poet, MC, activist; www.guante.info
New Video: “You Might Be An Authoritarian If…”
onI usually share new videos by contextualizing them a bit, but I do that IN this video, so I’ll just go ahead and post the transcript below. One thing I’ll add that isn’t in the video, though, is that this piece came together little-by-little over the past few years, and a couple of influences/reference points were Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” and Amanda Taub’s “The Rise of American Authoritarianism.” There’s also stuff like Zeynep Tufekci’s “America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent” or even the episode of Last Week Tonight that dug into authoritarianism both in the US and beyond. Lots of good resources out there, and like I say in the video itself, this is much less about the specific vocabulary word and more about exploring some of the ideas underneath it.
I guess if there is a more focused “point” to this piece, it’s about exploring how authoritarianism can manifest not just as a method of governing, or a political system, but also as a set of attitudes, values, and ideals that impact a wide range of real-world issues and situations. Here’s the video, with the full transcript below (transcript contains some notes meant for the text version of this piece):
Hey- I’m about to share something new, but just to frame it a little bit: I probably said this in my last video, but since most of my poems go up on Button Poetry’s channel, I haven’t been using my own channel much. I do, however, have some plans for it for this coming year, including a series that should kick off shortly. Before any of that is released, though, I wanted to just do a little test run of my setup.
So THIS is a piece that never really found a home anywhere. It isn’t really a spoken word poem. It isn’t really an essay, or a speech. There was a specific thing I wanted to say, and so I let the content kind of drive the form… and the form it ended up taking was that of a parody of a specific 90s standup comedy routine: Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if…”
So the piece is written to kind of mimic that 90s standup comic delivery style but it’s about something really serious… and actually memorizing it and turning into a performance art piece, just didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. So I’m going to share it here, and I’ll also include the full text at my website. And hopefully it can be useful in some way to someone out there.
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