a grotesque one. Here, the goal isn’t the preservation of a “rules based international order” (or the “Western Civilization,” that Netanyahu claims to champion), but rather its self-destruction. What comes after is presently unimaginable, though foreshadowed by the atrocities that continue to unfold in Gaza.

Accelerationism and the ‘necessity’ of chaos

In the worldview of the Religious Right—whether Jewish, Christian, or, increasingly, “Judeo-Christian”—history cannot result in a negotiated peace. Instead, the arc of the moral universe bends towards a final showdown between “Good and Evil.” In practice, this becomes an accelerationist worldview which posits that the End Times must be brought into being through human action.

When Netanyahu invokes the “eternity of Israel” in the context of a regional war that appears to be following a genocidal playbook, he’s dog-whistling to those who see End Times warfare as a cosmic necessity. Such a view doesn’t resemble “conservatism,” so much it does as “Traditionalism,” the esoteric spiritual philosophy, popular among the global New Right, that rejects modern rationalism in favor of primordial, and necessarily violent, “eternal” truths.

Political Traditionalists and Religious Zionists share a belief that the modern world is irrevocably corrupt, and its cleansing through ethnoreligious conflict is the only path to a restored, sacred order. In this light, war with Iran isn’t a strategic or human catastrophe to be avoided, but a catalyst for the Messianic Age. Operation Lion’s Roar, like the blast of a shofar (which Christian Nationalists blew during the January 6th insurrection), signals the end of an old world and the birth of a new one.

The self-fulfilling prophecy of ‘End Times Fascism’

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s “End Times Fascism” framework describes how right-wing political movements increasingly predicate themselves upon the collapse of liberal modernity. To this astute formulation I will only add that when a leader believes—or acts as if they believe—they’re enacting Divine Will, then any of the predictable “secular” consequences, such as economic instability, the threat of becoming a pariah state, or imploding the very concept of “human rights” will no longer constrain their actions.

Viewing Netanyahu as a cynical operator rather than a true believer keeps us waiting for a return to reason that will never arrive. It also offers a useful parallel to the long-standing debate among pundits over whether Trump “really believes” the extreme views he expresses or if he’s just pandering to his base. But the Trump regime has proven that this distinction is largely irrelevant: whatever Trump believes, he’s enacted policies that our supposedly rational institutions have been unable to control.

By framing the war against Iran in explicitly biblical and messianic terms, Netanyahu is rallying a political constituency that sees regional (and/or global) devastation as a holy mandate. This coalition doesn’t fear “political suicide” because it’s not playing a four-year electoral game. It’s playing for eternity.

Dropping the mask

To continue imagining Netanyahu as a sober check on his far-right allies is to carry water for the same religious fanaticism that he purportedly restrains. This narrative provides the alibi of mercenary “statecraft” to actions that predictably lead to ever-more destabilizing, even apocalyptic, circumstances; the consequence of what Tariq Ali has termed “The Extreme Centre.”

When Netanyahu tells us that he’s fighting for “the eternity of Israel” with “God’s help,” while steering Israel (and the U.S.) into forever wars that normalize the use of genocidal state violence, the catastrophic consequences are the same regardless of whether this is done to achieve “merely” political ends or as a matter of devout religious faith. We need to stop expecting Netanyahu, Trump, and the governing coalitions they lead to come to their senses. For those operating within an apocalyptic worldview, the “senselessness” of this conflict is precisely the point; they’re acting according to an entirely different set of rules. “The Lion’s Roar” isn’t merely a declaration of genocidal intent; it’s Netanyahu’s announcement to the world that the era of rational actors is over. The age of (self-fulfilling) prophecy has begun.

1. “They call you a Bodhisattva”: Thich Nhat Hanh’s friendship with Dr. King

Excerpted from “At Home in the World: Stories from a Monk’s Life”
Thich Nhat Hanh (2016) pp.72-73

2. “Journey in Satchidananda (Side A),” Alice Coltrane

Journey In Satchidananda 0:00
Shiva-Loka 6:41
Stopover Bombay 13:18
Something About John Coltrane 16:13
Isis And Osiris* 25:59

Alice Coltrane - Journey In Satchidananda (Impulse! AS 9203) (1971)
Pharoah Sanders (ss, perc), Alice Coltrane (harp, p), Vishnu Wood* (oud), Cecil McBee (b), Charlie Haden* (b), Rashied Ali (d), Tulsi (tamboura), Majid Shabazz (bells, tambourine)
Dix Hills, New York, November 8, 1970
*Village Gate, July 4, 1970

3. Building ‘beloved community’: Remembering the friendship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., left, appears at a Chicago news conference with Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh on May 31, 1966. AP Photo/Edward Kitch, File

And Now The Main Event!

“The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Original Source/Acknowledged Copyright Of: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/influence-mystery-religions-christianity

Main content start

Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr. (Crozer Theological Seminary)

Date: November 29, 1949 to February 15, 1950?

Location: Chester, Pa.?

Genre: Essay

Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Education

Details

King wrote this paper for the course Development of Christian Ideas, taught by Davis. The essay examines how Christianity developed as a distinct religion with a set of central tenets and how it was influenced by those pagan religions it assimilated. King repeats material from an earlier paper, “A Study of Mithraism,” but he extends the discussion here to the influence of other mystery religions.¹ Davis gave the essay an A, stating: “This is very good and I am glad to have your conclusion. It is not so much that Christianity was influenced by the Mystery Cults, or borrowed from them, but that in the long process of history this religion developed. It, Christianity, is the expression of the longing of people for light, truth, salvation, security.

“That is, with this study you have made, we see the philosophy both of Religion and History. Underneath all expression, whether words, creeds, cults, ceremonies is the spiritual order—the ever living search of men for higher life—a fuller life, more abundant, satisfying life.

“That is essential. Never stop with the external, which may seem like borrowing, but recognize there is the perennial struggle for truth, fuller life itself. So through experience, knowledge, as through other forms, the outer manifestations of religion change. The inner spiritual, continues ever.”

“The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity”

The Greco-Roman world in which the early church developed was one of diverse religions. The conditions of that era made it possible for these religions to sweep like a tidal wave over the ancient world. The people of that age were eager and zealous in their search for religious experience. The existence of this atmosphere was vitally important in the development and eventual triumph of Christianity.

These many religions, known as Mystery-Religions, were not alike in every respect: to draw this conclusion would lead to a gratuitous and erroneous supposition. They covered an enormous range, and manifested a great diversity in character and outlook, “from Orphism to Gnosticism, from the orgies of the Cabira to the fervours of the Hermetic contemplative.”\[Footnote:] Angus, The Mystery Religions and Christianity, p. vii.\² However it is to be noticed that these Mysteries possessed many fundamental likenesses; (1) All held that the initiate shared in symbolic (sacramental) fashion the experiences of the god. (2) All had secret rites for the initiated. (3) All offered mystical cleansing from sin. (4) All promised a happy future life for the faithful.\[Footnote:] Enslin, Christian Beginnings, pp. 187, 188.\

It is not at all surprising in view of the wide and growing influence of these religions that when the disciples in Antioch and elsewhere preached a crucified and risen Jesus they should be regarded as the heralds of another mystery religion, and that Jesus himself should be taken for the divine Lord of the cult through whose death and resurrection salvation was to be had.³ That there were striking similarities between the developing church and these religions cannot be denied. Even Christian apologist had to admit that fact.

Christianity triumphed over these mystery religions after long conflict. This triumph may be attributed in part to the fact that Christianity took from its opponents their own weapons, and used them: the better elements of the mystery religions were transferred to the new religion. “As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely,” writes Cumont, “the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weakness, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed.”\[Footnote:] Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, p. xxiv.\⁴ The victory of Christianity in the Roman empire is another example of that universal historical law, viz., that that culture which conquers is in turn conquered. This universal law is expecially true of religion. It is inevitable when a new religion comes to exist side by side with a group of religions, from which it is continually detaching members, introducing them into its own midst with the practices of their original religions impressed upon their minds, that this new religion should tend to assimilate with the assimilation of their members, some of the elements of these existing religions. “The more crusading a religion is, the more it absorbs.” Certainly Christianity has been a crusading religion from the beginning. It is because of this crusading spirit and its superb power of adaptability that Christianity ahs {has} been able to survive.

It is at this point that we are able to see why knowledge of the Mystery religions is important for any serious study of the history of Christianity. It is well-nigh impossible to grasp Christianity through and through without knowledge of these cults.⁵ It must be remembered, as implied above, that Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation, springing, forth full grown as Athene sprang from the head of Zeus, but it is a composite of slow and laborious growth. Therefore it is necessary to study the historical and social factors that contributed to the growth of Christianity. In speaking of the indispensability of knowledge of these cults as requisite for any serious study of Christianity, Dr. Angus says: “As an important background to early Christianity and as the chief medium of sacramentarianism to the West they cannot be neglected; for to fail to recognize the moral and spiritual values of Hellenistic-Oriental paganism is to misunderstand the early Christian centuries and to do injustice to the victory of Christianity. Moreover, much from the Mysteries has persisted in various modern phases of thought and practice.”\[Footnote:] Angus, The Mystery Religions and Christianity, p. viii.\

This is not to say that the early Christians sat down and copied these views verbatim. But after being in contact with these surrounding religions and hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for some of these views to become a part of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write they were expressing consciously that which had dwelled in their subconscious minds. It is also significant to know that Roman tolerance had favoured this great syncretism of religious ideas. Borrowing was not only natural but inevitable.⁶

The present study represents an attempt to provide a survey of the influence of the mystery religions on Christianity. In order to give a comprehensive picture of this subject, I will discuss Four {Five} of the most popular of these religions separately, rather than to view them en masse as a single great religious system. The latter method is apt to neglect the distinctive contribution of each cult to the religious life of the age and, at the same time, to attribute to a given cult phases of some other system. However, in the conclusion I will attempt to give those fundamental aspects, characteristic of all the cults, that greatly influenced Christianity.

The Influence Of The Cult Of Cybele and Attis

The first Oriental religion to invade the west was the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods. The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the powers of nature.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114.\⁷ She was the “Great Mother” not only “of all the gods,” but of all men” as well.⁸ “The winds, the sea, the earth, and the snowy seat of Olympus are hers, and when from her mountains she ascends into the great heavens, the son of Cronus himself gives way before her, and in like manner do also the other immortal blest honor the dread goddess.”\[Footnote:] Quoted in Willoughby’s, Pagan Regeneration, p. 115.⁹\

At an early date there was associated with Cybele, the Great Mother, a hero-divinity called Attic who personified the life of the vegetable world particularly. Around these two divinities there grew up a “confused tangle of myths” in explanation of their cult rites. Various writers gave different Versions of the Cybele-Attis myth. However these specific differences need not concern us, for the most significant aspects are common in all the various versions.¹⁰ We are concerned at this point with showing how this religion influenced the thought of early Christians.

Attis was the Good Shepard, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, who gave birth to him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the virgin Mary.¹¹ According to the myth, Attis died, either slain by another or by his own hand. At the death of Attis, Cybele mourned vehemently until he arose to life again in the springtime. The central theme of the myth was the triumph of Attis over death, and the participant in the rites of the cult undoubtedly believed that his attachment to the victorious deity would insure a similar triumph in his life.

It is evident that in Rome there was a festival celebrating the death and resurrection of Attis. This celebration was held annually from March 22nd to 25th.\[Footnote:] Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 166.\ The influence of this religion on Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy, and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adapted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord’s passion.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 199\¹²

Again we may notice that at this same Attis festival on March 22nd, an effigy of the god was fastened to the trunk of a pine tree, Attis thus being “slain and hanged on a tree.” This effigy was later buried in a tomb. On March 24th, known as the Day of Blood, the High Priest, impersonating Attic, drew blood from him arm and offered it up in place of the blood of a human sacrifice, thus, as it were, sacrificing himself. It is this fact that immediately brings to mind the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “But Christ being come an High Priest … neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood … obtained eternal redemption for us.”\[Footnote:] Heb. 9:11, 12.\ Now to get back to the festival. That night the priests went back to the tomb and found it empty, the god having risen on the third day from the dead; and on the 25th the resurrection was celebrated with great rejoicing. During this great celebration a sacramental meal of some kind was taken, and initiates were baptised with blood, whereby their sins were washed away and they were said to be “born again.”\[Footnote:] Weigall, The Paganism In Our Christianity, pp. 116, 117.\¹³

There can hardly be any doubt of the fact that these ceremonies and beliefs strongly coloured the interpretation placed by the first Christians upon the life and death of the historic Jesus.¹⁴ Moreover, “the merging of the worship of Attis into that of Jesus was effected without interruption, for these pagan ceremonies were enacted in a sanctuary on the Vatican Hill, which was afterwards taken over by the Christians, and the mother church of St. Peter now stands upon the very spot.”\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 117.\

The Influence of Adonis

Another popular religion which influenced the thought of early Christians was the worship of Adonis. As is commonly known Antioch was one of the earliest seats of Christianity. It was in this city that there was celebrated each year the death and resurrection of the god Adonis. This faith had always exerted its influence on Jewish thought, so much so that the prophet Ezekiel\[Footnote:] Ezekiel 8:14.\ found it necessary to scold the women of Jerusalem for weeping for the dead Tammuz (Adonis) at the very gate of the temple. When we come to Christian thought the influence seems even greater, for even the place at Bethleham selected by the early Christians as the scene of the birth of Jesus was none other than an early shrine of this pagan god—a fact that led many to confuse Adonis with Jesus Christ.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 110\¹⁵

It was believed that this god suffered a cruel death, after which he descended into hell, rose again, and then ascended into Heaven. Each following {year} there was a great festival in commemoration of his resurrection, and the very words, “The Lord is risen,” were probable used. The festival ended with the celebration of his ascention in the sight of his worshippers.¹⁶ Needless to say that this story of the death and resurrection of Adonis is quite similar to the Christian story of the death and resurrection of Christ. This coincidence had led many critics to suppose that the story of the burial and resurrection of Jesus is simply a myth borrowed from this pagan religion.¹⁷ Whether these critics are right in their interpretation or not still remains a moot question.

However when we come to the idea of Jesus’ decent into hell it seems that we have a direct borrow from the Adonis religion, and in fact from other religions also. Both the Apostles Creed and the Athanasian {Creed} say that between the Friday night and Sunday morning Jesus was in Hades. Now this idea has no scriptural foundation except in those difficult passages in the First Epistle of Peter\[Footnote:] I Peter 3:19–4:6.\ which many scholars have designated as the most ambiguous passages of the New Testament. In fact the idea did not appear in the church as a tenet of Christianity until late in the Fourth Century.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 113.\¹⁸ Such facts led almost inevitably to the view that this idea had a pagan origin, since it appears not only in the legend of Adonis, but also in those of Herakles, Dionyses, Orpheus, Osiris, Hermes, Balder, and other deities.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 114.\

The Influence of Osiris and Isis

The Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris exerted considerable influence upon early Christianity. These two great Egyptian deities, whose worship passed into Europe, were revered not only in Rome but in many other centers where Christian communities were growing up. Osiris and Isis, so the legend runs, were at one and the same time, brother and sister, husband and wife; but Osiris was murdered, his coffined body being thrown into the Nile, and shortly afterwards the widowed and exiled Isis gave birth to a son, Horus. Meanwhile the coffin was washed up on the Syrian coast, and became miraculously lodged in the trunk of a tree. This tree afterwards chanced to be cut down and made into a pillar in the palace at Byblos, and there Isis at length found it. After recovering Osiris’ dismembered body, Isis restored him to life and installed him as King in the nether world; meanwhile Horus, having grown to manhood, reigned on earth, later becoming the third person of this great Egyptian trinity.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 119.\¹⁹

In the records of both Herodotus and Plutarch we find that there was a festival held each year in Egypt celebrating the resurrection of Osiris. While Herodotus fails to give a date for this festival, Plutarch says that it lasted four days, giving the date as the seventeenth day of the Egyptian month Hathor, which, according to the Alexandrian claendar used by him, corresponded to November 13th.\[Footnote:] Frazer, op. cit., p. 257.\ Other Egyptian records speak of another feast in honour of all the dead, when such lamps were lit, which was held about November 8th.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 258.\²⁰

It is interesting to note that the Christian feast of all Souls, in honor of the dead, likewise falls at the beginning of November; and in many countries lamps and candles are burned all night on that occassion. There seems little doubt that this custom was identical with the Egyptian festival. The festival of all Saints, which is held one day before that of all Souls is also probably identical with it in origin.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 121.\ This still stands as a festival in the Christian calendar; and thus Christians unconsciously perpetuate the worship of Osiris in modern times.²¹

However this is not the only point at which the Religion of Osiris and Isis exerted influence on Christianity. There can hardly be any doubt that the myths of Isis had a direct bearing on the elevation of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, to the lofty position that she holds in Roman Catholic theology. As is commonly known Isis had two capacities which her worshippers warmly commended her for. Firstly, she was pictured as the lady of sorrows, weeping for the dead Osiris, and secondly she was commended as the divine mother, nursing her infant son, Horus. In the former capacity she was identified with the great mother-goddess, Demeter, whose mourning for Persephone was the main feature in the Eleusinian mysteries. In the latter capacity Isis was represented in tens of thousands of statuettes and paintings, holding the divine child in her arms. Now when Christianity triumphed we find that these same paintings and figures became those of the Madonna and child with little or no difference.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 123\ In fact archaeologists are often left in confusion in attempting to distinguish the one from the other.²²

It is also interesting to note that in the second century a story began to spread stating that Mary had been miraculously carried to Heaven by Jesus and His angels.\[Footnote:] The spreading of this story has been attributed to Melito, Bishop of Sardis.\ In the sixth century a festival came to be celebrated around this event known as the festival of Assumption, and it is now one of the greatest feasts of Roman Catholicism. It is celebrated annually on August 13th. But it was this very date that the festival of Dianna or Artemis was celebrated, with whom Isis was identified. Here we see how Mary gradually came to take the place of the goddess.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 125.\²³

The Influence Of The Greater Mysteries At Eleusis

In the first century of the Christian era the Eleusinian mystery cult was more favorable known than any of the cults of Greece.²⁴ Its fame and popularity was largely due to the connexion of Eleusis with Athens. The origin of this cult is obscure and uncertain. Some writers traced its origin to Egypt while others upheld Eleusis in Greece as the place of its birth.

In order to understand the type of religious experience represented by this important cult, we must turn to the myth of the rape of Demeter’s daughter by Pluto. It is stated with sufficient elaboration in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In this myth, Persephone is depicted playing in the meadows of Mysia in Asia with the daughters of Oceanus and Tithys. While playing she was stolen by Pluto and carried off to the underworld to be his bride. The mother, frenzied with grief, rushed about the earth for nine days in search for her lost daughter,²⁵ As a result of her wandering, she came to Eleusis where she was seen, although not recognized, by the four daughters of Kekeas sitting near a public well called the Fountain of Maidenhood. After telling a fictitious tale of her escape from pirates, she won the sympathy of the girls who took her home and at her own request was given a job to nurse their infant brother, Demophon. After making herself known, she commanded the people of Eleusis to build her a temple. In connection with the temple, she established certain ceremonies and rites for her worship.

