Category: El Loro Mojado

I wrote the first three posts in an attempt to straighten out some of my own views and I thought long and hard before sharing them. I was intimidated, perhaps; not so much by the currently politically correct suspicion that no white man has the right to opine on race – though that never seems to stop demented pundits and their followers from, for example, squarely placing the blame for police brutality against the black population on… the black population.

Much more important to me than the fundamentally chickenshit vagaries of PC is the question of spouting off about a subject of which I can have no deep emotional understanding because I’m a white man in a white man’s society.

With these misgivings in mind, I ran the material by friends – writers, producers and entrepreneurs of one sort or another. People I respect. I have collated their responses and present them as if they are once voice:

It’s interesting that, as we’ve discussed, the U.K. is de facto more integrated than the U.S.; an apparently higher level of intermarriage, to the extent that in London and other big cities, interracial couples are so common as to be totally unremarkable. Also, there is nothing like the residential segregation here that’s the norm in the U.S.

Americans by and large don’t seem to acknowledge (or know?) that U.S. Blacks have punched way, way above their weight in their contribution to international culture. Taking music alone: the huge breadth and depth, worldwide, of popular music – which effectively is Black music; everything from jazz (New Orleans, mainstream, big band, bop) blues, rhythm’n’blues, rock’n’roll, soul, swing, zydeco, etc. etc. Black American music has become the popular music of the world, from Beyonce to Khelani – and the deracinated R’n’B that is the lingua franca of pop is just Black music without Blacks. What has the U.S. white lower and lower middle class (the most racist bloc) contributed? Country music, 80 per cent of which is crap, and which anyway doesn’t mean shit outside the U.S. This is before we consider the contribution of Black comedians, writers, actors etc. What’s also amazing is that US Blacks, bearing in mind they’re outnumbered about 8 to 1, have survived at all, let alone made such a contribution.

I read somewhere whereby working class people striving towards the middle class, unless they have access to the cultural norms of middle class life – very broadly, books, theatre, cinema, art etc. – just become rich working class people. You have the phenomenon of university students who are ignoramuses, educated know-nothings data-stuffed but with zero ability to analyze or put their knowledge into any kind of moral or humane context.

One of the many things about which white people know more or less zero is Black  history whether it’s Windrush in the UK, King Leopold in the Congo, Zulu and Matabele uprisings against the British, and, particularly, the narrative of Black Americans: slavery, Jim Crow, Frederick Douglas, MLK, Charles Wright, James Baldwin, Tommie Smith, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters… the list is endless.

Not one of the commentators I talked to was sure what all this means. Perhaps, we seem – the human race –  increasingly to be embracing ignorance as a virtue; and excoriating education, science and the humanities as works of Satan. And the more widespread ignorance is, the less chance there is of understanding the ‘other’.

And let’s not even consider fundamental religionism…

We can pretty much give up on the hope that questions of race – or any social change for that matter – will be resolved by science or technology. Even where science and technology has the knowledge and data to effect change – to advance our evolution – it doesn’t have the human capital and the resulting financial means to do so.

For my money, it comes down to the arts which is one reason why so many in power are desperate to turn off any support for the arts or humanities. Another is that, at base, surely any artistic endeavour’s purpose is to inspire, provoke, uplift or question – and who among our politicians, ‘leaders’ and technocrats wants to be questioned by an inspired or provoked public?

But if social solutions can be inspired by the arts, the question is ‘which arts?’ Let’s face it, Picasso’s Guernica or Van Gogh’s heartbreaking studies of the miners of the Borinage might affect a tiny number of people lucky enough to see them but they ain’t going to change fuckall.

Movies like Platoon, In The Heat Of The Night, Serpico or Spotlight might affect a larger audience – but do they effect change? Real change?  Ditto Shakespeare or Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

But music… isn’t that the one universal art form that touches billions?

I reckon if there were a way of feeding the uncommitted (as against the incorrigibly bigoted) through a music-driven social transformer that begins with The Blues, perhaps that might prompt change. The passion of Springsteen, the hope of Two Tone, the sheer joy of KC or Sly, Eminem, NWA, Stormzy – name your passion –  could music be the so-far lacking engine of change?

If indeed there were a ‘transformer’ that began with The Blues we might also understand so much more about the racial history of the U.S.A.

