I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KOKOKO!-Tiny Desk Concert #911 (November 15, 2019).

KOKOKO! are a visually arresting band.  The band dresses entirely in yellow jumpsuits and they play…garbage.

KOKOKO! are sonic warriors. They seized control of the Tiny Desk, shouting their arrival through a megaphone, while electronic sirens begin to blare. There’s a sense of danger in their sonic presence that left no doubt that something momentous was about to happen. And it did!

Makara Bianko was the guy shouting through the megaphone, walking all around the room.  Then after the siren, he sat at the drums (which are held together with duct tape and electrical tape) and started singing lead vocals on “Likolo”

Dido Oweke on the “guitar” starts the simple riff.  It’s possible that it has one string and the bottom of the guitar is definitely an old can.

Backed by a bank of electronics, including a drum machine, this band from the Democratic Republic of the Congo redefines the norm of what music is and how music is made. Wearing yellow jumpsuits that are both utilitarian and resemble Congolese worker attire, this band from Kinshasa feel as though they’re venting frustrations through rhythm. And all the while they’re making dance music, all from their debut LP, Fongola, that feels unifying — more party than politics.

“Tongos’a” starts with an electronic drum pattern from Débruit on the synth (he’s making a lot of the noise and twisting knobs and chanting along) and a simple bass line from Boms Bomolo.  Everybody chants along to the chorus.

Starting “Malembe” Débruit sings an echoing opening call as he starts electronic drums and Love Lokombe plays some analog drums.

Each song is arresting and catchy as the next (although “Malembe” feels a little long.

The only bad thing about this Tiny Desk is that you can’t really get a good look at the instruments.  I mean, it’s clear that Love Lokombe is playing a rack of glass bottles.  But he’s also hitting some kind of metal scraps.  And at the end of “Malembe” Makara Bianko picks up a board with a can attached to it  There’s a guitar string, I guess, which he strums rapidly.  I guess he can change the pitch by moving the ca,  He gets a pretty cool melody sound out of it.  It’s such a cool instrument and I want to see more!

There’s a nice story about the band in this NPR piece at Goats and Soda.

[READ: March 1, 2020] “Waiting for the End of the World”

In the great tradition of authors I like writing long form non-fiction for Harper’s, Lauren Groff heads to a Prepper’s Camp to learn how to deal with TEOTWAWKI.

The camp was started in 2014 by Rick and “Prepper Jane” Austin.

Groff acknowledges that she is not he usual prepper.

I am a vegetarian agnostic feminist in a creative field who sits to the left of most American socialists: I want immediate and radial action to halt climate change, free Medicare and free public higher education for all, abortion pills offered for pennies in pharmacies and gas stations, the eradication of billionaires; the destruction capitalism; and the rocketing of all the planet’s firearms into the sun.

Amen.

And yet she is a doomsday prepper.   Born first of necessity.  She lives in Florida where hurricane season is June through November.  She has no less than 9 water back up systems in place.  She also has a place to escape tucked away in the woods of New England (how she’d get there in a real disaster is the stuff of apocalyptic books, my wife tells me).  She has made her children learn archery and signed them up with the Boy Scouts so they will know how to build fires and handle knives safely even though its soft-focus quasi Hitler Youth nationalism makes me queasy.

Her concerns are not EMP disaster, but climate change as well as mass displacement, pandemics (she wrote this before anyone even thought of Coronavirus), desertification, cities under water.

But it wasn’t just her beliefs that made her stand out.

As a journalist she was basically a spy.  But the problem was more fundamental.  As a woman alone, she stood out.  Plus she was wearing East Coast liberal arts college clothes.  She was being stared at hard by a blond man and two sullen looking girls with blurry blue tattoos on their arms.  It was worse than high school

Over the weekend she counted exactly nine non-white people (three of whom were presenters).

The men, they were mostly men, were proudly working class with huge paunches.  They wore medals like over the hill Eagle Scouts.  Most people were in camouflage.  There were Don’t Tread on Me flags and maga hats and lots of Ronald Reagan.

Despite all this, Groff was genuinely excited to go the Prepper camp to fill in her knowledge base of what to do when it was necessary.

The class listing was bizarre mix of hippie homesteading and paranoid militarism.  She wanted the hippie homesteading stuff which she thought would show how to plan escape routes, buy laminated maps and to gauge whether staying put or fleeing was the right course of action.

But the instructor talked about how he and his cronies tracked civil unrest via social media and police scanners. Not what she had in mind.

She went to a class by their host Rick Austin called Secret Gardens and Greenhouses (the class was so good she bought his book of the same title).  But before you do the same, read on.  He spoke of how he replanted his own garden (instead of following factory farming techniques) to use the land and the crops to their best mutual benefit.  His garden is so lush and productive it doesn’t need watering weeding or pesticides.  She later said she regretted buying his book because she read it in 20 minutes, it was poorly edited and offered vague recommendations and eccentric punctuation.  And was full of terrible (and racist) photography.  So, let’s not support that guy.

Most of the speakers were unpaid but were allowed to hawk their wares in the Prepper Camp Shopping Mall.  She spoke to a woman hawking Colloidal silver which had “antibiotic properties.”  When Groff asked how it worked the woman said “It just does.”  Another man was going to read from the “best selling book in history.”  Groff asked if it was the bible but no, it was a book by Timothy A. Van Sickel, a self-published book (one of five in a series) of survivalist fiction.