During her short stay at the temple of Eleusis, the whole earth grew barren. Men began to die for the lack of food while the sacrifices to the gods decreased in number because the animals were dying out. The other gods pleaded with her to relent but she refused to do so until Persephone was restored to her. Pluto, (also called Hades) therefore, at the request of Zeus released her but not before he had caused her to eat a pomegranate seed which magically required her return after a period of time. Demeter, in her joy at the restoration of her lost daughter, allowed the crops to grow once more and institute in honor of the event the Eleusinian mysteries which gave to mortals the assurance of a happy future life.²⁶

The significance of this story is immediately clear. It was a nature myth portraying a vivid and realistic picture of the action of life in the vegetable world in regards to the changing seasons. Every year nature passes through a cycle of apparent death and resurrection. In winter, all plants die, this represents the period of Demeter’s grief over her daughter. Spring, the time when all plants come back to life, indicates the return of plenty when the goddess maintains all life until autumn when her daughter returns to Hades and the earth becomes once more desolated.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, op. cit., p. 42.\²⁷

The myth is also an example of poignant human experience, reflecting the joys, sorrows, and hopes of mankind in the face of death. The mysteries of human life and death are vividly enacted by Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. Hades, the god of death, stole the beloved daughter, Persephone, from Demeter, the life giver, who refused to admit defeat until she secured her daughter’s resurrection. In this legend, human beings, who are always loved and lost, are depicted as never or seldom loosing hope for reunion with their God. These fundamental human experiences and the life of nature are the main substances of the Eleusinian Mysteries.²⁸ To the searchers of salvation, the Eleusinian cult offered not only the promise of a happy future, but also a definite assurance of it.\[Footnote:] Nilsson, Greek Popular Religion, p. 54.\

Now when we observe the modern Greek Easter festival it seems certain that it preserves the spirit if not the form of the old Eleusinian worship. In the spring, those who had shared Demeter’s grief for the loss of her daugher welcomed the return of Persephone with all the joy that the returning life of vegetation might kindle. And today similar experiences are represented by Greek Christians. After mourning over the dead Christ, represented most conspicuously by a wax image carried through the streets, there comes an announcement by the priest, on the midnight before Easter Sunday, that Christ is risen. At this moment the light from the candle of the priest is passed on to light the candles of his companions; guns and firecrackers are discharged as they prepare to break the Lenten fast.\[Footnote:] Fairbanks, Greek Religion, p. 288.\²⁹ As in the Eleusinian mysteries the modern Greek Christian finds this a moment of supreme joy. So we might say that Eleusinianism was not blotted out by Christianity. On the contrary many of its forms and some of its old content has been perpetuated in Christianity.³⁰

The Influence of Mithraism

Mithraism is perhaps the greatest example of paganism’s last effort to reconcile itself to the great spiritual movement which was gaining such sturdy influence with its purer conception of God.\[Footnote:] Dill, Roman Society From Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 585.\ Ernest Renan, the French philosopher and Orientalist, expressed the opinion that Mithraism would have been the religion of the modern world if anything had occured to halt or destroy the growth of Christianity in the early centuries of its existence. All this goes to show how important Mithraism was in ancient times. It was suppressed by the Christians sometime in the latter part of the fourth century a.d.; but its collapse seems to have been due to the fact that by that time many of its doctrines and practices had been adopted by the church, so that it was practically absorbed by its rival.³¹

Originally Mithra was one of the lesser gods of the ancient Persian pantheon, but at the time of Christ he had come to be co-equal with Ahura Mazda, the Supreme Being.³² He possessed many attributes, the most important being his office of defender of truth and all good things. In the Avesta,\[Footnote:] This is the sacred book of the religion of Iran.\ Mithra is represented as the genius of celestial light. He emerges from the rocky summits of eastern mountains at dawn, and goes through heaven with a team of four white horses; when the night falls he still illumines the surface of the earth, “ever walking, ever watchful.” He is not sun or moon or any star, but a spirit of light, ever wakeful, watching with a hundred eyes. He hears all and sees all: none can deceive him.\[Footnote:] Cumont, Mysteries of Mithra, pp. 2, 3.\³³ Tarsus, the home of Saint Paul, was one of the great centres of his worship; and there is a decided tinge of Mithraism in the Epistles and Gospels. Such designations of our Lord as the Dayspring from on High, The Light, the Sun of Righteousness, and similar expressions seem to come directly from Mithraic influence.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. cit., p. 129.\³⁴

Again tradition has it that Mithra was born from a rock, “the god out of the rock.” It must also be noticed that his worship was always conducted in a cave. Now it seems that the general belief of the early church that Jesus was born in a cave grows directly out of Mithraic ideas. The words of St. Paul, “They drank of that spiritual rock … and that rock was Christ” also seem to be {a} direct borrow from the Mithraic scriptures.³⁵

The Hebrew Sabbath having been abolished by Christians, the Church made a sacred day of Sunday, partly because it was the day of resurrection. But when we observe a little further we find that as a solar festival, Sunday was the sacred day of Mithra; it is also interesting to notice that since Mithra was addressed as Lord, Sunday must have been “the Lord’s Day” long before Christian use.\[Footnote:] Ibid., p. 137.\ It is also to be noticed that our Christmas, December 25th, was the birthday of Mithra, and was only taken over in the Fourth Century as the date, actually unknown, of the birth of Jesus.³⁶

To make the picture a little more clear, we may list a few of the similarities between these two religions: (1) Both regard Sunday as a holy day. (2) December 25 came to be considered as the anniversary of the birth of Mithra and Christ also. (3) Baptism and a communion meal were important parts of the ritual of both groups. (4) The rebirth of converts was a fundamental idea in the two cults. (5) The struggle with evil and the eventual triumph of good were essential ideas in both religions.³⁷ (6) In summary we may say that the belief in immortality, a mediator between god and man, the observance of certain sacramental rites, the rebirth of converts, and (in most cases) the support of high ethical ideas were common to Mithraism as well as Christianity. In fact, the comparison became so evident that many believed the Christian movement itself became a mystery cult. “Jesus was the divine Lord. He too had found the road to heaven by his suffering and resurrection. He too had God for his father. He had left behind the secret whereby men could achieve the goal with him.”\[Footnote:] Enslin, op. cit., p. 190.\

Although the above paragraph makes it obvious that there are many similarities between these two religions, we must guard against the fallacy of seeing all similarity as direct borrowing. For an instance, the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist have been mentioned as rites, which were preactice {practiced} by both Christians and pagans. It is improbable, however, that either of these were introduced into Christian practices by association with the mystery cults. The baptismal ceremony in both cases (Christian and Pagan) was supposed to have the effect of identifying the initiate with his savior. But although baptism did not originate with the Christians, still it was not copied from the pagans. It seems instead to have been carried over from Jewish background and modified by the new ideas and beliefs of the Christians. The eucharist, likewise through similar in some respects to the communion meal of Mithraism, was not a rite borrowed from it. There are several explanations regarding the beginning of the observance of the Lord’s Supper. Some held that the sacrament was instituted by Jesus himself. Others saw it as an out-growth from Jewish precedents. Still others felt that, after the death of Jesus, the disciples saw in their common meal an opportunity to hold a kind of memorial service for him.

On the whole, early Christians were not greatly concerned about the likenesses between the Mithraic cult and their own. They felt at first that these competitors were not worthy of consideration, and few references to them are found in Christian literature. When Mithraism became widespread and powerful, it attracted so much attention that certain Christian apologists felt the need to present an explanation for the similarities in their respective characteristics. The only one they could offer was quite naive, but it was in keeping with the trends of thought in that age. They maintained that it was the work of the devil who helped to confuse men by creating a pagan imitation of the true religion.³⁸

Conclusion

There can hardly be any gainsaying of the fact that Christianity was greatly influenced by the Mystery religions, both from a ritual and a doctrinal angle. This does not mean that there was a deliberate copying on the part of Christianity. On the contrary it was generally a natural and unconscious process rather than a deliberate plan of action. Christianity was subject to the same influences from the environment as were the other cults, and it sometimes produced the same reaction. The people were conditioned by the contact with the older religions and the background and general trend of the time.³⁹ Dr. Shirley Jackson Case has written some words that are quite apt at this point. He says: “Following the lead of the apostle Paul, the Christian missionaries on gentile soil finally made of Christianity a more appealing religion than any of the other mystery cults. This was accomplished, not by any slavish process of imitation, but by {a} serious attempt to meet better the specific religious needs that the mysteries had awakened and nourished, and by phrasing religious assurances more convincingly in similar terminology.”\[Footnote:] Case, “The Mystery Religions,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, Edited by Vergilius Ferm, pp. 511–513\

The greatest influence of the mystery religions on Christianity lies in a different direction from that of doctrine and ritual. It lies in the fact that the mystery religions paved the way for the presentation of Christianity to the world of that time. They prepared the people mentally and emotionally to understand the type of religion which Christianity represented. They were themselves, in verying degrees, imperfect examples of the Galilean cult which was to replace them. They encouraged the movement away from the state religions and the philosophical systems and toward the desire for personal salvation and promise of immortality. Christianity was truly indebted to the mystery religions for this contribution, for they had done this part of the groundwork and thus opened the way for Christian missionary work. Many views, while passing out of paganism into Christianity were given a more profound and spiritual meaning by Christians, yet we must be indebted to the source. To discuss Christianity without mentioning other religions would be like discussing the greatness of the Atlantic Ocean without the slightest mention of the many tributaries that keep it flowing.⁴⁰

Christianity, however, [strikeout illegible] survived because it appeared to be the result of a trend in the social order or in the historical cycle of the human race. Forces have been known to delay trends but very few have stopped them. The staggering question that now arises is, what will be the next stage of man’s religious progress? Is Christianity the crowning achievement in the development of religious thought or will there be another religion more advanced?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Angus, S., The Mystery Religions and Christianity, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York: 1925),

2. Cumont, Franz, The Mysteries of Mithra, (The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago: 1910).

3. Cumont, Franz, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, (The Open House Publishing Co., Chicago: 1911).

4. Dill, Samuel, Roman Society From Nero To Marcus Aurelius, (Macmillan and Co., New York: 1905), pp. 585–626.

5. Enslin Morton S., Christian Beginnings, (Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York: 1938), pp. 186–200.

6. Frazer, J. E., Adonis, Attis, Osiris, (London, 1922), Vol. I.

7. Fairbanks, Arthur, Greek Religion, (American Book Co, New York: 1910).

8. Halliday, W. R., The Pagan Background of Early Christianity, (The University Press of Liverpool, London: N.D.), pp. 281–311.

9. Hyde, Walter, W, Paganism To Christianity in the Roman Empire, (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia: 1946).

10. Moore, George F., History of Religions, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York: 1913), Vol. I, pp. 375–405.

11. Nilsson, Martin P., Greek Popular Religion, (Columbia University Press, New York: 1940), pp. 42–64.

12. Weigall Arthur, The Paganism in Our Christianity, (Hutchinson and Co. London: N.D.).

13. Willoughby, Harold R., Pagan Regeneration, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1929).

^1. See “A Study of Mithraism,” 13 September–23 November 1949, pp. 211–225 in this volume.

^2. S. Angus, The Mystery-Religions and Christianity (London: John Murray, 1925), p. vii: “These Mysteries covered an enormous range, and manifested a great diversity in character and outlook, from Orphism to Gnosticism, from the orgies of the Cabiri to the fervours of the Hermetic contemplative.”

^3. The preceding three paragraphs are similar to a passage in King’s earlier paper, “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 211 in this volume.

^4. Grant Showerman, introduction to Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (Chicago: Open House Publishing Company, 1911), pp. xi–xii: “Christianity triumphed after long conflict … It took from its opponents their own weapons, and used them; the better elements of paganism were transferred to the new religion. ‘As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely,’ writes M. Cumont, ‘the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed.’”

^5. The preceding two sentences are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 211 in this volume.

^6. The preceding paragraph is similar to passages in two of King’s earlier papers: “Light on the Old Testament from the Ancient Near East,” 14 September–24 November 1948, p. 163 in this volume; “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 212 in this volume.

^7. Harold R. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), p. 114: “Of these Oriental mystery religions the first to invade the west was the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods,… The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the powers of nature.”

^8. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114: “She was the ‘Great Mother’ not only ‘of all the gods,’ but ‘of all men’ as well.”

^9. Willoughby quoted from Apollonius Argonautica 1.1098 ff. (Pagan Regeneration, p. 115).

^10. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, pp. 116–117: “With [the Great Mother] was associated a hero-divinity called Attis who personified the life of the vegetable world particularly.… Around these two divinities, the Great Mother and the god of vegetation, there grew up a confused tangle of myths in explanation of their cult rites. Various writers, pagan and Christian, gave different versions of the Cybele-Attis myth.… The specific variations in all these diverse statements do not concern us, for certain significant elements were common to all the various versions.”

^11. Arthur E. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity (n.p.: Putnam, 1928), p. 121: “Attis was the Good Shepherd, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, or, alternatively, of the Virgin Nana, who conceived him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the Virgin Mary.”

^12. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 121–122: “In Rome the festival of his death and resurrection was annually held from March 22nd to 25th; and the connection of this religion with Christianity is shown by the fact that in Phrygia, Gaul, Italy, and other countries where Attis-worship was powerful, the Christians adopted the actual date, March 25th, as the anniversary of our Lord’s passion.”

^13. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 122–123: “At this Attis festival a pine-tree was felled on March 22nd, and to its trunk an effigy of the god was fastened, Attis thus being ‘slain and hanged on a tree,’ in the Biblical phrase. This effigy was later buried in a tomb. March 24th was the Day of Blood, whereon the High Priest, who himself impersonated Attis, drew blood from his arm and offered it up in place of the blood of a human sacrifice, thus, as it were, sacrificing himself, a fact which recalls to mind the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘Christ being come an High Priest … neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood … obtained eternal redemption for us.’ That night the priests went to the tomb and found it illuminated from within, and it was then discovered to be empty, the god having risen on the third day from the dead; and on the 25th the resurrection was celebrated with great rejoicings, a sacramental meal of some kind being taken, and initiates being baptised with blood, whereby their sins were washed away and they were said to be ‘born again.’”

^14. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, p. 123: “There can be no doubt that these ceremonies and beliefs deeply coloured the interpretation placed by the first Christians upon the historic facts of the Crucifixion, burial, and coming again to life of Jesus.”

^15. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 115–116: “Now one of the earliest seats of Christianity was Antioch; but in that city there was celebrated each year the death and resurrection of the god Tammuz or Adonis,… This faith had always exerted its influence on Jewish thought, and, indeed, the prophet Ezekiel had found it necessary to scold the women of Jerusalem for weeping for the dead Tammuz at the very gate of the Temple; while, in the end, the place at Bethlehem selected by the early Christians as the scene of the birth of Jesus (for want to [sic] any knowledge as to where the event had really occurred) was none other than an early shrine of this pagan god, as St. Jerome was horrified to discover—a fact which shows that Tammuz or Adonis ultimately became confused in men’s minds with Jesus Christ.”

^16. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, p. 116: “This god was believed to have suffered a cruel death, to have descended into Hell or Hades, to have risen again, and to have ascended into Heaven; and at his festival, as held in various lands, his death was bewailed, an effigy of his dead body was prepared for burial by being washed with water and anointed, and, on the next day, his resurrection was commemorated with great rejoicing, the very words ‘The Lord is risen’ probably being used. The celebration of his ascension in the sight of his worshippers was the final act of the festival.”

^17. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, p. 117: “This coincidence has, of course, led many critics to suppose that the story of the burial and resurrection of Jesus is simply a myth borrowed from this pagan religion.”

^18. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 118–119: “But there is one feature of the Gospel story which seems really to have been borrowed from the Adonis religion, and, in fact, from other pagan religions also, namely, the descent into Hell. The Apostles Creed and Athanasian Creed say that between the Friday night and the Sunday morning Jesus was in Hell or Hades;… It has no scriptural foundation except in the ambiguous words of the First Epistle of Peter; it did not appear in the Church as a tenet of Christianity until late in the Fourth Century.”

^19. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 124–125: “The popular and widespread religion of Osiris and Isis exercised considerable influence upon early Christianity, for these two great Egyptian deities, whose worship had passed into Europe, were revered in Rome and in several other centres where Christian communities were growing up. Osiris and Isis, so runs the legend, were brother and sister and also husband and wife; but Osiris was murdered, his coffined body being thrown into the Nile, and shortly afterwards the widowed and exiled Isis gave birth to a son, Horus. The coffin, meanwhile, was washed up on the Syrian coast, and became miraculously lodged in the trunk of a tree,… This tree afterwards chanced to be cut down and made into a pillar in the palace at Byblos, and there Isis at length found it.… Afterwards, however, he returned to the other world to reign for ever as King of the Dead; and meanwhile Horus, having grown to manhood, reigned on Earth, later becoming the third person of this great Egyptian trinity.”

^20. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 125–126: “Herodotus states that the festival of the death and resurrection of Osiris was held in Egypt each year, though he does not give the date;… Plutarch also records the annual Osirian festival, and says that it lasted four days, giving the date as the seventeenth day of the Egyptian month Hathor, which, according to the Alexandrian calendar used by him, corresponded to November 13th. Now we know from old Egyptian records that a feast in honour of all the dead, when such lamps were lit, was held … about November 8th.”

^21. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 126–127: “But the Christian feast of All Souls, in honour of the dead, likewise falls at the beginning of November; and in many countries lamps and candles are burnt all night on that occasion.… there seems little doubt that this custom was identical with the Egyptian festival.… the festival of All Saints, which is held one day before that of All Souls and which was first recognised by the Church in a.d. 835, is undoubtedly identical with it in origin. This still stands as a festival in the ecclesiastical calendar; and thus Christians unconsciously perpetuate the worship of Osiris and the commemoration of all his subjects in the Kingdom of the Dead.”

^22. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 129–130: “There were two aspects of Isis which commended themselves particularly to her worshippers: firstly, that of the lady of sorrows, weeping for the dead Osiris, and, secondly, that of the divine mother, nursing her infant son, Horus. In the former capacity she was identified with the great mother-goddess, Demeter, whose mourning for Persephone was the main feature in the Eleusinian mysteries;… In her aspect as the mother of Horus, Isis was represented in tens of thousands of statuettes and paintings, holding the divine child in her arms; and when Christianity triumphed these paintings and figures became those of the Madonna and Child without any break in continuity: no archaeologist, in fact, can now tell whether some of these objects represent the one or the other.”

^23. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 131–132: “At about this time a story, attributed to Melito, Bishop of Sardis in the Second Century, but probably of much later origin, began to spread that Mary had been miraculously carried to Heaven by Jesus and His angels; and in the Sixth Century the festival of the Assumption, which celebrates this event, was acknowledged by the Church, and is now one of the great feasts of Roman Catholicism,… It is celebrated on August 13th; but that was the date of the great festival of Diana or Artemis, with whom Isis was identified, and one can see, thus, how Mary had gradually taken the place of the goddess.”

^24. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 36: “Among the cults of Greece none was more favorably known in the first century of the Christian era than the Eleusinian mysteries.”

^25. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 41: “In order to understand the type of religious experience represented by this important cult, it is necessary clearly to keep in mind the main points of the Eleusinian myth which was developed to explain and justify the cult rites. These are stated with sufficient elaboration in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter,… According to the story, Persephone,… was stolen by Pluto and carried off to the underworld to be his bride.… The mother, frenzied with grief, rushed about the earth for nine days.”

^26. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 42: “Demeter, in her joy at the restoration of her lost daughter, allowed the crops to grow once more and instituted in honor of the event the Eleusinian mysteries which gave to mortals the assurance of a happy future life.”

^27. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 42: “The experiential basis for this story is quite clear. It was a nature myth, a vivid depiction of the action of life in the vegetable world with the changing of the seasons. Each year nature passed through the cycle of apparent death and resurrection. In winter vegetable life was dead while Demeter, the giver of life, grieved for the loss of her daughter. But with the coming of spring the life of nature revived again, for the sorrowing mother had received her daughter back with rejoicing. Through the summer the mother abundantly maintained the life of nature until autumn, when again her daughter returned to the underworld and earth became desolate once more.”

^28. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, pp. 42–43: “It was also a reflection of poignant human experiences, mirroring the joys, sorrows, and hopes of mankind in face of inevitable death. The three actors of the Eleusinian tragedy,… enacted the mystery of human life and death. The god of death himself stole the beloved daughter away from the life-giver; but the divine mother would not give up her loved one, and in the end she accomplished her daughter’s resurrection. Here was human experience made heroic and divine; for man has ever loved and lost, but rarely has he ceased to hope for reunion with the loved one. The Eleusinian myth told of these fundamental human experiences as well as of the life of nature.”

^29. Arthur Fairbanks, A Handbook of Greek Religion (New York: American Book Company, 1910), p. 288: “Certainly the Greek Easter festival seems to preserve the spirit if not the forms of the old Eleusinian worship. In the spring, those who had shared Demeter’s grief for the loss of her daughter welcomed the return of Persephone with all the joy that the returning life of vegetation might kindle. And today the Greeks mourn over the dead Christ, represented most realistically by a wax image borne through the streets on a bier; then at midnight before Easter Sunday the Metropolitan at Athens, the priest in smaller towns, comes out of the church announcing that Christ is risen; the light from his candle is passed to the candles of his companions and on to candles throughout the crowd, guns and firecrackers are discharged, and as they prepare to break their Lenten fast the multitude drop all restraint in the expression of wild joy.”

^30. Fairbanks, Greek Religion, p. 293: “This religion was not blotted out by Christianity. On the contrary, whatever real life it had was perpetuated in Christianity, since the conquering religion had adopted many of its forms and some of the old content in these forms.”

^31. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, p. 135: “It was suppressed by the Christians in a.d. 376 and 377; but its collapse seems to have been due rather to the fact that by that time many of its doctrines and ceremonies had been adopted by the Church, so that it was practically absorbed by its rival.”

^32. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 135–136: “Originally Mithra was one of the lesser gods of the ancient Persian pantheon, but … already in the time of Christ he had risen to be co-equal with, though created by, Ormuzd (Ahura-Mazda), the Supreme Being.”

^33. The previous five sentences are similar to a passage in King’s earlier paper, “A Study of Mithraism,” pp. 213–214 in this volume. Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra (Chicago: Open Court, 1910), pp. 2–3: “In the Avesta, Mithra is the genius of the celestial light. He appears before sunrise on the rocky summits of the mountains; during the day he traverses the wide firmament in his chariot drawn by four white horses, and when night falls he still illumines with flickering glow the surface of the earth, ‘ever waking, ever watchful.’ He is neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, but with ‘his hundred ears and his hundred eyes’ watches constantly the world. Mithra hears all, sees all, knows all: none can deceive him.”

^34. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. 136–137: “Tarsus, the home of St. Paul, was one of the great centres of his worship, being the chief city of the Cilicians; and, as will presently appear, there is a decided tinge of Mithraism in the Epistles and Gospels. Thus the designations of our Lord as the Dayspring from on High, the Light, the Sun of Righteousness, and similar expressions, are borrowed from or related to Mithraic phraseology.”

^35. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, p. 137: “Mithra was born from a rock, as shown in Mithraic sculptures, being sometimes termed ‘the god out of the rock,’ and his worship was always conducted in a cave; and the general belief in the early Church that Jesus was born in a cave is a direct instance of the taking over of Mithraic ideas. The words of St. Paul, ‘They drank of that spiritual rock … and that rock was Christ’ are borrowed from the Mithraic scriptures.”

^36. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, p. 145: “The Hebrew Sabbath having been abolished by Christians, the Church made a sacred day of Sunday, partly because it was the day of the resurrection, but largely because it was the weekly festival of the sun; for it was a definite Christian policy to take over the pagan festivals endeared to the people by tradition, and to give them a Christian significance. But, as a solar festival, Sunday was the sacred day of Mithra; and it is interesting to notice that since Mithra was addressed as Dominus, ‘Lord,’ Sunday must have been ‘the Lord’s Day’ long before Christian times.… December 25th was the birthday of the sun-god, and particularly of Mithra, and was only taken over in the Fourth Century as the date, actually unknown, of the birth of Jesus.”

^37. The preceding five sentences are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” pp. 222–223 in this volume.

^38. The preceding two paragraphs are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” pp. 223–224 in this volume.

^39. The preceding four sentences are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 224 in this volume.

^40. The preceding two sentences are similar to a passage in “A Study of Mithraism,” p. 224 in this volume.

Source: MLKP-MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass.

