The Bushmaster Male (Man Card in Tow)

Chandra Kumar recently wrote on my Facebook page:

One other thing not mentioned in the media: all these gun-happy killers seem to be male. Lots of women have ‘mental health’ problems too but I don’t hear about them going out on mass killing sprees. Surely this fact, in a civilized society, would be cause for reflection as well.

And then, this morning, Paul Campos wrote:

Now almost literally 100 percent of the mass murders and spree killings in America and around the world are committed by members of a very well-defined and particular social group: men.  Indeed it’s nearly impossible to find an example of a female mass murderer….Men commit the large majority of violent crimes, the overwhelming majority of murders, and practically all of the most violent murders (98.2 percent of current death row inmates are men).

Speculation about possible causes is the beginning of investigation, and so in that spirit, here goes.  (I don’t doubt for a second all of this will sound very familiar to anyone that has read more than one series of analyses that follow The All-American Mass Murder.)

The perpetrators of  spectacularly violent, elaborate killing sprees, besides being male, are frequently said to have suffered from some kind of ‘anti-social’ characteristic. Even if they weren’t the kind that pull wings off flies they were said to be moody, reclusive, given to dark, borderline unhinged ramblings, and so on. They were, in short, ‘misfits’. These folks didn’t fit in. They failed to meet some standard, follow some guideline for conformity. That rejection, that repeated cuff of the ears and the slap across the face, fed back and inward, till the repressed anger finally erupted in an attention-grabbing act. Still pretty familiar stuff. But why are males prone to such acts? What makes them particularly susceptible?

Because, in part, in this hyper-masculinized society, the male of the species is often brought up–in ways distinctive to males–to be acutely conscious of the consequences of the failure to conform. The lack of ‘fitting in’ is more often than not, the failure to match some notion of masculinity, well-established and cast in stone. The relentless invocation of generic notions of power and money and sexual conquest (preferably rough and dominating) as hallmarks of ‘success’ drums into most male heads a steady, repetitive maddening litany: you aren’t man enough till you throw off every single behavioral characteristic that might possibly carry the faintest whiff of the not-masculine (sometimes this is the feminine, sometimes this is just an established vision of the successful life). And our world’s cruelty doesn’t end there: these failures are not just met with social ostracism, they sometimes provoke mockery and violence. The misfit isn’t just ignored, he is sometimes tracked down, cornered and baited. That acute sense of failure at these moments of confrontation will be felt the most keenly by those aware that it represents the greatest distance from their supposed ideal state.

What better way to retaliate than to simultaneously strike back and exit? To go with an assertion of manhood, to carry a man card (like the kind issued by Bushmaster), to show up on the nightly news, the most accepted sign in our culture of having made it?

Growing up with Guns

I grew up with guns. Two of them: a 12-bore shotgun and a .25 automatic. I do not remember the make of the former but the latter, I’m pretty sure, was a Browning (a ‘Baby’; again, if I remember correctly). They belonged to my father (and thus, our family): he had purchased them overseas after getting the necessary clearances and applying for a gun ownership license, and then brought them back home. I do not remember how old I was when I first saw them, but they fitted rather seamlessly into our household. We were, after all, surrounded by weaponry of other kinds. Most prominently, large, loud, fighter jets that carried bombs, rockets, missiles and guns; we lived on an air force bases, and these reminders were never too far away. Our living room sported 20-mm and 30-mm cannon shells, remnants from gunnery exercises and actual wars that my father had participated in. The guns in our household felt like an extension of that visible firepower.

But these weapons were not visible quite the same way. For one thing, my father kept both guns disassembled, with the various parts scattered over the house, well-hidden away from my brother and myself. Once in a while, the pieces were collected, and the guns cleaned and assembled. These occasions also served as a time for my father to check the shotgun cartridges; they came in colorful boxes, with wax paper inside that enclosed the shells. They were all things of beauty; the gleaming metal of the shotgun barrel, the lettering on the red shells, the embossed marks on their back, the polished wood of the butt. Then, the cleaning and checks over, the guns and the ammunition were put away again.

