It must've been tenth grade....I'm at this bitch's house for a big ass pawty, excuse me....I have to pull my shawts lowuh past my crack to get into character. For brief shits, this'll be delivered in the upper-to-middle class white ebonics we spoke in 96'. This pawty was awff the chawts, I mean, shit had a fuckin full-size puttin green in the back yawd, shaved to the smoothest little surface it looked like a crop circle bic'ed onto a nice freshman's bald beautiful..........anyway. Back to the pawty...so yea, we're inside pumpin the ghetto shit in Alison's Muttontown mansion. Haha das funny, da bitch's name was Alison....could be a fantastic broad now, but back then...well, like I said... So anyway, the hip-hop's bangin, the bass is shaking a few B-Cups hea and thea and we're all excited ya know, because we're white and wantin to be black but happy because we know we'll always be white. On comes the hottest new song by The Fugees called 'Ready or Not.' Our hands are up in the air and shit, singin da lyrics of a woman who said she'd rather die than have a white man's baby....but we're psyched cause she's Lauryn Hill, and who are we....fuckin white asshole losers who have it easee fo sheezee. Lauryn said it, so it's gotta be! Word... so we're sophomores in high school, we know nothin. All I gotta know is what door to take when grazing my girl's pasture.....ohhhhh, high-fives from all of my boys...uppp, quiet down, here comes that dog Wyclef's part, I lud dis shit. He starts cacklin his jive, makin us all irie and cravin some Red Stripe......no Problem Mahn! Mmmmm antishipatin dat line we lud to recite like da pledge a' leeeshuns........"I refugee from Guantanamo Bay...." finishin it awff wit da rest of my slices, all JNCO Jeaned and White Structure Sweatered-Out....we don't give a fuck!! Shout-out, Sowth SHaw Strong Isle baby!
Present time:
(Speaking more like Dave Chapelle's impersonation of Tiger Woods during the nationality draft....)
Like most kids do, they memorize the lyrics of songs and sing them because they're catchy. I remember singing a Dead Kennedy's song about Pol Pot and knowing less than an excreted nugget of what the man did, but I skateboarded down my suburban block with a sandwich in my hand and headphones tucked into my ears, singing like mass killings were common and you could catch one down at the local sump whenever you felt like it.
“Gitmo”, as the savvy news reporters like to call it, became a topic of conversation amongst bigwigs the day after Obama’s inauguration. Barack said the place would be shut down within a year as offered explanations for its existence are cloudy and equivalent to a Cliffs Notes book report. Now, hating my ignorance of such topics and the flitting disregard of those lyrics I sung like I'd sat next to Wyclef helping him write them...it was about time to research what was being said to soon close down.
Originally the place housed Haitian and Cuban refugees and acted as an asylum before sending them back to their governments as dissidents. Far worse than the Principal’s office, these were not welcoming home parties; your balls on a platter and whenever you got hungry your food was available. Why in my gracious lord’s name we keep this steel labyrinth off in the country we despise second most, I’ll never know. We can’t buy cigars from them, but we can house our world’s most random with confidence in the hands of a dictator we haven’t agreed with since the day he jumped out of the woods. Because it's illegal for us to visit the country, it's smartest to keep it there? Then why even have maximum security prisons here where psycho killers sleep in the same state I do. Send those assholes to Cuba if you think it's safer.
This modern day Alcatraz our government keeps healthy by paying Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s company) 1 Billion dollars to build state of the art facilities. Talk about dipping the pen in company ink; a literal and architectural hell on earth, this thing was like rigging the lottery on Cheney's behalf. After 41 reported unsuccessful suicide attempts by prisoners, the Pentagon re-named the term “self inflicted injurious behaviors”. Way to make up for it guys....did you hold an elementary school competition on who could come up with the best synonym for suicide, and the winner got a shiny new computer lab for their fellow students? Could you imagine if they’re actually reporting 41 attempts, how many there's truly been? Everyday at lunch time...."shit, it's noon, there goes Benny smashing his doggy bowl over his head until he's unconscious...I betcha 20 push-ups he wakes in less than 5."
