looking for
A Brighter Day.
The revolution will not be televised.
There will be no highlights on the Eleven
O’Clock News
and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists
and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim
Webb or Francis Scott Key
nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom Jones, Johnny
Cash,
Englebert Humperdink or Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be right back after a
message about a white tornado, white lightning
or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom,
the tiger in your tank or the giant in your toilet
bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight germs that may
cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.
The revolution will not be televised
will not be televised
not be televised
be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers.
The revolution will be LIVE.
H2O GATE (WATERGATE) BLUES – INTRO
(as originally recorded on Winter In America)
This here, this is gonna be a blues number.
But first I want to do a little bit of background on the blues,
Say what it is:
Like there are six cardinal colors
and colors have always come to signify more
than simply that particular shade
Like ‘RED-NECK’
Or ‘GOT-THE-BLUES’
That’s where you apply colors to something else, you know,
To come up with what it is you’re tryin’ to say.
There are six cardinal colors –
yellow, red, orange, green, blue and purple.
And there are three thousand shades.
If you take these three thousand shades
and divide them by six,
then you’ll come up with five hundred –
meaning there are at least five hundred
shades of the blues.
For example there is the ‘I ain’t got me no money’ blues.
There’s the ‘I ain’t got me no woman’ blues.
There’s the ‘I ain’t got me no money and I ain’t got me no
woman blues’,
which is the ‘double blues’.
And for years it was thought that black people was the only
ones who could get the blues,
so the blues hadn’t come into no international kind of fame.
But lately we had the FRANK RIZZO with the lie detector
blues;
We had the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT talking
about the energy crisis blues;
And we gonna dedicate this next poem here to SPEARHEAD X, (Spiro Agnew)
The ex-second-in-command in terms of this country.
And the poem is called H2O gate blues
And if H2O is still water and g-a-t-e is still gate
What we gettin’ ready to deal on is
The ‘Watergate Blues’ …
H2O GATE (WATERGATE) BLUES
Click! Whirr … Click!
‘I’m sorry, the government you have elected is
inoperative …
Click! Inoperative!’
Just how blind will America be?
The world is on the edge of its seat
defeat on the horizon, very surprisin’
that we all could see the plot
and claimed that we could not.
Just how blind, America?
Just how blind, Americans?
Just as Viet Nam exploded in the rice
snap, crackle and pop
could not stop people determined to be free.
The shock of a Viet Nam defeat
sent Republican donkeys scurrying down on
Wall Street
and when the roll was called it was:
Phillips 66 and Pepsi-Cola plastics,
Boeing Dow and Lockheed –
ask them what we’re fighting for
and they never mention the economics of war.
Ecological Warfare! Above all else destroy the
land!
If we can’t break the Asian’s will
We’ll bomb the dykes and starve the man!
America! The international Jekyll and Hyde,
the land of a thousand disguises
sneaks up but rarely surprises,
plundering the Asian countryside in the name of
Fu Man Chu.
Just how long, America?
Just how long, Americans?
Who was around where Hale Boggs died?
And what about LBJ’s untimely demise?
And whatever happened to J. Edgar Hoover?
The king is proud of Patrick Gray
While America’s faith is drowning
beneath that cesspool – Watergate.
How long will the citizens sit and wait?
It’s looking like Europe in ’38 and
did they move to stop Hitler before it was too
late?
How long, America before the consequences of:
allowing the press to be intimidated
keeping the school system segregated
watching the price of everything soar
and hearing complaints ’cause the rich want
more?
It seems that MacBeth, and not his lady, went
mad.
We’ve let him eliminate the whole middle-class.
What really happened to J. Edgar Hoover?
The king is proud of Patrick Gray
while America’s faith is drowning
beneath that cesspool – Watergate.
How much more evidence do the citizens need
that the election was rigged with trickery and
greed?
And, if this is so, and who we got didn’t win
let’s do the whole Goddam election over again!
The obvious key to the whole charade
would be to run down all the games that they
played:
Remember Dita Beard and ITT, the slaughter of
Attica,
the C.I.A. in Chile knowing nothing about
Allende at this time
in the past. The slaughter in Augusta, G.A.
the nomination of Supreme Court Jesters to
head off the tapes,
William Calley’s Executive Interference in the
image of John Wayne,
Kent State, Jackson State, Southern Louisiana,
hundreds of unauthorized bombing raids,
the chaining and gagging of Bobby Seale –
somebody tell these jive Maryland Governors to
be for real!