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Ten musicians/bands I saw perform this year (in no particular order)

1. Rochelle Jordan

2. Essosa

3. Yukimi

4. Natalia Lafourcade

5. Fabiana Palladino

6. PinkPantheress

7. Digable Planets

8. Steel Pulse

9. Thunderhead

10. Steeplechase

I’ve also been noticing it’s harder in my late 30s to find friends to go see concerts with (especially on short notice)—we’re not so young w/ flexible schedules anymore it would seem 😢 so thank you to everyone who was willing to go see live music with me in 2025 🤗 hope to see even more in the new year, so lmk if you’re in Chicago and want to go see a concert together! 🎶🙏🎧

Happy Holiday Season!™℠®© #HappyMerryJolly

Apologies for the prolonged absence. Some big things are afoot here at Studying Up. Briefly, I’ve been wanting/waiting to share a significant “one giant leap” forward in our collective narrative. However, that update will have to wait for (Gregorian) calendar year 2026. Thank you for joining me on this journey. We’ve only just begun.

In the meantime, I will take advantage of the academic calendar winter break to post some shorter updates/attend to loose ends I’ve been neglecting.

First, I’m excited to announce a recent publication that marks another collaboration between (Studying Up) + Marcelo (). See our previous podcast conversation re: Sinners for the last entry in this (now multiple-decades long) intellectual & creative dialogue: https://substack.com/@studyingup/p-166428633

Check out our piece: “Star Wars: Andor – An Abolitionist Study Guide” in the latest issue of Feminist Pedagogy (a special issue on “Abolitionist Principles and Pedagogy: Teaching to Build the World Anew”).

Warning: Spoilers ABOUND (in the article, and in the excerpt posted below)… You have been warned.

In case you haven’t seen Andor Season 1 (or need a refresher) here’s the first three episodes, available on YT via the channel “Star Wars UK,” followed by our discussion/questions for these episodes from the study guide.

S1E1 “Kassa”:

S1E2 “That Would Be Me”:

S1E3 “Reckoning”:

Abstract

This study guide provides a set of activities for teaching abolition through Season 1 of the speculative fiction TV series Star Wars: Andor (2022). Through the practice of critical literacy (viewing, reading, and analysis), we offer various ideas on how to engage Andor as a relevant pedagogical tool for studying and teaching abolitionist movement histories and methodologies. By guiding students through a critical analysis of this widely-circulated, mainstream cultural text, we seek to activate an abolitionist pedagogical lens that can be applied across various genres and media – making tangible connections between popular culture and political struggles writ large. These activities are relevant for students and educators wherever abolition is being taught and engaged – including high schools and undergraduate classrooms, as well as non-institutional, community- based, and/or popular educational contexts. In this article we will detail a few of the most salient connections that we see between the show and the key terms and concepts of abolition – as well as possible pedagogical activities to guide students’ discussion and inquiry.

If this description piques your interest, read on, Dear Reader, read on:

Learning Objectives:
1. Connect the popular culture text (Andor) to key terms, concepts, and histories of decolonial, anti-imperialist, abolitionist movements.

2. Utilize critical literacy to identify and unpack explicit or implicit themes contained within Andor, relevant to questions of abolition and human liberation, broadly.

3. Consider how the police, prison, and military industrial complexes are portrayed in Andor, and how these systems in the fictional text compare with their actually existing cognates/inspirations in the real world.

4. Analyze the choices made by characters as they exist within, comply with, and/or challenge the power structures they are navigating, fleeing, and/or seeking to dismantle.

Reading Andor in these ways helps develop a set of pedagogical tools that could be applied not only to other parts of the Star Wars universe, but to science fiction and fantasy cultural texts at large – (re)orienting these works of popular culture towards the aims of political education.

Explanation:
Andor writer and showrunner Tony Gilroy has described the series’ (12 episodes-long) first season as being conceptualized into five distinct “episode clusters” (Kleinman, 2022, para. 4). They are as follows:

Episodes clusters:
- Part I: (1, 2, 3)
- Part II: (4, 5, 6)
- Part III: (7)
- Part IV: (8, 9, 10)
- Part V: (11, 12)

In this portion of the article, we will discuss each of these five discrete episode clusters as sub-texts within the larger season arc that can each be analyzed, discussed, and critically responded to by students. We offer the following Key Terms and Concepts, Character Analyses, Discussion Questions, and Real-Life Examples as potential starting points and through-lines for abolitionist approaches to curricula and pedagogy based on Andor, Season 1.

Episodes 1-3:
Identify examples of the following Key Terms and Concepts:
● Prison Industrial Complex:
o “The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems” (Critical Resistance, n.d.).
o The PIC is not only the prison itself, but “the prison outside the prison” (V. Robinson, personal communication, January 23, 2017. See also: Gilmore, 2007; Reut, 2016; and Story, 2016).
● Extractive Capitalism, or “Extractivismo”:
o “Extractivismo, as extractive capitalism is known in the Américas, indicates an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories” (Gomez-Barris, 2017, p. xvii).

Character Analyses:
● Andor
o What is Cassian Andor’s “origin story?” Why does he resist the Empire?
o How does Andor become a “fugitive?” How is he criminalized?
o How is Andor affected by the Prison Industrial Complex (i.e. the prison outside the prison)?
o What is the story of Kenari? How is it related to “extractivismo?”
● Syril Karn
o How does Deputy Inspector Karn embody the Prison Industrial Complex?
o What is the purpose of the Pre-Mor Authority Security Forces (the corporate police force, or “Corpos”)?
o What is the relationship between the Corpos and the workers on Ferrix?
o What is the relationship between the Corpos and the Empire? Discussion Question:
● What do you think these episodes are saying about the nature of policing?

Real Life Examples:
● Global Indigenous Resistance to Mining – how is this related to Kenari?
● The Case of Camilo Catrillanca – how is this related to how Andor is criminalized?
● Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) – How is this related to Andor looking for his sister?
● Political Prisoners, criminalizing alleged “cop killers” – for example Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal – how is this related to Andor’s case?
● Zapatista Uprising – Diego Luna visited in the 90s (Murray, 2022, para. 3), how is this related to Kenari?

A Brief Disclaimer (from the article):

Rationale:
Drawing upon popular cultural texts is a widespread practice across pedagogical lineages of popular education, as theorized by scholar-activists such as Freire (1968), Greene (2001), bell hooks (1994), Horton et al. (1990), Moses & Cobb (2001), and Ransby (2003). Part of this tradition includes a commitment to storytelling and story-based strategy, understanding the importance of stories to community-based, participatory, and liberatory pedagogies. In particular, pedagogy rooted in narrative (personal, historical, fictional, speculative) offers the opportunity for students to ground academic theory in lived experience: the phenomena available for observation in everyday life, and the stories we tell.

Popular (digital) media such as Andor are some of the primary ways in which we engage with stories in our current cultural moment. There is, of course, a serious contradiction that arises when considering that this text (Andor) which we are reading through an abolitionist lens, is produced and distributed through the multi-billion dollar media platform Disney+ – a company that has been problematized throughout its history for its racist, colonial, heteropatriarchal, and capitalist logics, and most recently has been part of many calls for boycott due to its material connections with Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. We see this contradiction itself as a teachable moment – an opportunity to experience and theorize the power of cultural resistance, as well as contend with some of the complexities and limits of operating within a mass culture industry that is resourced, produced, and distributed via racial capitalism and the carceral state.

Refocusing our storytelling and especially activating how we read, listen to, understand and interpret these “mainstream” stories (which convey the “common sense” of our time) can be a way of mobilizing this imaginative and narrative labor towards liberation, abolition, and decolonization. Carrying out this work within a settler/carceral structure is precisely the contradiction we must confront as abolitionists working to dismantle these multiple and interlocking systems of power as we build the worlds that can exist beyond and despite these structures of oppression.

Tell Me When To 🍉🇵🇸🍉🇵🇸

It appears the last entry in this series was all the way back in May (← for anyone needing a recap). So I’ve been avoiding wrapping this up for quite some time. But I will finally resolve that shortly.

To tide you over, here’s a beautifully curated playlist honoring the (now ancestor) Assata Shakur from the one and only :

Gabriel Teodros: Worldwide Underground

Songs for Assata

Today’s edition of the Worldwide Underground is entirely made of music inspired by Assata Shakur. Her voice, her words, or her name, is on every single one of these tracks…

Read more

a year ago · 11 likes · Gabriel Teodros

Direct link to the mix: https://www.mixcloud.com/gabriel-teodros/songs-for-assata/

As well: https://hotspotatl.com/6427760/songs-for-assata-shakur/item/6

Assata Shakur, a prominent figure in the Black Liberation Army who died this week at 78, remains a powerful symbol of resistance, freedom, and the fight against systemic oppression. Her life, words, and unwavering spirit have deeply influenced generations of artists, particularly within hip-hop. This genre, born from the struggles and stories of Black communities, has long served as a platform for political expression and social commentary. It is no surprise that Assata’s legacy is woven into the fabric of hip-hop, with countless artists invoking her name as a tribute to her revolutionary ideals. From calls for her freedom to reflections on her autobiography, these musical references ensure her story continues to inspire and educate.

See also, ’ reflection on DJ Phatrick’s “art of turntablism as a form of resistance,” in particular his mixes in solidarity with Gaza/Palestine:

Gabriel Teodros: Worldwide Underground

DJ Phatrick and the art of turntablism as a form of resistance

Since the last episode of Worldwide Underground came out, I’ve been hard at work on a new remix album that I just sent off to mastering this week, and I’m back to the podcast now with someone who knows a lot about remixes…

Listen now

2 years ago · 9 likes · Gabriel Teodros

As it happens, just today Phatrick dropped a new edit of “When Will the Time Come?” Voiced by his emcee “partner in crime” Bambu. This was already one of the most powerful songs I’ve ever heard (sincerely), and this remix takes it to another level.

I linked to the original version (from 2009) in my first post on “KD, ” back in April. So it is fitting (though also enraging) that I’m linking to the updated, 2025 version as I prepare to end this sub-series (in October):

It’s time we take it all back to no nonsense
Stop the massacre right now on the Gaza Strip
We talking [70,000] dead, [100] stacks hurt
Little boy’s legs gone, arm blown off little girl’s
Ain’t no more room in the morgue
They declare war
Like Palestine aint got no civilians any more
Helicopters brought over by the USA
Dropping missile after missile on a school day

—Bambu, “When Will the Time Come?”

Track description:

Originally made in 2009 for DJ Phatrick’s A Song For Ourselves Mixtape - a mix made for the release of Tad Nakamura’s documentary about Asian American activist & musician Chris Iijima, this song was a response to israel’s Operation Cast Lead campaign murdering thousands of innocent Gazans. Today, in 2025, every word that Bam raps still applies to the current situation in Gaza - the only change is that the casualties are exponentially higher. Stop the genocide, FREE PALESTINE!

And a couple more goodies from Phatrick:

Continuing our “musical interlude,” here’s a preview of next week’s post (for the 6th and final edition “inspired” by KD I had to triple the 12:1 ratio between 1 of his songs and everything else on the playlist, because it’s just that atrocious and offensive, and as a result this became a 36:1 ratio…). If you find the playlist title confusing, don’t worry, I’m just engaging in some “light numerology” lol. 😄

In closing, I’m including below an excerpt from the Erev Yom Kippur sermon given by Rabbi Brant Rosen, who for the past ten years has led the anti-Zionist Jewish congregation that I attend, Tzedek Chicago. This was his last High Holidays as Tzedek’s rabbi. And it was a heartbreaking one, as Rabbi Brant brought into focus our failure to stop the genocide of Gaza, on what is now the second Yom Kippur that has passed since Israel began its extermination campaign in October of 2023. During the Kol Nidre service, Rabbi Brant read aloud testimonials from Palestinians in Gaza (and their family members). This act of witness clarified: the total annihilation of Gaza is reaching its apex, while the world looks on. We can (and must) repent for our failure to prevent this, but what’s taking place is unforgivable.

https://rabbibrant.com/2025/10/03/we-have-failed-gaza-sermon-for-erev-yom-kippur-5686/

Gaza has fallen.

I’m not a sensationalist, nor am I someone who likes to shatter people’s hopes. But what we are witnessing today is the complete and utter annihilation of a people. It really feels like the end of Gaza City, and I don’t say this lightly, especially since I have family members and friends in Gaza who follow me on this page. This is the city where my father was born and where my family has lived for centuries.

Many of my relatives held out for two years under the worst conditions human beings can live under. But for more than 700 days, they’ve endured and found ways to survive in Gaza City.

No longer.

They’ve decided to leave Gaza City for the first time since this all started. It is just no longer possible to live there. With Israel’s systematic destruction of many of the major residential high rises in the city this week, the message is unequivocal: all of Gaza City will be leveled to the ground, the way Rafah and Jabalya and Khan Younis and Beit Hanoun were.

The images of displacement today broke something inside of me. People, looking back at Gaza with tears in their eyes, are moving south into another uncertain reality. Death and suffering are still a high likelihood as “safe zones” don’t truly exist. They know a return to Gaza is unlikely and they will be stuck in a cycle of displacement and suffering for years to come. But what choice do people have?

Some people refuse to leave Gaza. Not only out of stubbornness but also because they don’t have the means to leave. With the lack of aid organizations or large-scale efforts to facilitate the transfer of the population to another area, everyone in Gaza is left alone to figure out how to move their families to safer zones.

I have family members in Gaza who have gone back and forth from Gaza City to Deir El Balah 3 or 4 times to find a small plot of land to set up their tents. Finding an apartment or a built structure to live in is an absolutely hopeless endeavor. The best-case scenario now is to find a small plot of land large enough to erect a tent. With 2 million people squeezed into a small area on the Gaza coast, even that has become nearly impossible…

The stories we are hearing out of Gaza are heartbreaking and soul-crushing. A 10-year-old child in Gaza City was asked what his hopes are for ending this war. His response: “I only hope for one thing–to find my dad’s body and to bury him.” This is the extent of the boy’s hopes and dreams. To find consolation in burying the body of his father, who was killed at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site.

Other people have similar stories. They refuse to leave Gaza City, not because they don’t think it’s dangerous, but because they have loved ones buried under the rubble that they have not retrieved and can’t fathom moving on in life without burying them. The psychological and physical trauma of this genocide is so severe that people know that carrying that trauma will be the end of them anyway, and would rather die in Gaza City than endure years of more suffering…

To my family reading this: I am sorry. I have failed you. I don’t know what else to say. I hope you forgive me.

For the rest of us: whatever happens next will be very difficult. So prepare accordingly.

Rest in Power to a giant of revolutionary love. 🌠

“The whole liberation of oppressed people in the United States had to do not with climbing up some ladder to success. Not for asking to be just like Rockefeller or just like DuPont or just like Ford because that would only continue the oppression and exploitation of oppressed people in the United States and specifically African people born and raised in the United States. Socialism is an integral part of building social justice on this planet. The condition of my people, my history was very much connected with other oppressed people and I began to see that the same foot that was on the necks of the Vietnamese people (that was on the necks of all oppressed people on the planet) was the same foot that was on my neck. And so I began to understand that imperialism has to go. It is a poison that is killing people all over this world. The priorities of this planet have to be completely changed. Instead of profits and instead of policies that destroy the earth, that destroy the water, that destroy human beings, I believe a policy that protects people, that makes people live in a community, a world community: that’s what I believe. That’s my basic political commitment at this moment.”

–Assata Shakur

medusa: cuts both ways
by Dorothea Smartt (from her collection Connecting Medium)

Dread!
An Afrikanwoman
full of sheself
wid dem dutti-eye looks
sapphire eyes
Yes nuh! believe it!
she could turn a man t’stone
some whiteman
nightmare riding
he mind across the centuries
in turn turning we mad

Medusa
dread anger
welling up in her stare
natural roots Blackwoman
loving Blackwomen
serious

He’d be frighten fuh dat
mark wid d’living blood
that bleeds and never dies
turns blood our sweet honey
from a rock
yes, that is sum’ting
would frighten any man

And still it goes on and on and on
around us inside us
their voices
whistling against
our thunder
across an eternal sky

Medusa is Nanny
Medusa is Assata Shakur
Medusa is Cherry Groce
is Eleanor Bumpers is Audre Lorde
is Queen Nzinga Sarraounia
QueenMother is godmother
our mother
Medusa is our mother’s mothers
myself all coiled into one
Medusa is spirit
Medusa in you is you in me
is me in you
Medusa is my shield
impregnable
my aegis–
no mythical aegeanpeople shield
this is my armour
with Shango double-headed axe
Yemoja-Ocuti
my battle dress armour
of serious dread

———

A further note on Cuba’s deep history of internationalist solidarity, see: the new season of the exemplary podcast Blowback, which (among other things) describes Cuba joining the newly independent Angola (lead by the MPLA)’s struggle against the neocolonial aggression of Apartheid South Africa (supported by its allies, including the United States and Israel) and its proxies, the FNLA and UNITA.

Finally, I recommend this excellent post by :

Shabbat Shalom, Shanah Tovah, L’Chaim Intifada.

Studying Up returns, about 2.5 months since our last post. In that span of time the world has continued swirling down-drain towards an (eminently preventable, yet nonetheless currently still-impending) “Slo-mo Armageddon.”

Some positive moments mixed in there too, at least in the more circumscribed & mundane sense of individual lived experience. Including the successful defense of my long-deferred dissertation… (w/ immense gratitude to my committee for their generosity + patience over the past 9 years).

And so yet again, September marks “back to school,” the beginning of another academic year (except in Gaza, where the universities/schools have been flattened…):

Like noted recently, it stretches the limits of “cognitive dissonance” as a term to describe the seemingly inescapable split screen of (First World/Global North) “daily life” during times of (Third World/Global South) genocide.

As Noura Erakat described in her article “The Boomerang Comes Back” (which served as one of the inspirations for a previous Studying Up post “The Cross Becomes An Imperial Boomerang”) there is an indelible line being drawn between the annihilatory (neo)colonial violence unleashed on Palestine/Gaza and the “imperial boomerang” of colonialism-as-externalized-fascism returning (internally) to the Global North. In fact, as Erakat describes, this phenomenon was magisterially theorized by Aimé Césaire’s 1950 polemic Discourse on Colonialism in the immediate aftermath of what Césaire argued was colonialism’s apotheosis: Nazism/World War II/the Jewish Holocaust. So it is a horrific, though revealing, irony that the apotheosis of “Neocolonialism” (a term first theorized by Kwame Nkrumah) is Zionism’s genocide of the Palestinians, all in the name of “protecting Jews” (in reality: protecting Israel as a Jewish-supremacist, ethnoreligious apartheid state).

Here is Mamphela Ramphele (whose partner was Steve Biko, the politically assassinated anti-apartheid activist and theorist/leader of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement):

Host: Your statement likening the famine in Gaza to the Holocaust, do you not see that as provocative?

Ramphele: What provocative? It is a Holocaust.

Host: How can you compare them?

Ramphele: Why can’t I compare them?

Host: Because they’re different. [interrupting Ramphele] They are different. Why can’t you separate them? [continuing to interrupt] I’m not saying Gaza isn’t horrific. It is horrific. But comparing them… it almost undermines what the Holocaust is all about.

Ramphele: The Holocaust happened and the Holocaust will continue to happen in different forms for as long as we make criticizing this kind of behavior a holy cow. It is a Holocaust by any definition. If you look at the deliberate attack on children, on women, on unarmed citizens, and the starvation, using starvation as a weapon of war. Tell me what that is. How different is it?

Host: I’m not disputing what you’re saying… that it’s not a genocide. I’m not disputing that. That’s not for me to decide. But why do you think it is appropriate to compare what happened in World War Two to what’s happening in Gaza.

Ramphele: What’s different?

Host: I think we need to focus what’s happening in Gaza, because it’s different to what happened in the Holocaust. It’s almost like you’re undermining what happened in the Holocaust.

To be clear: one can only believe that naming the genocide of Gaza what it is “undermines what happened in the Holocaust” if one thinks of the Jewish Holocaust as the (one and only) Holocaust. As if the Nazi’s genocide of European Jews was somehow exceptional rather than paradigmatic of the larger processes of European colonialism’s mass murder and wholesale annihilation of entire peoples (across centuries) the entire world over… What this question of “comparison” brings into relief is also, not coincidentally, the relationship of Jews to “Western Civilization” as a whole.

Are we, as Jews, the victims of “Western Civilization,” who share in common with colonized and racialized peoples throughout the Global South/Third World a history of oppression, subjugation, dehumanization, extermination? Or are we somehow actually, at long last, indeed the foremost protagonists of “Western Civilization?” Like Netanyahu so loves to claim when he asserts that Israel in its “War on Hamas” is “Defending Western Civilization”—which brings to mind Theodor Herzl’s statement to Cecil Rhodes that “We [i.e. Zionism/Israel] should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Because if “we” (as Jews) are, in fact, the protagonists of “Western Civilization,” then we are simply the ones who are allowed to commit genocide rather than those who are being genocided.

This zero-sum ontological calculation is one that I reject entirely and unequivocally.

Because this way of thinking might just lead one to believe things like: “The only problem with the Nazis is that I was on the losing side,” a quote once uttered by Hanamel Dorfman, the man Itamar Ben-Gvir appointed as his chief of staff in 2022:

Which lends further credence to the enraged and derisive shouts of “Nazi” made by people protesting Ben-Gvir during his visit to NYC in April:

To this logic I say:
FUCK THAT!
¡Ya basta!
Dayenu!
Enough! is enough is enough.

NO ONE should be genocided.

NO ONE should be exterminated.

“Never Again” is utterly meaningless unless it means “Never Again for Anyone.”

To illustrate the lunacy of this proposition (“either we genocide others, or we are the ones being genocided”) I turn to, perhaps, an unexpected pop culture reference from my “early aughts” childhood/young adulthood: The Sopranos’ iconic/infamous “Columbus Day” episode:

Hesh: “Jews because of their history have common cause with the oppressed. Some Indians were deliberately given blankets tainted with smallpox. Died like flies.”

Christopher: “No shit.”

Hesh: “Yes shit.”

Reuben: “Yeah, you wanna talk bioterrorism? Look who started it.”

Hesh: “Amen to that my friend.”

Reuben: “That’s right. Christopher Columbus was no better than Adolf Hitler.”

Hesh: “Hey, woah, woah, woah.
Back up. Hitler?”

Reuben: “Yeah. I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

Silvio: “Yeah, that Indian from the protest, who was whining about the wilderness, they had him on TV and he called Columbus ‘Hitler.’”