Part four posts shortly

Colombians tell me that I look at their multi-ethnicity through rose lenses and that prejudice is rife; that if you lined up the richest to the poorest, the richest are the whitest and the poorest the blackest. Turning to the UK, I’ve aways been heartened by the fact that if you’re in a shop and surrounded by Brits of all colours and ethnicities, shut your eyes and you’ll not know which or who is speaking. That is rarely the case in the USA – and I don’t even know if that’s important.

But beware those rose lenses when it comes to the UK. Every Black friend or contact you have will tell stories of horrible prejudice and discrimination (much as a majority of women will have stories of insult, abuse and worse).

Repeating myself, the fear and hatred that politicians have encouraged in their voters in pursuit of power; the general pusillanimity of mainstream media (now very much a minority taste); and the disgusting social mores of the ultra-rich who have their social media boots on our necks – these three phenomena threaten to extinct empathy, humaneness and rational debate.  AI and AGI will not come to our rescue, witness the widely experienced racism, sexism and homophobia embedded in the underlying databases. ‘Scraping’ is an appropriate description of AI’s information-gathering process. The scrapings not only of human inspiration and the Enlightenment but of the vilest of the vile bottom of the barrel hatreds – and an inability to moderate the difference.

A step toward rationality might be to throw political correctness to the four winds and recognize that we are all tribal creatures with a deeply ingrained fear of ‘other’ tribes. Let satire and political humour run riot because we are, or ought to be, sufficiently evolved to be able to rise above the  childish feelings of being offended. Surely by now we should be able to overcome the tribal fear of other. Ricky Gervais, who I often find unbearably smug, is right on the money when he talks about human evolution: we have risen above terrible dangers, we have evolves and advances – only to have become afraid of words.

Humour is a path toward humanity and rationality, to questioning the absurdities of prejudice and discrimination, and it’s interesting that very, very few truly racist, classist or sexist comedians have careers. I mean truly racist, classist or sexist in their hearts. Yes, one may be outraged by a particular riff or joke but that outrage so very rarely accurately defines the comedian or commentator as racist, classist or sexist. The joke is the joke and if that offends us perhaps we need to toughen up. If the teller is an irredeemable racist, misogynist or homophobe, well that’s something else and fortunately, while many of them might thrive in their sordid secret social media caves or, indeed, in branches of government and law enforcement, they rarely do in humour or satirical comment. Which, of course, those racist, misogynist and homophobes would love to shut down.

An aside. Some liberals and progressive exert their cancel muscle (though how liberal or progressive that makes them I’m not sure). Some conservatives and retrogressives demand that institutions, (including the BBC, incidentally) balance this tsunami of allegedly left-leaning content with right leaning content. Good luck with that. Name me one comedian who can get big laughs out of the conservative and retrogressive policies that are turning us against each other and bundling us to the cliff’s edge like a herd of buffalo driven toward a buffalo jump.

Yes, of course, the solutions to racial and class conflict require more than incisive humour. They need the kind of investment in political, economic, social and educational recalibration of which we seem to be incapable; increasingly incapable, in fact, in an age when ‘fuck you’ has prevailed over common cause and ‘empathy’ is an incomprehensible three syllables. I fully expect it to be excised from online dictionaries within my lifetime.

Part three posts shortly

In the spirit of the wet parrot squawking, the next few posts centre on race. When I look back to MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, Rock Against Racism and the hope and optimism of Two Tone, it’s hard to understand how far we’ve travelled in reverse. Smarter people than me may tell me I’m full of shite but I think we began to engage reverse gear with Reagan and Thatcher. They were the first politicians in the modern age to mobilize fear through intensely focused dishonesty and a ruthless disregard of empathy. The rise of untrammeled and conscienceless social media, the monetizing of cruelty, the castration of political and social humour and the looming inhumanity of AI and AGI have set human evolution back god knows how many decades.  Right or wrong, here’s my two cents. It rambles hither and thither but race and society is a badly explored jungle. Getting lost here and there is inevitable:

Who the Hell am I to express any kind of opinion about Black and White and PC? Or is it Black and white and PC? Maybe one qualification or experience is that I grew up in Central Africa, in a very remote area in which I was the only white child. Hardly surprising that I thought I was an African. In fact, I didn’t have to think it. It was just a fact.

