Hijacking the Rainbow
or
Mykel's June 2024 Blog: You're Still Wrong
Florida
is where woke goes to die
--
Gov. Ron DeSantis
Try
to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.
—
Maya Angelou
Freedom’s
just another word for nothing left to lose.
--Kris
Kristofferson made famous by Janis Joplin
It was while giving a speech in Washington about the British theft of the Elgin marble from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as "niggardly." Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved — having felt the word hanging in the air a bit — to say "parsimonious" from then on. --Christopher Hitchens
I think I’ve told this story before. I must’ve. It was an epiphany… a life changer. Google tells me no. Google tells me there are no instances of “Mykel Board” and “Miles Davis” occurring on the same page. Who am I to argue with Google? Am I the one to stand in front of the charging train with my hands out in front of me, while a little baby lies crying on the track? Sorry kid, but I’m getting out of the way. Maybe I’ll come to the funeral.
I only vaguely knew of the word WOKE I didn’t get what it meant… something about being aware… with some kind of racial overtones. Nothing that would stick. I probably heard it sometime in the late 1960s, but I was too involved in taking LSD and stopping the Vietnam war to bring it into full consciousness. It laid in the background… written off as a fashion word… until the 1980s or so. I knew that lots of white people were using the word… that couldn’t be a good sign.
My high school buddy David told me about Miles Davis. David is the only person I know who loves music and doesn’t give a fuck about genre. He hates (or loves) NOTHING on principle. He just tunes into the sound and judges from there. David had seen Miles in the 60s, when we were in high school together. I had no idea what the jazz guy sounded like… only that he was a famous jazz musician… maybe the most famous jazz musician in the world. Normally, talk about jazz artists would go in one ear and come out my asshole. But David’s report of this Miles event… since double checked by Mr. Google... was something special.
In Manhattan, around 1959, Miles Davis was driving through midtown Manhattan in an expensive car... could have been a Mercedes. A cop (in New York in the 1950s the words “white cop” were a pleonasm.) stops Miles and asks him to get out of the car… show ID…
“Why’d you stop me?” asks the trumpet player. “I wasn’t speeding or nothin’.”
“You don’t fit the car,” answers the cop.
BOING! Awareness bops into my brain like an erection at a strip club. A thought I’d never thought before. A realization I’d never realized before. An epiphany. If it were me driving, I wouldn’t have been stopped. No white person would have! Suddenly, I was WOKE! What a beautiful and right word. What a sudden consciousness… like something zen. Like realizing that… hey… boys can be cute too. Just POW!
What a wonderful word WOKE was. What a perfect expression of learning. A word that should not be used easily, but one that expresses a moment of awareness… especially of something that happens to people who are different from you. Wow.
Then that beautiful word changed meanings. It became… mostly in the hands of right-wing Republicans… clichéd... what used to be called Politically Correct. [NOTE: Those Politically Correct or their initials PC also changed meaning. Their origins lay in the glory days of the 60s debates between anarchists and “New Leftists” on one side and the traditional Marxists on the other. The “new left” used PC as an epithet against the Marxists. George Bush Sr. got hold of it somehow and twisted it to mean “doctrinaire” “unthinking allegiance to cliches” etc.]
Woke lost its exquisite meaning of “sudden awareness of someone else's reality.” It came to mean dictatorial, literal, a leftist political crowd follower. Such a beautiful word… wrecked... destroyed... hijacked by the right.
FLASH TO A THUNDERSTORM: The end of it. The breaking sun through the mist of raindrops that never achieved the weight to fall to earth. The sky becomes a prism. Sunlight filters through. Everyone my elderly age remembers ROY G BIV red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet… the colors of the rainbowy, learned before knowing what exactly indigo was.
When Jesse Jackson ran for president, he gathered supporters among blacks, whites, yellows, men, women, old, young. All this before “diversity” became a cliché. Jackson used the metaphor RAINBOW to show the mix of people who supported him. His supporters were The Rainbow Coalition. Rainbow was EVERYBODY… all kinds of people… coming together for something new… something great.
FLASH TO PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL, in Hell’s Kitchen NYC. 2019-- slightly pre-pandemic. An attractive teenage boy… brown hair just over his forehead… the slightest hint of a mustache on his upper lip. He wears white PUMA sneakers, tight black Levis, and a rainbow-colored shirt. Not a strict hard-lined rainbow, but a soft rainbow, where each color slowly fades into the next.
