A MWC Special Feature

A Personal Reflection  (Part Two)                    

“What the Communists said about themselves was all wrong, but what they said about Capitalism is all correct.” A Moscow joke in the late 1990s.

In classic neo- Orleans style Jazz, it is the duty of the trumpets to state and embellish the theme, which unfortunately New Orleans today trumpets, failures of the America Inc.

A few miles from Senegal‘s capital Dakar in west Africa, lies the island of Goree, which long served as a thriving entrepot for European slavers to herd African slaves from the hinterland, mostly helped by rival tribes , to be sorted out like cattle for export to the new continent of Americas, to labor there as domestics or in plantations.

When posted at Dakar in late 1970s I went over to Goree many times, now a small, picturesque town and a UNESCO heritage site with museums including ’ The Maison des Esclaves ‘(“Slave House”), which was constructed in1786 , which displays slavery artifacts, and the Fort d'Estrées built in the 1850s. 

Once I chanced on a jazz festival there to which some well known and rising young talents, mostly from USA had come over to participate .Many others also came to West Africa in search of their roots .A few hundred miles south of Dakar is river Gambia, the locale for the book ‘The Roots’.

There were colorful and lively Jazz bands vying with each other. But there was one young girl whose singing left a searing imprint on my soul, as if after visiting the museum and the dungeons below ,where Black Africans were chained like animals ,she had transmuted into music the bruising of their souls , tortures and suffering of centuries - free human beings turned into animals ,sold and bartered like any other commodity. Even now, a flash of that wailing music, the cry of a caged soul pierces down my spine. 

All that Jazz;

The enslaved from West Africa, isolated both socially and geographically from their native environment created the jazz music as an expression of their culture, borrowing from European harmonic structure, Christian religious hymns but based on African rhythms. The white hunter, forbidden to enslave other Christians invented the lie that he was enslaving a savage , converting him into a Christian to save his soul (as now a days , under the charade of globalization, US led West is saving the world’s poor in Asia and Africa from poverty!) This allowed the enslaved to invent a music, which diverged widely, even violently from all previous canons of musical composition and performance, as if in defiance to grab at the opportunity, and the freedom .In the only domain he was his own master, improvisation ran riot as it still does. Indian classical music too is rooted in improvisation, which respects all religions, with performers though respected, used to be poor. The Indian and black musicians soon discover many affinities when they come together. 

From the very beginnings and at the turn of the 20th century Jazz has been a constantly evolving, expanding and changing music, passing through several distinctive phases of development. A definition that might apply to one phase—for instance, to New Orleans style or swing—is not applicable to another segment of its history, say, to free jazz. It has used both creative approaches in varying degrees and endless permutations. It is not—and never has been—an entirely composed, predetermined music, nor is it an entirely extemporized one. 

Early definition of jazz music with its chief characteristic improvisation, made it too restrictive, since composition, arrangement, and ensemble were also essential components throughout most of its history. Similarly, syncopation and swing, often considered essential and unique to jazz, are in fact lacking in much authentic jazz. However, despite diverse terminological confusions, jazz seems to be instantly recognized and distinguished as something separate from all other forms of musical expression. To repeat Armstrong's famous reply when asked what swing meant: “If you have to ask, you'll never know.” 

New Orleans exposes putrid underbelly of corporate greed; {mosgoogle right}

Across the wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean from Goree lies the city of New Orleans , where the slaves taken from West Africa, first mostly to Caribbean , worked themselves out on British sugar plantations  and later taken to colonial tobacco and cotton plantations in north America.

Nevertheless, the scenes in New Orleans, the Mississippi delta and elsewhere in South as telecast and reported by the media convey that little has changed for these unfortunate human beings.  From time to time, they cry out and explode as in the Watts riots forty years ago. Fire and anger remains bottled. 

Commenting on the handling of Hurricane Katrina a senior US officer in far off Iraq said  "If anything, I am kind of embarrassed.''  We are supposed to be telling the Iraqis how to act and this is what’s happening at home?" He further added that still he would rather be in Iraq than in New Orleans right now! A  National Guard member who returned to New Orleans from Iraq said that New Orleans was worse than Iraq.

