High John and the Triple Seven Blacks Convene
by BAR contributing
editor Harold Bridgeman
"They sat, incognito, in the back of the bar while up
front Howlin Wolf was singing about his inability to prevent a certain woman
from putting him on the killing floor."
On the seventh day of the seventh month in this year 2007,
High John and seven Two Headed Doctors will reconvene their once per fifty year
recurring meeting at Arnellia's bar on University Avenue in St. Paul to again
assess the status of the Black Mississippi Diaspora. What will be different about this meeting is it will not be ad
hoc as in the past but formalized as called for by all seven Doctors with a
request for ordered presentations.
Their last assessment was conducted fifty years earlier at Theresa's
Bar on the south side of Chicago. At
Theresa's, appropriately named for another Black woman, they sat, incognito, in
the back of the bar while up front Howlin Wolf was singing about his inability
to prevent a certain woman from putting him on the killing floor. The killing floor, High John and the Doctors
agreed, was an apt metaphor for the treatment of the Diaspora in Chicago and
throughout it's migrating range.
Fifty years prior was the last time the assessment was held
in the state where the Diaspora Ancestors had first called out High John. At the 1907 assessment they again sat,
incognito, in a jook joint a few miles off the Natchez Trace Road. They all stared intently at an alcoholic
half-Black, half-Choctaw woman trying to coax a couple of drunken patrons into
buying her a drink. What caught the
group's eye was the woman appeared the personification of what was then called
melancholia. Of course High John knew
the source of the woman's melancholy was the fact that half her people had perished
in the first and second death marches and the other half had succumbed to the
ravishes of the plantation, sharecropping and Jim Crow systems.
"The seven Doctors all agreed the coping mechanisms that
had sustained the Diaspora through much of it's journey had become seriously
undermined."
In their call for the triple seven meeting at Arnellia's,
the seven Doctors all agreed the coping mechanisms that had sustained the
Diaspora through much of it's journey had become seriously undermined by the
relentless repackaging and redeployment of ever more lethal harm agents by the
Diaspora's continuing and unyielding oppressor. The concluding diagnosis of all Doctors was that for many in the
Diaspora the destruction of hope, the perversion of song and the usurpation of
laughter were all but complete. As
evidence of their conclusions the Doctor's offered what is popularly called
tipping points.
A major tipping point for the Doctors was the treatment of
Diaspora members who found themselves in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina. Their treatment
by named and unnamed city, county, state and federal functionaries in effect
instituted protocols of suffering theretofore only imagined in the depiction of
Hell and The Final Judgment by the medieval
painter Hieronymus Bosch. The
Two Headed Doctors swore any functionary remotely connected to that carnival of
horrors be forever cursed by the Mississippi Diaspora and forever denied succor
by the circle of true healers.
The Doctors also pointed out the last few federal election
cycles have highlighted the real inability of many in the Diaspora to either
cast or have their vote counted. This
in effect mocks any so called right to vote and further fictionalizes the
concept of participatory democracy.
Additionally, the once laudable goal of having the people's business
conducted by honest and dedicated public servants has given way to avaricious
retainers of accumulated capital writing laws that subvert the public trust and
bring benefit to an ever narrowing constituency. All indicia of enlightened democratic governance operated for the
benefit of the commonweal have all but disappeared replaced by the purple logos
of the imperium.
The Doctors have concluded current global economic practices
have in effect created a global neo-plantation system where most workers
receive what amounts to twenty first century plantation maintenance. Excess labor, which include many in the
Diaspora, languish in crumbling communities of despair or are compelled to criminal
involvement and ultimately warehoused in the prison complexes. To a large extent the neo-plantation system
has been designed to be self-controlling and self-perpetuating by continually
encouraging enmity, miss-understanding and violence between and among different
regional, ethnic, religious, class, ideological or other interest groups.
"The neo-plantation system has been designed to be
self-controlling and self-perpetuating."
Functionaries in media, entertainment and educational
complexes operating as neo-plantation overseers and gatekeepers further
exercise control. Their job is the soft
control of bondage by shaping patterns of thinking and belief based upon
fictions, mythology and contrived history.
The hard control of bondage is the purview of interlocking legal,
government and military directorates. Their overseer and gatekeeper functions
include an array of direct and indirect instruments of coercion and force that
are legal, illegal and extra-legal as well as known and unknown.
Finally a regressive evolutionary spike in the behavior of
some Diaspora members has alarmed the Doctors.
Specifically since their last assessment, the Doctors have seen a sharp
increase in the inability of these members to at least try and protect and not
directly harm their innocents. This
behavior, The Doctors lamented, had not been seen in such numbers since before
the time of the Walking Tribes.
In part, for the above stated, The Seven Two Headed Doctors
have put forth the following ordered agenda to be presented in succession by
each Doctor.
1. Would providing supplemental coping strategies to the
Diaspora significantly improve its overall progress and ultimate
self-development?
2. Does the nature
of the people who control the system in which the Diaspora exists include a
narcissistic sense of entitlement, an uncontrollable greed, a biogenetic
inability to empathize with unlike out-groups, an inherent militarism, a
compulsion to bully, a disdain for compromise, a hatred of the weak, a natural
aversion to the any truth, a perverse enjoyment of the suffering of others and
a religious belief in a neo-plantation system that animates a Fourth Reich?
3. Are the
characteristics listed in 2 indicative of an inherent nature or artifacts the
economic and
political systems currently operable?
4. If 2 reflects an inherent nature in men, what coping
strategies are best?
5. If 2 reflects system artifacts and not an inherent
nature, what strategies
are best?
6. If number 2 is in fact true, would any coping strategies
really matter?
7. If number 5 is in fact true, is it possible for High
John, all Two Headed Doctors, like minded members of the Diaspora and anyone
else who believes in the perfectibility of man to begin to construct a system
in which the characteristics listed in 2 are rarely operable?
Harold Bridgeman is a
writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota. He can be contacted at Hbridging@aol.com.
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