Next was a talk on Frugal Homesteading by John Moody (I actually have this book at my desk at work and have been meaning to read through it).  He talked about how preppers prioritize the wrong thing.  They will spend years prepping fro an EMP although most people in this room are going to die of diabetes and heart disease. (Groff had been surprised at how astonishingly unfit most attendees were).  Moody said that when he heard a man say he now had seven glocks, he wanted to reply, “Well, sell two of them and get a membership to Golds Gym.”

Next up was “Anti-kidnapping and Hostage Survival.” She looked around the room at the aged infirm and unfamous and thought that the people who got kidnapped were usually journalists, or the wealthy or children of the powerful.

At “Sun Cooking,” Paul Musen, president of Sun Ovens showed off his oven which only needs the sun to work. He was the only person to talk about climate change, deforestation, and how millions of people cook over fires which takes time, contributes to environmental collapse and gives people respiratory diseases. He even used the word progressive without saying it was a bad thing.

During meal breaks, she stayed mostly by herself. She admits to being scared to light a fire in front of people who obviously knew how to do so, so she ate granola and fruit and almond milk.

The evening’s entertainment included an episode of Nat Geo’s Doomsday Preppers that featured the Austins.  But the tone of the show was was very clearly poking fun at them.  The show gave them an 89 out of 100 for preparedness and a twenty month survival time.  It appeared that the Austins didn’t register the ridicule since they were showing this to everyone.

This was followed by a Dinesh D’Souza film which among other absurdities presented Hitler and the Nazis as liberals.  Why was she the only one who saw how stupid the film was? The only saving grace of the film was during the technical problem when the spoken audio track went silent. Background music played while D’Souza flapped his lips. This felt appropriate.

She wondered what it would take for people to hole up and stop caring about their fellow man.  How did people come to this.  The American narrative of macho self-reliance emerged from the moral gymnastics of supposed Christians sailing across the Atlantic to commit genocide.

She gives some historical background of survivalists, like Robinson Crusoe.  Do not forget that he was a 17th century slaver and the book has a broken moral compass.  His plight began when he was on a mission to bring slaves back to the new world–he was an unapologetic murderer of the island’s cannibals.

She also says that those preppers who do read all love Emerson’s self reliance which they think is a libertarian gospel.  But Emerson’s but his argument is more of a call to question the structures that inhibit social change–the things that lead to inquiry.   Self-reliance is not the same as self-interest.

The next day “Wild Edible Survival” was useful (she discovered hat plantain was nature’s Bendadryl).  But things like “Concealed Carry and Defensive Shooting” were depressing for showing children under 12 shooting at silhouettes of people.

She did enjoy How to Build a Medical Kit and was intrigued by the final presentation of the night. It was by a contestant on Naked and Afraid (one of the few black men at the event).  He talked about PsyOps and she wondered if he was there doing psychological operation on the preppers to lean more about them–or perhaps she was just losing her mind,

Guest Speaker Curtis Bowers was a deep state paranoid crank.  Spouting racist, pseudo-nonsense that I won’t bother repeating.

The penultimate section shows her getting ready for the last day when a police car rolled through. She was wondering who was in trouble–especially among a group of people with outward disdain for the police.  Until it turned out it was her!  Her rental car was reported stolen.  It was of course a misunderstanding–a mistake by Hertz–but it took several hours to clear up (and she was pleased that her suspicious neighbors all vouched for her).

But she couldn’t get over how ridiculous this was–she was a good liberal, among the fee attendees glad to pay hefty taxes for such agents of then Nanny State as police officers and yet she was the one who found herself squirming under the Nanny State’s attention.   Later, instead of apologizing, Hertz put her on a list of people who couldn’t rent cars from them in the U.S.

She felt vulnerable and exposed bringing the cops there, so she left as soon as the cops did.  And she immediately went to the glories of civilization–a hotel with a warm bed, a warm bath and room service.

She was saddened but not surprised at how few facts were ever evoked at Prepper Camp.  It was a lot of fear mitigated by practical-seeming ideas and baseless venom shown at imagined liberals.

But scientists and historians note that there is very little antisocial behavior after a disaster.  There is often solidarity–people rise to help others.

Panic on behalf of white conservatives led to avast increase in prepping during Obama’s presidency with a downtick during the current presidency–ironic given the comparative risks of a catastrophic event then and now.  The current occupant of the White House’s deregulation causing far more harm than anything.

Then she thought about the people at the prepper camp.  Most of them had military background, they were powerful and good with weapons, traits not valued in out daily life. It must be weird to be back in society where people walked around so vulnerable–its easy to believe that institutions have failed you.

But Groff wonders if she is worse. She is prepper because she believes the only way we are going to pry the worlds wealth out of the greedy grasping hands of the billionaires who are willfully killing the environment is through a total collapse of the staus quo–she is goddamn ready for the guillotines.

She now believes that liberals need to have their own kind of prepper camp–made of useful knowledge to apply during disasters.  It would be created with an understanding of science and facts and would develop uself and actionable survival skills during a catastrophe: emergency heath care,  food storage and foraging, making shelters, the means to find water.

We need to override the pervasive libertarian impulse to concentrate on the needs of the self. American needs immediate collective action.  Self reliance only works in stable civilizations.

She realize that the

angry individualists like those I met at Prepper Camp have the leisure to concentrate on their own needs, to pretend that the concerns of the larger world simply don’t exist.  We need to pull these people into the collective to make them understand the need for common good.

I totally agree, but think it’s a very uphill battle.