I watch him from my seat on a waiting room bench. Yeah, he’s a beauty, but probably a year or two before legality. It’s not worth the effort… or the risk. I watch someone braver and about 5 years younger than me… with a full head of hair… slightly gray at the temples.
Gradually, the older man sidles in on the boy. He says something, touching the kid on the arm The boy turns to him and starts yelling. His English is accented… something central European.
“Get away from me!” shouts the boy. “Why are you touching me?”
“Your shirt,” says the man. “You’re advertising yourself.”
“What about my shirt? It’s a nice shirt. That’s all… just a nice shirt.”
The man steps away... turns his back to the boy, and pretends to read a newspaper he picked up from a vacant bench. The boy walks quickly out of the waiting room. He stands... remaining near the track gates, by the departure/arrival board. Here and there his concentration flits from the train information sign to us in the waiting room .
This
time it was the encyclopedia Britannica… not Google… that
explains:
It
goes back to 1978, when the artist Gilbert Baker, a gay man and a
drag queen, designed the first rainbow flag. Baker later revealed
that he was urged by Harvey
Milk,
one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S., to create
a symbol of pride for the gay community. Baker decided to make a flag
because he saw flags as the most powerful symbol of pride. As he
later said in an interview, “Our job as gay people was to come out,
to be visible, to live in the truth, to get out of the lie. A flag
really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your
visibility or saying, ‘This is who I am!’”
The first versions of the rainbow flag were flown on June 25, 1978, for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade. Baker and a team of volunteers had made them by hand, and now he wanted to mass-produce the flag for consumption by all. The various colors came to reflect both the immense diversity and the unity of the gay community
It was not until 1994 that the rainbow flag was truly established as the symbol for gay pride. That year, Baker made a mile-long version for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Now the rainbow flag is an international symbol for LGBTQ pride and can be seen flying proudly all around the world.
The idea
of rainbow was the sum
of the parts. A
unity of colors, genders,
ages,
philosophies.
In 2024, all
those parts have
shrunk to:
Vagina, Penis, Anus, Mouth, and where you put them. Rainbow
parades ban cops, NAMBLA and, maybe these days, gay Republicans.
The people
behind the flag are
less diverse and colorful than
a McDonald’s burger offering. That beauty, that unity of
differences has become little more than a pick-up signal meaning
“Hey, wanna fuck?”
The
gay liberationists have stolen the rainbow. And
now only men can be gay! Women are lesbians and their “L” must
come first in any alphabet
of homosexual letters. The
same thing, of course, happened to the word gay itself…
which appears
in its original meaning in old songs that people chuckle to.
Sometimes, it’s possible to take back a stolen word-- make a negative into a positive. One of the best examples of that is QUEER. Its first meaning was strange, unusual, different… with a negative connotation. Then, it homofied. I remember my father telling me how when he was in England during the Second World War, one of the British soldiers complained that he was “feeling queer today.” Dad moved to the other side of the room.
So even in the 1940s, QUEER had become attached to homotude… but kept the negativity. Then the queers took it back… with PRIDE.
It was such a joy listening to people use QUEER as a brag. You bet I’m queer. Different from you boring hets. I’m different and love my difference. I’m so fuckin’ queer… kiss me now!
Nigger is another word that twisted and turned its way through history. Mark Twain used it without negativity… just to identify race… maybe with a slight tint of downtrodden… former slave. Then it took on a negative meaning. A pejorative so fiercely taboo, that it’s unprintable… censored in TV… referred to as “the N-word,” replacing FUCK, which had been the F-word, (and now can be heard on every cable TV show). Nigger took over as the number one bad word. Even words unrelated, but that sound vaguely like nigger, are banned… or at least avoided. Check out Christopher Hitchens’ quote at the top of this blog.
But black folks picked up NIGGER and ran with it. (I hate the euphemism “African-American.” Most black people have no history in Africa and there are plenty of white folks who are REALLY African-American.) Yes, Nigger became natural in Black English. A wonderful spit in the face to the white people who used it with a sneer.
Yo! White boy… I can say nigger because I am one. It’s a marker… it’s the way I talk. You CAN’T say nigger… because you ain’t one.
So, as with QUEER, the recipients of the negative took it over and stuck it to the original users, while keeping it for themselves.