The problem with this place is that no one wants to be there but no country wants them back. Most of the criminals there now are those involved in terrorist groups, and since that's the case, no country wants to admit they harbor terrorists. Some men await trial and others are just waiting......waiting for the day they can pick up the Kur'an again and read some religious nonsense that got them there in the first place. And by the way, they don't let them have any holy books while in prison and this causes animosity. Personally, I think it's a catch-22. If these guys get out, they hate you and our country for denying them their opportunity to educate themselves in their faith and therefore they blow themselves up to kill Americans because that somehow is holy. On the other hand, you can give them their holy books, they become obsessed fundamentalists and take snipits of dialogue from the text, misconstrue it into something totally absurd like, 'kill kill da white man"(howard stern in "Private Parts").....and they go ahead and draft up a plan to fly airplanes through our tallest buildings. It's a Bush family choice that Obama's working to make obsolete.
What it all comes down to really is whether or not the release of these prisoners is in the best interest of our country and whether or not they are given a trial for whatever it is they're being detained for. If it's prison because the guy is religious and suspected of enjoying terrorism, I still don't believe you could hold someone prisoner on a hunch. If the guy willfully committed a crime then like any other jailbird, keep em locked up. If he was trying to escape his country illegally then ask him which he would rather do, go back to his country and hope not to get killed or stay in the jail. But seriously, you've gotta let those people go that you have no evidence on...unless somehow you prove they're insane and need constant medical attention......in this case, every chicken is labeled in the pen as inflicting self-injurious behaviors...therefore, they're all a bit crazy...we just have to find which pharmaceutical company Cheney owns so he can profit while drugging them up.
.........i've always wanted to say this...."fo shizzle'......
Showing posts with label Cuba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cuba. Show all posts
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Che Guevara - Four and a Half Hours to Celebrate, Thank and Applaud Revolution..and let's not forget, Murder
Tonight I spent a comfy 4 and a half hours through the bio-epic Ernesto Che Guevara film done by Steven Soderbergh. Although my intentions for the film were to understand better those actions behind the revolutionary and psychotic mind of the man, instead I got a feel good, we all love Che, Che can do no wrong…Che never killed a man film. Well he never did personally in the movie, kill a man. At least not from what I remember… unless the 20-minute Intermission, constant personal sewing of comrades’ battle wounds, or high winds of Cuba or Bolivia, swept those bad images from my mind. Although I would never spoil such a film for anyone looking to see it, I would suggest you see it in its entirety if possible because to cut this movie in half is to subject yourself to having the ingredients for a sandwich on your plate, yet the first and only thing you can eat is the bread.
My minor obsession with Che Guevara started in Amsterdam three months ago, unaware that there was a movie ever even being made about the man with the Communist ideals. It was his face that we couldn’t avoid. Every shop we’d passed on the way to a jazz club, the Anne Frank House, or the Red Light District, we saw a t-shirt hanging with a shadow silk-screened onto it. A celebration of some man…a man who’s name we’d known but couldn’t pronounce, and couldn’t relate anything to. The face looked like that of a proud young druglord with blown-out muttonchops and an untamed muslim beard. A beret kept his unkempt hair, kept, and his face held such mystery and power that it dared further research. He must’ve done something right to be remembered, to be bled and smeared onto shirts for young skaters and eco-degenerates to praise. But the more I dug deeper to find out this man’s history, the more I related him to Fidel Castro and the murdering tendencies we’ve all associated with Amin of Uganda. However, I think a bit differently about such men after a recent conversation. Normally we’re brought up to hate such men because only what we know of them were the horrors they caused. It was a talk with a man who worked to introduce a brief glimmer of light in a dictator’s purpose and