Reuben: “Cause it’s true man.”

Hesh: “You’re talking out of your ass. Columbus and Hitler? You’re trivializing the Holocaust. Frankly Reuben, if you’ve got that kind of covert antisemitism, I’d like you to leave my house.”

Reuben: “Antisemitism?”

Hesh: “That’s right.”

Reuben: “Fuck you too my man.”

Tony: “Woah, woah!”

No one can say they “didn’t know.” And yet, in the words of Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

As wrote in May: “The genocide in Gaza is not just unfolding in silence. It’s being confessed to, live, in real time.”

Jehad Abusalim

"Down to the Last Baby"

The Israeli regime is no longer hiding its intentions. It doesn’t have to. Its leaders are stating, in explicit terms, that the objective in Gaza is not “self-defense” or even defeating Hamas — it’s the mass killing and forced removal of Palestinians, including children. The genocide in Gaza is not just unfolding in silence. It’s being confessed to, liv…

Read more

a year ago · 19 likes · 7 comments · Jehad Abusalim

Too, Noura Erakat noted in her testimony before the UN Palestinian Rights Committee (on May 15, now 4 months ago) during a commemoration of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (should it now be called the “First Nakba?” and what has been unfolding over the past two years the “Second Nakba?”):

“The Nakba is ongoing”

(a formulation also illustrated by Rabea Eghbariah in his—unsuccessfully censored, thankfully—May 2024 Columbia Law Review article “Towards Nakba as a Legal Concept” ).

In a rather succinct and precise formulation (that I plan to discuss further in future posts… in order to understand some of the less visible dimensions of Zionist/Right-wing religious thought), Marc Lamont Hill on his Al Jazeera English show UpFront (and his guests) describe Israel’s recent missile strike on Hamas negotiators in Qatar thusly: “Israel is Trying to Assassinate the Concept of Diplomacy Itself.”

And we are now witnessing the further “boomerang effect” of political violence rebounding, from third world genocide (blow)back to the neocolonial metropole…

In related news, Maddy Clifford over @ wrote one of the most astute things I’ve read regarding the killing of Charlie Kirk:

Interview with a Muse

The Politics of Empathy

In the light of Charlie Kirk’s death—and the wave of conversation it has sparked about political violence—I’ve been reflecting on how powerful words and ideas can be. I’ve been mulling over the ways in which harm is understood and constructed in this country, how often fear is conflated with physical harm and what happens when dangerous ideas are platfo…

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a year ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Maddy Clifford

Or, as (another Seattle diaspora) friend recently texted me:

Ending this (admittedly bleak, as are these extremely dismal times…) “post” with what feels almost a crying out to the eternal, holy power of music & poetry, here’s Ruby Ibarra’s May 2025 NPR Tiny Desk Concert, which I’ve been listening to + watching on repeat as of late:

Which raises the inevitable question: “If this is not America, then what is?”

I’m in the final stretch w/ my dissertation and that’s (I hope understandably) thrown off the regular publication schedule for our “Substack” experimental writing project.

My apologies, but please don’t think I’ve given up quite yet, Dear Reader! There is OH SO much more in store… once the hurdle of the diss. has been surmounted.

While “not writing” my Substack, I have (in addition to the slightly higher priority of working to finish my dissertation…) refreshed myself on some info regarding the “poetry cults” thread of our narrative.

This includes re-listening to the six episode podcast mini-series Revelations, about the “Fellowship of Friends,” a cult based in Oregon House, CA which (I learned within the past couple years…) my high school teacher (who led the *second* poetry cult that I was a part of, in this case a “cult of one”: Star Wars “master and apprentice” style…) was himself a member of, unbeknownst to me at the time.

Content warning for the Revelations podcast, a significant portion of the mini-series is devoted to investigating/discussing long-time and endemic sexual abuse by the cult leader of many young men in the cult. This is not directly connected to my own experiences with the second “poetry cult” I will describe encountering as a teenager, but it does add some extremely disturbing background context. As well, the Fellowship of Friends is an offshoot of the “Fourth Way” teachings propagated by the early-mid 20th c. Greek-Russian mystic/cult leader George Gurdjieff (whose name has already come up on here previously, in relation to the Enneagram, a personality test which Gurdjieff inspired). For anyone who’s seen the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country or knows about the Rajneesh cult (participants referred to it as the “Rajneesh movement”) that the documentary focuses on, their leader Rajneesh/Osho himself modeled his communities on Gurdjieff’s compound at Fontainebleau (outside Paris).

Told you this story gets (even more) weird. And we’ve “miles to go before we sleep”… (after I finish my dissertation!)

On “Not Writing,” here’s the great Anne Boyer (who it appears was previously active on Substack, up until Nov. 2023, when she shared her resignation as poetry editor of the NYT to protest Israel’s genocide of Gaza):

M I R A B I L A R Y

my resignation

I have resigned as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine…

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3 years ago · Anne Boyer

Not Writing
by Anne Boyer

When I am not writing I am not writing a novel called 1994 about a young
woman in an office park in a provincial town who has a job cutting and
pasting time. I am not writing a novel called Nero about the world's richest
art star in space. I am not writing a book called Kansas City Spleen. I am
not writing a sequel to Kansas City Spleen called Bitch's Maldoror. I am not
writing a book of political philosophy called Questions for Poets. I am not
writing a scandalous memoir. I am not writing a pathetic memoir. I am not
writing a memoir about poetry or love. I am not writing a memoir about
poverty, debt collection, or bankruptcy. I am not writing about family
court. I am not writing a memoir because memoirs are for property owners
and not writing a memoir about prohibitions of memoirs.

When I am not writing a memoir I am also not writing any kind of poetry,
not prose poems contemporary or otherwise, not poems made of frag-
ments, not tightened and compressed poems, not loosened and conversa-
tional poems, not conceptual poems, not virtuosic poems employing many
different types of euphonious devices, not poems with epiphanies and not
poems without, not documentary poems about recent political moments,
not poems heavy with allusions to critical theory and popular song.

I am not writing "Leaving the Atocha Station" by Anne Boyer and certain-
ly not writing "Nadja" by Anne Boyer though would like to write "Debt"
by Anne Boyer though am not writing also "The German Ideology" by
Anne Boyer and not writing a screenplay called "Sparticists."

I am not writing an account of myself more miserable than Rousseau.
I am not writing an account of myself more innocent than Blake.

I am not writing epic poetry although I like what Milton said about lyric
poets drinking wine while epic poets should drink water from a wooden
bowl. I would like to drink wine from a wooden bowl or to drink water
from an emptied bottle of wine.

I am not writing a book about shopping, which is a woman shopping.
I am not writing accounts of dreams, not my own or anyone else's.
I am not writing historical re-enactments of any durational literature.

I am not writing anything that anyone has requested of me or is waiting
on, not a poetics essay or any other sort of essay, not a roundtable re-
sponse, not interview responses, not writing prompts for younger writers,
not my thoughts about critical theory or popular songs.

I am not writing a new constitution for the republic of no history.
I am not writing a will or a medical report.

I am not writing Facebook status updates. I am not writing thank-you
notes or apologies. I am not writing conference papers. I am not writing
book reviews. I am not writing blurbs.

I am not writing about contemporary art. I am not writing accounts of
my travels. I am not writing reviews for The New Inquiry and not writ-
ing pieces for Triple Canopy and not writing anything for Fence. I am not
writing a daily accounting of my reading, activities, and ideas. I am not
writing science fiction novels about the problem of the idea of the au-
tonomy of art and science fiction novels about the problem of a society
with only one law which is consent. I am not writing stories based on
Nathaniel Hawthorne's unwritten story ideas. I am not writing online dat-
ing profiles. I am not writing anonymous communiqués. I am not writing
textbooks.

I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future
times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day
and all of the night.

[This one’s on my personal Spotify page rather than the Studying Up Spotify page (which features post-specific playlists, and also the podcast episodes we’ve started releasing). If you’re looking for additional (only somewhat random) playlists (unrelated to Studying Up), there’s plenty more music where this came from. Just click “IGM” on the player embedded above].

The one thing I’ll note about this “Independence Day/Fuck the 4th” playlist (because based on my anecdotal experience this piece of trivia isn’t all that widely known—though it should be) is that between the ages of 8-12, the artist now known as Doja Cat lived (with her mother) as part of Alice Coltrane’s ashram in the Santa Monica Mountains. There’s much to unpack there, but (at the very least) I think you can draw some interesting points of connection between the (eternally brilliant) musical oeuvre of Alice Coltrane and the psychedelic/cosmic imagery and theme of Doja Cat’s 2021 album Planet Her.

“Alice Coltrane’s ashram—and her ‘Black radical imagination’—lives on at the Hammer Museum” (LA Times): https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2025-02-14/alice-coltrane-hammer-museum-ashram-monument-eternal

Also the line “I don’t mind working / but I do mind dying” from Joe Lee Carter’s song “Please Mr. Foreman” (included on this playlist) serves as inspiration for the title of the classic Detroit: I Do Mind Dying about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The rest of the playlist I’ll leave for you to interpret as you will, Dear Reader.

A young Doja Cat (née Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini) dressed in pink, seated front row Left. Alice Coltrane, dressed in orange, seated front row Center.

(Perhaps) unrelated: For a rather interesting, at times disturbing (fictional) examination of a mother-daughter relationship in the aftermath of (the narrator’s) childhood spent living in an ashram, see the novel Burnt Sugar (for its UK and US release, first published in India as Girl in White Cotton) by Avni Doshi.

Before signing off, I’ll note just some of the catastrophic news “since we last spoke”: i.e. Trump and Netanyahu’s terrifying geopolitical brinksmanship (and unacknowledged declaration of war by bombing) Iran, alongside the hundreds of starving Gazans being brutally massacred by the Israeli army and the (so-called) “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” on a daily basis. [Among other, seemingly endless, cruelty… the US Supreme Court’s recent spate of rulings enshrining the President’s authoritarian powers, the trillions of dollars in tax breaks recently gifted to the rich, the $100 billion+ allocated to ICE’s deportation/terror machine, the defunding of SNAP and Medicaid… so much cause for celebration! 🤬🤬🤬]

In the words of that iconic protest sign:

Please support Jewish Voice for Peace—Chicago hunger strikers demanding an end to Israel’s genocide of Gaza:

Chicago Jewish Activists Embark on Indefinite Hunger Strike Over Gaza (In These Times): https://inthesetimes.com/article/jewish-leaders-chicago-hunger-strike-gaza

The worst stage of 20 months of genocide (Jewish Voice for Peace): https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/07/03/the-worst-stage-of-20-months-of-genocide/

In closing, here’s a video I took on June 22 (the night the US bombed Iran). A truly, unfortunately fitting song choice by the band playing the bar where I was at:

According to the Wikipedia page for Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”:

The lyrics criticize the George H. W. Bush administration, then in its first month, quoting Bush's famous “thousand points of light” remark from his 1989 inaugural address and his 1988 presidential campaign promise for America to become a “kinder, gentler nation.” The song also refers to Ayatollah Khomeini's proclamation that the United States was the “Great Satan” and Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign slogan, “Keep hope alive.”

For your listening pleasure please peruse the present podcast (our second on this topic) regarding the motion picture Sinners (which we discuss as a piece of “fine art”/work of “embodied theory”). MAJOR SPOILERS ahead: Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

This session is a collaboration with Studying Up’s partner project (←watch this space), hosted by “friend of the show” Marcelo Garzo Montalvo.

Marcelo and I “officially” met as undergraduates in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, while taking an upper division seminar (in Chicano Studies, now Chicanx Latinx Studies) on Latina/o Philosophies and Theologies of Liberation.

However, after many years of friendship later, our memories were jogged to recall that the actual first time we met was at a meeting organized by Dave Stark, then Director of Stiles Hall (a social justice-based “community service” nonprofit literally and figuratively adjacent to UC Berkeley), who had gathered student organizers he knew to talk about the threat of a US war with Iran (I believe inspired by his spouse, who was a member of CODEPINK). This must have been Spring 2008 (the course Marcelo and I took together was later that Fall, the same semester as Obama’s first election, as well as various other events discussed in our narrative thus far). You may remember, Dear Reader, that the specter of a “nuclear Iran” was a major issue during the contest between Obama-McCain, with John McCain infamously responding to a campaign-trail question about the need to “send them an airmail message to Tehran” by singing “Bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” (by the Regents, popularized by the Beach Boys, then xenophobically/genocidally parodied by Vince Vance & the Valiants all the way back in 1980).

As the below video from Al Jazeera English makes clear, Benjamin Netanyahu has been claiming for 33 years (since Year of Our Lord 1992) that Iran is only years, months, even weeks away from developing a nuclear bomb:

In other words this is entirely a crock of shit. To say nothing of Israel being a nuclear-armed rogue state (itself possessing an arsenal of what’s estimated to be at the very minimum 90+ nuclear weapons, in violation of various international laws), which is currently waging a belligerent war of aggression against Iran, while committing an active, ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza/Palestine, and continuing to terrorize the region more broadly.

So from that meeting in Stiles Hall where Marcelo and I “first met” to now, 17 years later…

Here’s Noura Erakat responding to Netanyahu’s warmongering against Iran/assorted grifting for Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism before the United Nations in 2015, describing the tried-and-true Hasbara playbook:

Or, in the words of George W. Bush:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee…

I know it’s in Texas, it’s probably in Tennessee, that says:

Fool me once, shame on… shame on you…

Fool me… you can’t get fooled again.”

For more déjà vu see Season 1 of the excellent podcast Blowback, visualized on YouTube by a very talented fan—clearly a professional video editor—Isaac Roman (no relation):

But first, Sinners:

See also:

The Boneyard

Haints & Saints: The Sinners Review

Hey Family…

Read more

a year ago · 23 likes · 8 comments · Nikki Buchanan

Chapel of Honey

Sinners: Memory Mojo

Blessed Saturday…

Read more

a year ago · 7 likes · Miss Honey

https://www.thewrap.com/sinners-irish-vampire-meaning-history-explained/

Since I missed Friday’s post (end of the academic year… amiright?) today’s post is a “2-for-1.”

In the spirit of “Jazz + Jazz = Jazz”…

“Research Shows That Our Listeners Love Jazz”

Probably the best song I’ve heard in the past 10 years:

right up there with “Twice” by Little Dragon, maybe the last “song of the decade” for me…

or, if we consider 2007 to be on the “edge of the aughts,” then more recently than that would be:

and before that:

It seems that, at least when concerning my “Songs of the Decade,” perhaps I do “have a type”: AKA Songs That Make Me Feel The Feels. 😭

So we’ll track it as being:

My favorite song of the ‘00s was “Twice” by Little Dragon
My favorite song of the ‘10s was “Oblivion” by Grimes
My favorite song of the ‘20s was “Perfect Stranger” by FKA Twigs
So that would make “Baby” by Aya Nakamura my Song of the ____ ‘25s?

Nope. That math doesn’t add up. Let’s try:
Song of “every Seven Years:”

so 2007 was “Twice” by Little Dragon
2012 was “Oblivion” by Grimes
2025 was “Perfect Stranger” by FKA Twigs
Oh, I see, 2023 was “Baby” by Aya Nakamura

So: 2007, “Twice”;
2012, “Oblivion”;
2023, “Baby”;
2025, “Perfect Stranger”

So (it’s not exactly every 7 years, but close enough for us to call it my “Septennial Songs”). This is a very Scientific and precise selection process, as you can tell!

Except Spotify’s algorithm just played “Be Sweet” by Japanese Breakfast (2021), and that really needs to be on there (the algorithm knows!), SO:

2007, “Twice” by Little Dragon
2012, “Oblivion” by Grimes
2021, “Be Sweet” by Japanese Breakfast
2023, “Baby” by Aya Nakamura
2025, “Perfect Stranger” by FKA Twigs

Whose titles, when combined, really come out to form a beautiful poem,
as if written by Emily Dickinson:

Twice Oblivion
Be Sweet Baby
Perfect Stranger

Kind of a “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” No?

Anyway, the word for “every five years” is “quinquennial” which just sounds absolutely made up LOL: “Quinquennial Songs” crying laughing face emoji.

“Septennial Songs” has a much better ring to it, even if each song represents five years”: i.e. “Isaac’s Top Five Songs of 2000-2025, in Chronological Order”…

^^^Keep an eye out for the “Beats by Dre” product placement 😉 (P.S. emojis really are our hieroglyphs aren’t they?).

+ I added Holly Walker’s “Deep Dark Cosmos” because fuckit, and I’m not changing the playlist title deal with it.

So now the “Title Cento” poem would read:

Twice Oblivion
Be Sweet Baby
Deep Dark Cosmos
Perfect Stranger

To which I can only say: WOW!

Anyway, we need to get on with “the distribution of the sensible.”

So let us begin.

1. check out the (genuinely terrific) interview in the podcast portion (at the top) of this post: A “Sinners Roundtable” w/ my friends Andrew (Studying Up’s “N.Y. Deep State of Mind Correspondent”) and Jalin (my colleague in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University). Andrew passed on to our Dear Readers, “you can say that I essentially do this”:

2. check out this excerpt from my research (as developed from writing prompted by a graduate seminar I took during my PhD coursework, on “Decolonial Black Political Thought”).

   1. Here’s a playlist I developed that you can listen to while reading (or simply whenever, at your leisure, Dear Reader):

Reading Rancière in the 1992 LA Rebellion

“There’s a bank a church a myth and a hearse
A mall and a loan a child dead at birth
There’s a widow pig parrot
A rebel to tame
A whitehooded judge
And a syringe and a vein
And tha riot be tha rhyme of tha unheard”

–“Calm Like a Bomb,” Zack de a Rocha (1999)

In Disagreement, Rancière makes a theoretical differentiation between “the police” and “politics.” What we traditionally think of as “the political” is actually the order that polices a fundamental inequality, a “miscount” of the city’s parts which over-represents the rich and underrepresents the poor. Politics, by contrast, is the rupture of the police order, whereby those who are excluded from the distribution of power make an account of themselves as speaking beings entitled to an equality that they have been denied. Utilizing Rancière’s differentiation between “the police” and “politics,” I will examine the ways that Hip Hop culture in the early 1990s offered an aesthetic account of the LA Rebellion and the historic gang truce that preceded it. I argue that the LA Rebellion was the political “meeting point” between the police order of supposedly representative democracy and the egalitarian content of the people’s speech.

While the Rebellion was termed a Riot in dominant US discourse, “merely perceived as a noise signaling pleasure or pain, consent or revolt,” the accounts made by West Coast rappers including Kam, Ice Cube, Yo-Yo, MC Eiht, and others, framed the Rebellion as a claim to political justice: “the order that determines the partition of what is common.” For example, in his song “Peace Treaty,” Kam raps, “We came through in understandin', demandin' / Justice, bust this, we all had our hand in / The cookie jar, took it far enough to make a statement.” Here “the cookie jar” that “we all had our hand in” represents the “partition of what is common.” As Rancière argues, “Whoever has no part—the poor of ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat—cannot in fact have any part other than all or nothing.” Fundamentally, it is this denial of the people’s right to their “part” that generates the existence of the political community. What makes the community “political,” according to Rancière is the division between the just and unjust, “the partition of what is common.” Accordingly, the LA Rebellion is an instance of the “part that has no part” in the division of justice (the Black and Latinx poor) making a claim to “a common world of argument.” Here we must recognize that even in the denial of the people’s speech there is a (submerged) recognition by the State of their capacity to act as speaking beings. In this gap between denial and assertion lies the rupture of politics.

Rancière states that, “Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity.” For Rancière, political entities do not exist “prior to the declaration of wrong” (p. 39). As such, in assessing a Black political movement through Rancière’s criterion, we must examine the point at which such a wrong is declared.

The history of Black rebellions, uprisings, revolts, and riots are examples of this process of “declaring the wrong.” In the context of the police order, Black political claims and grievances are not legible, except as they are managed, mediated, and assimilated into the very order that they oppose. As such, 20^th century urban rebellions have signaled moments where the police order broke down, where claims erupted outside of police management and in ways that challenged and exceeded the dominant political order. These tensions are palpable in moments such as the Fort Houston Rebellion of 1917, where Black US infantry soldiers rebelled after racist harassment and beatings by local white police. Du Bois saw the hypocrisy of white media demonizing the Black soldiers while ignoring the underlying causes of the revolt: “I wish to say to The Brooklyn Eagle that it is sadly mistaken when it says, ‘the crime at Houston will never be repeated.’ Give men the same provocation, and the same thing will happen fifty times again." Similarly, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statement after the 1965 Watts Rebellion that “a riot is the language of the unheard” frames uprisings as political accounts by speaking beings who are making a claim, articulating a wrong that they demand be heard and addressed by the polity. The wave of Black urban rebellions that swept the United States during the late 1960s (marking the transition from Civil Rights to Black Power) are a testament to this “language of the unheard,” which was not accounted for in the limits of liberal reform (Rancière’s “police”).

White race riots (which could be referred to as pogroms or massacres) have an even longer history, including those taking place during the Civil War (in Detroit and New York City), and in the early 20^th century, including East St. Louis in 1917, as well as 1919’s “Red Summer” in 38 cities including Chicago, Charleston, Norfolk, Virginia, Omaha, Nebraska, and Longview, Texas. In 1943, the Detroit Race Riots targeted Black people in response to racist fears about Black workers moving to Detroit during World War II. Throughout the period of Jim Crow, as Ida B. Wells documents, the Southern United States was engaged in the ongoing “race riots” of lynchings and mob violence against Black people and Black communities. When white lynch mobs proclaimed that “This is a White man’s country and the White man must rule,” they made an account of a political order that they were reinforcing and affirming. In other words, they were forced to make a response to the rupture introduced by Black politics. Otherwise, “This is a White man’s country and the White man must rule” would be redundant. We can, therefore revise MLK’s statement to: “A [Black] riot is the language of the unheard.” In contrast, a “white riot”/“white backlash” is the language of the police. While purportedly “extra-legal,” as Ida B. Wells pointed out, in the thirty years following the Civil War, when “more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution,” only three white people were tried, convicted, and executed for lynching a Black person in the United States. Wells marks this “as evidence of the absolute impunity with which the white man dares to kill a Negro.”

