Uncle Tom, Little Black Sambo, and Mammy

 I have been  in a complete musical funk for over a month.  The importance of music for me has waned to a minuscule level, because absolutely none of my musical sensibilities or abilities are reinforced in my immediate environment.  There is music in abundance in the community, but you have to seek it out.  It is in third party institutions, so you must go to these places.  When you attend church it is not long before they ask you for an offering.  You get what you pay for in American society.  I opted to get rid of cable television, and I don't regret it.  What was being offered as usual programming became trite, commercial, and eventually coercive.  Television is propaganda.  While I am happy that there is free TV over the air, and I usually can find something distracting to watch, the format of these networks has succumbed to the same low level of selling soap.  Yes, they need to earn revenue to support their broadcast, but regulation of the advertising on television is non existent.  There are few products being offered that would appeal to any sane human being.  The ad's are aimed at seniors who suffer from dementia.  They are full of false information and blatant lies.  It is offensive to watch these commercials, and it incenses me because the FCC is doing nothing to protect the American consumer.  Federal agencies have become nothing more than shell companies comping their own people.  The corporate lobby has done its job, and before long America will spiral into oblivion.  The rich are so rich they no longer need average Americans, and evidently they really want the real estate.  We are being assaulted on all fronts through the food system, in medical care, and in civil rights.  Our opportunities, while the job market may be rich, are limited.  The potential for social mobility is scant.  It is a hugely depressing landscape, the left over trappings of a violent coup attempt.  I would like to compliment the Washington Post for their expose of the hardliners who continue to run for public office.  The caricatures of these Trump-supporting bandits are vivid, inciting, and telling.  As Americans we feign civility and intelligence, but this insurrection merits tenacious resistance by all.  There is no option other than to see evil for what it is.  These people are trying to kill us, and Covid was a part of it.  The landscape is depressing, because underneath our mustered optimism of hope the reality is our American freedoms gravely have been threatened.  The American way of life is under threat.  It is difficult to return to our former lifestyles, because they are in question.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have been replaced with slave labor, oppression, and the Stockholm Syndrome.  I never had heard of this malady, but it represents the faux relationship slaves have with their masters.  To make the best of their situations and not live in utter despair and darkness, they choose to fabricate a positive attitude about their situations.  At this time I would like to interject an opinion about racism based in the practice of Blackface.  I have watched many documentaries on the practice of Blackface and its accompanying stereotypes.  If you are a millennial, then you could not have an accurate opinion.  You have not lived long enough to have seen or experienced true racial diversity.  Those of us who are a bit older have seen more in our lifetimes.  When I watch the entertainments created through animation, or see the seeming racist images of the Blackface era, I am not offended by the images.  Why?  It is because I have seen these images first hand in real life.  The so called stereotypes, the Black Sambo, the Uncle Tom, or the Mammy were real depictions of black slaves working on southern plantations.  I don't find them offensive at all, because they real.  Cancel Culture would dispute this, but if you viewed factual footage from that era plainly you would see black people who look this way.  Especially in the musical genre of the Blues and in Black Church, these depictions were accurate.  To say that they were or are disparaging is a value judgement made by someone too naive to understand the brutality of American history.  Of course this history is not just limited to the newly burgeoning country of North America.  Slavery was rife all over the world, and perhaps America escaped the worst of it.  If you asked any of the slain soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary or Civil Wars, they would attest to the reality of a musket ball in the chest.  In the case of Stockholm Syndrome, this is what slaves did to create Christian and civil lifestyles in the midst of great persecution.  These exaggerated characters such as Zip Coon were based on real people.  The plight of these freed but still oppressed slaves was so grievous and dire, it showed in their faces, bodies, and clothing.  It was not a fabrication, and when the Minstrel Follies began using these characters as entertainment by utilizing Blackface, it necessarily wasn't meant as personal assaults on these individuals.  Their likenesses were so foreign and strange to American whites, they created their on mystique.  It is true some publishers exploited these images and used them as inciting propaganda, which fueled a race war against Blacks.  The people responsible for such depictions and their negative implications are the same people that continue to support Donald Trump.  The blood has remained, and that purely evil desire to oppress others for your own amusement remains.  It can be described or depicted as nothing else.  When I write about Jim Crow Jr., the millennials will continue to deny reality, because they never have seen it.  For this reason American history should sustain unpleasantries and all.  Cancel Culture and its companion "Woke" are created devices to separate the people of America.  We have Donald Trump to thank for that.