FOR THE BROTHAS: CULTURE AND INTELLECTUALISM: THE GREAT HEIST OF 1492...

FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Friday, October 5, 2012

THE GREAT HEIST OF 1492...

Portrait of Christopher Columbus

We Americans are the survivors and beneficiaries of one of the greatest heists and one of the greatest gangsters in all history… 520 years ago wheels were set in motion that would ultimately change the world. The huge fact that irreversibly catastrophic global change came about due to the stupidity of a man called Columbus carries such irony with it.

Tomb or Reliquary of Christopher Columbus in Seville Spain

In all fairness the evaluation of whether this global tsunami was toxic or tonic depends on your palette after sampling a broad selection of racial, sexual and socioeconomic entrees either fried, grilled, sautéed, baked, marinated, boiled rubbed or served raw and cold…

The African Slave Trade

What exactly was stolen from humanity in 1492 that could have had such a pejorative impact on global culture to this very day? The answer lay in the millions of faces and lives beginning, peaking and ending behind them on all 7 continents of this sphere we call earth. The truth lay buried beneath 520 years of human struggle from the Alaska to the tip of Argentina; the truth of two Americas has been buried beneath five centuries of lies.

The demise of Pre-Columbian Cultures in South America by the Conquistadors began when Spaniards betrayed them with false alliances.

The culture and legacy of countless and nameless peoples has been systematically stolen, hidden and lost in one of the bloodiest human dramas in all history beginning with a singular event, The Great Heist of 1492.

Massacre at Wounded Knee

The legacy of Christopher Columbus includes Genocide, Sexual, Political and Intellectual persecution, Slavery, Economic extortion and exploitation among other horrors. The continents of The Americas including The Atlantic and Caribbean should be o’er flowed with the blood of innocent men and women who died defending their right merely to exist free in the world.

Native American Tribes were betrayed by American Treaties and forced to leave ancestral lands they had inhabited for millinea to subsist on paltry reservations

Because we have been reminded of these atrocities to humanity so many times we have grown immune to them but we should never be good with them. At the end of the day the voyage of Christopher Columbus was a failed journey. His theory was wrong, his navigation poor, he never found the West Indies and what he did find was a world that was familiar to the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks and Persians the new world would have been spared despoilment for a few hundred years.

The Conquistadors frought genocide on Pre-Columbian Cultures

I will never celebrate or acknowledge Columbus Day or Thanksgiving, for to me they are reserved as days of contemplative mourning. Mourning for a world that might have been, for a magnificent world of ancient wonders that has been lost. I have stripped away the very name, Columbus Day having replaced it with the Lububrious title, “THE HEIST OF 1492”!