FLASH TO WHAT THE FUCK I’M TALKING ABOUT
One of my longtime fantasies has been to write a book called Hijacking the Rainbow… something about Woke, Rainbow, Fascist, Freedom, Queer, Liberty, Hold To Account, all those ideas that have been turned upside down, lost or reversed their meaning. I figure here I can break the ice… start the ball rolling… try them out… get the ink scratched on the parchment by putting things down in a blog. I hope the feedback from this blog and the act of touching fingers to keys will bring me out to get my writing ass in gear. Maybe a reader or two can suggest an inclusion. I’ve already gotten a good suggestion about how the words “gender-affirming” have come to mean ‘gender-rejecting.” We’ll see what “fantasies about writing a book” becomes. More word changes and ideas are welcome. Please use the comment section of this blog for your suggestions. And don’t let the creeps hijack your rainbow.
See you
in hell,
Mykel Board
ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]
→ HEY, YOU CAN’T SAY THAT! Dept: After complaining about words lost to language change, censorship, or wokitude (new/negative meaning) I came across this “list of banned words” compiled by Lake Superior State University. It’s actually a list of words and phrases that various contributors say SHOULD BE banned. The site doesn’t really want to impose censorship. The list has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek. It’s having fun expressing annoyance. It includes one of my many pet peeves: “No Worries” when used as a synonym for “You’re Welcome.”So the guy holds the door open for me as I enter the prostate radiation room. I thank him. “No Worries” comes the answer. I’m having fuckin’ radiation next to my fuckin’ balls!!! Don’t tell me NO WORRIES.
→ SCARIER THAN THAT DEPT: There is an on-line program that will make your job easier by censoring “sensitive words.” Say the inventors: Text Censor is The World's Simplest Text Tool and the world's simplest browser-based utility for censoring words in text. Load your text in the input form on the left, specify all the bad words in the options, and you'll instantly get censored text in the output area. Powerful, free, and fast. Load text – get safe text. You can try it yourself here.
→ FETUS? ARE YOU SERIOUS? DEPT: The Jstor Daily reports that during the Trump administration, the CDC was instructed not to use certain words and phrases in its public reports. Science-based” and “evidence-based” are on the list of the banned words, along with “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” and “fetus”.
See you in hell (redux)
MB
COMMENTS: For some reason Google wasn't allowing comments. So I'm posting this one here from Tony Autoharp. (anonyarena@yahoo.com):
============================
I don't think anyone wearing a rainbow shirt or any other kind of shirt is "advertising" themselves and it is not an invitation for random strangers in a train station to touch you uninvited. If this man is interested in someone, he has a mouth. He can use it to ask first. This is not difficult. "I like your looks and I am attracted to you. Do you like me?" And from there if he gets an affirmative reply he may ask "May I touch you?" There is a step-by-step process to these things. But just sitting down next to someone and immediately starting in with grabby hands, and blaming that unwelcome behavior on the shirt the kid is wearing is not just impolite, its inappropriate. It is no different from Trump broadcasting to the world "I don't even wait, I just kiss. And when you're a star they let your do it; you can grab 'em by the pussy and do anything." These self-entitled assholes ruin everything. And that man in the train station probably ruined the joy of wearing a nice colorful shirt for this young man. And that's just sad. It is quite probably he now feels like he's never want to wear that "nice" shirt again, because it is now connected to an unhappy experience. That's how you coat rainbow colors with a tarnish.
I have never interpreted the Rainbow Flag to mean "I wanna fuck." I don't know who thinks these things.
I also don't hear black people use the "N" word the way you seem to. The "er" sound at the end is usually changes to an "a" sound. Whatever the case may be, you know the old saying "like the pot calling the kettle black?" Well, that's how come it can be used as a symbol of solidarity. It does not matter if the pot calls the kettle black because both are black - no harm/no foul. It means something else entirely if the white porcelain pitcher in the fancy china cabinet calls the kettle on the stove black, to emphasize that different distinction and imply that the while porcelain is superior. That's not only snobbery, it can quite seriously be something far worse, more ugly, and even a prelude to something dangerous.
Queer is a little different. A non-Queer may call an LGBTQ person "Queer" if that is how that person self-identifies. It's all about context. Say it with love and respect and you will get love and respect in return. Say it in the context of insult and antagonism, that's something else again. There is a chasm of difference between, "I love you, you colorful, brilliant and wonderful queer you. Keep on dancin'!" And "You fuckin' queer, you ought to be shot in the head for dancing like that in here!" The former is an encouragement. The latter is a threat.