We recall all of these events just to prove
that Waterbuggers in the Watergate wasn’t no
news!
And the thing that justifies all our fears
is that all this went down in the last five years.
And what really happened to J. Edgar Hoover?
The king is proud of Patrick Gray
while America’s faith is drowning
beneath that cesspool – Watergate.
We leave America to ponder the image of its
new leadership:
Frank Rizzo, the high school graduate Mayor of
Philadelphia, whose
ignorance is surpassed only by those who voted
for him.
Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago, who took
over from Al Capone and
continues to implement the same tactics.
&
nbsp; Lester Maddawg, George Wallace, Strom
Thurmond, Ronald Reagan –
an almost endless list that won’t be missed
when at last
America is purged.
And the silent White House with the James
Brothers once in command.
Sauerkraut Mafia men deserting the sinking
White House ship and
their mindless, meglomaniac Ahab.
McCord has blown. Mitchell has blown.
No tap on my telephone.
Haldeman, Erlichmann, Mitchell and Dean
It follows a pattern if you dig what I mean.
And what are we left with?
Bumper stickers saying Free the Watergate 500,
spy movies of the same name with a cast of
thousands,
and that ominous phrase: If Nixon knew, Agnew!
What really happened to J. Edgar Hoover?
The king is proud of Patrick Gray
while America’s faith is drowning
beneath that cesspool – Watergate.
WE BEG YOUR PARDON, AMERICA
We beg your pardon, America.
We beg your pardon
because the pardon you gave this time
was not yours to give.
They call it due process and some people are
overdue.
We beg your pardon, America.
Somebody said ‘BrotherMan gon’ break a
window,
gon’ steal a hub cap,
gon’ smoke a joint and BrotherMan gon’ go to
jail.’
The man who tried to steal America is not in
jail.
Get caught with a nickel bag, BrotherMan!
Get caught with a nickel bag, SisterLady
on your way to get yo’ hair fixed!
You’ll do Big Ben and Big Ben is Time.
A man who tried to fix America will not do
time.
Said they wuz gonna’ slap his wrist
and retire him with $850,000.
America was shocked!
America leads the world in shock.
Unfortunately, America doesn’t lead the world
in deciphering
the cause of shock.
Eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars they
said and the people protested;
so they said, ‘All right, we’ll give him $200,000.’
Everybody said, ‘Okay, that’s better.’
I’d like to retire with $200,000 some day.
San Quentin, not San Clemente!
Go directly to jail, Do not pass Go! Do not
collect $200,000.
We beg your pardon, America
We beg your pardon
because somehow the pardon did not sit
correctly,
What were the causes for this pardon?
Well, they had phlebitis.
Rats bite us – no pardon in the ghetto.
They said National Security, but do you feel
secure
with the man who tried to steal America
back on the streets again?
And what were the results of this pardon?
We now have Oatmeal Man.
Anytime you find someone in the middle
Anytime you find someone who is lukewarm
Anytime you find someone
who has been in Congress for twenty-five years
and no one ever heard of him, you’ve got
Oatmeal Man.
Oatmeal Man: straddling uncomfortably
yards of barbed wire.
Oatmeal Man: the man who said
you could fit all of his Black friends
in the trunk of his car and still have room
for the Republican elephant.
Oatmeal Man: there was no crime he
committed.
Oatmeal Man says that, America,
In 1975 your President will
be a 1913 Ford.
Regressive.
Circle up the wagons
to defend
yourself from nuclear attack.
Reminiscent of 1964’s Goldwater.
Thank God he didn’t win.
But Oatmeal Man didn’t win.
I didn’t vote for him.
Did you vote for him?
But that’s the first result. And the second would
be:
The dread Rockefeller. Doubtlessly being
promoted
for the job he did at Attica?
Forty-three dead and millions of Americans
Once again, in shock!
Doubtlessly being promoted for the job he did
on the streets
of New York City, where the pushers push
drugs that the
government allows in the country to further
suppress the masses
who then do time.
They do life or death or life and death
behind bars.
