Friday, July 2, 2010

Ken Coates Marxman

I read today of the death of my friend and author of a book I helped illustrate Ken Coates. When we met I was a green young photographer who had discovered that most of what he knew was a lie.
Growing up in the fifties and early sixties in America I had become keenly aware that there were major differences between what Americans believed and what we saw in the real world.
We were told that we were educated to advance our personal standing in the world yet were some how better than Black people.
We were told that we Americans could administer the world in a much more humane way than Africans Asians and Latin Americans.
We were told that American culture was much more vital and real than the peoples of the world.
I had seen though the lies and the layers of lies that make up first American education and second the American Nightmare.
I had seen America point the rifle at the Mexican and ruin his country. I had seen the FBI set up the machinery for the drug cartels in Oaxaca and the enslavement of the peasants to to work the soil for the rest of their short lives growing drugs.
I knew the segregated South with millions tied to depleted soil their dreams subjagated by first Dixiecrat then Republican White folk.
I had worked with W.Eugene Smith as his lives was smashed by the Luce Empire of lairs Henry the First Henry the Second and Henry the third. Men who created an America of false saviours and ever more rapatious criminal leaders.
I knew the Kennedys, Bundy's, Duponts, Bushs' and Duvals knew they were lying looting a continate and leaveing the people who did the work in the dirt.
Coates intoduced me to Marx, Lenin and Trotsky also Fanon C. Wright Mills. While I worked for the Week and with the Dialectical analysis he enhanced the isometric thinking my capi6talist educators had indoctrinated me with as a student. Coates opened a confusded mind and I could see the direction of victory over the corprate state. Coates, and Trevor Griffins set the opening of my mind into high gear. Then Ray Gosling challanged me when I parroted what I was reading at the time.
I was able learn the contradictions of Marxist Leninist thought almost as I saw how these ideas worked in the world. I was horrifed by the great slaughter that great minds put together. Socialist Russsia China Germany became thrones of blood. When I read Walter Benjamin, Buckminster Fuller, Makhano, the manifesto 's of the Kronstadt, the work of Debord and the Situationists I learned there are other better ways achieve liberation from the corporate fascist state that was forming back in those days.
I thank Ken Coates for challenging the mind I arrived at his doorstep carrying like paper sack. I am proud to have known him when I read and critique Zizek, Zarzen or the primitives who offer stone tools to feed seven billion people.

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