We did use them though. It was pretty clear they were meant for hunting, and not for defending ourselves against intruders or the government. So, I learned how to shoot at an early age. By the age of nine, I could shoot the shotgun, and was a reasonably good shot. I learned how to load, the use of the safety catch, how to handle the inevitable recoil, how to aim,  the safe ‘barrel-down’ carrying of the gun, and so on. (My father made sure to tell me a few stories of careless fools who mishandled their guns and caused grief to themselves and their families.) We did occasional target practice and a little hunting for partridge. One of my fondest memories of my childhood, by far, was spending a week–as a nine-year old–by myself, with my father on an air force base, which like most bases of its time, was partially forested and thus offered ample opportunities for tracking and hunting. We would take out the shotgun, assemble it, get the ammunition ready, and head out in the evening. Those walks through the elephant grass with my father in front, and as the sky darkened, won’t ever be forgotten. Game was easy, and I had the satisfaction of bagging a bird or two.

I do not know where the guns went, and what ever became of them. In my teen years, I lived in a city, and hunting never happened any more. (More to the point, hunting had lost its appeal for me after I saw a deer get shot but not die immediately.) I remember seeing the guns once when I was seventeen, and then a few years later, I left for the US.  After that, on my trips back home, I never inquired about them, and they never came up again in conversation. I still don’t know where they are or what happened to them.  I don’t think I will ever own one myself.

A Couple of Reflections Prompted by Sandy Hook

Yesterday, on Facebook, I reposted a link to a post I had written here in response to the Aurora shootings in July. You could change the title of the post slightly to reference ‘Sandy Hook’ rather than ‘Aurora’ and nothing else would need changing. This morning, still clearly unable to write anything coherent in response, I posted the following three messages on my Twitter feed and Facebook page:

Guns don’t come up with half-assed arguments against gun control. People do.

Guns aren’t scared of the NRA. People are.

Guns don’t say after every tragedy: “Lets mourn, no time to talk politics’. People do.

You get the picture; I’m still not capable of making a reasoned contribution to the ‘national debate’ on gun-related violence.

But I do want to make a couple of points about the nature of the ‘debate’, such as it is.

The first is prompted by the third quip above. For an outstanding feature of the political response to the sickeningly common and soon-to-be-mundane massacres is the loudly broadcasted call to immediately seek refuge in bromides and palliatives: the usual mix of mourning, counseling, holding hands, which is supposed to bridge political divides, apply ‘healing balms’ and bring peace to all us traumatized folks. There is never, ever, seemingly any desire evinced by our political classes to prevent the recurrence of the massacres, for they are, as noted before, inevitable. This call is then faithfully parroted by the media (always at its ghoulish worst in its coverage of these kinds of tragedies). This is what I’d much rather see the next time: ditch the candlelight vigil and tell your local politician, congressman, senator, or anyone else that matters that they don’t get your vote unless they start a ‘national conversation’ about guns. Or something else. (The broad similarity of this call to the calls that electoral disputes be settled quickly so that the nation’s citizens don’t get embroiled in something as messy as a politically tinged dispute, one that might produce a little heat and light, is unmistakable and not coincidental. As always, the most important thing is to keep citizens numb, not provoked. God forbid that a difficult issue be aired in all its complexity and that the inevitable disputes it provokes be allowed to get a decent hearing.)

The second is prompted by noticing how mental health is sought as an obfuscatory factor in this debate.  That is, a familiar slogan soon starts making the rounds in two variants: one, ‘this is a mental health issue, not a gun issue’ and second ‘people will find a way to kill people, so banning a particular weapon is unlikely to bring these massacres to a halt.’   These are particularly egregious; they amount, roughly, to saying that no actions need be taken that might make it more difficult for mentally deranged people to go on brutally effective and successful killing sprees. We can control the damage done by the insane by treating them and by making sure they cannot lay their hands on dangerous weapons. The two are not mutually exclusive.

It is truly amazing that a nation, so willing to put up with the evisceration of its civil liberties in order to guard against shadowy, poorly understood threats from elsewhere, is unwilling to countenance the most minor of inconveniences in order to guard against a clearly visible threat from within.

