No Planet B - Part Two
or, The History of the World Backwards
July 2006
Spacemen
In 1969 something amazing happens. An alien spacecraft lands in Houston, Texas. Two men get out who say that they have come from the moon! They are subjected to a series of tests. They are strapped into a centrifuge machine and spun round at high velocity first one way and then another. But after a while they are too much like us and we lose interest.
Dance
After the sixties, at the beginning of the fifties, white Europeans forget how to dance. Trinidadians, Barbasians, Greeks, Brazilians and Jamaicans are all emigrating. As they leave, anxious whites follow them down to the harbour, to the very gangplank of the Windrush begging to be shown the steps just once more. Still smarting from the ‘no dogs, no Irish, no blacks’ signs which have just started appearing in the front windows of Ladbroke Grove and Toxteth B&B’s, the emigrants refuse.
The Windrush is a Greek-owned ship and as the whites stand on the quay a Greek falls in the water. Watching him drown the Saxons think he is showing them dance moves, and so for the next twenty years white people dance like this...[Rob does drowning man dance].
MUSIC: OFFSTAGE GUITAR AND TAMBOURINE FUNK RIFF
Race in the USA
In 1966, the unofficial white bus boycott comes to an end as economic segregation is finally replaced by legal segregation. At last making buses attractive options for whitey.
BACK-PROJECTION: TWO BLACK PANTHERS HOLDING GUNS
PANTHER: Come away from the window, Esther. You wanted to know..? Oh yeah. How did we get here? It all came from Point 11 of the Black Panther Party’s 11-Point Program, which we began to implement in '68, soon as we’d defeated COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program against what J. Edgar Hoover called “the greatest single threat to the internal security of the United States.” We knew our phones were being tapped, by the way, when we ran up a $10,000 phone bill and were not cut off. The Panthers never paid a phone bill! But we survived the assassinations, infiltration, bugging, spying, jail, internicine splits and crack. And so by 1968 it’s clear that we are the only organization in America in a strong enough position to take the radical action necessary actually to achieve Climate Stabilization by realizing Point 11 of the Black Panther Party Program: grounding 90% of US airplanes by 1950.
Now there had always been an ecological dimension to the black power movement from time, from way back before the Panthers even. LA riots of '91, when that white truck-driver Regionald Denny was beat up on the highway, what the bourgeoise media did not point out was the reason for this attack, was the incident several minutes erlier wherein benzene particulates from Denny’s truck’s tailpipe had been detected on the brothers’ spectrometer indicating leaded gasoline in violation of the Clean Air Act of 1996. I’m not saying he deserved the whoopin’. I’m just sayin’ - you drive through our neighbourhoods you better have a blended diesel-electric hybrid in that tank. A’ite? All I’m saying.
Step One in implementing Point 11 we reclaimed vacant lots, and grew food locally outside of the capitalist system and combined that with a boycott of air-freight food. Step Two, we ran a blockade of approach roads to LAX airport, and walked the ensuing car-jam explaining the reasons for our action through the driver window. But, you know what? No matter how clearly we explained how with air travel you gotta multiply the global warming effect by three because vapour trails form ice crystal clouds in the upper troposphere which trap the earth’s heat and melt the ice at the poles and send Fats Dominos’ gumboli-eatin’-ass into the Gulf of Mexico - oftentimes seemed these mopes was more concerned with making their flight than listening to the mighty truths we were dropping on their ass.
Hold up! What’s that noise, Esther? Say what? Tanks? [Gets up goes to window]. Must be six, seven Sherman tanks all comig this way. Pardon? Is it the phone company? No, I don’t think it’s the phone company. Listen, we’re gonna split. Head for the tunnel people. You wanna know who? If it’s how I think it is and they gun me down this afternoon and pop a howitzer shell in my ass, you will find the Last Testament Of The Black Panther Party behind the behind the framed portrait of Elaine Brown, in the Northern Californian Chapter’s Oakland HQ. When you find that then you will know. Get away from the windows! The tunnel everybody! The tunnel!