Until it wasn’t and it was made very clear that I could not be African and white.

I wrote about this is an autobiography/fiction crossover, Fishing For Crocodiles.  I need to add that watching the post Mandela triumphant Springboks and now world champion Proteas, would anyone divide the players into black and white? They are patently and joyously South African. That’s a simple fact and it is not intended to make light of horrible status and economic differences which also exist there. South Africans are working on it, which is more than can be said for a lot of ‘white’ societies.

My adult life has been spent in the UK and the USA, with long periods of time in the Colombian melting pot. I’m depressed and saddened to see that when it comes to color blindness (to use an old-fashioned phrase that seems very appropriate today), we’re locked in reverse and stomping on the accelerator. Conscienceless profit driven social media have enabled bigots of all sorts to find each other and unleash their fear and hatred. They have been given permission to do so by hate- and fear-exploiting politicians, autocrats, influencers and tech bros. One might think that AI and AGI will reverse the process but since their development is largely in the hands of the same shameless zero empathy billionaires who control social media, and since the foundation of AI and AGI is the scraping of uncountable quantities of existing data and victor-written history, almost all of it seen through the white Western telescope, I don’t hold out much hope there.

Part two posts shortly

Little Jimmie played his 75th birthday at another of those ramshackle clubs which any other city’s fire department, police department or other bureaucratic nanny would close down. Little Jimmie’s a compelling blues guitarist and singer. Depending on your taste, he may lack the,charisma of some of the late greats but he is a direct link to an earlier era and the ‘authentic blues.’ Quite what authentic blues are, I’m not sure. Robert Johnson, certainly, but there are people who will tell you that once Muddy Waters invented electricity, he surrendered his authenticity. Most of those aficionados will be white and on the earnest side because blues, like jazz, does not have much of a Black following. Perhaps that’s why Little Jimmie’s band was all white, the drummer looking as though he’d be more at home in a country western setting; the harmonica lank haired and ineffably sad of expression; the bass player young, tubby, curly haired and apparently in charge of the play list. The set up reminded me of a Chuck Berry tour. One of the three or four fathers of rock, Chuck traveled solo and picked up usually white musicians at his various venues.

Little Jimmie’s audience in this fire-trap music bar was almost exclusively white and jigging enthusiastically in that somewhat spastic style which may have something to do with following the lead guitar or melody rather than the rhythm; or having no feel for on- and off-beat. It’s an intrusive and fundamentally uncool movement which doesn’t quite gybe with electric blues and tends to spill beer on adjacent patrons. If this reads like the classic ‘they’ can dance and we can’t – and therefore just another racial stereotype – there are reasons for stereotypes and anyone who cannot see that, as a generality, there is a big gulf between black and white dancing is either blind or terminally infected with political correctness.

Listening to Little Jimmie was another wonderful New Orleans night for me but I have to say that something just did not feel right and, without being able to put my finger on it, I believe that something is race-connected. Perhaps Rockets was organic where Little Jimmie’s night was constructed. One was life, the other a show.

Glory is one of the most expensive restaurants in the French Quarter.  No longer in my financial pomp, I was taken there by new friends, a wonderful and generous couple who give the lie to the generality that the mega rich are usually ‘filthy’ rich.

The restaurant may seat forty people. It was more or less full. There was one black couple. Apart from one table of more or less drunk corporate types, our table was the only one giving off any real energy, probably because we were fresh friends eagerly finding out about each other and sharing our delight in New Orleans. Most everyone else appeared quite glum. Certainly, if one had a device that measured Enjoyment Factor, on the face of it at least, Rockets would be right up at the top of the scale and Glory somewhere down around the dentist’s office. But then Rockets is a music club and Glory a restaurant where a chateaubriand costs about the same as a small cow and the wine list runs up to three grand a bottle.  Bearing in mind that the median black income here is around $25,000 and the median white $65,000, Glory’s racial mix is no surprise.

Personally, much as I enjoyed the meal and the company, I’d take 80 visits to Rockets for every one to Glory, because Rockets is alive with a contagious energy where Glory is pretty much po-faced and dead. Rockets is hanging out on the stoop, watching or being part of the street life. Glory is staying home and watching TV.