This longer historical context underlies Ice Cube’s post LA-Rebellion lyrics on “We Had To Tear This Muthafucka Up,” where he relates the linkages between the US judicial system and the KKK: “Go to Simi Valley and surely / Somebody knows the address of the jury / Pay a little visit, ‘Who is it?’ (Ohh it's Ice Cube) / ‘Can I talk to the Grand Wizard,’ then boom!!” As such, we must view riots as the declarations of political entities, whether the (Black) parties that demand a part of the distributing of the common from which they are excluded, or those (white) parties who already lay claim to “the common” of whiteness. It is in this context that we must read Rancière’s assertion that “Disagreement is not the conflict between one who says white and another who says black. It is the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it.” When these two parties (white and Black) say “riot” they do not mean the same thing. A white riot presupposes the assurance of the law, while a Black riot is against the law of whiteness.

Let us turn our attention more specifically to the LA Rebellion of 1992, in order to assess how the Rebellion—and the contemporaneous gang truce—ruptured the police logic of white society. It is crucial to view this moment through the historical context of LAPD police chief Darryl Gates’ 1980s and 90s “War on Gangs,” which was in fact a war on Black communities. As such, to be Black was to be classified as a “gang member,” as evidenced by the LAPD registering almost half of all young Black males in South Central in their gang database. Following Rancière’s description of the process of political subjectification, I argue that the transformation of “gang member” from a criminalized and pathologized status to a political identity (“a part that has no part”) is essential to understanding the significance of this moment. Again, Rancière argues that, “Parties do not exist prior to the declaration of wrong.” Accordingly, as Yo-Yo raps on “Get the Fist,” a record released following the LA Rebellion: “We're gettin’ wiser, you can tell by the fires / That they're fed up, the war is on us.” The mobilization of gang affiliation and gang identity as a political formation is precisely the kind of reversal of terms that Rancière describes. This “declaration of wrong” speaks to the acquittal of the officers caught on tape beating Rodney King which served as the immediate catalyst for the rebellion, but the roots of the uprising lay in the collective oppression experienced by LA’s Black community.

The early 1990s economic recession (which the Gulf War was waged to distract from) hit Black communities especially brutally (as is true of every economic downward trend, whether automation, outsourcing, recessions, or depressions). Yet this moment also marked a re-centering of capital towards warfare and mass incarceration, and away from welfare state programs inaugurated by the New Deal. Of course, these welfare state programs had themselves always been selectively applied—in the GI Bill, the Federal Housing Act, and insurance redlining—on terms that consolidated white civil society at the expense of Black communities.

In contrast to government attacks on the already severely limited economic resources apportioned to Black South Central, on the eve of the Rebellion, LA gang peacemakers presented plans to the Los Angeles City Council seeking funding for jobs and pathways out of the drug economy for gang members. The council’s response was to tell them to apply for a $500 grant. This was after the LAPD had been given hundreds of millions of dollars to declare a War on Gangs, brutalizing, criminalizing, and imprisoning Black and Brown communities (by 1992 the city was paying $11 million a year in brutality settlements alone). As Rancière argues, “the inferior has understood the superior’s order because the inferior takes part in the same community of speaking beings and so is, in this sense, their equal.” However, “the understanding of language has no bearing on the definition of the social order.” Within this logic “inequality exists because of inequality.” With almost no support from the city, and facing active antagonism, disruption, and attacks by the LAPD, the gang truce would last for nearly a decade after the LA uprising. Even within the “police order” of Western “political order” (as exemplified by the LA City Council), going through established channels, attempting to seek the minimal, reformist demand of economic development funding, these poor and dispossessed Black subjects are completely illegible to Western political philosophy. The Rebellion was an act of political speech in the context of a “police order” that denied Black politics a grounds for legibility. Accordingly, “a provisional confrontation, must be set up between two camps: those who think there is an understanding within understanding, that is, that all speaking beings are equal as speaking beings, and those who do not think so.” Exemplary of the practices of Black political speech, LA gang members managed to accomplish a staggering historical feat, addressing the issue of gang violence that the LAPD’s “War on Gangs” was supposedly staged in order to solve. However, “inequality exists because of inequality,” and it is obvious by the terms of this logic that the “War on Gangs” only reinscribed the inequality that perpetuates inequality. Here, the solution is the problem.

For Rancière, “Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account.” Former Black Panther and community organizer Michael Zinzun argues in 1997 that, “We participated in the formation of the gang truce before the Los Angeles uprising [in response to the Rodney King verdict]. The L.A. uprising galvanized the gang truce and in fact we're going on the fifth anniversary of the truce this year. We were able to seize the opportunity to bring a lot of young people together.” In his song “Peace Treaty,” the rapper Kam similarly states: “10 percent blood suckers of the poor took a loss / For exploitation, had to show ‘em who was boss / Teach ‘em not to be so greedy / Had to shut them down, bound by a peace treaty.” In this way, Kam demonstrates how the gang truce “galvanized” the rebellion: “Had to shut them down, bound by a peace treaty,” just as Zinzun argues that “The L.A. uprising galvanized the gang truce.” These two phenomenon (gang truce and urban uprising) are inextricably interconnected and must be read as being mutually constitutive—enmeshed at the moment in which the wrong is declared and the gang as a political entity comes into being as “a part that has no part.”

The organizing work that it took to facilitate the LA gang truce took place in the context of a widespread discourse of Black Consciousness—in response to police beatings and assaults on Black communities during the Reagan-era rise of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration (analogous to the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko in South Africa). Following Rancière, political subjectivity is formed in response to a perceived wrong. What binds these communities together as “Black” is their shared oppression and treatment at the hands of the police. Therefore, both Black and Latinx communities (as well as Samoan and Pacific Islander communities) found themselves collectively oppressed by the same racial state in ways that overlap and form a collective affiliation for the project of resistance. This “partition of the perceptible” results in the forging of their own political community, through the document of the gang truce.

Now they say it's on with the esés, right
But I know Chicano pride
So let's raise better days in jail so I'm quiet
Tryin' not to get stuck in a race riot
I can't buy it when I hear "That's the enemy!"
'Cause I'm knowin' down deep they're some kin to me

—”Keep The Peace,” Kam (1995)

This is in line with Rancière’s example of the Aventine Plebeians, who “establish another order, another partition of the perceptible, by constituting themselves not as warriors equal to other warriors but as speaking beings sharing the same properties as those who deny them these.” The gangs are analogous to this category of “warriors,” arising out of armed self-defense against white mob violence, and lynch law in the early and mid-twentieth century. Over the course of the Black liberation movement of the 60s and 70s these affiliations and grouping were transformed into a political program, which subsequently returned to underground, criminalized economic activity, and acts of intra-community violence in the wake of the violent repression of Black Power by the State. With the moment of the gang truce and the LA Rebellion, there was a renewed “account” of gangs as political formations. The 1992 gang truce hearkens back not only to the 1971 South Bronx gang peace treaty that precipitated the birth of hip hop, but also the gang truce during the 1965 Watts Rebellion, where gangs similarly identified “a common enemy.” This sense of understanding oneself in opposition to the colonizer is the position of Blackness beginning with slave revolts that inaugurate the “Black Radical Tradition” posited by Cedric Robinson in his book Black Marxism. This identification of a common enemy is central to the political account being made: the grounds for collective opposition to the enemy of white supremacy and the attendant police order. The recognition of collective abuses suffered and the experience of a common wrong forms the basis for the collective claim of “a part that has no part.” These are “beings engaging in a collective destiny through words.” In this way, the moment of the gang truce and subsequent Rebellion mark the process of subjectification, which parallels Blanqui’s statement to the magistrate when asked to provide his profession, he responds: “proletarian.” Likewise the collective identity and subjectification of gang members as oppressed peoples signifies a subaltern, decolonial Black politics enmeshed in everyday, grassroots practices of political struggle –including not only the practices of street protests and rebellions, but also the practices of peacemaking.

The 1971 South Bronx peace treaty, between Black and Puerto Rican gangs—as with the later 1992 LA gang truce—demonstrates a collective identification among Black and Brown gang members that can be analyzed through the framework of “Black political thought.” The four-point document of the gang peace treaty, clearly influenced by the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program and the Thirteen Point Program and Platform of the Young Lords Party (themselves responding to the United States Declaration of Independence), models a decolonial Black political imaginary:

“To All Brothers and Sisters: We realize that we are all brothers living in the same neighborhoods and having the same problems. We also realize that fighting amongst ourselves will not solve our common problems. If we are to build up our community to be a better place for our families and ourselves we must work together. We who have signed this treaty pledge peace and unity for all. All of us who have signed this peace will be known from now on as The Family... PEACE BETWEEN ALL GANGS AND A POWERFUL UNITY.”

The gangs of the South Bronx are reconstituted as “The Family,” who are “living in the same neighborhoods and having the same problems.” These collective problems are imposed by the external enemy of the (colonial) police order and as such, the ethos of a “PEACE BETWEEN ALL GANGS AND A POWERFUL UNITY” is a unity against the common enemy of white supremacy. Rancière’s description of the act of “renaming” deployed in the process of subjectification is highly salient here:

“No doubt the demonstration operates more clearly when the names of subjects are distinct from any social group identifiable as such. When the dissidents of the Eastern Bloc adopted the term ‘hooligans’ with which they were stigmatized by the heads of these regimes, when demonstrators in the Paris of 1968 declared, against all police evidence, ‘We are all German Jews,’ they exposed for all to see the gap between political subjectification—defined in the nexus of a logical utterance and an aesthetic manifestation—and any kind of identification.”

The renaming of gangs as “The Family” is also paralleled in the transition from “gangs” to “crews” which marked the rise of the Ghetto Brothers, the Universal Zulu Nation, Grand Master Flash’s Furious Five, the Cold Crush Brothers, and the Rock Steady crew, among many others. This process of “subjectification” is fundamental to the formation of Hip Hop culture, and is also influenced by the “Black Aesthetics” of Black Arts-Black Power, and the cultural-political dimensions of Black liberation movements in the era immediately leading up to hip hop’s birth, which facilitated processes of “subjectification” among the Black proletariat and lumpenproletariat. Drawing from these historical predecessors, in the time period of the late 1980s and early 1990s, rap groups with avowedly radical Black nationalist political messages including Public Enemy, X Clan, and KRS-One’s Boogie Down Productions were at the fore of hip hop culture. The abovementioned artists, as well as Eric B. and Rakim and Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth (among others) were influenced by the Nation of Islam, Five Percenter, and Afrocentric ideologies. These messages and ideologies were crucial to the upswing in Black nationalism and Black consciousness in the time period leading up to the LA gang truce and Rebellion.

Of course, it is important to recognize the gendered dimensions of these aesthetic and cultural formations. In fact, the South Bronx peace treaty document itself begins with a gendered contradiction: “To All Brothers and Sisters: We realize that we are all brothers.” However, while recognizing the male-dominated and at times highly misogynist and homophobic elements of the hip hop culture that arose out of the gang truce, it is also crucial to acknowledge the many important female participants and innovators in Hip Hop culture. Challenges to sexism within early hip hop include the work of emcees Sha Rock, Queen Latifah, Roxanne Shanté, and MC Lyte. Yo-Yo, Ice Cube’s protégé, was one of the most important Black female emcees of this era. Her rap battle with Ice Cube on the track “It’s a Man’s World” on his first album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted is significant in addressing and denaturalizing misogyny in hip hop, another account of a “wrong,” another process of subjectification that specifically addresses the consciousness and experiences of Black women. Her later verse on “Get the Fist” articulates an important framing of Black consciousness in the actions and political claims of the LA Rebellion. However, it is striking that Yo-Yo turns to a male-centric language when articulating collective Black resistance: “I said it's just 'a few good men' when we were fightin / I guess it'll be more good men now we're united / Now all of a sudden they wanna bring in troops.” Even for a Black female emcee, in the moment following the Uprising a discourse or account of Black feminist political praxis is elusive or forestalled.

While not eliding the masculinist tendencies and contradictions in Black Arts, Black Power, and hip hop, we can also note their significance in facilitating the cultural organizing that undergirded the gang truce and the Rebellion, and the account made after-the-fact by gang members, Rebellion participants, and hip hop artists. Rancière argues that, “Politics is the practice whereby the logic of the characteristic of equality takes the form of the processing of a wrong, in which politics becomes the argument of a basic wrong that ties in with some established dispute in the distribution of jobs, roles, and places.” In this way we can view the Rodney King verdict as the representative event that speaks to the larger history of police abuse, violence, and incarceration committed and propagated by the LAPD.

On “Get the Fist,” MC Eiht raps:

“What happened to the drive-by killings?
Ain't nothin poppin no more cause brothers now chillin
From every hood to block to corner to street
Not black-on-black, the other color gets beat
Mh, I guess it's time for brothers to turn the page and
Let out some rage and bang a Caucasian
Geah, MC Eiht got the pale face runnnin scared
Gang of blue, fuck the white, I'm down with the red.”

Here MC Eiht sums up the political content of the “stop the violence movement,” and the gang truce, which advocated for Black people to stand together against white police and state oppression. He also weaves together the colors of blue, white, and red (the aesthetic elements of the American flag), to differentiate the blue and the red of Crips and Bloods from the white of the colonial power structure. The “Gang of Blue” could also refer to the “police gang” of the LAPD, and finally, being “down with the red” can be read as advocating for armed self-defense and revolutionary community organizing.

Black politics challenges the instantiation of the political, what Rancière terms “the police.” Rancière writes, “The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution ‘are’ or ‘are not,’ whether they are speaking or just making a noise.” This question of whether a riot equals “speech” or “noise” is a central political problematic. As such, it should come as no surprise that the 1965 Watts Rebellion (the 1992 LA Rebellion’s precursor) occupies a formative place in the genealogy of Black politics. As Lance Hill argues in The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement:

“Watts transformed black political consciousness unlike any event in modern history. For the first time in the twentieth century, racial politics were explicitly shaped by the threat of black civil violence. More than thirty thousand people participated in the riot. They picked their targets selectively, sparing schools, churches, and public buildings, prompting Bayard Rustin to observe that Watts ‘marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism.’”

Hill argues for the linkages between the Deacons for Defense (the armed Black participants in the purportedly “nonviolent” Civil Rights movement) and the Watts rebellion: “Watts would dramatically affect the movement in Bogalusa, as Bogalusa had affected Watts. Journalists reported that as the rioters pelted motorists and firemen with rocks, they were shouting, ‘This is for Bogalusa!’” Furthermore, the Watts Rebellion had a signal influence on the Black Panther Party. Huey Newton “identifies the urban riots, such as the rebellion in Watts as protopolitical resistance to this occupation and proposes that by arming and organizing the ghetto, black people can obtain power, channeling these protopolitics into an organized military force.”

The Black Panther Party’s efforts to organize the Black lumpenproletariat (including many gang members), and the subsequent repression of Black Power by the State, offers an important prehistory to the South Bronx and LA gang truces. As with the treaty offered to Menenius by the Aventine plebeians (as recounted by Rancière), these peace treaties represent an account of subaltern communities establishing “another order, another partition of the perceptible, by constituting themselves… as speaking beings sharing the same properties as those who deny them these.”

This other “partition of the perceptible” offers an alternative reading of the context that informs the conjuncture of the LA Rebellion, not as a singular, senseless or irrational event—as understood by the police order—but as an account by those whose capacity for political speech was denied. Houston Baker argues that “What many of the black rap artists were and had been producing, for more than a quarter of a century, was a contemporary, reverberant echo of historical black soundings on the scene of violence.” He concludes that “We might actually gain a hearing from rap of what precisely it sounds like to be violently scened in the United States.” In fact, “a hearing of Rodney King can commence with a hearing of rap.” A hearing, an account: What Rodney King was denied. What the Rebellion demanded.

“Works Cited” (in order of appearance in text of the essay):

Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota (1999).

Du Bois, W.E.B. "The Houston Horror," The Crisis, no. 4 [1918]: 188.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “The Other America.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Accessed online: http://www.crmvet.org/docs/otheram.htm

Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900. Bedford/St. Martin’s (2016), 56.

Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. St. Martin’s (2005).

Robinson, Cedric. “Race, Capitalism, and Antidemocracy,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. Ed. Robert Gooding-Williams. Routledge (1993), 75.

Thomas, June Manning. Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1997), 85-87.

Krikorian, Michael, and Greg Krikorian. "Watts Truce Holds Even as Hopes Fade." Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1997.

Zinzun, Michael. "The Gang Truce: A Movement for Social Justice." Social Justice, Vol. 24, No. 4 (70), Losing a Generation: Probing the Myths & Reality of Youth & Violence (Winter 1997), 259-60.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. UNC Press (2000).

Hill, Lance E. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. UNC Press (2004), 235.

Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. UC Press (2013), 67.

Baker, Houston. “Scene… Not Heard,” in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. Ed. Robert Gooding-Williams. Routledge (1993), p. 46.

[Lowkey]
Born alone and die alone
Those words ringin' inside my dome
Best friends are the pen and the microphone
Roamin' until I find my way home
Turn my body cold but my soul is mine
Take a deep breath, and I close my eyes
I will go when I'm supposed to die
But in death I will multiply

[Mai Khalil]
My back’s against the wall
But you can't kill us all
Even if you take my life
Still we will survive
We shall overcome
And the tables will turn
Today I die as one / but as millions I'll return
But as millions I'll return
But as millions I'll return

[Lowkey]
You might take my life
But you can't take my soul
You can't take my soul
You might take my freedom
But you can't take my soul
You can't take my soul

First, a “reprint," from my brief stint as the “Spoken Word Editor” of The Progressive Magazine (online). My tenure only lasted three months: early February-early May 2011 (this was around the time that my last long-term relationship was in the process of falling apart rather spectacularly—prior to my recent experience of same—so one could definitely say that my mental health was not in the best place at that particular moment in time, and that probably the last thing I should’ve been focused on was unpaid “online copywriting” (even if it did come with a cool-sounding title and a minor affiliation with the time-honored Left-wing independent media outlet The Progressive). But, as they say: “hindsight is 20/20” and them’s the breaks…

At any rate, it means I now have this “nifty dispatch” from “Past Isaac” to repost here (with newfound significance in the “Year of Our Lord” 2025). Brief note: You can see that the music video for “Million Man March” was posted to Lowkey’s YouTube channel on Nov 4, 2010, and I wrote the following post in January 2011, in the midst of witnessing that year’s Egyptian Revolution (during the so-called “Arab Spring”). Remarkably, Lowkey, in releasing this song, really (as ever) had his finger “on the pulse” of the times. Here’s an introductory comment from “Past Isaac” (with some slight edits contributed by “Present Isaac”):

I am listening to the song “Million Man March” released last year by UK musicians Lowkey and Mai Khalil, as the eyes of the world are now on Egypt, where the people of the world's largest Arab country are rising up against a military dictatorship which receives $1.3 billion of annual U.S. military aid (second only to Israel). Egyptians are suffering from widespread poverty and unemployment and 30 years of violent repression by the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak's government is also a key ally to the United State's imperial project in the Middle East, and actively collaborates with Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people.

What is occurring in Egypt is not simply an uprising against Mubarak's dictatorship, just like Tunisia's uprising wasn't simply against Ben Ali's. These movements are not, ultimately, about individuals. They are uprisings against the neoliberal economic systems that have impoverished the peoples of these nations (along with the majority of the world) and the neo-colonial occupations and oppressive regimes through which those systems are enforced. Perhaps most importantly these are uprisings in consciousness, where people shake off the power that their oppressors hold over them. In the words of Steve Biko, leader of (Anti-)Apartheid South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement: “the most powerful tool in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.” This week's song embodies the message of the current uprisings: that even in the face of the most oppressive regimes, when the people rise up, their liberation cannot be stopped, even by death.

The song's title and chorus are inspired by a quote (shown at the end of the video) “I will return and I will be millions.” attributed to Túpac Amaru II, a leader of 18th century uprisings by indigenous Aymara and Quechua-speaking peoples against the Spanish Empire in what is now the nation of Bolivia. Túpac Amaru II (born José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera) changed his name to honor his ancestor Túpac Amaru I, the indigenous Andean leader who also organized a rebellion against the Spanish (in the 16th century). For leading these uprisings, Túpac Amaru I was hung to death, while Túpac Amaru II was, likewise executed by the Spanish by being tied to four horses who (unsuccessfully) attempted to pull his body apart, before he was then quartered/dismembered and beheaded. Túpac Amaru II is seen as a forebear to Bolivia's contemporary indigenous movement, a movement which has propelled Evo Morales to the country's presidency. Bolivia, also the place where Che Guevara was executed (and his hands cut off, the same punishment Columbus declared for those Taino who failed to bring him sufficient quantities of gold), embodies the history of revolutionaries who saw their legacy not through the length of their own lives, but in the ways that their actions would influence others to struggle for liberation.

The rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur was named after Túpac Amaru II by his mother Afeni Shakur, herself a member of the Black Panthers, an organization that drew inspiration from the work of Frantz Fanon and the wave of anti-colonial revolutions sweeping the African continent. Afeni Shakur said of her son: “I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world. I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood.” Furthermore, as discussed in the documentary Slingshot Hip Hop, Tupac was one of the foremost influences on DAM (Da Arabian MCs), innovators in the Palestinian hip hop movement that Lowkey and Mai Khalil have been influenced by. DAM saw parallels between Tupac's description of the oppression Black people experience in the ghettos of American cities and the oppression that their people experience living under Israeli apartheid.

Connections such as these, which stretch across history and geographic location, show that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt can be viewed both as part of a global struggle against neo-colonial/neoliberal empire, and in the lineage of the over 500 year resistance to European colonization of the majority of the world. This song reflects the cross-pollination represented in global hip-hop culture and the transnational/transhistorical movements for justice which global hip-hop has the power to reflect and give artistic voice.

