I Hotel Book

Lu Hsun gives up medicine. What's the point? He could study all he wanted to make his people healthy in body, but they were sick in their minds, dig. Now this might seem like a jump, but Lu Hsun thinks the answer is literature. So he starts a new life writing. I know of the 'People's History of the United States' but what about the 'Non-White People's History of the United States'? Something huge and intricately spun and developed on a scale to put Gibbon to shame, something which may already exist and due to my inherent whiteness in a Silicon Valley suburb I mistakenly believe I have conjured up as the Next Big Thing, because what my piss-poor in the realms of consensual and non-fetishizing miscegenation people didn't invent, they stole and tied up the trail in court and copyright. Betty Boop, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, almost all of the '20's and 60's today's rap tomorrow's fashion everything in between, and that's just from black people. I learned the hard way that whether it's the prison community or the Asian American community, the academy will close ranks to keep that experiment with reality out. In a short period of time, we saw the politicization of prisoners and the criminalization of students. And this scared folks. Students saw three choices: go to school, go to prison, go to war. We challenged the idea that society, and therefore education, should be controlled by the threat of punishment and the history of race. So, Bay Area. Multicultural Chinatown Japantown the majority of my neighbors being of Asian descent after the requisite white flight, right? A white liberal's wet dream, a radical political hotspot with a heady history of the pushing the envelope straight white man, all full up in the books about the earthquakes and the fires and the drugs and the sex and all that white appropriated jazz leaving nothing for those who were here before and those who were brought here by force and those who came and could never blend in the skin tone range even though their lives depended on it. It leaves us here today with a video about the Berkeley protests of the 60's without a single black speaker, gentrification in the leaps and bounds of tech companies and the Ellis Act, and the awesome gutting of cultural minorities wielded by the one and only BART and its Oakland et al. stations. White people resting on their laurels when white people didn't do shit. History tells us that the white man's pride is located in his laws, such that he will justify his pride and his greed, his great paternity and his superiority, with the great writ of his laws. Everything must follow accordingly. The white man will only give up or lose something if forced to do so by his own laws; in this way, he cannot lose face and continues secure in his pride that his law must be just. I can just imagine the faces of people who followed me for my review of Les Misérables and are getting this 'reverse racism' 'radical' 'raging' instead of CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING plastered on pictures of the Ferguson protests cause US Americans sympathize a lot more with their white-rinsed entertainment than their blood rinsed politics of the non-European people. Newsflash: if you read this book and don't find it extremely sexy, I can't help you, because not only is there erotica and ancient Japanese woodcut pornography and food that makes you want to eat the pages and thought writ large upon the planes of This Is What Happened and This Is How We Acted and This Is How We Are Building Our Hope, there's life. There's love. There's the young people before the respectability politics and the old people who could were left behind by the Capitalism Psychopathy train and all the Communists in between, and if that's a turn off for the love of cognitive dissonance do not come crying to me about democracy. Some Ferguson protesters have baggy pants and don't wear shirts, Martin Luther King, Jr. always preached nonviolence in a suit, Malcolm X rallied to physical resistance in a suit as well, and both of the suit-wearers were murdered in cold blood. The only solution to today's democracy is to be rich and white, and those in disagreement are not the ones I'm writing for. Those offended by that, educate yourself. You would not believe the carnage that has been wreaked in the name of offense by those in suits. Who, then, is the revolutionary woman? In these days she is a barefoot peasant, a child on her back, wielding an AK-47. Of course, she may be uniformed in cotton pajama trousers, batik sarong, sari, Mao jacket, jilbab, miniskirt, or Levi jeans; covered in straw hat, veil, hijab, worker's cap, or helmet. In every case, the winds of liberation blow through her fingers. You could stick this in WWII Germany and you'd get a movie made out of it right quick because of there's one thing US Americans love it's a villain whose crimes they know they'll never be convicted of. Read the recently released CIA Torture Report if you don't believe me. Obama pardoned them all in efforts to "move forward" and in doing so became the final straw of why I will trust the most ineffectual protester over the President of the United States anytime, all the time, and if you're going to accuse me of racism because of that jesus fucking christ please. I don't have any black friends that I can talk to face to face and am as racist as they come, so we're going to move on from your pitiful attempt at derailment now. So I tell people I don't want equal no equal rights anymore. I'm fighting for human rights. I don't want to become equal to men like them that beat us. I don't want to become the kind of person that would kill you because of your color.
-Fannie Lou Hamer

The police across the street who now guarded our four doors pointed at our stupid battle and laughed. Politics is why my earliest US American ancestor was a landowner instead of a landstealer. Politics shafted the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island and put the white straight man's landing on the moon in its historical place. Politics is the swooping of corporate interests into the refuge of minority cultures and building idols to Finance and Tourism on the guts of those who had the power of life but didn't know how to market it. Politics is Mark Wahlberg having a violent history of racist assaults and attempting to wipe the slate clean so he can expand his business and sell alcohol in California. If you've never been used as target practice by politics, congratulations. You haven't necessarily had an easy life, or are rich, or any of the requisites for happiness as mandated by capitalism, but if you are killed, rest assured your murder will not be justified and your murderer will have by legal standards committed a crime. Now honey, not to confuse you or anything, but some of us are reading Borges instead of Mao.

Poem's like cuisine. Makes the world sensible. Ingredients in the head, then apply fire. Have you eaten today? How about some warnings for people interested in picking up this book. Well, it's long, it's difficult, Yamashita swears more than I do, character development's like wut, dense political meanderings and controversial wieldings of meaning galore, feminism that repeatedly gives white feminism the finger, non-PC whatevers for those who need a slogan to delimit the boundaries of their Mayonnaise social justice, plot? Plot. Ten years of revolutionary activism in a hotel that ends up being destroyed anyway, and lost causes are never worth reading about, right? Thus we emerged from every living crevice in our hilly city, every tenement, blighted Victorian, public housing project, cheap hotel, single or collective rental, many of us the forgotten and abandoned people whose voices were muffled in the underbelly of working poverty, stuffed into the various ethnic ghettos, we the immigrants from the Old and New Worlds, from the black and white South and tribal America, we the dockworkers of the long shore, we the disabled and disavowed vets, we the gay and leathered, we the garment workers, restaurant workers, postal and clerical workers, we who praised the Lord in his house at Glide and his People's Temple, we of the unions, tired and poor, we the people. What do I need to say to get you to read this book? If I haven't said it already, I can't help you. That's another thing to take into consideration, the way things happen because you are young and don't know any better. You might say it's youthful idealism, but youth doesn't really know what's ideal. It just feels right sometimes.

Must rescue books, Sesshu announces with determination. Life is politics is life.