#BTColumn – The pen is the deadliest of rifles

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today Inc.

by Adrian Sobers

“Mike Tyson disciple, trifle with my pen, it’s a rifle/Sixteen ways to shoot you through your Chrysler, duke.”
— (Raekwon, Rich & Black)

“Gods always behave like the people who make them.”
— (Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse)

Sho Baraka’s album The Narrative doubles as the perfect complement to his recently released book, He Saw That It Was Good: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair a Broken World. Narratives matter. In Bajan parlance: “Dah wuh you telling youself?” “The stories we accept about our tribes”, writes Sho, “have lasting impact on how we see ourselves.”

As the subtitle suggests, we live in a broken world. This would be just cause for despair, except that we play a part in God’s restorative work: “The command to love — in all the fullness and justice of that word — is laid on all, from politician to painter. With every policy pushed, every stroke of the brush, we put forth what we believe about God and about good. With what we make, we affect the world. For better or for worse.”

The Jamaica Gleaner carried a story on their Instagram feed where Senator Charles Sinclair “accused members of the entertainment industry of being the faces of gangs during deliberations on the Criminal Justice (Suppression of Criminal Organisations) Act, commonly referred to as the anti-gang legislation at the weekly sitting of the Senate.”

One of the commenters went against the grain, against the usual cries of artists are not scapegoats; but, but what about X. “Anyone who is in a position of influence should always be mindful of the power that they have over others, especially young and impressionable minds. Regrettably some musical entertainers have fallen short of the mark in this regard.

Alas, politicians too.” The above lyric from Raekwon alludes to the fact that the pen can be likened to a rifle. On a collaboration with Nas, and as Sho alludes to, when it comes to government policy.

The pen is the deadliest of rifles when we remember that governments are inherently inflationary. It is becoming more obvious that policy response to the great financial crisis was, contrary to what the flyer said, a sedative.

The only thing rising faster than inflation is denial about inflation. Those who penned policy measures while bobbing their head to the quantitative easing rhythm should be jailed.

Rising prices have nothing to do with “greedy capitalists” and everything to do with the fact that printing unearned money increases the money supply which leads to more money chasing goods that have not been produced.

Shortages have nothing to do with pent up demand but the fact that central bankers are enabling governments’ appetite for debt (by keeping interest rates artificially low). Consumers would be better off if the government worried less about “greed” and more about their monetary policy shenanigans.

The above is why angst anthems like Fed Up are penned. When the much hallowed poetic licence is combined with prophetic imagination, artists hold not only the powers that be accountable, but themselves and their audience.

(Concerning the latter see the hooks for A Better Tomorrow and Little Ghetto Boys on Wu-Tang Forever.) One of the best examples, however, comes on The Message (The Saga Continues), “I’m ready to compete with anybody for our young people’s minds.”

Those who do not commit violence with their limbs can do so with their lines. Not in the causal sense that listening/watching X causes Y; as suggested by our friends in Extremistan (behave do). Poets who manufacture poems on microphones know this and often allude to this influence.

As Jason ‘Propaganda’ Petty says in Terraform: Building a Better World: “words build worlds.” Therefore, we do well to pay attention to what we tell ourselves at the individual and collective level.

Using the metaphor of terraform from science fiction Prop asks, “What if we thought about our cultural climate in the same way we consider the actual climate, and the harvestable ground was actually represented by the ideas we plant in others’ hearts and minds?”

He continues: “What if the air we breathe was represented by the songs, poems, and stories we sing over each other? What if our words created worlds?”

They do, therefore the poetic licence afforded to our poets should be paired with the prophetic imagination where possible. (Creatives function best as thermostats not thermometers.) Prop’s Terraform is, in part, a call for creatives to “have some prophetic imagination”.

Not in the sense of answering the blind who taunt those who see clearest (Luke 22:64), but prophetic in the forthtelling sense. Prop draws on the lesson from William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect who “believed that virtue sits upstream from politics and culture.”

He then asks, “And who truly communicates virtue that then informs politics and culture? Artists. Art informs culture and then culture makes the human.”

If he’s right, and I suspect he is, then what are the implications of our stories? What we really telling  ourselves though?

Adrian Sobers is a prolific letter writer and commentator on social issues. This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.