Facts and Fictions
Like Che printed t-shirts and Darfur doo-rags, tragedy has become fashionable. 
It isn’t rare that I find someone trading stories (with great excitement) about a friend of a friend who was in Indonesia during the tsunami, or meet an artist eager to proclaim that he lost everything in New Orleans. Surely, a life of meaning must have been filled with unbelievable obstacles. If you spit lyrics, you must have bit the bullet (literally) at some point, right? Well, if not…did you almost die some way? Why do you think Kanye West is still rapping about his car crash?
Rappers are some of America’s earliest poverty-pimps, doling out pain and suffering long after they can pay bills. But rap artists aren’t the only people making a pretty penny off popular pities. Reality television has become the great distributor of everyone’s story, for better or worse. We can watch obese people cry over food, older women bed younger men, unattractive people get new faces, and burdened parents struggle with troubled children. The is The Biggest Loser, The Cougar, Extreme Makeover, and The Nanny.
Beyond reality television, there is Facebook, twitter, blogs, and i-reports. As a result, the democratization of news has created a culture of entitlement, where people not only hope, but believe their individual stories are important. And when pop culture themes suggest otherwise, people go to great lengths to swing the spotlight to their side. 
They crash acceptance speeches and White House parties and build mysterious saucers to fake-launch their six year-olds. And we return, ad-nauseum, to the same opportunity for uplift where people fight to surmount unbelievable obstacles. With media along for the ride, who is left to interrogate how we all got to this new reality in the first place? Who bears the responsibility of separating fantasy from the real world’s many harsh realities?
This is so real. How many middle and upper class kids did i go to college with who were fans of socialists like castro, che guevara, and etc.? It’s so pathetic how people want to claim some kind of connection to pain, but none of them really want to feel it. Chris Rock always says, “everybody wanna be a nigga but nobody want to be a nigga.”
great post!
This is so real. How many middle and upper class kids did i go to college with who were fans of socialists like castro, che guevara, and etc.? It’s so pathetic how people want to claim some kind of connection to pain, but none of them really want to feel it. Chris Rock always says, “everybody wanna be a nigga but nobody want to be a nigga.”
great post!
I like this.
I love shopping, and coming to the U.S., going out bargain -shopping was one thing i looked forward to.
Then, i was kind of surprised, and bothered, by how much ‘peace’ is marketed here. And especially for women. Just go into any Forever 12, Charlotte Russe, H&M, Urban Outfitters, really ANY shop out there affordable enough for students, and these peace things are everywhere.
Dont get me wrong, im a proponent for peace, but i cant help but wonder if we’re missing the whole point here. U know what i’m saying? I hardly think these shops have all their merchandise peace-guaranteed to promote peace as much as to promote social liberty at large.
I like this.
I love shopping, and coming to the U.S., going out bargain -shopping was one thing i looked forward to.
Then, i was kind of surprised, and bothered, by how much ‘peace’ is marketed here. And especially for women. Just go into any Forever 12, Charlotte Russe, H&M, Urban Outfitters, really ANY shop out there affordable enough for students, and these peace things are everywhere.
Dont get me wrong, im a proponent for peace, but i cant help but wonder if we’re missing the whole point here. U know what i’m saying? I hardly think these shops have all their merchandise peace-guaranteed to promote peace as much as to promote social liberty at large.
A really important argument about the fetishization of suffering and its weird morphing into (mass)mediated fantasy (errr….hunh, Fanele?). For some strange reason, your post makes me think of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and why I’ve always hated (downright, hated) that novel, but loved her other work. In Kindred, you have the protagonist black woman in a relationship with a white man who keeps slipping through time back to the plantation. Not only is she subjected to spectacular bodily violences during these shifts, but she’s being called back in time to “save” a white ancestor. (Whatever.) In one flash she has her arm cut off for some offense or the other and ends up back home in Pasadena an amputee- this is the Butler novel that everyone teaches to high school students- sterile multiculti ideals, connected to weird lessons about uplift/community, and always, always about a romantic narrative of pain and redemption. Yawn.
A really important argument about the fetishization of suffering and its weird morphing into (mass)mediated fantasy (errr….hunh, Fanele?). For some strange reason, your post makes me think of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and why I’ve always hated (downright, hated) that novel, but loved her other work. In Kindred, you have the protagonist black woman in a relationship with a white man who keeps slipping through time back to the plantation. Not only is she subjected to spectacular bodily violences during these shifts, but she’s being called back in time to “save” a white ancestor. (Whatever.) In one flash she has her arm cut off for some offense or the other and ends up back home in Pasadena an amputee- this is the Butler novel that everyone teaches to high school students- sterile multiculti ideals, connected to weird lessons about uplift/community, and always, always about a romantic narrative of pain and redemption. Yawn.