Psychologizing, Immortalizing, and Unamuno Contra Nietzsche

As promised yesterday, here is Miguel de Unamuno on Nietzsche. In my first post on Unamuno, I had written that ‘there are streaks of ‘conventional’ conservatism visible in his fulminations against Nietzsche.’ The following is one such outburst. It occurs in the chapter that sets up Unamuno’s central thesis in The Tragic Sense of Life: ‘The Hunger of Immortality’:

There you have that ‘thief of energies’ as he so obtusely called Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and he talks to you about courage. His heart craved the eternal All while his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved. Because he could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Bursting with his own self, he wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of eternal recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, full of pity for himself, he abominated all pity. And there are some who say that his is the philosophy of strong men! No, it is not. My health and my strength urge me to perpetuate myself. His is the doctrine of weaklings who aspire to be strong, but not of the strong who are strong. Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death. [Nietzsche is not named directly here but, instead, is footnoted via the ‘he’ in the first sentence above.]

Sympathetic readers of Nietzsche will find plenty to disagree here: the accusations of nihilism and self-pity, the claim that ‘his is the doctrine of weaklings’, the resignation of Nietzsche to ‘final death’ (this is especially an oddity as it occurs a few sentences after noting Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence).  But these criticisms of Nietzsche are not novel, of course; most arch-critics of Nietzsche have made them too. The irony implicit in a man perpetually racked by illness writing so eloquently on ‘health and strength’ has not gone unnoticed, for instance, and neither has Nietzsche’s religious upbringing, nor his anxiety over romantic failure (with Lou Salome) and publication and recognition. There is plenty in Nietzsche’s life to prompt such readings then. And because Nietzsche dished out so many dressings-down in his writings and suggested much philosophical theorizing amounted to involuntary autobiographies of its authors, he himself invites such polemical counterblasts built on relentless psychologizing.

It is not something that he would have minded, I suspect. The vigor of his polemics have clearly provoked Unamuno and shoved the proverbial burr under the saddle. Unamuno has been forced to admit he has read Nietzsche and found him a threat to the doctrines he aims to expound and defend in his book; he knows that unless Nietzsche is defused and defanged, his writing will continue to mock them.

For a man who feared lack of attention the most, this is not such a bad outcome. For the final irony is that Unamuno himself immortalizes Nietzsche by this attack.

Unamuno on Lasting Glory

Today’s post is merely a pointer to a couple of lyrical passages from Miguel De Unamuno‘s The Tragic Sense of Life (Collins; The Fontana Library of Theology and Philosophy, 1962). These aren’t just lyrical, they ring true as well. Or perhaps that’s the same thing. Either way, here they are.

This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend with the dead because we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow. We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names, standing out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from oblivion. The heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it the less is the share of each. The great names of the past rob us of our place in it; the space which they fill in the popular memory they usurp from us who aspire to occupy it. And so we rise up in revolt against them, and hence the bitterness with which all those who seek after fame in the world of letters judge those who have already attained it and are in enjoyment of it. If additions continue to be made to the wealth of literature, there will come a day of sifting, and each one fears lest he be caught in the meshes of the sieve. In attacking the master, irreverent youth is only defending itself.  (pp. 68)

If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him. If the Imitation of Christ is anonymous, it is because its author sought the eternity of the soul and did not trouble himself about that of the name. The man of letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal. Of Dante, the author of those three-and-thirty vigorous verses on the vanity of worldly glory, Boccacio says that he relished honours and pomp more perhaps than suited his conspicuous virtue. The keenest desire of condemned souls is that they may be remembered and talked of here on earth, and this is the chief solace that lightens the darkness of his Inferno. And he himself confessed that his aim in expounding the concept of Monarchy was not merely that he might be of service to others, but that he might win for his own glory the palm of so great a prize. What more? Even of that holy man, seemingly the most indifferent to worldly vanity, the Poor Little One of Assisi, it is related in the Legenda Trium Sociorum that he said: You will see how I shall yet be adored by all the world. And even of God Himself the theologians say that he created the world for the manifestation of His glory.  (pp. 66)

Note: I hope to excerpt another passage from Unamuno (on Nietzsche) tomorrow.

RIP Ravi Shankar

I was born in an obscure small town in Central India: Maihar. If that name is known outside of its local, provincial, confines, it is almost certainly due to the Maihar gharana of Indian classical music. (From Wikipedia: ‘In Hindustani music, a gharānā is a system of social organization linking musicians or dancers by lineage or apprenticeship, and by adherence to a particular musical style. A gharana also indicates a comprehensive musicological ideology. This ideology sometimes changes substantially from one gharana to another….The word gharana comes from the Hindi word ‘ghar‘, which means ‘family’ or ‘house’. It typically refers to the place where the musical ideology originated.’) One of the most distinguished members of that gharana, which includes the sarod maestros Baba Alauddin Khan and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, was Ravi Shankar.