The question of "hijacking" (which is not a word that I use so much but would use the more accurate words like "appropriating" and "redefining") words and symbols, is a question of something that is all too often beyond our control. The swastika used to just mean "good fortune." World events forever transformed it, "re-defined" it, and now we can't unsee what we see when we see it. Even when we see it in its original Himalayan or Tibetan or Native American tribal contexts, it will always be jarring to see it. The late 1970s punk rockers tried and failed to re-define it as "rebellion" but that didn't work. At some point meanings of certain words and certain symbols just permanently change, and there's we can do about it because there's no going back. Or if it does, it will take thousands of years and a lot of cultural forgetting to reach that point. I think that is probably no longer possible. We no longer live in the Stone Age. There are no more "forgotten" civilizations. After the information age took hold, anyone can look up anything on Google and find it, even where "Mykel Board" and "Miles Davis" may appear in the same place. This makes cultural "forgetting" a much more impossible task because our collective memory is now stored at at our fingertips in an instant. We may try to "redefine." But the reason propagandists have been so successful at changing the meanings of words and phrases like "woke" "critical race theory" "feminist" and "liberal" is not because anyone let them do it. They do it because anyone with enough determination, money and power behind them CAN do it.
=============================
BACK TO THE NATION DEPT:
The newest issue of THE NATION has a
great column by Kali Holloway on why TikTok banning is such a bad
idea. (As is most (all?) censorship.) It again makes me point out
that THE NATION is the only lefty magazine I know that is often right
(I mean CORRECT) about things.
Besides the Holloway column,
there’s also
a good one by Ginny Hogan (strangely, but slightly, different on
the website than in the magazine) with the pull-quote talking about
the up-coming presidential election.
We
have our two candidates.
One of them is deeply uninspiring,
and
the other is Donald Trump.
Time to subscribe, I’d
say.
LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:
READ THIS AGAIN!! Lots of new stuff here:
I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions many I’d never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.
I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.
Here's a start:
Here’s Ricardo Wang with a “micro-label” in Seattle “specializing in 8-track tapes and CDs. WOW! Check out one of their label staples: The Dead Air Fresheners.
Also
on bandcamp: My very long time faves in NYC, the BLACKOUT
SHOPPERS. Featuring pals Seth, superstar comic writer,
Justin Melkmann and possibly the next vice-president of the
US, Charles Bukkake.
Here’s
an update on the current URL for Sid Yiddish’s Dating Game (type)
entry.
And this sounds right up Sid’s alley. The Bilderberg Jazz Arkestra on Bandcamp!
Eric Grayson has an online music review zine, Sobriquet. Full pictures of the sleeves too! Something missing from too many zines. Sometimes you CAN judge a… er… book… by its cover.
Steen Thomsen is a Dane I’ve known ever since Lincoln was shot. I put his band THE ZERO POINT on the great WORLD CLASS PUNK Cassette for ROIR. It must be worth a mint now. I don’t have any left, I’m afraid. You can (and should) connect to the Zero Point on facebook. Tell ‘em Mykel’s blog sent you.
Sorry Dorothy, we are STILL in Kansas. And it’s as weird as OZ. Check out Bob Cutler’s DISTOPEKA.
And for a quiet smile and a much needed break for you and the dog, try G.C. Adams’ YouTube entry.
Christopher
Selden has a bandcamp entry for his band Crooked
Ghost. I say any band with a publicity photo like this deserves
at least a listing… maybe an orgasm or two.
Y ou
already know Murder & Mayhem zine… those guys who did the Mykel
Board centerfold. (No genitals shown… and probably for the better.)
Their on-line version is here.
The Clean Boys
from Denmark are also longtime friends of mine. In Denmark we
recorded as The
Bend-over Boys. Only one 10-inch available… but at least now I
can say I have a 10-incher!
Finally, for this month, Margaret O’Brien asked me to include the site: anti-war.com They seem to be folks after my own heart.
Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.
Longtime writer, Randall Fleming, has a new book out about the reversal of flag desecration. In his view, the right And more generally it’s about political violence in the 21st century.
Let
me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and
want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already
seen mine. mykelboard@gmail.com
