Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
Politics of the Hip-Hop
Pimps
A
Review of A Phat Death: a Nina Halligan Mystery
By RON JACOBS
Who is Nina Halligan? Imagine Mike Hammer as
an African-American woman with leftie politics who was once a
New York City prosecutor until she skirted certain rules regarding
evidence after her family was killed by a gangster and you begin
to get an idea. The heroine of three detective novels by Norman
Kelley, this dynamic lady takes on the new dynamic in post-Civil
Rights US society. It is a dynamic that Kelley calls the New
World Plantation-where black men and women do the white-dominated
system's dirty work all in the name of money. Black America as
product: selling the culture, selling the religion, selling the
history-whatever it takes to make a buck, Halligan's foes will
stoop to it. In the course of events, this strategy usually
results in a trail of blood.
Blood usually spilled by an apparent
innocent who is somehow connected to the life of Nina Halligan.
Connected to her even when she wants nothing to do with the
blood or the mystery that lies in its wake.
It is the last sentence that provides
the reader with the tip off for Kelley's latest (and last, at
least for a while) installment in the Nina Halligan series, A
Phat Death Akashic, 2003). Finally recovered emotionally
and physically from her last bout with the mercenaries of the
African-American nation that was told in Black
Heat, Halligan begins this adventure by telling the reader
about her new husband. She makes it clear that the only adventures
she wants to have are of a sensual nature and that she intends
to have them with her new man-a music critic and sax player with
connections in the musical worlds of jazz and hip-hop.
From the get go, however, it's apparent
that there is going to be trouble, in no small part thanks to
the overly commercial world of gangsta rap. Although Nina doesn't
really "get" music, her husband Glen Sierra, who is
also ten years her junior, does. Indeed, he sees himself as
part of a mission to save hip-hop from the crass and pointless
noise of gangsta rap-a music that Glen is available only because
it is easier to sell it to white suburbanites who want to piss
off their parents but don't know any real black kids to bring
home. So they bring in the modern version of the dozens instead:
the meaner and dirtier, the better to scare them with. Of course,
there are so-called black entrepreneurs who are only too happy
to skim a buck off of the sales of this racially demeaning music
no matter who that means doing business with.
In A Phat Death, the entrepreneur
is none other than an old street brother of Glen's who goes by
the name of Big Poppa Insane. In order to distribute the music
he is producing, he makes an alliance with a former white-skinned
member of the South African security forces known for his interrogation
practices, primarily the practice of brutally raping women suspected
of being members of the anti-apartheid resistance. Now this man
owns the world's largest entertainment conglomerate. He is accompanied
by his dark-skinned assistant who worked undercover with the
same security force. It is he who is seen fleeing from the scene
of the murder of another of Sierra's old street bro's: a hip
hopper named SugarDick. Oh yeh, Sierra, Insane, SugarDick, and
two others from the old days were all members of one of the first
rap groups known as The Five Points. (The name represented the
five points of African unity according to a nationalist religion
whose leaders appear in all of the Halligan books-it is these
leaders who are the overseers of the New World Plantation).
As the murders begin to pile up, the
plot twists and turns, taking Halligan from an industry bash
in midtown Manhattan to Paris and out to America's southwest.
Her bittersweet comments on the state of Black America pepper
her conversations and intimacies, while her comments on the sexual
state of her and her friends keeps the reader's prurient interest
involved. This is not tame reading. Indeed, it is about as
wild as one can get without pictures and an X rating. If it
were 1903, this story would seem fantastic because it couldn't
happen. In 2003, it's fantastic because it could.
Kelley does not spare anyone or any segment
of U.S. culture and politics in his books. The scenario he acerbically
portrays could have easily come from today's headlines. The
speculation regarding his characters' political and monetary
motivation rarely appears in the mainstream media like the New
York Times or Rolling Stone. After all, this part
of Kelley's story hits too close to these media moguls' home.
A Phat Death is about the commodification of black American
music, culture, and history. Yet, it's about more than black
skin vs. white skin; it's about global capitalism and the overriding
power of obscene amounts of money that transforms every thing
into product.
You don't necessarily know this while
you're reading the novel, but Kelley's Nina Halligan books are
what college types call postcolonial literature. These fast-paced
private eye stories explore the junctures where the white-dominated
capitalist system hooks up with the sons and daughters of slaves
and colonial subjects who are only too willing to assist that
system in their own cultural (and personal) destruction. At
the same time, Halligan and her female compatriots provide a
glimmer of hope in their struggle for personal and cultural liberation.
Ron Jacobs
is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground.
He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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