I have never been a particularly sophisticated fan of classical music, Indian or Western. Still, it wasn’t that difficult to sense the presence of genius when confronted with a performance–live or recorded–by Shankar. There was the physical dexterity, of course: the dazzling, giddiness-inducing play of his fingers over the strings and frets of his sitar; they would fly and strum and pick with such speed and abandon that worries about the physical state of his digits were only natural. (I often wondered whether he iced his hands after a show.) Then there was the visible physical absorption, so characteristic of the accomplished artist: the intense meditation on the progression of his piece, the coaxing out with visible effort of a series of complex notes one after another. Finally, there was the music.  Since the sounds of the sitar were the sounds that were indelibly, part of the sonic landscape that had surrounded me from my earliest days, it wasn’t too hard to find an emotional resonance in Shankar’s playing; his genius lay in being able to summon up, seemingly effortlessly, the varied moods associated with each raag.

I had an indirect personal connection with Shankar, which I bragged about for a bit before I gave it up: my grandmother took lessons in playing the sitar from Baba Alauddin Khan in his company i.e., they were classmates. Or at least, that’s how I was told the story and I faithfully repeated it. Perhaps she only sat in one session, perhaps she was a regular. The details seemed irrelevant: after all, there were photographs of him in our family album, and that seemed confirmation enough. (Even now, after all these years, it’s hard not to feel that connection, even one so distantly intimate. Perhaps it’s because it establishes a link to my grandparents.)

Despite this link, I never met or spoke to him in person. I did see him up ‘close’ once, when he performed live at my undergraduate college. He arrived on time, set up his stage with little fuss, and after a short opening address, got down to playing the raag selected for the day. I watched from the balcony. There was the usual crowd-pleasing crescendo that brought the house down, and those attending to their feet, but what came before it was infinitely superior: the gradual, textured, development of a complex composition, finding, yet again, at the hands of a master, a unique, personal realization.

RIP Pandit Ravi Shankar.

Free Software and ‘Appropriate Technology’

Last week, as part of a panel session organized at Queens College of the City University of New York, I spoke briefly on ‘Free Software and Appropriate Technology.’ I began by introducing the term ‘appropriate technology’ by setting it in the context of India’s attempts to achieve self-reliance in energy production, an effort that in the 1970s involved a serious interest in nuclear power. This effort had become the subject of a fierce critique by Professor Dhirendra Sharma of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, who suggested in his book, India’s Nuclear Estate that nuclear power was an ‘inappropriate technology’ for India: it encouraged centralization of political power, made energy into a national security issue with its concomitant secrecy, encouraged dependence on erstwhile colonial powers and the signing of treaties that were detrimental to national sovereignty, and more to the point, was expensive, unproven, and unlikely to meet India’s growing energy needs. (Sharma’s efforts did not meet with favor in the councils of power; he was ‘transferred’ to the School of Languages from the School of Sciences as a reprimand, a bizarre move that did nothing to silence Sharma and merely directed more attention to his writings.) Over the course of a few conversations with Sharma I grew to develop an understanding of the notion of ‘appropriate technology’, which might not have been in complete accordance with those who first coined the term, but which did a great deal to provide me with an evaluative framework for thinking about technology and its connection with politics.

I then moved on to making the case for free software as an appropriate technology for India. As Scott Dexter and I noted in our book, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software:

FOSS provides a social good that proprietary software cannot; for example, FOSS may be the only viable source of software in developing nations, where programming talent is abundant but prices for proprietary-software  licenses are prohibitive. Countries such as China and India have seen in FOSS an opportunity to draw on their wealth of programming talent to provide the  technological infrastructure for their rapidly expanding economies. Microsoft’s substantial investments in Indian education initiatives may be prompted by worries that free software might fill indigenous needs instead. FOSS has been cited by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a key element of achieving economic independence from the global North. At the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, the Youth Camp focused largely on  FOSS issues. This enthusiasm for FOSS extends to the industrialized First World as well, as many members of the European Union adopt it for governmental administration. [citations removed]

To emphasize the point made in the first sentence above: FOSS prevents lock-in with a monopolistic vendor; it provides an educational laboratory for a country where education in advanced technology is necessary to sustain its economic growth; it encourages autonomous development of software applications and local skills; its price is right, especially if local talent can train themselves on it; it is the ideal software base for the educational system; and so on.