Of course, if New Orleans becomes Disneyland, which many locals fear, all this will fade into the past.

Up next – Part Three – Little Jimmie

(I’ve fictionalized places and names in the next three columns, for obvious reasons.)

The first time I walked into Rockets it was a Sunday evening. It’s easy to miss –  barely more than a house front on a dual carriageway. Outside the club, a handful of flash Harley’s parked. Bikers’ Night? Inside, the band was playing a kickass mix of soul, rock and reggae. Every member talented far beyondthe average bar band and the singer one of those performers able both to sing and engage his audience, bring them with him, sometimes integrate their voices, with compelling ease. A few days earlier, I’d been in another club, the band playing extreme up-tempo versions of Bob Marley classics and its singer much more concerned with engaging – chivvying – her audience than actually singing. It was so irritating that I left.

Rockets is basically a long narrow room, a bar running down one side, a row of tables down the middle and along the wall opposite the bar. It was packed. Two hundred people?  The youngest there maybe thirty; the oldest up in the indefinables. Seventies? Eighties? It was indeed a bike night, for several men, most of them on the larger side, wore colors. One, shaved head, yellow shades, sported an embroidered vest that proclaimed him ‘Big Daddy Ben – One Man Gang.’ This was a tough crowd, if only in appearance – though it would take a very hard man indeed to put that appearance to the test; and why would you, since the atmosphere was so mellow, the music so tight and everyone gently grooving, drinking, dancing and having a fine time on a Sunday night.

Walking in, we were a few Whites in a Black room. Not a glance, not a frisson, not a moment of discomfort, WTF?  or even surprise. I’m pretty damned certain that if three Black people walked into a Santa Monica club packed with two hundred Whites, those strangers would not have felt – or been made to feel – anywhere near as comfortable as we were.  Moreover, were I Black I would not be this magnanimous. I would have wondered, and probably asked out loud, what the fuck these three Whites were doing on my turf.

(To put this in further context, I visited Rockets just a couple of weeks after a white supremacist youth shot dead numerous black churchgoers and was obligingly fed hamburger and fries shortly afterwards by the white cops who gently took him into custody. Days later, the black congregation was praying for his forgiveness.)

Up next – Part Two – Glory

I ask the R.V. owner about the ramshackle frame on wheels, the strategic cans chained to its parking  meter.

   “I’m the birdman,” he cackles. “Come take a look” and he knocks on the R.V. door.  I’m not too enthusiastic about this proposed tour of his stately home but, before I can refuse, the door opens and a thinner version of my new friend – more hair, same threads, same cologne – appears. Behind him, I get a glimpse of the R.V.’s grim, dim interior, a large part of which seems to be taken up by a cage. Unspoken words pass between the two men and More Hair takes two cockatoos – or, anyway, bloody huge parrot-y birds – from the cage, materializing them on his hand like a conjuror.

With similar sleight of hand, the birds are transferred, one to my hand and one to my shoulder. The one of my shoulder takes an unhealthy interest in my ear and I’m very aware that one clack! of his or her nut-cracking beak and I’ll never wear earrings again.

Now, to my shame, I’m vaguely irritated to have been caught in a hustle but as quickly as it flares that irritation passes because I realize that this really isn’t a hustle. That these two partners are simply happy to show me their birds, placing them on the ramshackle wheeled frame and explaining that this is their life: cruising their world and sharing their birds with anyone who wants a photograph. A few bucks for a shot on Bourbon or Royal, or maybe in front of Brad and Angie’s place; the state house, Baton Rouge; to whatever destination the old R.V. will stumble. A picture to upload to social media. An image to tweet. Perhaps even to remember.

And through it all, keeping that generator going so the birds can live in air-conditioned comfort.

So many ways to pass through life. So many ways to scratch a living. Two men between middle age and social security, drifting – sometimes staggering – along a wilder shore; anomalies, unsuited to the ordered beaches of our aspirational, greyed, working world. Gentle rebels,

these Birdmen and I hope they’ll rebel for many years; inspire others to digress. I hope this because it’s these rebels, these eccentrics, that help us maintain our humanity and stave off a style of living that seems increasingly robotic and unfulfilling.