Babylon a fall!

[imomus]

One thing the current financial crisis ought to be making us say (though I haven't seen anyone saying it yet) is "Shit, the Rastafarians were right -- Babylon a fall!". These past couple of weeks have seen the Rastafarian concept of Babylon looking stronger and smarter, and our own concepts about the efficiency and intelligence of the market system looking ever weaker and more stupid. If Bush and Blair and Brown thought that Babylon would save us, it's now becoming clear that it won't. Instead, Babylon is more likely to do what the Rastafarians have been telling us all along it will: Babylon is likely "a fall".



The Rastafarian concept of Babylon is one we all understand in its broad outline. Babylon is the white man's world, the oppressor's world, the world of the slave-taker and slave-trader, the world in which precious spiritual things are reduced to mere commodities. It's a world characterized by greed and dishonesty, a corrupt and decadent world, a world with no respect for nature and no respect for humanity. One should have as little to do with it as possible -- one shouldn't deal with Babylon. For, because of its endemic vices and iniquities, Babylon shall fade and Babylon shall fall, just like the reggae songs tell us.

Babylon in reggae and in Rastafarianism is a catch-all phrase, a metaphor. The real, historical Babylon, Wikipedia tells us, "was a city-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which can be found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq, about 85 kilometers (55 mi) south of Baghdad." Interestingly, the current-day location of Babylon is occupied by the Americans, who are without a doubt the current-day metaphorical Babylonians too. Ominously, though, "all that remains today of the ancient famed city of Babylon is a mound, or tell, of broken mud-brick buildings and debris in the fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in Iraq." Babylon was a holy city by 2300 BC and the seat of an empire by 612 BC. It boasted a globalization-friendly skyscraper in the form of the Tower of Babel and a world-standard tourist attraction in the form of the Hanging Gardens. And yet, by 141BC, Babylon was to be found "in complete desolation and obscurity". Babylon a fall.



We could call Babylon, the Rastafarian concept, a "cautionary metaphor". By tunnelling far back into the past, the Rastafarians point to the fall of one empire, map it to the current empire, and preview, by extension and with relish, its fall too.

As David Bardfield explains in The Roots of Babylon (The Dread Library), the concept as it appears in Rastafarianism comes from Marcus Garvey's teachings, which map the exile of African slaves in the Caribbean to the exile of Jews into Babylon, as described in The Bible. It's a word which is shorthand for a whole political program: "Instead of saying "Injustice must fall", "Poverty must be alleviated", or "Jamaican legislation must represent its people", a Rasta need only say "Babylon must fall".

Babylon represents a range of corrupt and unjust institutions: politics, police, laws, even cities are "Babylon".

What's really remarkable is that the speeches from both sides of the current US presidential debates could very easily be reframed (I'm sure there's a text engine out there that could do it with cut and paste) in Rastafarian terms. When McCain and Obama agree that "Washington is broken, and Wall Street is broken", or when they talk about greed and corruption being endemic, they're basically recognizing that they live in Babylon. Even Bush, admitting that the $700 billion bailout may not solve the financial crisis, is warning us that Babylon may not be easily fixable. It may, indeed, fall. In fact, in a long enough perspective, it's absolutely sure to.

Babylon has been a theme in my own music -- I even put an image of Haile Selassie on the inside of my 2006 album Ocky Milk. Here's a clip from a track on my forthcoming Joemus album which pits "the Babylon King" against his nemesis, a "Jahwise Hammer":

Jahwise Hammer of the Babylon King (excerpt) stereo mp3 file, 1.4 MB, 1 min 45 secs

Maybe one day this song will bring it all back: exactly where you were when Babylon began a fall.

Comments

[bricology.livejournal.com]

If a new Godwin's Law is what you seek (a singular atrocity of the past, conveniently referenced for effect today), I suggest that slavery -- abolished 150 years ago in this country -- is a much closer parallel than clitorectomies. Regardless, even though it's still practiced upon a few million African girls every year, I'll cheerfully withrdraw the clitorectomy reference, since you deem it "lazy shorthand" and an "excuse".

In its place, I submit child-rape, which every year victimizes millions of African girls as young as infants every year (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/444213), due to the bizarre notion that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/world/africa/01madagascar.html). A practice, I might add, unique to Africa and one that flourishes despite the best efforts of European and American volunteers to educate against it. Evil, meddlesome white man!

It's your blog, so apparently you can have it both ways. But this hoary image of the "noble savage", snatched from his earthly paradise, bravely struggling against "Babylon", is too farcical to not challenge.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Your argument seeks to reduce the value of rastafarian insights into the unsustainability of "Babylon" -- insights and predictions massively vindicated by current events, to the extent that both candidates in the US presidential elections are, to all intents and purposes, currently singing reggae songs -- by imposing a moral equivalence between the worst excesses of black cultures and the worst excesses of white ones. Let's call this technique "Atrocity Snap", a Procrustean (http://imomus.livejournal.com/194903.html) parlour game.