The case is compelling, I think.

Aimé Césaire’s Immortal, Eminently Quotable Line

From Notebook of a Return To My Native Land:

For it is not true that the work of man is finished,
That we have nothing more to do in the world,
That we are just parasites in this world,
That it is enough for us to walk in step with the world,
For the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to conquer all,
The violence entrenched in the recess of his passion,
And no race holds a monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength, and,
There is a place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.

— Aimé Césaire

I read the closing line of that excerpt first in Edward Said‘s The Politics of Dispossesion: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination and since then, have quoted it extensively in conversation and also used it as the epigraph to the concluding chapter of my book Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket. (There, I quoted it in the translated form that I first encountered it: ‘there are enough spoils at the rendezvous of victory for everyone’.)

Why am I so enamored of this line?

It is, of course, as all great segments of poetry are, simple and powerful simultaneously. With one stroke it dismisses the notion of politics as a zero-sum game and dispenses with the temptation to indulge in the raising of false dichotomies as barriers to action. It is evocative: the ‘rendezvous of victory’ is a yet to be attained destination that calls for journey and sacrifice, but not alone, rather, we do so, in the company of others; and what we will find waiting for us at the ‘rendezvous’ will not be a grimly parceled out, diminishing set of ‘spoils’; rather the rendezvous promises enough for all. The translation in the excerpt above has some advantages over the one I first encountered: by speaking of ‘a place for all’ as opposed to ‘spoils’ we sense the table being set for all, an act of generosity that informs and enriches us even as man is sometimes opposed to man.

So with one beautifully phrased line Césaire exposes the falsity of the notion of inevitable conflict, of those who must lose in order to ‘let us win.’ It rejects the inevitability of a grimly Spencerian or Malthusian notion of survival, and the bleak vision of life it brings in its wake, and replaces it with one where man’s actions may lead to a flourishing of not just his life but that of others as well. Our interactions with others become not invitations to deprivation but opportunities for enrichment instead. Thus it urges us to imagine the ‘rendezvous of victory,’ of final attainment, of resolution as a more capacious, generous, place or notion than might have been imagined. Political conflict is typically painted for us in the relentlessly grim colors of survival, conjuring images of the polis red in tooth and claw, its ecology requiring inevitable sacrifice. Césaire urges us to replace it with the idea that political interactions with others can be mutually enabling.

Watching People Lift Heavy Things

I have written about my weightlifting experiences on this blog on previous occasions. (Sometimes, about my experiences with, feelings about, and lessons learned from, particular lifts like the squat or the clean.) Today, I am writing about watching others lift weights. More specifically, I am watching some friends of mine complete the so-called Crossfit Total: three attempts to establish maximum weights at the one lift of the back squat, deadlift and press.(I have also written on a pair of Crossfit Totals I have attempted in the past).

So why is watching other people lift a good idea?

For one thing, it is straightforwardly educational. Part of the process of becoming a good weightlifter is to study lifting technique and form. But studying weightlifting doesn’t just mean looking at YouTube videos or reading books about it (though both of those are certainly very useful activities and I have done my fair share). Yet another way to study it is to watch others lift weights–with an appraising eye. There is a wonderful variety in the human form: height, weight, the length of the legs and arms, the flexibility of hamstrings or the shoulder joints, all of which make a difference to the ease or difficulty of executing lifts. (Lifters with short legs have an easier time with the squat for instance; taller people face their own particular challenges when deadlifting.) A Total provides an opportunity to inspect the form of a diverse set of lifters attempting to resolve their own particular idiosyncratic take on a lift. Watching lifters solve these problems–sometimes on the fly, sometimes under extreme stress–is edificational in the extreme.Watching lifters lift close to the limits of their capacities is also instructional: how does their form change as they approach that maximum? Part of developing a strong critique of one’s own lifting is to look for common faults and see if they show up in these stress situations. Every lift, every attempt is a veritable laboratory, a chance to look and learn, and troubleshoot.