In my capacity as The Progressive’s (last, I believe?) online “Spoken Word Editor,” I took over from the longtime homie Josh Healey, a fellow Lefty/anti-Zionist Jewish American poet/spoken word artist (who, among many other illustrious accomplishments, helped found the First Wave Spoken Word and Hip Hop Arts Learning Community while an undergraduate organizer at the University of Wisconsin—Madison). Side note: In other funny/uncanny parallels, Josh’s wife Esther is (like my ex, “A”—who I described as “my anti-Zionist Jewish/Israeli-American college girlfriend” in a previous Studying Up post, “Night of the Remix: My Long Poem”) a professional midwife, an (admittedly remarkable) career that “A” was embarking upon when we moved to Detroit together. Somewhat tangentially, here’s a (rather sad, but, I think meaningful) poem I wrote years later about that time in our lives (thanks to The Cortland Review for publishing it):

The Moon is a Moan

over quiet winter
streets paved with unplowed

snow. inside our bed, the cheap
mattress reveals a furrow

down its middle that we roll
towards. we fall asleep turned

away from each other's face,
watching the peeling walls.

winter of loud words
raised against ceilings,

slammed doors and snow
boots. better cold than in

love when this is what love will
do: turn the neighborhood

into a moonscape
where our voices echo

until a call (miraculous)
is heard and we drive

to the midnight hospital. she
is learning to deliver babies. this,

her first. she hurries into the opening
hospital doors. i meander the car

through streets of steaming
manhole covers, veer away from

potholes, follow the moon down MLK,
Grand River, Joy Road. until,

past downtown's glow, the moon
becomes the mouth of a mother

giving birth. moon of sacrament,
moon of departure.

train whistle in the distance, or
wind. does it make a difference?

the moon grows full
before it's extinguished.

In maybe what’s a story for another time, it’s interesting to note that I met my past two long-term partners through friends of mine who are (both) Palestinian women. “A” through Dina Omar (mentioned in previous posts) and “G” through T (who I, in turn, met through “A,” because they had been part of a doula collective together… and, after “A” and I broke up and she moved back to California, T became my next-door neighbor in Detroit’s Woodbridge neighborhood). Are my semi-pseudonymous single initial names getting confusing enough yet? LOL 🙃. I think what I’m trying to say is that I owe the two most significant relationships/romantic partnerships of my life to close friendships with Palestinian women, so that has to count for something, somewhere, someway, somehow.

On that note, I’ve been reflecting (relevant to several aspects of “our story”) on the fact that there are crucially important revolutionary communities, “socialities,” and networks of resistance that have been brought into being through+by the historical Palestinian movement, cause, & struggle. This is something that I’ve personally experienced since I was an undergraduate (& maybe even before, in middle school-high school, when I first began unlearning Zionism via my initial encounters with Palestinian narratives, even before I knew/became friends and comrades with Palestinians personally). It feels significant to acknowledge that Palestine/Palestinians have been a political “guide star” for me, as for so many people the world round. “We” owe much to Palestine, and that is a debt “we” (including as anti-Zionist Jews) must honor and hold ourselves/each other accountable to.

Back to Mr. Healey: Josh now co-hosts the podcast “Friday Night Semites” with the Palestinian American comedian Sammy Obeid (according to his Wikipedia page, more accurately/comprehensively Obeid is “Lebanese-Palestinian-Syrian-Italian-American”). I still have (one of multiple contact entries for) Josh’s number saved in my phone as “Josh Big Baby Moses” (his old nickname, not my own invention 🤣).

I also found this IG video by Sammy Obeid on the nonsensical/racist origins + usage of the term “Semitic” to be quite illuminating (/disturbing), as well as more than a little funny (“gotta laugh to keep from crying”):

https://genius.com/Logic-peoples-army-spectator-lyrics

Insha'Allah we all can see
That God is the goodness in you and me
No religion has ownership
See, the Quran and the Bible and the Torah
were all wrote with ink

https://genius.com/Lowkey-relatives-lyrics

Pain is the same fam, it's all relative
They cried the same tears, you cried for your relatives
And one way or another, my brother we’re all relatives
Home is where the heart is, yeah that's where it is

^A song whose music video ends with the quote, attributed to Henry Kissinger:
“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

[Which reminds me of the time when, while on a coffee break one evening during an MFA workshop, one of my classmates mentioned the “funny anecdote” about how they’d once worked catering for an event where Henry Kissinger was present (he was still alive at the time when I was doing my MFA…), and I joked: “Did you try slipping some poison into his champagne?” Whereupon my classmate immediately gave me a terribly confused, aghast look…]

As they say, “the good die young”:

Speaking of (unfortunately) “ever-timely” songs:

https://genius.com/2pac-changes-lyrics

And still I see no changes, can't a brother get a little peace?
It's war on the streets and the war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty
They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me

Yet, in spite of everything, as the OG poet-friend Maddy Clifford AKA MADlines (who I first met back in 2006, when she and Hollis Wong-Wear performed an incredible “duet” group piece on the Brave New Voices finals stage @ the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, representing Youth Speaks Seattle—Legends! 🙌🏻) just posted:

Other places to view Maddy’s work:
Maddy on Creative Wildfire: https://www.creativewildfire.org/maddy-madlines-clifford
(on Substack):

Interview with a Muse

A community for artists when curiosity is contraband; lets alchemize disconnect and despair into solidarity and world-making.

By Maddy Clifford

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@madlines
IG: https://www.instagram.com/mad.lines
FB: https://www.facebook.com/maddyclifford1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MADlinesTV

And Hollis just dropped a GENIUS brand-new music video:

Other places to view Hollis’ work:
Hollis’ website: https://www.hww.work/
on Substack:

What Only You Can Do

Reflections, conversations, and exercises to inspire creativity, community building and social change. Written by multi-disciplinary artist and creative strategist Hollis Wong-Wear.

By hollis wong-wear

IG: https://www.instagram.com/holliswongwear
FB: https://www.facebook.com/holliswongwear/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS3brQZ6D0WGxFRxCE2tv1w/about

+ Here’s some more Seattle (+ “Seattle diaspora”) brilliance:

Further context for this post’s ruminations…

This past weekend I went on a bike camping trip with two dear friends (and fellow recent “divorcées,” though only one of us was actually legally married/divorced). This was my first time going bike camping and it was a beautiful, though no doubt challenging, experience. Coincidentally, my older brother Max (who I’ve talked about previously as one of my role models—from the very beginning—in life: politically, intellectually, and in terms of his character and the way he carries himself in the world) last week attempted the most grueling bicycle race he’s ever competed in (across decades of such feats): a 300+ mile mountain bike race through Colorado and Utah where each entrant is responsible for fending for themselves entirely, i.e. they carry all their own food + supplies, chose where and when to sleep (mostly bedding down by the side of the road), when to ride (Max chose to do so primarily at night, because the temperatures were in the triple digits, i.e. 100+ degrees Fahrenheit, the whole time). Ultimately, Max made (what I think was a very wise decision) to withdraw from the race along with what ended up being over half the other racers who’d entered. From the online leaderboard it looks like he was one of the last to withdraw, after having already traveled a considerable portion of the route, but due to dehydration and riding the borderline-edge of heatstroke for multiple days he finally chose to bow out. For which I have just as much respect as for him entering the race in the first place (and completing as much of it as he actually did). Considering this is my brother who used to hop freight trains across the country (after he dropped out of UC Santa Cruz), en route to attending anti-globalization/counter-WTO & IMF mobilizations across the country (and beyond—he was a street medic during the April 2001 anti-“Summit of the Americas” protests in Quebec City, which were not quite on the scale of the “Battle of Seattle”—but somewhat in the proverbial “vicinity”).

https://genius.com/Blue-scholars-50-thousand-deep-lyrics

They threatened to arrest us, we pushed back and then
A hail of rubber bullets hit teens and old men
I admit, had to split when the first gas canisters hit
Felt it burn in my eyes, nose, and lips
They tried to blame it on the anarchists, garbage
I was there, I'll tell you right now the pigs started it
But they distort it in the news
Talkin' bout stompin' down Niketown wearing their shoes

…

Globalization is the root of the pain
Made the reason that they left and the reason that we came
Catch my breath, blood pulsates my brain
And they called it a riot?
Huh, I call it an uprising
And they call this a riot?
But nah, I call it an uprising
And they call this a riot?
Nah man fuck that, I'ma call it a uprising

Anyway, I say this to make the point that my older brother, while infinitely more hardcore than I am, has also (by his own admission) matured and wised up, at least somewhat (and “wizened” too lol, haven’t we all? 😂), though he’s still an inspiration as far as attempting new challenges and pushing myself to face the unknown/attempt the severely intimidating… (my cousin Zoe as well, who over the past few years has dived into long-distance biking in the Metro Detroit/SE Michigan region, in ways that really speak to a kind of “Miller stubbornness” that many in our family exhibit, mostly for the better, though sometimes for worse). At any rate, this past weekend, me + two friends biked ~40 miles each way up to Illinois Beach State Park and back. And, along with the two training rides we did (both in the opposite direction, south all the way to the Illinois-Indiana border) in preparation for this bike camping trip, I’ve biked around 175 miles in the past two weeks, which is pretty outrageous lmao... It helps that I pushed myself/was pushed to ride alongside friends who are (like my brother) considerably more hardcore than I am. Though I’m proud of myself for being able to hang with them (to the extent that I did). While they could have made even better time if they were setting the pace without me, I don’t think I slowed them down too much, and, ultimately, we made the journey together.

While I’m genuinely proud of this accomplishment, and I hope to continue pushing myself to build (further) strength and discipline in this sphere of activity, the main reason I bring this up (in addition to fleshing out the “worldbuilding” of this “Substack”/experimental writing project), is that I was mostly off the internet and social media over the weekend and arrived back in Chicago last night (Sunday night) to the news that there was a full-blown uprising against ICE (our very own American Gestapo) taking place in Los Angeles, at the same time that Israel was stopping and kidnapping the activists aboard the Madleen Gaza aid flotilla (I remember well the 10 activists murdered by Israeli soldiers aboard the Mavi Marmara during the Freedom Flotilla attempting to break Israel’s siege. of Gaza back in 2010) and updates on the North African “resilience convoy” consisting of thousands of diplomats, humanitarians, and solidarity activists traveling in a 100-vehicle convoy with participants from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Egypt, currently attempting to deliver aid to Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, attempting to break Israel’s siege that is starving millions of Gazans. I watched the video of a young Gazan boy (you can see the starvation on his face) whose mother had just been murdered while attempting to seek aid from the nightmarish (+ Orwellianly titled) “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” and I just lost it…

To think that any single story of the tens upon tens (upon hundreds) of thousands of Gazans murdered, exterminated, imprisoned, tortured, starved, maimed, orphaned by Israel, if stared directly in the face, is enough to bring me (and I’m sure any one of us who has not yet been robbed of our souls) to tears is an overwhelming, and blunt, fact. Especially given the sheer magnitude of human suffering that we can only attempt to extrapolate from the violence, pain, and out/rage contained in every single one of the lives irreparably shattered and/or destroyed by the unceasing Zionist violence that has taken place over Israel’s past year-and-a-half-long genocide. Furthermore, this gaping chasm of despair is practically unfathomable when “scaled up” to the actual size of this catastrophe (not even thinking historically to the 75+ years of ongoing Nakba—see, for example, the article “Towards Nakba as a Legal Concept”). Even just reading the list of names of Palestinian children alone who have been killed by Israel over the course of this genocide is enough to shake me to the core of whatever even remains of my/our shared humanity after witnessing (or just attempting to conceptualize or “wrap one’s head around”) such dehumanizing and spiritually disfiguring violence:"

https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2024/israel-war-on-gaza-10000-children-killed/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/11/20/an-a-z-of-the-children-israel-killed-in-gaza

On a somewhat different, though related, note—I recommend reading ’s latest article:

Ken Klippenstein

False Flags

As I’ve followed the Los Angeles demonstrations, one voice has been missing: those of the actual protestors…

Read more

a year ago · 359 likes · 30 comments · Ken Klippenstein

“They’re terrorizing U.S. citizens,” one man said of law enforcement’s deployment of tear gas to disperse the protests. The clear emphasis on how this affects people in general — not just immigrants — surprised me.

Another protester, a black woman named Alex Walls from Louisiana, told CNN that the deportations were “disturbing” to children. “You’re separating people from their kids, families, and whatnot,” she said. “Ya’ll got kids don’t understand what’s going on, seeing this going on. It’s very disturbing.”

Others said explicitly that their motive was to impede the deportations, like Ron Gochez, who also told CNN: “ For every single minute that we were here resisting against the Border Patrol, that was time that they were not out deporting people in our community.”

(To be continued…)

In solidarity,

—I

So, continuing my “procrastivity,” here are more memories from college (and prior), along with a few intellectual vantage points for thinking about the project/practice of “Studying Up.”

———

Several of my housemates during sophomore year of undergrad (including some people I went to high school with, before we wound up going to “Cal” together) took Laura Nader (sister to Ralph)’s widely recommended course on “Controlling Processes” (i.e. those “processes” which the proverbial “System” uses to control us). I heard a lot of “good things” about the class (funny thing to say, given the topic), though I never took it myself. Later in undergrad I came across Nader’s essay on “Studying Up” and it’s stuck with me ever since (clearly, since it’s from this essay that my “Substack” takes its title—more on that, below).

Related by association in my memory: The day my mom took me out of school in Fall 2000 (that would have been seventh grade) to go watch (Laura’s brother) Ralph Nader give a speech during his Presidential campaign running on the Green Party ticket. Nader gave his speech at the El Rey Theater (which was, at the time, a somewhat dilapidated historic movie theater) downtown, close to the CSU Chico campus. I don’t remember much of what was said by Nader, but I remember feeling pretty pretty cool (as Bob Odenkirk would say) that I got to be there. At some point I found out that my Dad was mad at my mom (they were recently divorced) for taking me out of school to go see Nader speak (and later that year voting for him and not Al Gore, never mind that we lived in the solidly blue state of California). Not long afterwards I remember reading a storyline in Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks (comic strip, before the TV show) that in some ways resembled this (real-life) plotline, but instead featuring the parents of the Freeman family’s neighbors the DuBoises. ComicBookResources.com (in the article “10 Best The Boondocks Comics, Ranked,”) tells me that this particular strip was titled “Tom Dubois Is Mad His Wife Sarah Voted for Ralph Nader in 2000,” published November 6, 2000:

“Tom Dubois, a staunch Democrat in an interracial marriage, wasn’t happy when his wife, Sarah DuBois, voted for the Green Party candidate in the 2000 presidential election. He called her a “hussy” for her lack of loyalty to the Democratic Party. As a consequence, Sarah kicked Tom out of the house. She only allowed him to return home after Huey offered to be a mediator between them as they discussed their marital (and electoral) problems. Some Democrats blamed Ralph Nader for Al Gore losing the election to George W. Bush. They charged that if the votes cast for Nader in Florida had been cast for Gore instead, then he would’ve won. While the names and details change, this anger among two-party voters toward third-party voters persists. It’s just another way the Boondocks comic remains relevant despite its commentary being about the current events of yesteryear.”

———

In college, the house I shared with friends from my hometown would eventually be called affectionately “Milvia House,” renowned for its backyard firepit. The landlords, as I previously mentioned, were two older gay couples who had joined together in a “quadruple” marriage (at one point I attended their joint wedding ceremony, at the Trinity Methodist Church, whose building was home for many years to the Berkeley Free Clinic). Described online: “It’s a massive structure whose upper floors have long been in disuse due to seismic concerns.”

At one point I went over to their house in North Oakland for Shabbat dinner and one of the men, who I’d met at Torah Study sessions for Beyt Tikkun (held at Michael Lerner’s house in the Berkeley Hills), after finding out that I did “spoken word,” asked me to read a slam poem at the dinner table. He told me afterwards that I “should become a rabbi.” I also vaguely remember him trying to set me up with his niece who was there? Extremely awkward, lol… The other thing that sticks out in my memory is him telling me about the Enneagram, the New Age personality test that sorts people into three spiritual/intuitive “centers.” These include Sensing or Body-Instinctual, Feeling or Heart-Emotional, Thinking or Head-Intellectual. Within each of these “centers,” there are three subtypes: for Sensing, these are The Protector (8), The Mediator (9), and The Perfectionist (1); for Feeling, these are The Giver (2), The Performer (3), and The Romantic (4); and for Thinking, these are: The Observer (5), The Loyal Skeptic (6), and The Epicure (7). Lastly, it is believed that the Enneagram is based on the spiritual teachings of the Greek-Russian mystic/cult leader (depending on one’s perspective) George Gurdjieff (about whom, more in future posts).

Three Takes on the project of “Studying Up”:

1) Studying “Up”: e.g. studying hierarchies of power: institutional, social, political. Riffing on Laura Nader (sister to Ralph) and her (in)famous 1972 essay “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives From Studying Up.”

“What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty? Studying ‘up’ as well as ‘down’ would lead us to ask many ‘common sense’ questions in reverse. Instead of asking why some people are poor, we would ask why other people are so affluent? … If, in reinventing anthropology, we were principally studying the most powerful strata of urban society, our view of the ghetto might be largely in terms of those relationships larger than the ghetto. We would study the banks and the insurance industry that mark out areas of the city to which they will not sell insurance or extend credit… Slums are technically illegal; if building codes and other municipal laws were enforced, our slums would not be slums (if enforcement were successful), or they might be called by another name, which would indicate that they were results of white-collar crime.”

2) Studying “Up”: e.g. studying “knowledge as power.” AKA covering our bases: “Study struggle; study, then struggle.” As Grace and Jimmy Boggs would say, it’s important to always think dialectically: “There is no ‘final struggle,’ no ultimate unity, no ‘promised land’ in which we just sit back and reap the benefits of past struggles.” Or: if “History is a Weapon” then beam me up, Scotty!

“History isn't what happened, but a story of what happened. And there are always different versions, different stories, about the same events… Some histories tell us that our leaders, at least, have always tried to do right for everyone. Others remark that the emperors don't have the slaves' best interests at heart… The very selection of which histories to teach in a society shapes our view of how what is came to be and, in turn, what we understand as possible… Those who choose, either following a set agenda or guided by hidden prejudices, serve their interests. Their interests could be to continue this world as it now stands or to make a new world… History is just one tool to shape our understanding of our world. And every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.”

3) Studying “Up”: e.g. studying the “power of spirituality”: Or, “As above, so below.” Aptly discussed in Mark Singleton’s article “Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism in the Early Twentieth Century” (International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2007):

“Popular notions of evolutionary biology and Social Darwinism are pervasive in the writings of modern Yoga authors. Nowhere are they more apparent than in the Theosophical writings of Annie Besant (1847-1933), which represent one of the most significant early attempts to package Yoga for the modern individual. Theosophy, indeed, might reasonably be portrayed as the main contender for Vivekananda's title (bestowed by De Michelis 2004) of original progenitor of a properly modern Yoga…Yoga, for Besant, was a way to speed up evolution, a voluntaristic override function of nature's stately processes, much as Nietzsche's ‘self-overcoming’ is also a conscious rebuttal of Darwin's passive evolutionary schema. Using the metaphor of the gardener, Besant asserts that Yoga is a way of weeding out the undesirable elements of character, ‘eliminating those that are against his aim’ in order that ‘the evolution of the people shall be quickened’ (1927: 37). It is the catalyst for the evolution of the Mother Race, a higher form of civilization, and the equivalent of ‘what used to be called the Aryan Race’ (Besant 1927: 44). With utmost earnestness, Besant (for example, 1959) proclaims the coming of the ‘super-man’ through Yoga practice, adapting to an Indian context the cherished Nietzschean concept of her Fabian colleague Shaw. That Besant's Yoga incorporates significant aspects of benevolent eugenics and Nietzscheanism is, if nothing else, evidence of the transfer ability of these ideological items and the facility with which they are naturalized within modern Yoga. The Theosophist and Helena P. Blavatsky disciple Karl Haushofer's imputed schooling of Adolf Hitler in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine while they were both in Landsberg prison in 1924 (Carr 1978: 93), as well as Nazism's continued fascination with Theosophy, are certain of the more sinister aspects of this multilateral transferability that will not directly concern us now.”

I do (unfortunately) have more to say about the “artist” known as “Kosha Dillz,” but (likely due to the utterly grim state of things, and how much writing about “Kosha” is beginning to turn my stomach) I couldn’t bring myself to finish off that particular storyline just yet. We’ll have to wait til Friday to “Study Up” towards higher ground.

So instead, I’m going to “riff” (i.e. “Procrastivate” from writing about Kosha Dillz, which is itself my “procrastivation” from my dissertation...) by, first, dropping a link to a mix I’ve had on repeat in recent days. This recommendation comes courtesy of Rahul, who some Dear Readers may immediately recognize as a “friend from college.” [Match Cut]: Friends From College is also the name of an (imho) thoroughly under-rated Netflix comedy series (which includes a stellar performance by Keegan-Michael Key, from the aforementioned Key & Peele). My favorite line in the show (and maybe just one of my favorite lines, period) takes place when a character, realizing that he forgot his Fitbit, goes home to retrieve it—in the process stumbling onto a scandalous situation which he would have been otherwise completely oblivious to—and afterwards, upon picking up his Fitbit, listlessly delivers the perfectly under-played bit: “I’ll never get those steps back…”

I could (and maybe eventually will) write an entire essay on that single line, but for now, suffice it to say: “You can’t step in the same river twice” (thank u, Heraclitus 🙏) but also: “pics or it didn’t happen.” i.e. it’s only “real” if it’s been recorded (or better yet gamified).

Anyway, the above mix ^^^ is 🔥🔥🔥.