the extent by which his or her damage actually often make’s unique progress….and that too is the goal of a revolutionary….progress, not just destruction and death. This dictator, for conversational reference to the point I’m making overall was Adolf Hitler, and although he is one of the worst people in the world to emulate, he turned what was then a desperate German society where any local mother would wheelbarrow millions of her own Deutsche-Marks into the grocer’s market and dump it on the shop-owner’s countertop just to buy an apple, to a thriving competitive global and economic force within only 9 years. Che and his buddy Fidel were not all too different in what they wanted for farmers and countrymen, to get them out from under Baptista. Che, an Argentinean by blood, and an educated doctor, we should already note is a bit outrageous for leaving his family to go fight for some other country’s people. Believing that the best way to overthrow a power that they truly believe the people want overthrown, is by brute force and guerrilla warfare. So public that everyone hears about it, so daring that it can’t be mistaken in the news as some accidental exchange of friendly-fire at a jolly quail hunt out in the jungle. The movie itself is a masterpiece in the geographical landscapes and scenes it portrays amongst the forests and mountains it pitches tent after tent. It also reveals a unique take on the life of a revolutionary…..a lonely nomadic existence, laying your head against a different tree trunk each night. And the things one abandons such as family and freedom for this life in hiding, always on the run making your next move for people who aren’t sure they really care you’re there because it puts them in equally more danger. Benicio Del Toro did a fantastic job….he really did, but then again he remains the same character he usually is, a slower moving, talking and squinting version of himself, except this time with a bad case of asthma and a love for Cuban cigars and cigarettes. Soderbegh should’ve never had the Hollywood celebrity cameo that you’ll catch in the 2nd part of Che because it seriously deters from the movie’s local mission and geographic feel. In fact I dont even remember what his part was it threw me off so bad to see him. The whole film is subtitles as they’re speaking Spanish, some scenes even with thousands of locals scattered amongst the brush in tactical formats…and there, this additional character out of the blue, although brief, was a totally unnecessary casting decision that jostled audience whispers and deep breaths of disappointment.
Aside from that, the film cut out Che’s motorcycle ride across the South American continent that made him come to love and appreciate it’s beauty so much, the celebratory years after defeating Baptista that became more of a conflict in service and opinion amongst Fidel and his inferiors, as well as his unsuccessful attempt at stirring up a revolution in the Congo. The movie lacks any love story, which I actually liked since these days everything has to do with what piece of ass is affecting the main character’s current decisions. For some reason they chose to have it be a film that jumps around a lot, irrationally shifting from different time periods in ten minute intervals. His life is a story of successive battles...moaning and roaring his wise demeanor into the ultimate sculpture, and therefore the time flickerings just makes us work harder to keep focused on what city or year we’re in.
In the end, I hated that I liked Che the man (I knew I'd like the movie), because they portrayed him more as the doctor and next door neighbor than the obsessed maniac cult leader with a gun who imprisoned eager minds to join him in shooting the heads off any dissenters he’d crossed. How can you be one of Fidel Castro’s most lethal and feared assassins if you’re a saint with a heart of gold? Give me a break. I think if we’d seen more of a mental struggle with what Fidel had become and how it differed so much from what Che wanted to achieve, which was never-ending liberation of all of Latin America, than we would’ve understood the more obsessive, stop-at-nothing murderer that he’d really been….enough so to understand why any country would ever request his hand be chopped off for fingerprint analysis and confirmation that he really was caught……even this was left out of the movie, making my point stronger for the blatent disregard of historical fact to swap amicably for admiration and tender-loving vittles we and our kittens should enjoy when thinking about the motives and the man behind the loved interjection Hey “Pal” or “Bud” or “Che”.