Then there is the inspirational aspect of it all. The lifters at this Total have finished eight weeks of training, they have worked hard three times a week, lifting progressively heavier weights building up to this crescendo. Now, they are faced with a test of that training and hard work. Some of the lifters are relative novices, having started from a baseline of not being able to lift very much weight at all. Yet others are more experienced hands, capable of squatting or deadlifting twice their bodyweight. But in each case, the effort remains the same: they strive for their limits, trying to find out how hard they can push themselves, whether they have it in them to dig themselves out of the ‘squatters hole’, whether they can find it in themselves to execute each lift as it gets harder and harder. Lifting is not easy; the platform is often an arena where one’s fears and anxieties bubble up to the surface; a weight on one’s back can be an implacable foe.  Watching an ordinary human being master these fears is euphoria inducing in its own way.

Lastly, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity. of weightlifting is a marvel in its own right. Yes, all of it just boils down to: pick a weight up off the floor; raise a weight above your head; stand up with a weight on your back. But in each case, the devil lies in the details. Inspecting those details is where the fun begins.

Coming For You with Chuck D and Public Enemy

In reviewing Jay-Z‘s book Decoded—a collection of lyrics with extensive commentary–(‘Word‘, The New Yorker, December 6 2010) Kelefa Sanneh writes:

Too often, hip-hop’s embrace of crime narratives has been portrayed as a flaw or a mistake, a regrettable detour from the overtly ideological rhymes of groups like Public Enemy. But in Jay-Z’s view Public Enemy is an anomaly. “You rarely become Chuck D when you’re listening to Public Enemy,” he writes. “It’s more like watching a really, really lively speech.” By contrast, his tales of hustling were generous, because they made it easy for fans to imagine that they were part of the action. “I don’t think any listeners think I’m threatening them,” he writes. “I think they’re singing along with me, threatening someone else. They’re thinking, Yeah, I’m coming for you. And they might apply it to anything, to taking their next math test or straightening out that chick talking outta pocket in the next cubicle.”

Jay-Z is on to something here, though I disagree with him about the distinction he is trying to draw, a doubt induced by what he says about his own lyrics. In part, this is because Sanneh describes Public Enemy‘s lyrics/rhymes as ‘overtly ideological,’ (pop version: they are ‘preachy’ or ‘intend to deliver a message or raise consciousness’.) That is certainly true in one dimension. But more broadly, it is an inaccurate description of the effect of Public Enemy’s lyrics, for they work and achieve their effect on listeners, not just because of the ‘political message’ but also because they induce the same effect that Jay-Z claims for his lyrics.

Consider for instance, the following amazing closing sections of ‘Rebels without a Pause‘ from the brilliant It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back . These bring the sonic power of the preceding sections to a dynamic crescendo; here, the barely contained force that has been been building up through the song threatens to break loose, through the barricades:

No matter what the name – we’re all the same
Pieces in one big chess game
Yeah – the voice of power
Is in the house – go take a shower boy
P.E. a group, a crew – not singular
We were black Wranglers
We’re rap stranglers
You can’t angle us – I know you’re listenin’
I caught you pissin’ in you’re pants
You’re scared of us dissin’ us
The crowd is missin’ us
We’re on a mission boy

Terminator X

Attitude – when I’m on fire
Juice on the loose – electric wire
Simple and plain – give me the lane
I’ll throw it down your throat like Barkley
See the car keys – you’ll never get these
They belong to the 98 posse
You want some more son – you wanna get some
Rush the door on a store – pick up the album
You know the rhythm, the rhyme plus the beat is designed
So I can enter your mind – Boys
Bring the noise – my time
Step aside for the flex – Terminator X

The effect of these lyrics, I suggest, is precisely that which Jay-Z ascribes to his own. This is not just a ‘lively speech’ – this is a dynamic invocation of action. The listeners, even if they don’t ‘become Chuck D’, want to be him, they want to be the force that he summons up, ascribes to himself, and more importantly, seems to instantiate. And as Jay-Z suggests above, the listeners don’t think Chuck D is threatening them. Instead, they are singing along, trying to be the person, or the member of that group, which is capable of saying ”Attitude – when I’m on fire/Juice on the loose – electric wire/Simple and plain – give me the lane/I’ll throw it down your throat like Barkley’ or my personal favorite: ‘I caught you pissin’ in you’re pants/You’re scared of us dissin’ us.’

But Jay-Z is right: that mood can be invoked for almost anything. Besides ‘math tests’, for lifting weights, stepping out of a plane with a pack on your back, or meeting your future in-laws for the first time.