<Side Note: Typing these words it strikes me that this “Substack” is also a virtual representation of the psychogeographic/mental “space” where all my friends and acquaintances congregate—as you are, in fact, doing right now, Dear Reader(s)—even if you’ve never met “IRL.” It can be thrilling (though also overwhelming) to think about the multitude of interpersonal interconnections/cross-pollinations that each of us carries and embodies: the “infinity of [social] traces” we all carry. “Infinity of traces” being a phrase from one of my favorite quotes (by Antonio Gramsci), that I first heard via the artist (also a friend through Youth Speaks and the Allied Media Conference—who I haven’t spoken to in years but hope he’s doing well) Evan Bissell’s powerful multimedia history of the US prison-industrial complex, A Knotted Line, the curriculum resources for which I and several other teaching artists once used as the basis for a social justice media education residency through Detroit Future Schools (now People in Education). For another iteration of this project (Detroit Future Schools, not Knotted Line), check out the article I co-authored with my friend/colleague Danielle titled “Me and the D: (Re)Imagining Literacy and Detroit’s Future” about the year-long residency we co-taught together (her as a HS English teacher, me as the co-teaching artist) which is still hands down the best teaching experience I’ve ever been a part of—our article is available over at English Journal via the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) website, an organization, who for some reason (utter, unrepentant pettiness) I find myself on some subterranean internal level still bitter at for not awarding me an essay prize that I was a finalist for in high school 🙃😂 rant (and shameless academic article plug) over>

Rahul, to continue what I was talking about before I got derailed by that series of tangents, was (along with a number of friends/comrades in undergrad) an ASUC student senator who took part in passing UC Berkeley’s first successful student government BDS bill in 2010 (which was then immediately vetoed by the student government President, who, of course, belonged to the rival political party “Student Action” 👎).

Below I’m embedding the video to Israelism, a documentary about the indoctrination (don’t call it “brainwashing!”) of young American Jews into Zionism/“loving Israel” which I’ve heard at one point features footage from these events (the UC Berkeley student senate meetings leading up to the BDS vote), in order to narrate the political evolution of Simone Zimmerman (profiled as one of the documentary’s two protagonists). Zimmerman, while a UC Berkeley undergraduate, was a pro-Israel activist (and spoke against the BDS bill during the public deliberations) before later becoming one of the co-founders of the Jewish American activist group IfNotNow, whose raison d'etre is organizing against the Israeli Occupation/Apartheid regime. I’m including this video in part because I still haven’t watched it yet (though “I’ve heard good things”) and this will likely motivate me to finally do so (perhaps I’ll even discuss my “reaction” later). The film is available in full via Al Jazeera (“funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government,” though let’s not get started on the CIA…)’s YouTube channel:

Returning to this post’s main “thread”: As it happens, Rahul is a fellow alumnus of not only the student political party CalSERVE, but also CalSlam and Cal Students 4 Hip Hop… (I’ve now said “Cal” enough times that I’m starting to feel like Oski the Bear):

“Fun” fact: the California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus), which serves as the inspiration for both California’s state flag (“The Bear Flag”) as well as the name of UC Berkeley’s sport teams, the “California Golden Bears,” was already hunted to extinction by the 1920s. “Less than 75 years after the discovery of gold in 1848, almost every grizzly bear in California had been tracked down and killed.”

According to Wikipedia, though Berkeley adopted the name “Golden Bears” in 1895, “Oski the Bear” debuted as Berkeley’s sports mascot on September 25, 1941 (approximately two decades after the “California golden bear” had officially gone extinct). That day, “Oski” (the fake bear which, like many sports mascots, became the performative “stand-in” for a population, human or non-human, which was the target of settler extermination) premiered at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theatre (the same locale where I once hopped a fence to sneak into the end of a Paul Simon concert, scraping my knee pretty badly in the process, though miraculously not getting caught 🤷).

Anyhoo… speaking of SETTLER COLONIALISM:

As discussed in books like Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad by Manu Karuka and Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris, the late 19th century, with its advances in transportation technology (the railroad/steam engine, and steam powered naval transport), colonial expansion stretching around the world (the “sun never setting” on the British empire, and so on), led not only to the conquest/pillage/capture (by Western/imperial/settler colonial nation states and corporations) of economic markets and natural resources previously belonging to colonized peoples, but also a series of crises for Capital (and its racial-colonial-imperial system of rule) that would eventually culminate in the “world scale” inter-imperial conflicts soon to come (in the 20th century). It does not seem insignificant to consider that this is also the global (geo)political context out of which Zionism arose as a political movement. (I’ll return to this point in the future… for now, flagging it as a “topic of interest”).

For now: “The Rhodes Colossus,” an 1892 cartoon depicts the British-South African mining magnate Cecil Rhodes standing over the continent of Africa. Writing to Rhodes in 1902, as discussed by Tom Pessah (another friend/comrade from UC Berkeley) in this article for the Left-wing Israeli online publication +972 Magazine, “Under Zionism, Jewish lives have always mattered more”, Theodor Herzl said the following:

“You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”

Palestine… it is Something Colonial is also the title of the Palestinian American decolonial/Ethnic Studies scholar (and a co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine) Hatem Bazian’s book on this very topic:

In centering Palestine’s modern history around settler-colonial discourses, Hatem Bazian offers a theoretical basis for understanding Palestine while avoiding the pitfalls of the internationally supported “peace process” that, on the one hand, affirms settler-colonial rights and, on the other hand, problematizes the colonialized and dispenses with the ramifications of the colonial project.

re: “the sun never setting on the British Empire,” in the pithy words of the (“cult classic”) SLC Punk:

Back to “our narrative”… In addition to being friends (and quasi-housemates during my senior year, when Rahul and several other mutual friends lived in the same house as my then-partner), he and I also overlapped in New York for a couple years and got into a number of adventures along with a few other “friends from college”… including one especially memorable night spent reciting poems about the Brooklyn Bridge on top of the Brooklyn Bridge…

However, one adventure from our friend group’s NYC-era that I wasn’t there for was going to see Cornel West open for Bob Avakian (leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party—definitely a cult—who was “returning from exile” or some such bs…) at the historic Riverside Church (where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” speech, which to my understanding was largely drafted by the late great Vincent Harding, who I’ll always remember seeing speak on a panel with Grace Lee Boggs at the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, right after I moved there). Supposedly the Cornel West/Bob Avakian event at the Riverside Church wasn’t very interesting, but I wish I’d witnessed it, if only so I could now give a first-person account.

Side note, while recently listening to the audiobook version of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, I was stupefied at the number of times Bob Avakian makes an appearance, as an avatar of the “white New Left”—go figure.

A time that I was present to watch Cornel West speak alongside the RCP (though not Bob Avakian) was at Union Square on the night (in 2014) when the Grand Jury announced that it was refusing to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown. I remember Dr. West speaking with righteous, clarifying, even prophetic outrage (though I was left puzzled as to why he was associating himself with the RCP). [Foreshadowing]: Cornel West will, rather strangely, make an appearance later in the Studying Up narrative, since it was actually his Presidential campaign announcement (almost exactly two years ago, on June 5, 2023) which most directly triggered the chain of events leading to me writing this Substack… a story that is much too complicated and bizarre to summarize at this particular juncture because that would be jumping the gun.

Cornel West also co-authored the extremely 1990s-titled Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America with Michael Lerner, who was the rabbi of a Lefty Jewish congregation Beyt Tikkun that I attended in Berkeley for my first couple years of undergrad. It was at this congregation where I met the “quadruple couple” of older gay men who ended up being my (and a number of friends, including several I’d gone to high school with) landlords during our Sophomore year, in what became known as “Milvia House” (I’ll probably return to this nostalgic reminiscence another time, including the extremely Berkeley memory of attending our landlords’ quadruple wedding, which I remember as being quite tender and moving, though I was, and still am, somewhat puzzled by their relationship—and once again, as with everything on my “Substack” I am not making any of this up lmao).

(I just noticed that this version of the book even features “a Post-O.J., Post-Million Man March Epilogue” 🤣🤣🤣). Smdh…

Michael Lerner’s politics were in many ways fairly left-wing (though he was, with regards to Israel, ultimately a Liberal Zionist, committed to dying on the hill of a non-existent “two state solution”). That said, he was, at the very least, decidedly anti-war/anti-Occupation. One year he invited Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and later wrote a great memoir about it, to speak at High Holidays services, which was both incredibly moving and also pretty frightening. Ellsberg was speaking about the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping which at the time felt like an absolutely dystopian nightmare, though in retrospect, post-Edward Snowden/WikiLeaks, and the recent news of Trump’s contracting Peter Thiel’s Palantir to create a national “Big Brother” database feels almost quaint.

(To be Continued…)

• I)

• II)

———
Scheherazade’s Dream
by Isaac Ginsberg Miller

Did she? In daylight, after the murderer
king went about his day, and she
collapsed into sleep that was not.
Even in her body’s withdrawal
descending deeper beneath the palace.

But did she dream? In the scant hours
between djinns and castles of basalt,
one-eyed butchers and thrice-spared merchants,
did her mind dare to wander,
to imagine bathing in a pool of salt,
washing her skin with a cool blue stone?

Enough has been said of the body’s ability
to heal. What of our ability to survive
without healing? To cradle the snout
of the beast to our breast and sing
him to sleep. To begin the story again.

———
First Tale
by Rachida Madani (translated by Marilyn Hacker)

I
What city and what night
since it’s night in the city
when a woman and a train station argue over
the same half of a man who is leaving.
He is young, handsome
he is leaving for a piece of white bread.
She is young, beautiful as a springtime           
                                                                                      cluster
trying to flower for the last time
for her man who is leaving.
But the train arrives
but the branch breaks
but suddenly it’s raining in the station                                                                        
                                                                        in the midst of spring.
And the train emerges from all directions
it whistles and goes right through the woman
the whole length of her.
Where the woman bleeds, there will never be spring                                                                                                            
                                                                                                      again.
In the night, in her head, under the pillow
trains pass filled with men                    
                    filled with mud
and they all go through her                                       
                                               the whole length of her.
How many winters will pass, how many snowfalls
before the first bleeding letter
before the first mouthful of white bread?

———
Scheherazade
by Richard Siken

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake                                                                             
                                                                        and dress them in warm clothes again.                         
      How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.                
                 It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,        
       it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,                       
                       how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                            to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means                         
       we’re inconsolable.                                                     
                                                 Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.                                                                                     
                                                                               Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

———
So You Think You Know Scheherazad
by Mohja Kahf

So you think you know Scheherazad
So you think she tells you bedtime stories
that will please and soothe,
invents fairy creatures
who will grant you wishes

Scheherazad invents nothing
Scheherazad awakens
the demons under your bed
They were always there
She locks you in with them

And when you struggle to escape from them,
and when you run
to the very end of the corridor, you find
that it leads only to another corridor

And every door you open is a false door
And suddenly you find yourself in a room
within a room within a room within a room
and suddenly you find yourself forced to meet them,
the demons she unleashes,
the terrors that come from
within you and within her
And suddenly Scheherazad is nowhere to be found
but the stories she unlocked go on and on––

this is the power of the telling of a story––
And suddenly you find yourself
swimming through the sea to the Reef of Extremity,
flying to the Valley of All That Is Possible,
walking barefoot on a blade
over the Chasm of Flames,
landing in a field where you wrestle with Iblis,

whose form changes into your lover,
into Death, into knowledge, into God,
whose face changes into Scheherazad––

And suddenly you find yourself.

———
Scheherazade Sleeps Through the Executions
by Saeed Jones

There are so many rooms inside her
& just as many locked doors, but sometimes

when the silence snaps shut, she hears the soft
thud. Another body falling onto the white

marble floor of her sleep. All night they fall.
She doesn’t remember when the bodies started

disappearing from their lives & arriving
inside her, gagged & hooded, but she wakes

a little heavier each morning, a night’s worth
of bullet casings tangled in her hair.

The King just now easing back
into bed beside her.

———
The Book of a Thousand Eyes [A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding]
by Lyn Hejinian (1941 – 2024)

A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding
The gap left by things which have already happened
Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do
But that. Dreams are like ghosts achieving ghosts’ perennial goal
Of revoking the sensation of repose. It’s terrible
To think we write these things for them, to tell them
Of our life—that is, our whole life. Along comes a dream
Of a machine. Why? What is being sold there? How is the product
emitted?
It must have been sparked by a noise, the way the very word “spark”
emits a brief picture. Is it original? Inevitable?
We seem to sleep so as to draw the picture
Of events that have already happened so we can picture
Them. A dream for example of a procession to an execution site.
How many strangers could circle the space while speaking of nostalgia
And of wolves in the hills? We find them
Thinking of nothing instead—there’s no one to impersonate, nothing
To foresee. It’s logical that prophesies would be emitted
Through the gaps left by previous things, or by the dead
Refusing conversation and contemplating beauty instead.
But isn’t that the problem with beauty—that it’s apt in retrospect
To seem preordained? The dawn birds are trilling
A new day—it has the psychical quality of “pastness” and they are trailing
It. The day breaks in an imperfectly continuous course
Of life. Sleep is immediate and memory nothing.

———

After some unfortunate technical difficulties (Isaac forgot to plug in the laptop that was hosting our Zoom call… womp womp 😢 What can I say? It was Sunday, the Lord’s Day & our minds were on loftier things 😇 😊) the conversation continued for another ~50 minutes. (Some might even say that this was when shit got real).

We took it as a “sign” that the episode’s 2nd half was (pre)destined to be Studying Up’s first (of many 🤞) Premium Content™ posts/episodes. If you’re excited about the project, this is a great way to support our nascent (but growing) platform + go deeper “down the rabbit hole.” 🐇🐰⏰ To hear the second half of the episode you can become a Paid Subscriber™! (or use your “Substack free subscriber single use unlock” 🪄✨ to check out this sample of things yet to come).

Read more

Speaking of Content (Warning): This episode includes discussions of abuse (of various kinds), cults, mental illness, state violence, genocide and/as suicide.

See timestamps below for a sense of the different sections/topics covered:

Intro music: “Like Water” by MEDL4 Feat. Byear (AKA a slightly younger Felipe)
1:10: “Compulsive Recording”
3:40: “Teen Talk”
7:00: “My Long Poem” + “Being in a Poetry Cult”
10:30: “The Power of Belief” AKA “Being a Belieber”
13:30: “On Integrity” (referencing a Substack post by Fatimah Asghar re: Gaza and Kashmir, life + “ethics” in times of genocide)
19:00: “Normalizing the indefensible” (referencing clip of Israeli MP Zvi Sukkot on IG)
24:00: Living in an era where images “no longer endure”/collective memory loss
27:00: critically studying QAnon (referencing the podcast QAnon Anonymous)
29:00: re: “Spiritual Warfare”
34:00: re: “Spiritual Abuse”
39:00: Material Need/“Take the Best and Leave the Rest”
44:00: Mental illness = vulnerability to joining cults
49:00: “Talking the Talk” vs. “Walking the Walk” of healing trauma
52:00: “The Poetry Cult” goes to Brave New Voices
57:00: Children doing emotional labor for adults
1:00:00: “Hurt people hurt people.”
1:02:48: Recording cuts out. (whoops!)

Today’s post follows a slightly different format. It’s written as a more formal journalistic/opinion piece with less of the “electronic literature” elements found in previous installments of Studying Up. Though I hope you’ll still see connections to the ground we’ve covered thus far, this is also an attempt to more directly tackle the urgency of the current political moment. This follows some of the intellectual moves I made in my last post, in order to “study up”/”scale up” from personal or pop cultural anecdotes towards a more structural analysis.

—I

The Cross Becomes an Imperial Boomerang

Recent events have set alarm bells ringing in the mind of anyone with the slightest memory or knowledge of the 20th century's archetypal, “orthodox” fascist regimes. The sudden kidnapping of people off the street and from their homes by (undercover) US government agents targeting students for expressing public solidarity with Palestine marks a sharp escalation towards overt and unmasked fascism in American "domestic" political life. The deportation proceedings against student visa holders (and in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, green card holders), is accompanied by even broader attempts to criminalize, hunt down, deport, and revoke visas for anyone who has expressed (ostensibly constitutionally protected) political speech supporting the Palestinian people or criticizing the numerous war crimes committed by the Israeli military. This dovetails with the Trump administration’s high-profile deportations of undocumented immigrants, including their removal to overseas prisons like Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT)—translated as “Terrorism Confinement Center”—in El Salvador, similar to the “black sites” hosted by US-allied nations throughout the (still ongoing?) “War on Terror.”

These tactics closely resemble those that the Israeli military and security services have long used against Palestinians, where the practice of "administrative detention" (imprisonment without charge) is commonplace. The pretense of a “rule of law” other than “might makes right” is largely absent under the Israeli Occupation, as reported in The Guardian: "The conviction rate for security offences in the West Bank is more than 99%. Campaigners say detainees are often unable to read Hebrew-language statements or other documents, even confessions, and defence lawyers encourage young clients to plead guilty to avoid lengthy trials and detentions."

America’s currently escalating fascist turn follows on the heels of Israel’s year-and-a-half-long (and ongoing) US-backed genocide of Gaza. So if, still, one was under any doubt as to whether we have yet entered the “portal” into a fascist state, that ship sailed quite some time ago. Palestinian American legal scholar and activist Noura Erakat (author of the 2019 book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine), writing in a February 2024 Boston Review essay (titled “The Boomerang Comes Back”) draws on Aimé Césaire’s 1950 Discourse on Colonialism (a seminal text for anticolonial and “postcolonial” theory) to describe our present-day “imperial boomerang” (e.g. fascism rebounding back from Palestine to the United States). Erakat, in summarizing Césaire’s thesis, describes colonialism’s “boomerang effect” as the process “whereby violence in the colonial periphery manifests itself in the colonial metropole. Hitler’s genocide of European Jews, [Césaire] noted, was modeled after European rule over African and Asian colonies.” To which we may also add the American genocide of Native Americans and the policies of Jim Crow apartheid (a perpetuation of “slavery by another name”), both of which the Nazi leadership explicitly studied and mirrored.1

Erakat writes of our current political moment: “For fifteen months, Palestinians and their allies protested relentlessly and, at times, heroically, not only to stop a genocide but to salvage and preserve core humanitarian principles governing life within the United States, insisting that genocide is suicide. Surviving this next chapter demands that we see ourselves as the rest of the world sees us too.” While Erakat knows (and has herself argued) that the litany of injustices against her own people in Palestine must, first and foremost, be opposed as injustices in their own right, Erakat has also dedicated considerable scholarly attention towards analyzing the ways in which Israel’s apartheid regime and its ongoing genocide of Gaza are taking a wrecking ball to the foundations of international law. We are witnessing the erosion (verging on collapse) of the institutional frameworks through which “human rights” and “civil rights” could presumably be recognized as legitimate categories, let alone enforceable ones. Césaire’s colonial “boomerang” is one way of summing up this interrelation. Another is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, where he wrote: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

I was reminded of King’s statement this year during Passover, an occasion which offers what many (including, as discussed in a previous post, myself) consider to be the bedrock of the Jewish prophetic tradition, namely that “none of us is free until all of us are free.” The inverse of this assertion is equally true: “what threatens one of us threatens us all.” As the famous poem (which has, unfortunately, gained renewed timeliness) written by the German pastor Martin Niemöller reads (in its most literal translation from the original):

“When the Nazis came for the Communists,
I remained silent; I wasn't a Communist.

When they came for the Trade Unionists, I remained silent;
I wasn't a Trade Unionist.

When they imprisoned the Social Democrats, I remained silent;
I wasn't a Social Democrat.

When they imprisoned the Jews, I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.”

The brute fact of the speaker’s continued silence in the face of naked fascism is damning, first morally and politically, and then even from the standpoint of (mercenary) self-interest, a kind of slow-motion consent to “genocide as suicide,” to use Erakat’s term. Others have written movingly about this poem’s relevance to our current political moment, including Rabbi Brant Rosen in his essay titled “First They Came for Mahmoud Khalil.” I do not wish to retread ground already covered elsewhere, instead I hope to extend an analysis of the “inescapable network of mutuality” (following King)—and the imperial-colonial/geopolitical symbiosis embodied in notions of a US-Israel “special relationship”—to a consideration of how these phenomena play out in relation to organized religion.2 It seems to me that the “boomerang effect” which Erakat describes (following Césaire, along with Hannah Arendt’s similar articulation in her 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism) has many troubling implications when viewed alongside the rising power of the Religious Right in shaping the second Trump Administration’s policy decisions across a wide array of issues.

It is a startling (though illuminating) statistic that there are more members of Christians United For Israel (CUFI)––which boasts a membership of over 10 million––than there are Jewish Americans, period (approximately 7.5 million, as of the 2020 census). Frederick Clarkson and Ben Lorber’s recent In These Times article “The New Face of Christian Zionism” describes the power wielded by the Christian Zionist movement (which is much larger than CUFI as a single organization, no matter how large or powerful CUFI alone may be). In particular, Clarkson and Lorber connect the growing influence of Christian Zionism with the “New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR), a rapidly expanding religious-political movement that views our planet as rapidly approaching the Biblically prophesied End Times. Furthermore, they believe that Christians around the world have been divinely mandated to “wage spiritual warfare” in order to bring about Jesus’ “Second Coming” (synonymous with the Christian apocalypse, as described in the Book of Revelations). In order to facilitate this process, many NAR members believe that God has gifted humanity new apostles and prophets, like those that existed during Christianity’s early years. These churches and ministries “reject many historic Christian doctrines, denominations and leadership roles while gradually restoring offices of the first century church as outlined in the biblical book of Ephesians. Among those offices are the movement titles of apostle and prophet, such that Lou Engle bears the title of an NAR prophet and Paula White-Cain [the Right-wing evangelical pastor who was appointed by Trump to lead the recently established ‘White House Faith Office’] is an NAR apostle.” As bizarre and shocking as this may sound, it is by no means a fringe worldview within mainstream American Christianity. Clarkson and Lorber explain:

“According to a 2024 survey by Djupe, more than 60% of U.S. Christians agree that ​‘there are modern-day apostles and prophets.’ About half believe that ​‘there are demonic ​‘principalities’ and ​‘powers’ who control physical territory’ and that the church should ​‘organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.’ And 42% directly embrace NAR’s dominionist mandate in agreeing that ​‘God wants Christians to stand atop the ​‘7 Mountains of Society.’”

