Name one genius that ain’t crazy — K. West, “Feedback”

My Aunt, Uncle, Mother, and Stepfather roll their eyes whenever Trump comes on and talk about what an idiot he is. I talk about President Trump and they say this is a scary thought, but possible.

Mobile Flood Wall In Austria

It is hard to know how scary the the period of 2016–2020 will be. Nick Bostrum argues that “we will have superhuman artificial intelligence within the first third of the next century” I haven’t seen the argument rebutted, so I’ll assume he’s right, this means that every one of the next seventeen years, or however long it takes until superintelligence develops, will be more important than any of the many hundreds of thousands of years in humanity’s history.

How does the identity of the president of America relate to the happiness of the future of humanity?

Campaign 2016 is a contest between three teams.

Team One believes that this man named Donald Trump, a real estate developer with personal access to vast wealth and Charles Manson undercurrents, is the kind of symbolic energy that should lead the American Imperium.

Team Two believes that a man named Bernard Sanders, a 74 year old Jewish American Socialist should lead something he calls a “political revolution” and change the structure of power within the United States, specifically, transfer power from the owners of Capital to those who toil for Capital.

Team Three believe for one uncertain reason or another that a candidate produced by the American Corporate and Military Elite named Hilary Clinton should become The Presedential Emperor.

From what the internet tells me, Team Two is the biggest, followed by Team Three, followed by Team One.

As a member of Team Two, this is good news, but the problem is that it isn’t a contest to have the most members: it is a contest that involves a specific kind of competitive ritual: Electoral Politics.

This is a picture of Kenneth Krantz, the inquisitor of a man named Steven Avery. The United States kidnapped Steven Avery and locked him in a solitary room for eighteen years for a rape he did not commit.

Two years after he was released, the United States coerced Steven Avery into a cage once more, and charged him with a murder.

Like basically everyone I know, I learned about Steven Avery from a work of art: a six part documentary called Making A Murderer, directed by Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi.

1970 Gil Scott-Heron released his first album.

The fourth track is called Comment #1

Poem here says, Comment #1

Uh, Comment #2 is dynamite

But Comment #1 is the one we decided

To use here this evening

Because it makes a comment if you listen

Closely on what is now being advertised

In East Harlem as the “Rainbow Conspiracy” — a combination of

The Students For A Democratic Society

The Black Panthers, and the Young Lords

And this is my particular comment about that conspiracy, “Comment #1”: The time is in the street you know

Us living as we do upside down

And the new word to have is revolution

People don’t even want to hear the preacher spill or spiel

Because God’s hole card has been thoroughly piqued

And America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey

The youngsters who were programmed

To continue fucking up woke up one night

Digging Paul Revere and Nat Turner as the good guys.

America stripped for bed and we had not all yet closed our eyes.

The signs of Truth were tattooed across our often-entered vagina

We learned to our amazement untold tale of scandal

Two long centuries buried in the musty vault

Hosed down daily with a gagging perfume

America was a bastard the illegitimate daughter

Of the mother country whose legs

Were then spread around the world

And a rapist known as freedom: free doom

Democracy, liberty, and justice were

Revolutionary code names that preceded

The bubbling bubbling bubbling bubbling

Bubbling in the mother country’s crotch

And behold a baby girl was born

Nurtured by slave holders and whitey racists

It grew and grew and grew screwing

Indiscriminately like mother, like daughter

Everything unplagued by her madame mother

The present mocks us, good Black people

With keen memories set fire to the bastards

Who ask us in a whisper to melt and integrate

Young, very young, teeny

Bopping revolt on weekend young dig

By proxy what a mental ass kicking

They receive through institutionalized everything

And vomit up slogans to stay out of Vietnam

They seek to hide their relationship with the world’s prostitute

Alienating themselves from everything

Except dirt and money with long hair, grime, and dope

To camo-hide the things that cannot be hidden

They become runaway children to walk the streets downtown with everyday

Black people sitting on the curb

Crying because we know that they will go back

Home with a clear conscience and a college degree

The irony of it all, of course

Is when a pale face SDS motherfucker dares

Look hurt when I tell him to go find his own revolution

He wonders why I tell him that America’s revolution

Will not be the melting pot but the toilet bowl

He is fighting for legalized smoke, or lower voting age

Less lip from his generation gap and fucking in the street

Where is my parallel to that?

All I want is a good home and a wife and a children

And some food to feed them every night

Back goes pale face to basics

Does Little Orphan Annie have a natural?

Do Sluggo’s kinks make him a refugee from Mandingo?

What does Webster’s say about soul?

I say you silly chipe motherfucker, your great grandfather

Tied a ball and chain to my balls

And bounced me through a cotton field

While I lived in an unflushable toilet bowl

And now you want me to help you overthrow what?

The only Truth that can be delivered to a four year

Revolutionary with a whole card i.e. skin is this:

Fuck up what you can in the name of

Piggy Wallace, Dickless Nixon, and Spiro Agnew

Leave brother Cleaver and Brother Malcolm alone please

After all is said and done build a new route to China if they’ll have you Who will survive in America?

Who will survive in America?

Who will survive in America?

Who will survive in America?

Heron recorded this track live, with only bongo drum as a support.

The last track of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is called “Who Will Survive in America.” Iin it West sets part of Scott-Heron’s“Comment #1” to a New Beat.

Craig Werner, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America” and “Playing the Changes From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse” suggests that West’s track “Blood on the Leaves” is involved in a practice that Tony Morrison, calls “re-memory”

I mention all of these to explain why I have nothing to say about The Life of Pablo, or the public conversations surrounding it. To me, and to anyone who pays attention, West is — like Picasso, Kubrick, Paul the Apostle, and Pablo Escobar — an artist constructing a life as a work.

Foucault defined madness as “l’absence d’oeuvre” — the absence of a work. By this definition, all American presidents have been mad. Perhaps Bernie Sanders is an exception, perhaps not. Kanye West already has a work: if a political entity with such power as the United States should exist, and there seems to be no reason why it should, it goes to reason that a sane president like Kanye West would increase the probability of a happy future for all. It’s more possible than you think