System’s Failure or I am all right Jack (in fortress condominium)

It is not that scientists and others had not pointed out that we might indeed be entering a new, globally warmed world of extreme weather conditions. But global warming, the Bush administration which did not accept the Kyoto Protocol , has refused to acknowledge .How could they, as most of the top guns in the administration are from the energy sector .Global warming was discussed in terms of melting glaciers in terms of distant islands and atolls in South Pacific and Bangladesh. But the "Atlantis scenarios" for New Orleans was brought up by USA Today a year ago .It even discussed Mississippi delta threatened with rising ocean waters .It was well known for some time that New Orleans' levees weren't fit for a class 5 hurricane but instead , the Bush administration had slashed the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers. The "Atlantis scenario" was banished as nightmare, which hits others. (Or the Blacks and poor) When the reality hit, it was first ignored. For a change BBC was much better in telling the truth.( Remember , many independent reports had concluded  that the BBC gave only 5 % time for anti- Iraq war view ) 

Soon” much of New Orleans became the Atlantis from hell, a toxic sludge pool of a looted former city, filled with dead bodies and fires in places. The city is threatened with diseases such as cholera and typhus that haven't visited the Big Easy since early in the last century, and with thousands upon thousands of the black poor and a few of the stranded better-to-do such as doctors, nurses and a few local officials left for days on end with next to no way out. It was, in short, the feral city that 30 years of science fiction films (and post-apocalyptic novels) have delivered to the American public as entertainment as well as prophesy.”

Expectedly affluent white people and some middle class black people too fled the city in their cars , except the poor and mainly the Blacks , left behind in their below-sea-level shacks and aging tenements to face the wrath of Poseidon .To begin with ,the sanitized versions were shown by US media of the many of the black poor of New Orleans not only left behind , many thousands upon thousands of them - those who didn't die in their wheelchairs or on highway overpasses or in the ill-fated convention center or unattended and forgotten in their homes , just forgotten . Soon the reality of New Orleans and the Mississippi coast, as so many reporters have observed with shock, are ‘simply the Bangladesh of North America (after a disastrous set of monsoons), or in poorest Africa. [One rarely sees blacks and US poor in documentaries made by US producers, who scour the world to show sickness and filth to make US well off feel better.]

Katrina has only exposed the bankruptcy of US corporate free for all grab with little accountability. Every one is blaming the other, the federal government the state government and vice versa. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security , are blaming each other .The budget cut of  the Army Corps of Engineers which reined in on crucial levee work in New Orleans was done under the guise of preparing for, or fighting, or funding the "war on terror" at home and abroad. It also exposed the Neo-cons going on wars in Iraq with thin results but huge benefits for their masters.

All this had previously worried the governors of many states with significant chunks of the National Guard, just as important for disaster relief with its heavy equipment happened to be in Iraq, liberating it and through its mayhem spreading democracy, instead of handling the emergency at home. Soon when the avian flu or the next health disaster suddenly hits, the administration and the media would again be filled with the same sort of shock about the civilian response, because the public health system has also been gutted and de-funded under the guise of the "war on terrorism".

In his recent Dispatch, Tom Engelhardt summed up six failures, abroad in Iraq and at home.

1. Revelations of unexpected superpower helplessness: A single catastrophic war against a modest-sized, not particularly dramatically armed minority insurgency in one oil land has brought the planet's mightiest military to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in all directions. A single not-exactly-unexpected hurricane leveling a major American city and the coastlines of two states, has brought the emergency infrastructure of the world's mightiest power to a complete, grinding, disastrous halt and sent its wheels flying off in all directions.

2.Planning ignored: It's now well known that the State Department did copious planning for a post-invasion occupied Iraq, all of which was ignored by the Pentagon and Bush administration neo-cons when the country was taken. In New Orleans, it is already practically notorious that endless planning, disaster war-gaming, and the like were done for how to deal with a future "Atlantis scenario", none of which was attended to as Katrina bore down on the southeastern coast. [How ever, the author would like to point out and has maintained since the invasion of Iraq that the best of the Plans for occupation and colonization would have failed.]