the arc'd hell-naw

I’ve been off the grid ‘cause I’ve been traveling. A couple of days ago I stayed in a a mid-sized in France. It has one of those plazas that's an arch with a road going through it with a traffic circle around it with roads merging into it that are so common in Paris. Walking down the street towards it and looking at it I started to laugh at the pointlessness of the arch from the standpoint of someone driving a car in the year 2005 and it’s total meaninglessness for me as a pedestrian at that moment. Anyway it got me to thinking about the crossroads and what that particular one meant. And I realized the meaning of that crossroads totally changed depending on if you drove, rode a bicycle, or walked through it . In a car you could only negotiate the crossroads the way the designers intended and the architectural meaning was fixed. On foot you could negotiate the crossroads as you wished and the architecture changed meaning accordingly. Walking offered an opportunity to traverse the crossroads in a way that was totally at odds with the designers’ intention. Traveling by foot easily subverted a certain aspect of the control mechanism of that town and neutered the power of it’s’ architectural iconography. I was reminded of the first time went to L.A. and was stopped by the cops cause I was walking. Walkers are automatically suspects in L.A. I hadn’t thought before then about how important vehicles and the confinement and restrictions inherent in using them are to the law enforcement process. Enforcement of the types of vehicles used, enforcement of the means of transportation is necessary for controlling the crossroads. Transpose this concept from physical to the spiritual and a new angle of systemic negotiation and if necessary, attack opens up. Transpose from vehicles to bodies and the connection between oppression, law and the degrees of skin melanin deemed optimum in the U.S. become apparent. On one hand operating a vehicle, a body, other than the one the designers intended will allow the greatest freedom of movement through the crossroads. On the other hand this body will immediately draw the interest of the command and control entities guarding a system if it is recognized for what it is. Attempting to harmonize with the system by incorporating the correct “vehicle” may let you pass through unmolested. Or it may result in the dreaded “DWB” (Driving While Black) syndrome, especially if your vehicle is well developed and maintained, where the system comes at you with guns drawn and you’re trapped in your vehicle guilty until proven innocent. Ultimately interacting with the American system becomes a question of cloaking devices and codes of recognition, and of subverting the mechanisms of the system in order to attain your goals. For those of us with tropical skin melanin optimization subversion is unavoidable because the system was not designed for us or our interests. Quite the opposite, in fact. So maximizing who we are makes us by definition opposed to the system as it has been constituted up until today. Operating on and through the subversive mechanisms build into the American system and maximizing their potential for use, for flippin da script as the old skool hip-hop heads used to say, has been the goal of rootworkers and hoodooists since day one. ``