You guys do slavery too? Oh, snap! You wiped out some tribes? We did too! High five! We're quits! Now nothing you say about our collapsing economy has any relevance any more! Yay!

[bricology.livejournal.com]

But you haven't really presented any "value of rastafarian insights into the unsustainability of 'Babylon'," Momus. You've just tortured one group's historic circumstances into serving the purpose of another polemic. To wit: "Babylon in reggae and in Rastafarianism is a catch-all phrase..." And yet you dismiss Godwin for being a convenient catch-all! Anything can be reduced to a catch-all, and pressed into service elsewhere. The Rastafarian conception of "Babylon", the extermination of the Cathars, Moore's Law, the excesses of the Hellfire Club, the herding instincts of muntjac -- any old thing will do, so long as one can string them together in a convincing way. But why? Does it really illuminate? Or is it just to privilege and perpetuate the certain approved classes of victimhood, and to dismiss current atrocities? Perhaps one day you can write a post about how the crimes of the US Government can be seen as a metaphor for the rape, genocide, tribal warfare, slavery and clitorectomies taking place in Africa today. But I won't hold my breath.

No, I understand what you're doing, and it's no different from what any clever political pundit does: go mining for a metaphor to serve the current situation, no matter how tenuously connected. "Both candidates in the US presidential elections are, to all intents and purposes, currently singing reggae songs -- by imposing a moral equivalence between the worst excesses of black cultures and the worst excesses of white ones"? Really? Was the Rastafarian conception of "Babylon" the most insightful metaphor that could've been selected to refer to the current economic situation? I don't think it's even in a hypothetical top 100. I have to say that I don't think I've ever seen a connection stretched closer to its breaking point than this particular one -- especially one that conveniently exchanges the atrocities being committed right now for those committed in the past. But congratulations for referencing the Presidential elections, Reggae and Theseus in the same post; a first, no doubt. I sometimes wonder if these semantic Venn diagrams aren't the whole purpose of your political posts.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Mapping the current political rhetoric of greed and iniquity to reggae lyrics seems to me a much smaller and more reasonable jump than mapping a Jamaican religion to African genocide and genital mutilation, Bricology.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that you made that connection for me:

"Babylon is the white man's world (as opposed to the black man's world, Africa), the oppressor's world, the world of the slave-taker and slave-trader (taking slaves from Africa)...the exile of African slaves in the Caribbean to the exile of Jews into Babylon, as described in The Bible. It's a word which is shorthand for a whole political program: 'Instead of saying 'Injustice must fall', 'Poverty must be alleviated', or 'Jamaican legislation must represent its people', a Rasta need only say 'Babylon must fall'. Babylon represents a range of corrupt and unjust institutions: politics, police, laws, even cities are 'Babylon'."

You posited an injustice -- not visited by white British Jamaicans on black Jamaicans, but on Africans who happened to be in Jamaica. An injustice that is largely a thing of the past, while Africans are currently engaged in even worse injustices upon their own. Even Jamaicans are engaged in this, with their brutal treatment of homosexuals. But let's just forget all of that, because it's inconvenient to accept that freight while trying to force Rastafarianism and the US financial empire into some contrived dualistic relationship.

I realize you're trying to make a point, but at the same time you're dismissing that other reality as irrelevant. Victims are often victimizers, and vice-versa. It all depends upon where you choose to draw the boundaries. Yes, don't worry -- we all can see where you've chosen to draw yours: White = Bad, Black = Good, America = Bad, everywhere else = Good. Got it, already.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Your argument seems to be with Marcus Garvey rather than me.

I also think your need to see Procrustean equivalences wherever you look ("they're just as bad as anyone") betrays a failure to see that asymmetrical multiculturalism is asymmetrical for a very good reason: because power is asymmetrical.

mapping a Jamaican religion

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

http://www.freewebs.com/bujud/aboutme.htm

You need the beats.

Not quite sure why A bible quotation heads the page or what the hatred of the decadent white establishment has to do with universal love.
It all sounds illusive and very Jonestown, Guyana which was a cult of death.

Still Babylon rules.

Re: mapping a Jamaican religion

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, the Old Testament is a key document for rastafarians! That's where the accounts of Babylon come from. And the metaphor of themselves as the Jews in Babylon.

That particular quote about the herb of the field emphasizes self-sufficiency. You should become self-sufficient because you shouldn't deal with Babylon. Naturally it helps that it also sounds like a divine endorsement of herb, grass, dope.

Hatred of the decadent white establishment can be squared with universal love if you practice non-violence, as rastafarians do.

Re: mapping a Jamaican religion

[bricology.livejournal.com]

"Hatred of the decadent white establishment can be squared with universal love if you practice non-violence, as rastafarians do."

Except (http://www.aegis.com/news/re/2005/RE050211.html), of course (http://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/world/jamaica/janews011.htm), when they don't (http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-06-22/news/paradise-lost/).

[bugpowered.livejournal.com]

genital mutilation

If genital mutilation is so bad, why doesn't anyone care about those poor circumcised americans? (They are something like the majority of population, no?)