zona folklore

Once in a while, once in a while
You have to burn your lips keep your feelings alive


Now I know what it must have been like 125 years ago in Dracula’s castle while the old one, the bastard, suffered hammerblow after hammerblow as the stake went through his heart. The tremors that shot through corridor and cellar, the loosed flocks of squeeling spirits. After hundreds of years of undeath, liberation comes like this. Their first taste of life was terror, the accumulated terror of every victim.

We’ve reached the point where it is lingua franca to talk of zombie banks, but the mote is in your own eye, brother spirit. Who are the real zombies but us, unable to understand what is happening as the sysem shivers apart. We’ve forgotten outside the castle. It has been so long.

Even me, the crowlike prophet of other people’s doom, have been surprised by the slippage of the credit/speculation system. It is insanely out of control, to quote an excited clerk about the latest in bootware in the NYT – but this is the bootware of putting the boot in and hard. All the talk is of nationalization, but the story has gotten beyond that. In fact, the financial infrastructure is melting, melting, and away goes not only pension and college, but the tied up resources necessary for city, state and government. In percentage terms, the slide in the Stock Market is just tickling the slide in 2001-2003, but percentage don’t tell you relevance. The stock market is making itself irrelevant. For how long?

Who knows. We are suddenly free.

Already we are seeingt an interesting reaction in the bearers of the “little tradition”. This was anthropologist Robert Redfield’s name for the state of the art traditions in peasant communities, dependent as they were, he claimed, on the great tradition – which was the public opinion woven by elites in urban centers. The great traditions penetrate the part-world of the peasant in many ways and guises (school, teacher, church, priest, party, commissar – and now YouTube and talk radio), but invariably they are folded by the part world and reformulated in terms of myths and concrete objects. James C. Scott uses the example of class struggle, which has a certain asceptic, abstract air as it is elaborated in texts by the ciity’s black magicians, but comes into the part world as twenty dollars more per week and torching the local landowner’s woods.

Scott’s examples come from the revolutionary 70s, but the relationship of the part to the greater world does not necessarily have any political coloring.

Redfield did his field work in a Mexican village, and Scott in an Indonesian one. Myself, I just visited Politico. I wanted to read an article in which it was reported that Senator Shelby of Alabama had said that he had not seen Obama’s birth certificate. Shelby claims to be misquoted. I don’t care. I do care about the comments on that article. The Republican base was out in full cry. Slippage, slipping. In a few months, that base has seen its power and its deepest beliefs casually overturned. A Black man is in the White House, all the shadow investment verities have burned to the ground (the stock market always goes up, decade after decade; house prices always go up; diversify your portfolio; entrepreneurs so often start out by using their credit cards, but look at how they become millionaires; follow your dream). The hits to the belief system are so massive that, in a sense, this constituency is staggered. However, it is no surprise that myth and misplaced concreteness have bubbled up to explain this turn of events. I’ll put my little selection of comments at the end of this post, an appendix. The important thing is that the story has assumed a certain narrative form: Obama’s sister’s birth certificate, in the story, was switched for his in Hawaii. He was never born in America. He was born in Kenya.

A marvelous tale – for is not this country the land of the bed trick? Founded on the crudest lines of race – a line that could mean life or death – and riddled with fears of amalgamation, miscegenation, and what only the shadow knows lying in the arms of your homecoming queen. In our dark hearts, we of the white magic, we know the evil slave switched her baby with the master’s. Had to of.

This was Ralph Ellison’s territory: the tangle of black and white in the hinterlands. In the part world, the notion that the city elite has moved on evokes an uncommon but predictable fury. In the heart of the heart of the GOP, there is a violent clinging to those past positions.

And so the zona stories are told, and what comes up like snake-eyes is an archetype poisoned by history in which every mother’s son turns out to be a tarbaby. The confidence man. Puddenhead Wilson. Passing. Tie the rope and lynch your own heart, motherfucker. This tale is told of you.

Of course, Redfield and Scott believed that the peasant and the suburbanite were two different things, and that the latter was the product of modernization.

Once in a while, once in a while
You have to burn down your house keep the dreaming alive


Sen. Shelby is correct ....NO ONE has seen a REAL BIRTH CERT. except what is on the internet..that is NOT CREDIBLE ...barry soetoro aka bo has NEVER SHOWN ANYTHING to prove he was NOT BORN IN KENYA !!! Barry is still NOT A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN --- His father was born in KENYA ---Barry can never be a NATURAL BORN CITIZEN JUST ON THAT FACT THAT HE HIMSELF HAS STATED....

Perhaps if Obama spent $800k not on keeping his records out of site this "rumor would have gone away. As it stands, he has not produced any school records from Occidental college, a long form birth certificate that states hospital or physician present. The man traveled to Pakistan in 1981 which was it was illegal to go their with US passport, however, with an Indonesian passport it would have been easy. Anyway we could go on and on about his non proof of qualification but until he produces proof, Mr. Sortero a.k.a. Obama is just a usurper.

While Obama has a Hawaii birth certificate, there is no birth record from any hospital in Hawaii, and no birth listing in any Hawaii newspaper. His mom moved from Africa to Singapore, and later to Hawaii. Obama attended school in both Singapore and Hawaii. If he was born in Singapore, his mom actually didn't meet the legal requirements for his citizenship. His grandmother was a VP of the largest bank in Hawaii, and may have arranged the certificate after she got custody from mom.

Probably the most widely e-mailed Obama "tip" at the moment alleges that he isn't a natural-born American citizen and thus isn't eligible to run for president. This began in the die-hard pro-Hillary section of the blogosphere, which spent part of the summer discussing laws that deal with the citizenship of a child with one American parent born abroad. When it emerged that this challenge wouldn't hold water if Obama had been born in the United States, the focus shifted to the allegation that he had been born outside the United States. In August, a Pennsylvania lawyer, Philip Berg, filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia. Berg, who also has been active in arguing that there was "government complicity" in the attack on the World Trade Center, demanded that the court force Obama to produce his original birth certificate. The court dismissed the lawsuit. So why isn't this getting wide coverage? Well, first, there's lots of evidence that Obama was born in the United States, and none that he wasn't. The campaign handed over an official copy of his short-form birth certificate ? the standard document produced by the Hawaii Department of Health ? to Factcheck.org. And Poliltico has confirmed the authenticity of a contemporaneous announcement of his birth in the Honolulu Advertiser. Berg fights on, though, on a website with supporters known as ChileMan, ChileWoman and MommaERadioRebels. He recently told conservative talk radio host Michael Savage that he has an audiotape of Obama's Kenyan grandmother recalling the candidate's birth in a Kenyan hospital. "l'll release it in a day or two," he said six days ago. A spokeswoman for the Hawaii Department of Health, Janice Okubo, said she's forbidden by state law from releasing birth certificates, but directed a reporter to the FactCheck.org item dismissing the rumors.