My minor obsession with Che Guevara started in Amsterdam three months ago, unaware that there was a movie ever even being made about the man with the Communist ideals. It was his face that we couldn’t avoid. Every shop we’d passed on the way to a jazz club, the Anne Frank House, or the Red Light District, we saw a t-shirt hanging with a shadow silk-screened onto it. A celebration of some man…a man who’s name we’d known but couldn’t pronounce, and couldn’t relate anything to. The face looked like that of a proud young druglord with blown-out muttonchops and an untamed muslim beard. A beret kept his unkempt hair, kept, and his face held such mystery and power that it dared further research. He must’ve done something right to be remembered, to be bled and smeared onto shirts for young skaters and eco-degenerates to praise. But the more I dug deeper to find out this man’s history, the more I related him to Fidel Castro and the murdering tendencies we’ve all associated with Amin of Uganda. However, I think a bit differently about such men after a recent conversation. Normally we’re brought up to hate such men because only what we know of them were the horrors they caused. It was a talk with a man who worked to introduce a brief glimmer of light in a dictator’s purpose and the extent by which his or her damage actually often make’s unique progress….and that too is the goal of a revolutionary….progress, not just destruction and death. This dictator, for conversational reference to the point I’m making overall was Adolf Hitler, and although he is one of the worst people in the world to emulate, he turned what was then a desperate German society where any local mother would wheelbarrow millions of her own Deutsche-Marks into the grocer’s market and dump it on the shop-owner’s countertop just to buy an apple, to a thriving competitive global and economic force within only 9 years. Che and his buddy Fidel were not all too different in what they wanted for farmers and countrymen, to get them out from under Baptista. Che, an Argentinean by blood, and an educated doctor, we should already note is a bit outrageous for leaving his family to go fight for some other country’s people. Believing that the best way to overthrow a power that they truly believe the people want overthrown, is by brute force and guerrilla warfare. So public that everyone hears about it, so daring that it can’t be mistaken in the news as some accidental exchange of friendly-fire at a jolly quail hunt out in the jungle. The movie itself is a masterpiece in the geographical landscapes and scenes it portrays amongst the forests and mountains it pitches tent after tent. It also reveals a unique take on the life of a revolutionary…..a lonely nomadic existence, laying your head against a different tree trunk each night. And the things one abandons such as family and freedom for this life in hiding, always on the run making your next move for people who aren’t sure they really care you’re there because it puts them in equally more danger. Benicio Del Toro did a fantastic job….he really did, but then again he remains the same character he usually is, a slower moving, talking and squinting version of himself, except this time with a bad case of asthma and a love for Cuban cigars and cigarettes. Soderbegh should’ve never had the Hollywood celebrity cameo that you’ll catch in the 2nd part of Che because it seriously deters from the movie’s local mission and geographic feel. In fact I dont even remember what his part was it threw me off so bad to see him. The whole film is subtitles as they’re speaking Spanish, some scenes even with thousands of locals scattered amongst the brush in tactical formats…and there, this additional character out of the blue, although brief, was a totally unnecessary casting decision that jostled audience whispers and deep breaths of disappointment.
Aside from that, the film cut out Che’s motorcycle ride across the South American continent that made him come to love and appreciate it’s beauty so much, the celebratory years after defeating Baptista that became more of a conflict in service and opinion amongst Fidel and his inferiors, as well as his unsuccessful attempt at stirring up a revolution in the Congo. The movie lacks any love story, which I actually liked since these days everything has to do with what piece of ass is affecting the main character’s current decisions. For some reason they chose to have it be a film that jumps around a lot, irrationally shifting from different time periods in ten minute intervals. His life is a story of successive battles...moaning and roaring his wise demeanor into the ultimate sculpture, and therefore the time flickerings just makes us work harder to keep focused on what city or year we’re in.
In the end, I hated that I liked Che the man (I knew I'd like the movie), because they portrayed him more as the doctor and next door neighbor than the obsessed maniac cult leader with a gun who imprisoned eager minds to join him in shooting the heads off any dissenters he’d crossed. How can you be one of Fidel Castro’s most lethal and feared assassins if you’re a saint with a heart of gold? Give me a break. I think if we’d seen more of a mental struggle with what Fidel had become and how it differed so much from what Che wanted to achieve, which was never-ending liberation of all of Latin America, than we would’ve understood the more obsessive, stop-at-nothing murderer that he’d really been….enough so to understand why any country would ever request his hand be chopped off for fingerprint analysis and confirmation that he really was caught……even this was left out of the movie, making my point stronger for the blatent disregard of historical fact to swap amicably for admiration and tender-loving vittles we and our kittens should enjoy when thinking about the motives and the man behind the loved interjection Hey “Pal” or “Bud” or “Che”.
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