The United States of Black. - Red and White bars are all over town - host the immediacy of this American Empire. These Red and White, uneven rambling root- bars that writhe in the dust. There is no easy paralell - this ain't no Nike ad, the track ain't even, it's twisted in the rubble and the wreckage of a century and a half of greed in this nation. No thin white lines, sleek and emaciated lines of Liberty for the shining runner lady to run between. No certain red - no way, no folks neither. Rather the red like the brown-red man - Chicano laborer - brown pride, black pride... and as for white pride? Well, I have none! There is no white pride that isn't some epithet for the Ku Klux Clan. Brown pride and black pride, I hope you will do better! Well at least you can fight while the shadow of white pride creeps up like a vine that's strangling you. White pride has become a corporate cancer. This color line is still the power line is still the poverty line. This line, this power to life, held in the hands of wicked men, this power over life can never BE life... that's what one man has said, and I believe him. I've got no voice on this flag of pride. I've got no "Blue Angels" - I've got no bright stars and broad stripes! Singing: "Off we go into the wild blue yonder..." I dont have time for that! That kind of jingoism is the worst insult: "we go off into the wild blue yonder, leaving you behind!" What Independence is there on Independence day 2007? What independence is there when we have got troops over in Iraq, waiting to die defending the democracy that they really believe in, waiting to die defending my freedom of speech? Let me ask you this. Let me put you to this question: Are you willing to die defending the democracy that someone else told you to defend because you wanted to hold a legal gun in your hands? Did you ever think that the war was lost back at home? When the Robber Barons told you to die defending their democracy did you ever think of that? Did you ever decide to die defending their right to free speech? Maybe you wanted to die defending the American Empire? Did you ever think about that? Democracy or the American Empire, whichever comes first, give or take! ...When we have culled all the black nations for their terrorists--- terrorists, they hide in the mobs of the innocent and explode themselves, shoot marines with guns. And let's be frank, no matter how much some of these boys wanted to hold a gun in their hands, I don't think many of them want to shoot a nursing mother through the head. I don't think these marine boys want to use their grandmothers as decoys or as faulty body armor - now that is obscene! Brown pride - White pride - Gay pride - This country is no poem - Poems now are words that act as lies in the hearts of men - this country is no poem - written in fact by the poet, sitting in the Slum. Sitting in the slum, the poet Aj Dagga Tolar sits and writes his poem. He is sitting in Nigeria, in Lagos, in the slum of about 5-million, Ajungele, the jungle. He writes that this country is not a poem. Well, now, everywhere is a slum, not as desperate as Lagos, but everywhere is a slum: we are all slumming for the American "Standard of Living" - a living of life that has gone too far, that bought too many races, that kept its passions beating too strongly for the American whore. We might all go back to life, back on the farm, but we cannot resist the city, even the artists and the bohemian sculptors, forgive us a little for being seduced, we believed even just a little that she had some kindness. We cannot resist the city with its famous Americans: William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski - drunkards, lusches and letches, junkies, tricks with whores. America is not chaste and its heroes are neither. But that is not the only story in town. I cannot believe that that is the only story in town. Each man searching for liberty at the bottom of some addiction. The rebels and the revolutionaries search for an addiction other than our addiction to American pride and glory, the glut of technological Rome in an American empire. That is not the only story I heard you say, I heard that one must say! Not the only story in town, it circles down to its own rock bottom, as you try to avoid fundamentalism like pigs on the wing. It circles down, you follow it round, you give it size, you give it measure, you say "It gives me life, this American land!" You said a lot of things on the way down to try to find yourself, but there was no one there when you hit the bottom, just a predicament, just an empty American high school classroom where there are no students. I mean, who is really willing to learn? Are the robbers willing to learn? All the unruly teenage players have left the classroom, and now its just one big recess. They will come in again, but I will be there waiting to tell you that this is America! How do you hope to teach the Cholo-gangsters? How many speed bumps of education do you wish to put in the way of a life that is gone too fast? How many speed bumps of metaphor do you wish to put in the way, to say Life is but a metaphor, when we know that for them metaphor just gets in the way of their struggle and their suffering will to power. Life has gone too fast in the American inner city - the young man grows up his whole life round liquor and booze - how do you hope to teach them that this is some American wasteland where their fathers and their fathers' fathers have been forgotten and fogotten again and again, that we have made at each step a deliberate attempt to forget them? We live on eating each other: cheap Hispanic labor. I know, another hornet's nest: "to live outside the law you must be honest," but America? Outside the law? Never! Was there anything in America that was outside the law? America was the land ot the law - and it always promised religious freedom. Now we have Puritanical churches, or, what's worse, Satanic Junkies - Jerry Falwell getting fat and slick on your blood. Walt Whitman wrote a poem. Walt Whitman wrote that poem for the captain of his country... a poem for his captain. And maybe there, behind suspenders and a broad rimmed hat - maybe crossing Brooklyn Ferry - maybe there at dawn - you might find the American we desperately need. But what good is the dawn of our country when each passing day we become more of an empire? What is left is each man's private home. Each man steps into his abode like a fortress. Each abode is a fortress as distant as another nation. Here we hold the flag for our nation: No longer the stars and stripes, it reads with the number of our house in black and white. I painted it there. I added a star because stars stand for other places and other predicaments, I added a fertile valley of a crescent moon, or a Saracen sword, to cut a little deeper into the valley, to cut away the American Empire, to till the land a little deeper. It says that there is no American flag flying here. There is no red, white and blue. There is clay-red, and bone white and all-devouring black - inside our living room - that is all you will ever see: just bones, marrow and emptiness. You can cut through the emptiness with your thin white lines but you won't hit anything, not even a star to split in two with your scimitar.
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