According to the 2023-2024 Pew Research Religious Landscape Study, 62% of US adults identify as Christian (the 2020 Census lists the number of adults in the US at 258.3 million, 62% of which would be 160.15 million people). Therefore (approximately) 60% of all adult US Christians (using 2020 numbers) would be around 96 million people. The (seemingly plausible) idea that (in the US alone) 100 million adults believe in the existence of “modern-day apostles and prophets” should offer cause for concern, given that such “Biblical” protagonists are central to the NAR’s millenarian belief in an impending (or already unfolding) End Times prophecy. Furthermore, Israel is central to facilitating this acceleration of apocalyptic conditions. Clarkson and Lorber write that the NAR holds the opinion that the End Times are “currently underway.” If the future is steered correctly, “the NAR believes it can bring about the millennial utopia—1,000 years of perfect Christian rule—by expanding Israel’s sovereignty over ​‘biblical’ land, supporting the immigration of Jews to Israel and converting Jews to faith in Jesus.”

In their 2024 annual report, the Southern Poverty Law Center declared the NAR to be “the greatest threat to American democracy that most people have never heard of.” This is, undoubtedly, a highly organized and committed network working to fulfill what they themselves understand to be a divine commandment to advance Christian “Dominion” over US politics and culture. In this context, the horrifying forms of state violence that have become daily occurrences in Palestine (viewable from the screens of our computers, mobile devices and TVs) may be closer to home than some of us would like to pretend. Returning to Discourse on Colonialism, powerfully invoked by Erakat, Césaire’s words (published seventy-five years ago) resonate with our present historical moment to an unsettling degree:

“People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: ‘How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.”

In a previous post, on “Israel Liberation Week,” I wrote:

As you may have seen/heard, over Passover, Far-Right Israeli/Zionist platforms shared an AI-generated video of the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the construction of the “Third Temple.” This is, without a doubt, the “endgame” of Israel’s (and the US’) current political trajectory. Regardless of whether that “game plan” is rendered in “Religious” or “Secular” terms. The end result is the same.

And it should make all of us tremble with fear and rage.

Lawrence Wright, in a 1998 article for The New Yorker titled “Forcing the End” (reprinted in full over at PBS, in case you hit a paywall) describes how the construction of the “Third Temple” is one of three Biblically prophesied conditions for bringing about the “Second Coming,” which also includes the “restoration of Israel” as a nation and Jerusalem as a “Jewish city”:

A longing for the rapture and the return of Jesus on Earth is at the core of Evangelicalism. The fact that we are coincidentally approaching a millennial milestone in the human calendar certainly adds to this yearning and to the sense of anticipation felt by believers of all faiths. Most fundamentalists assume that we are living on the edge of human history in any case, and that modern events in the Middle East are fulfillments of prophecies made some two thousand years ago by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and John, among others. These prophecies require three great events before the Messiah can return: the nation of Israel must be restored; Jerusalem must be a Jewish city; and the Temple, the center of worship and sacrifice in the ancient Jewish world, which was last destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D., must be rebuilt. Two of these conditions have been met in the last fifty years.

What precisely the “Return of the Messiah” actually means is open to interpretation, to say the least. Putting a finer point on it, I just recently came across a quote by the ever-relevant James Baldwin, from his 1979 article in The Nation, “Open Letter to the Born Again,” where he argues that “the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.”

In other words…

It dawned on me that my corny joke about Kosha Dillz being essentially the real life version of “Gefilte Fresh and Doctor Dreidel” (the Bar/Bat/B’nai Mitzvah “Party Motivators,” as portrayed by Key and Peele) hits closer to the mark than I previously realized. 🎯🎯🎯

Basically, “Kosha” is a Pro-Israel/Zionist “novelty rapper” (i.e. a “Joke Rapper,” and he is an absolute joke…), a “Jewish Flava Flav,” as it were (in his “Flavor of Love” era, sans Public Enemy/Chuck D and the S1Ws). And the only thing worse than a novelty rapper is a novelty rapper who takes themselves seriously (i.e. who isn’t “in on the joke,” and therefore becomes, unintentionally, a parody of themselves). Which is precisely what we are dealing with in the case of Kosha Dillz.

And when that self-serious and (unwittingly) self-parodying “joke rapper” becomes a whole-hearted advocate and cheerleader for genocide (in the name of “freeing the hostages”) it ends up coming off as an especially sick joke. In other words, a joke that stops being funny and instead starts to turn one’s stomach. Given that the Israeli government/military has itself ranked freeing the hostages as the lowest priority among its reasons for “continuing the war” (i.e. the ongoing genocide of Gaza): I call bullshit. This reality was aptly summarized by a recent Haaretz exposé: “Israeli Army Places Returning Hostages at Bottom of Its Gaza War Goals, Despite Promises to Families.”

*Side note: the Israeli government, despite calling the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (initiated by the global call of Palestinian civil society) an “antisemitic attack,” is now essentially waging its own BDS campaign against Haaretz (which is itself by no stretch of the imagination an “anti-Zionist” outlet).

So when “Kosha” uses “Bring Them Home” (the title of his utterly self-absorbed and, when all is said and done, mind-numbingly boring documentary about being a Pro-Israel social media “content creator”) or “Free the Hostages” as rejoinders to the demand for a “Free Palestine,” who exactly does “Kosha” think he’s fooling? The slogans “Free the Hostages” and “Bring Them Home” have absolutely nothing to do with the actual Israeli (let alone Palestinian) hostages, and everything to do with justifying and providing cover for Israel’s genocide of Gaza.

“You want that real fire
How bout the facts for peace?
You want a ceasefire?
Please get the facts from me
Problems I’m working on it
Solutions think I got it
Weapons down and no profit
But first release the hostage(s)”
—From “Ceasefire” by Kosha Dillz

This dynamic was encapsulated in a grotesque scene that I think of as “Ben Gvir’s Bear Hug,” where, during a meeting with the families of Israeli hostages he (without consent and against the explicit protests of the family member he was hugging) wrapped his arms around Gil Dickmann, the cousin of an Israeli hostage, and squeezed him tight. This is, distilled in single image, precisely the dynamic between the Israeli government and the Israeli hostages/their families, i.e. that of “being hugged to death.” While Gazans, receiving no such courtesy, are—without pretense—treated as “human animals” to be butchered by the tens of thousands.

Dickmann reposted Ben Gvir’s post, saying that he told the minister not to hug him but Ben Givr had done so anyway.

“I told you: Don’t hug me but you hugged [me] anyway. I told you: Don’t endanger our beloved ones but you endangered them anyway. All for a picture. Itamar Ben Gvir, you have no boundaries. Everyone sees that you’re making a circus out of the blood of our families. It’s not too late. Stop.”

Much like Kosha Dillz’s song “Ceasefire,” included in the playlist which accompanies this post, the Israeli government has no genuine interest in “ending the war.” Instead, they are hard at work creating literal hell on earth (what Fanon described as “les damnes de la terre”).

On to the matter at hand… This past week I unintentionally practiced “the law of attraction,” and conjured up “IRL” the subject of Studying Up’s first “series-within-a-series:” Kosha Dillz, who I’ve been “profiling” in my series of posts for “White Rappers, Volume 1.” After including “Kosha” in a series of Spotify playlists (always at a exchange rate of 1 “KD” song for every twelve songs by other artists), the app notified me that Kosha Dillz had an upcoming show in the city of Chicago. Specifically, this was for a screening of his film-in-progress Bring Them Home, a documentary about Kosha Dillz’s work as an “Israel advocate” and “content creator” during Israel’s ongoing genocide of Gaza (not his choice of words, of course). When I saw this I knew (whether I wanted to or not) I simply couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see “in the flesh,” the very artist on whom I/we, Dear Reader, have been “studying up.”

As a reminder (or if you, Dear Reader, are just now joining us), in a previous post I discussed how I was first introduced to Kosha Dillz when he headlined an “Israel Liberation Week” concert at UC Berkeley in 2008. This was the show where three Palestinian students (friends of mine) were attacked by a mob of Zionist college undergraduate fanatics who were members of the (overlapping) student organizations Tikvah and the Zionist Freedom Alliance.

While the event was originally scheduled for FACETS Theater in Chicago proper, I received an email the day of, notifying attendees that the theater had canceled “Kosha’s” reservation (likely after learning that they were renting the theater to an anti-Palestinian hate group, innocuously named—as the Right so loves to do—the “Chicago Jewish Alliance”).

This is how the CJA framed things:

“You Can’t Cancel Jewish Voices.

Facets Theater tried to silence us — hours before showtime.
But guess what?

We moved the show. We’re back on. And it’s going to be even bigger.”

The show must go on! No longer in Chicago, but instead moved to the northern suburb of Wilmette. This is indeed an auspicious location, close as it is to Winnetka, IL, the childhood home of none other than Donald Rumsfeld, the only US Secretary of Defense to serve under two separate Presidential Administrations (Ford, from 1975-1977 and W. Bush, from 2001-2006). Additionally, Rumsfeld (who died in 2021) still holds the title as both the youngest (appointed at age 43) and oldest (leaving office at age 74) Secretary of Defense in US history.

Wilmette is also home to a Bahai’i House of Worship (one of eight Bahai’i continental temples). On the multiple times I have visited this impressive work of architecture, I’ve pictured Robert Hayden (the first Black US Poet Laureate—a position previously called “Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress”—and a member of the Bahai’i faith) seated in prayer, living as he did (across Lake Michigan) in Detroit and Ann Arbor. In the post Kosha Dillz, Part 1, I included Hayden’s poem “The Rabbi” (about the poet, as a child in Detroit, observing Jewish Americans, his friends and neighbors, participating in the larger historical process that would become known as “white flight”).

I’m not sure whether it was intentional, but the Kosha Dillz show fell only two days before Nakba Day, which commemorates the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from what would become the newly created State of Israel, turning them into refugees in their own homeland (expelled to areas now known as the West Bank and Gaza, i.e. the “Occupied Territories,” and far beyond—creating the global Palestinian Diaspora as it now exists today).

I feel compelled to share just a few of the litany of Instagram posts that I saw yesterday commemorating the Nakba and showing the actual history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, occupation, and genocide of the Palestinian people. What Rashid Khalidi has called The Hundred Year’s War on Palestine.

The historical record is clear (even the Israeli military and Israeli government’s own archival documentation of Plan Dalet): the Nakba was achieved with clear strategic intention and design by the Zionist militias that would become today’s IDF.

Still, as grotesque and stomach-turning as Kosh Dillz’s minstrelsy and his acting as a “cheerleader for genocide” may be (and is) the ultimate goal of this writing project is to “study up” towards understanding the larger systems of power, institutions, and ideologies that influence and guide the various cultural expressions and manifestations of the movements/worldviews of the powerful.

In this case, the most clear example of such a connection is the group The Tikvah Fund itself (the national parent/umbrella organization to the campus chapter of Far-Right Zionist student fanatics I became familiar with as an undergrad at UC Berkeley).

The Hebrew word “Tikvah” (תִּקְוָה) translates to “Hope” or “Faith” in English. It also denotes an act of “binding” together, as with a strand of rope, and has an association with several biblical stories about such acts of “binding” in relation to family, which can be extrapolated to a broader connection with one’s “people,” i.e., in this case, the “Jewish People.” Israel’s national anthem “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”) makes an emotional appeal to precisely this correspondence.

Setting aside the question of who or what is “a Jew”/who or what is “Jewish” (not as simple a question as some might assume, or pretend it to be), this word “Tikvah” is a poignant one, precisely because it distills several interrelated but also rather different conceptual registers. For example “hope” or “faith” indicates an orientation towards the future/futurity, but also “faith” in God and God’s covenant or “promise” to (in this case) the Jewish people (or Capital-P “People?”). In the context of Jewish history, particularly after the Holocaust, this indicates a faith in the survival of the Jewish people (which again resurfaces the vexing question: who are/what is “Jewish” or “the Jewish people”?), but also the question of: survival of a people towards what end? For what reason? Towards what purpose? If such a faith (or commitment) on a material, political plane is grounded in a faith in God and God’s covenant/commandments, then such faith is also an indication of certainty or conviction that such faith will be proven correct or justified.

Another way of saying this is: “Belief” that one’s cause will be ultimately vindicated as “Righteous.” And in the name of such “Righteousness,” the Believer believes, everything is permitted. Which is why the Right doesn’t give a rat’s ass when we point out their blatant hypocrisy. So what? They may be hypocrites, but they are Righteous hypocrites, and are accountable to a higher Truth where the “empretzled” logical knots they tie themselves into can be viewed as internally consistent. From this bird’s eye view, clarity is achieved. As Derek Gregory described in The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, “the West” performs the neocolonial “God-trick” of only seeing evil in the actions of “the Other,” and never in ourselves and the horrors we commit in the name of our loftiest aims. Another name for this is “getting high on one’s own supply.” So high that we ascend above such petty mortal matters as “ethics,” “morality” and merely human “rights.”

In Kabbalah, or the tradition of Jewish mysticism, among the Sefirot (the “centers” or “emanations” of God’s Divine energy which manifest across the various planes of existence), Netzach (נֶצַח) symbolizes “endurance” towards “Victory.” In other words, the maintenance and continuation of one’s Faith in the face of Doubt. Certainty in spite of Uncertainty.

Such certainty is channeled into/through the act of “binding,” which the word “Tikvah” references and invokes. However, to me the word “binding” also brings to mind the “binding of Isaac” (also the name of a popular video game) where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son because so deep was his faith in God that he would sacrifice his firstborn without question. Furthermore Isaac was, according to the Torah, born when Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was 90 years old and thought to be unable to conceive—which is where the name “Isaac/Yitzhak” originates. Yitzhak (יִצְחָק) meaning “Laughter,” as in Sarah and Abraham’s laughter (out of disbelief) in response to God’s telling them that Sarah would give birth to a child (after, presumably, long ago having gone through menopause). This makes Isaac’s birth nothing less than a miracle, and so Abraham’s “faith” or willingness to sacrifice his son (born only by an expression of God’s miraculous power) all the more impressive. Yet this was also a consequence of Isaac having been born due to God’s will, so his death by sacrifice would only be continuation of the same ("The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away," to quote the Book of Job).

Allegorically, when God stayed Abraham’s hand (and, in doing so, saved Isaac’s life), the act of ritual sacrifice was transferred from a human to a (non-human) animal sacrifice.

Eventually, with the rise of Christianity, this animal sacrifice was itself believed to have been made unnecessary due to the “sacrifice” embodied in Jesus’ crucifixion, where God “sacrificed” a human “Son” for the sake of humanity’s salvation as a whole. (Please correct me if I’m getting any of these details wrong, seeing as this is decidedly not the religious tradition I was raised in: studyingupsidedown @ gmail.com).

Okay: so much for the word “Tikvah” on a religious/allegorical/metaphysical level. What about The Tikvah Fund (whose slogan is the not at all creepy “Advancing Jewish Excellence and Western Civilization through Education & Ideas”) as an organization?

Well, it was only in the past year or two that I came to learn that Tikvah the UC Berkeley student organization was actually a student campus chapter of a national organization called the Tikvah Fund. This organization was set up by the Right-wing philanthropist Zalman Bernstein with the goal of advancing “Israel advocacy,” but also conducting leadership development as well as intellectual/ideological training for Jewish, Zionist Conservatives (not Conservative Judaism as in the religious denomination—though I’m sure there is plenty of overlap—but rather politically Conservative/Right-wing Jewish Americans). It just so happens that the current President of the Board of the Tikvah Fund is none other than Elliot Abrams, a man who was convicted for withholding information from Congress over his knowledge of and participation in the Reagan Administration’s Iran-Contra Affair, as well as being intimately involved in the coverup of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador (interconnected manifestations of the Reagan Administration’s foreign policy, and the linkages between its Cold War geopolitical machinations in the spheres of both the “Middle East” and “Latin America”). In other words, Abrams is a truly nasty piece of work.

Furthermore, another board member is Moishe Koppel, an Israeli Computer Science professor and also advisor to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, via the Right-wing Israeli think tank that he founded: the Kohelet Policy Forum. It is important to note that the Kohelet Policy Forum was responsible for drafting the proposed legislation that would decrease the power of the Israeli Supreme Court and increase the power of the Prime Minister. This proposal led to massive protests in Israel against Netanyahu’s government and the proposed changes to the Israeli judicial system (such as it is—remember, Israel does not have a Constitution, only a Declaration of Independence, and has never in its history had established borders) in the months leading up to October 7, 2023 (in fact, this was the primary focus of Israeli political life and world attention on Israel in the period immediately leading up to October 7th).

To be continued…

I decided to extend our intermission from “White Rappers, Vol. 1” (in order to “tie up some loose ends”). In the meantime, as promised (or at least inferred) by links in previous posts (an important feature for this work of “electronic literature”, i.e. “hypertext”), I’m going to give some further insights into the “stories-within-stories” nature of this creative endeavor… In the context of our “frame story.” Via a series of tasty epigraphs! (interspersed with my own reflections on poetry—and otherwise—cults). Make sense?? Everybody good? 🫠

Of course, though the links I include provide additional “layers” of meaning (and delight!), they are not “essential” to read (as my friend Felipe recently told me: “technically I’m not all caught up—I only engaged with about 1% of the links in your posts” 😂). But they’re also not going anywhere, so if you’re ever looking for time-wasters (+intellectual edification!) on the internet, you can always return to previous posts to dig for additional “easter eggs.” 🥚🐣 Anyhoo, moving on:

Strange as it sounds, as a teenager I was a member of not one, but two “poetry cults.” As you may have gathered from my last post I don’t mean this in terms of “cult poetry” as if discussing a “cult movie,” or a “cult poet” like “a poet’s poet” (in the sense of being “obscure but beloved”). I mean that I was a member of two separate groups that I’d now characterize as matching the definition (and over the years several therapists have concurred) of a cult, as in: a group or organization that engages in “coercive persuasion,” otherwise known as “psychological manipulation,” and “brainwashing.” Even more strangely, both of these cults happened to revolve around (in different ways) the study of (and devotion to) poetry.

Who knew such things existed?

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From The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy, based on the text edited by Muhsin Mahdī (1926-2007):

“Now, as mentioned earlier, the vizier, who put the girls to death, had an older daughter called Shahrazad and a younger one called Dinarzad. The older daughter, Shahrazad, had read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, had studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined. She had read and learned. One day she said to her father, ‘Father, I will tell you what is in my mind.’ He asked, ‘What is it?’ She answered, ‘I would like you to marry me to King Shahrayar, so that I may either succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest.’”

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Dear Reader,

Anniversaries are tricky things, being simultaneously heartfelt and arbitrary, artificial yet indispensable. What separates one day from the next, one year from the next? Who chooses the turn of a decade? As if there were only one true calendar…

Every anniversary is simply the point at which we choose to begin (telling) a story. Even so, this will do. It helps to have an occasion to inspire commemoration and testimony, holding (oneself and others) “to account.”

I’ve contemplated the “subject at hand” for (at least) the past twenty years. Following this “red thread” has shaped my adult life (as a writer, scholar, educator, not to mention person), and as such I’ll venture that I’m about as qualified as anyone to speak my piece on this.

Of course, these days, who among us is not eminently “qualified” to act—or should I say “perform”—the role of “expert,” in the age of Instagram, TikTok, and Substack? Sinners one and all…

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From “La Faustienne” by Lyn Hejinian (1941-2024), Poetics Journal (Number 10, June 1998).

“The greatest of all night works is the one called The Thousand and One Nights (sometimes A Thousand Nights and One Night) or, alternatively, The Arabian Nights, with its chains of tales and concentricities of tales within tales, ‘together with all that there is in them of wonder and instruction,’ told by a woman to postpone her death by holding a man in narrative suspense.

…

In the Faust legend, Faust is able, with Mephistopheles’ help, to take nocturnal voyages, flying through the air to other times and places and summoning scenes and personages from them to his study. He is permitted to gaze on them—to have them as sights—but other interaction is impossible, including, explicitly, speech. In the face of knowledge, Faust is silenced.

Scheherazade’s position is the reverse of this. ‘Be silent then, for danger is in words,’ says Marlowe’s Faust to some companions before whom he is exhibiting Helen of Troy. But for Scheherazade danger lies in silence, danger hovers at the edge of dawn on the horizon of light when all stories come to an end, inscribing her end as well. Where Faust sells his soul for knowledge, Scheherazade saves hers by offering it.”

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Dear Reader,

I wrote these particular words during the start of Passover, a holiday which expresses what I’ve always believed to be Judaism’s central message (at least the Judaism I was raised to practice): the imperative that “none of us is free until all of us are free.” This emancipatory, egalitarian, and universalist impulse at the core of the Jewish prophetic tradition is, to me, irreconcilable with the annihilatory politics of Zionism. To be sure, what we’ve witnessed in Gaza every single day for the past year-and-a-half is not only the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and a crime against humanity, it’s also (secondarily, yet significantly) an utter desecration of the Judaism I believe in. The genocide of Gaza is a nearly unfathomable disgrace to the memory of our ancestors exterminated in the Shoah; a betrayal of the historical experience of Jews who were, for generations scapegoated, dehumanized, tortured, ghettoized, and massacred. Throughout the history of “Western Civilization.”

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From “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” by Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

“And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, ‘Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

• https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/04/26/606080885/kelis-nas-ex-wife-accuses-rapper-of-physical-and-mental-abuse

• https://artsfuse.org/166669/commentary-metoo-and-dethroning-rock-deities/

• https://consequence.net/2017/11/the-uncomfortable-disregard-for-legendary-rockers-sexual-misconduct/

• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/06/can-i-still-listen-to-david-bowie-a-superfans-dilemma

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Dear Reader,

We should be careful not to privilege Jewish claims to singular moral authority in condemning Zionism (certainly not above the political and ethical claims of Palestinians themselves, who have always been the most rigorous and perceptive critics of Zionism). There is, at the same time, a specificity (even a specific “significance” or “importance”) to the Jewish critique of Zionism. This specificity derives from the manner in which Zionism—though it purports to be a “Jewish” ideology, and a political project representing the best interests of “the Jewish people” (is this different from “Jews, who are people?”)—is, in all truth, not what it claims to be.

• https://jewishcurrents.org/against-zionist-realism

Until soon!

—I