While William Saxbe wanted to dismiss
the Lorton Furlough Program
and Brother Richard X faces 1,365 years
(did he say one thousand three hundred and
sixty-five years) for participating at Attica.
Rockefeller faces the Vice-Presidency of this
country
for his participation.
And all is calm and quiet
along the white sands at San Clemente.
We beg your pardon, America.
We beg your pardon, once again
because we found that seven out of every
ten Black men
are behind bars
(and it seems that seven out of every ten men
behind bars are Black)
seven out of every ten of these Black men
never went to the 9th grade
and hadn’t had a hundred dollars for a month
when they went to jail.
So the poor and the ignorant go to jail
while the rich go to San Clemente.
We beg your pardon, America
because we understand much better than we
understood before.
But we don’t want you to take the pardon back.
We want you to issue some more.
Pardon Brother Frank Willis, the Watergate
security guard.
He was only doing his job (and now he can’t
find one).
Pardon H. Rap Brown, it was only burglary.
Pardon Robert Vesco, it was only embezzlement.
And pardon us while we get sick.
Because they pardoned William Calley:
twenty-two dead and America in shock.
And as we understand all the better, we beg your
pardon
as unemployment spirals to seven per cent
(and it seems like seventy per cent in my
neighborhood)
as we watch cattlemen on tv shoot cows in the
head
and kick them into graves
while millions are starving in the Sahel?
and Honduras and maybe even next door.
We understand all the more deeply
as Boston becomes Birmingham becomes Little
Rock becomes Selma, becomes Philadelphia,
Mississippi
becomes yesterday all over again.
We understand and we beg your pardon.
We beg your pardon, America
because we have an understanding of karma:
what goes around comes around.
We beg your pardon, America
because the pardon you gave this time was not
yours to give.
THE GHETTO CODE
(DOT-DOT-DIT-DIT-DOT-DOT-DASH)
Communication has always been an important part of our existence. In Africa we were dependent upon the drummer’s rhythm to keep us informed and in touch with villages far
up the Nile. As captives, in this country, our contact through the drums was destroyed, but not our need to communicate or our need for independent communications.
For the past couple of years, we have seen a totally new Ghetto Code begin to develop. The primary phrase that has caught on from the code has been ‘Dot-dot-dit-dit-dot-dot- dash.’ It means ‘Damned if I know.’ Daily there are more and more revelations that make us uncertain of things we thought we were positive about. So: ‘Dot-dot-dit-dit-dot-dot- dash.’ Damned if I know.
A good example I might give would be Astrology. Lately, more and more people have been re-investigating Astrology – finding out what their signs and their placements are. That was all well and good until folks found out that somebody had been messing with the calendar. They found out that the month in our calendar called July was slipped in to honor Julius Caesar. They found the month called August had been slipped in to honor Augustus Caesar. They found there was a problem with September because it is the Latin word for seventh, but it is the ninth month in our calendar. And people familiar with the romance languages jumped all over it – octo means eight, but October is the tenth month; nove means nine, but November is eleventh; and dece means ten, but December is twelfth! ‘Dot-dot-dit-dit- dot-dot-dash.’ Damned if I know.
The problem seems to originate in February. It takes at least thirty days to qualify as a month (the precedent having been established by the other eleven). Yet, February has twenty- eight days three times in a row and if you make the leap year, you get a bonus. ‘Dot-dot-dit-dit-dot-dot-dash.’ Damned if I know.
There was another problem with the alphabet. Tracing the origins of the symbols, I found that they were called ‘Alpha Beta’ and contained all of these symbols from Alphato Omega – that is from beginning to end. From Alpha – the letter a – the beginning, to Omega – the letter q – the end; but they got nine more letters coming after ‘the end.’ R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z. What do I think? ‘Dot dot-dit-dit-dot-dot-dash.’ Damned if I know!
The letter that has become my favorite is the letter ‘c.’ It is multipurpose, but it does not receive the proper amount of respect. Highly underrated.
The first letter in Cash.
The first letter in Constitution.
The last letter in musiC.
The first letter in C.I.A.
The C.I.A. and F.B.I., noses pressed against our window panes,
Ears glued to our telephones.
Why won’t they leave us alone?
Trying to pick up on … the Ghetto Code.
Now and Then Page 7
