If you smoke marijuana in Amsterdam, it’s legal, but if you deal weed in Indonesia, you face 12 years of hard jail time… if you chew gum and spit it on the ground in NYC it makes a stain on the street, but if you’re caught in Singapore spitting gum, you’re fined $2000…. if you’re a woman in Saudi Arabia, you wear a burqa and cover everything except your eyes, but if you’re a Maori woman in New Zealand you expose your breasts and cover your pubic area with bunches of fragrant plant material. If you were black in Africa in the 1700’s you would be captured, enslaved, and transported to the America as a commodity, sold at markets, condemned to work the plantations, banned from reading and writing with all future offspring being legally the property of your owners, but if you were white you could declare yourself independent and free and celebrate your freedom every July 4th.
After spending a week listening to sociology lectures online
I’ve come to the conclusion it would be hard to navigate the world as a time
traveling pot smoking gum chewing maori woman. One moment you could be smoking
pot in Amsterdam, savoring naked haka dance memories in New Zealand, only to
travel through Saudi Arabian airports in full burka mode with gumless layovers
in Singapore to a time travel machine into a life of slavery on a Georgia
plantation. Behaviors acceptable for one group of people may not be acceptable
to others. For reasons beyond the scope of my logical brain, when a society feels
threatened by women’s choice of clothing, or psychoactive drugs, or the color
of one’s skin, or gum chewing, they find a way to regulate and modify group
human behaviors through their legal system.
Having established the fact that cultural context drives the
way people behave in the world, and pondering dark ideas that free will is an
illusion, you may begin to think, is there a way to change society, to reverse
global warming, end racism, or chew gum in Singapore?
(off topic side note: Chewing gum was causing maintenance
problems in apartments, with vandals disposing of spent gum in mailboxes,
inside keyholes, and on lift buttons. Chewing gum left on the ground,
stairways, and pavements in public areas increased the cost of cleaning and
damaged cleaning equipment. In 1987, the $5 billion local railway system,
started running. It was then the largest public project ever implemented in
Singapore.
It was reported that vandals had begun sticking chewing gum
on the door sensors of subway trains, preventing doors from functioning
properly and causing disruption to train services. Such incidents were rare but
costly, and culprits were difficult to apprehend. In January 1992, Singapore Statute Chapter 57, was enacted to ban
the chewing of gum.)
While chewing gum may be a tough sell now in Singapore, there
are movements in America to end racism that are rather active. Statues of Jefferson
and Roosevelt are being decommissioned in NYC and sent out of public view. Schools
are introducing counter narratives of the indigenous and oppressed that were part
of the nation’s founding but silenced. The foundations of these movements are
nothing new. They were laid by those brave enough to speak the honest truth that
people were too afraid to speak in public, or in Foucault’s words, those people
brave enough to hold up a mirror to society, “To confront, oppose, or find
fault with another individual or a popular view in a spirit of concern for
illuminating what is right and best.”
45 years before the emergence of the current woke movement,
cancel culture and critical race theorists, Richard Pryor was pioneering
critical joke theory. 124 years prior to Pryor and a day after the nation’s 76th
anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 5, 1852,
Frederick Douglass delivered this piece of fiery “What to the slave is the
fourth of July?” critical race theory oratory in protest of the continuing
enslavement of millions of people.
“But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad
sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this
glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable
distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed
in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and
independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The
sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to
me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To
drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call
upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious
irony.”
Douglass is kind of boring and predictable, wholly logical,
safe, and rhetorical. He’s a serious dude, very articulate but incredibly soporific.
If I were a high school US history teacher designing a syllabus, I would have
my students listen to Pryor’s Bicentennial Prayer instead.
“We are…. gathered here today… to
celebrate this year of bicentenniality in the hope of freedom and dignity.
We’re celebrating two hundred years of white folks kicking ass. Now white folks
have had the essence of disunderstanding on their side for quite a while.
However we offer this prayer and the prayer is “how long will this bullshit go
on?”
How long? How long. How long will
this bullshit go on? That is the eternal question man have always asked, How
long? When man first got here, he say how long will the animals kick me in the
ass? How long before I discover fire and stop freezing to death?
We always here in our church of
understanding and unity have tried to figure out how long. They say in the
bible we will know how long when an angel come up out of the sea. He will have
seven heads and a face like a serpent and a body like a lion. I don’t know
about you, but I don’t want to see no motherfucker look like that! If is see
him come out of the water I shoot him in the air.
We only making one collection
this year. We ask that this year you donate five or six hundred. We ain’t gonna
fuck with you no more. We won’t be round your house asking for shit or nothing
like that.
Let us offer as the choir sing
that old negroid spiritual, “I will see” or “we will see” whether the case may
be. if you sing alone it’s “I will see” if you’re singing with people it will
be “we will see” see that shit works out right.
They’ve been rehearsing. Go
ahead. (singing gospel: we will see, we will see, we will see, we will see, we
will see… :||)
That was lovely. That was lovely.
Yeah before I spend some more money on rehearsal, we will see. Bring me some
shit like that.
Now I’d like to make some
apologies to you because last Sunday, a spiritual thing happened. Nice family.
the Walker family brought in their son. They asked me “can you heal my son?”
well I apologize because he’s a big waterhead boy. And I wasn’t going to touch
the motherfucker. Little nigger had a big head about this big and they wheeled
him in. his head was bobbing back and forth. I was not about to touch that
motherfucker. I’m telling you cause that shit is contagious. I said “go get
that nigger a big hat or something. Leave me alone.”
And some of the deacons come down
on me for that. And I like to say to the crippled people that come here. Can’t
you find another church to go to? Goddamn you come in knocking shit down and
breaking up furniture and shit. Learn how to crawl, shit. And you deaf and dumb
motherfuckers, you motherfuckers that can’t talk. We don’t need you here. all
the ‘hoo hoo’ shit kiss my ass. They got schools for you to go. Go learn how to
speak goddammnit. Shit!
Also there’s some discrepancy about the baptisms last month because 3-4 people drowned. They was old people. I did not know a couple of them had asthma. I just put them under a little while I just thought the little bubbles were from the spit…” Bicentennial Prayer (Remastered Version) - YouTube
Pryor questions behaviors and social norms, provokes people with
weird thoughts and makes people laugh hysterically. More than likely, he would get
me fired as a high school teacher for his word choice and ‘colorful’ use of
language. But if you look beyond his digressions into church donations, imaginary
choir practice management, aversions to the physically deformed, degrading
remarks about the crippled and the learning disabled, and dark jokes of baptism
drownings of the asthmatic you can see how he created jokes using the same texts
regarding Bible scenes of Second Coming mythical beasts from that Albrecht Durer
read and illustrated 400 years prior. You can marvel at the creativity of delivering
serious sermons in the persona of a southern Baptist minister that climax in
vivid bible scenes. You can see his search for universal truths, like finding common
ground between whites and blacks (ie., how to cope with oppressors, oppressive
conditions) while speaking the truth about the reality of race relations in America.
Simply put, you never know what Pryor’s going to say next in his monologues, like
Durer and the rhino, he is able to weave existing texts into a jumble of truth,
fantasy, and entertainment, and make you think.
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