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Jello Biafra Reality Check
By I-Wei Shu
from Art+Performance Magazine April 28, 1995
Jello Biafra's eloquently sardonic passion made the Dead Kennedy's the paradigm
of political punk.
He seeks out and understands our culture and society's numerous fallacies, and
he's unafraid to shove his findings and reality up your ass.
"The people down below are getting more angry," he said. "In order to protect
the wealthy, those who control mass media are of course trying to pit different
groups of the downtrodden against each other. Get the blacks to blame the
Jews. Get the lower-class whites to blame the blacks, Mexicans, and Asians,
and get everybody to blame rock and rap music. That's why pushing racism is en
vogue. Anybody else other than Charles Murray and his Bell Curve book would
have been shot down immediately as a eugenics advocate, but they put Murray on
the cover of Time magazine right before the `94 elections. They wanted to make
sure as many Gingrich clones taking part in the further corporate swindle got
into Congress as possible."
Biafra wouldn't say who he wanted to be President of the United States. He
refused to even answer the question. Instead, he called for a grass-roots
movement to fight the right.
"If we're going to fix anything, it's going to have to be from the ground up,
not the top down," Biafra said from his home in San Francisco. "A change of
faces at the top still meant that George Bush's policies were being pursued.
Bush is gone, but NAFTA, GAT, and that horrifically fascist crime bill went
through. Those were all Bush's babies, but now there's a warm fuzzy yuppy face
called Clinton in there. The policies are the same- full speed ahead for
corporate dictatorship."
With the Dead Kennedys, Biafra spewed out high energy rhythms and caustic
lyrics assaulting everyone from Phyllis Schlafly to Jerry Brown and everything
from Christianity and capitalism to Washington D.C. They added sophistication
to punk's anti-establishment angst.
As a solo artist Biafra continues to transform punk from simply fast angry rock
to a well-thrown wrench in corporate America's system. He has worked with
various artists including Steel Pole Bathtub, Nomeansno, D.O.A., Al Jourgenson,
most recently Mojo Nixon. He regularly goes on spoken words tours, and also
ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Francisco.
Biafra said he has no faith in the system and no one else should either. The
Religious Right have been particularly effective in Biafra's home state,
California. He described the political environment in California and
the recent passage of Proposition 187 as he ridiculed "moderate, kinder,
gentler, Republi-fascist" Governor Pete Wilson.
"Proposition 187 proves that he's at least as evil as Oliver North," Biafra
said. "He pulled [Proposition 187] out as soon as he was down to 15 percent
approval in the polls... He figured, `Aha! I will go after the closet racist
vote,' and tap basically what I call the asshole contingent. When you're all
alone with the curtains pulled in the voting booth, you can come right out of
the closet and say `Fuck it, I hate everyone with brown skin. I'm just saying
fuck you to Mexicans by voting in Proposition 187.'"
Biafra said that the amendment has polarized the entire state.
"Thousands of people have walked out of class to protest the amendment," he
said. "Meanwhile, people in Los Angeles have been jumped and beaten in broad
daylight, because of the brown color of their skin. And even before
Proposition 187 passed there was already a white van driving around with a
sheriff officer and [Immigration and Naturalization Services] agent that was
picking Mexican people at random and pulling them out of their front yards, out
of the parking lot at Safeway, and dragging them off to who-knows-where unless
they could prove citizenship on the spot. Some of them were dragged out of
their own gardens. They said, `Hey, my card is inside. Can I go inside my
house and get my proof?' `No!, come on along with us,' and they got dragged
away in front of their families. I'm hoping at least those so called `legals,'
and their neighbors of all different ethnic backgrounds will band together, and
next time they see somebody dragged away they will get out in the street and
block the van and hopefully call out the media and get coverage on this."
Biafra reminded Proposition 187 supporters that outside of a "handful of
Native Aboriginal Americans who didn't get exterminated" that everyone is an
illegal immigrant. Biafra added that along similar racist lines, Proposition
187 has been joined by the the California Civil Rights Initiative, which
targets affirmative action.
"That was completely misnamed," he said. "It's designed to destroy civil rights
and make it a white male dominated society more than it already is. Just
another bunch of bigots trying to strut their stuff and seeing how much they
can get away with, and of course the right wing corporate owned mass media
seized on it immediately and had it thrown on the cover of Newsweek."
Biafra traced the initiative's origin.
"The campaign against affirmative action started with none other than David
Duke who barely had his white hood off when he ran for governor of Louisiana
using `welfare cheats' as a code word for black people and `affirmative action'
as a code word for `we've got to put the niggers and spics in their place,'" he
said. "Duke lost, but people like Jesse Helms and later George Bush took very
careful notes of how he ran his campaign. Helms saved his anti-affirmative
action blitz for one week before the election, and a black man, Harvey Gant,
the mayor of Charlotte, N.C., had been leading him in the polls until he showed
a T.V. ad showing a distraught white male who couldn't get a job, because they
gave it to a black person, and the Helmsoids came out of the closet and sent
the toad back to Washington.
This is just blatant white supremacy plain and simple. "
Biafra blamed the popularity of racist, sexist, exploitative policies on the
corporate buyout of the mass media. He described Time and Newsweek as
propaganda sheets for large corporations. He said they encourage a Gingrich
line that seeks to wipe out counter-culture in the same way Joe McCarthy tried
to stop communism.
"Another message being put out now is," Biafra said. "Liberalism is dead. You
have to accept the Newt line. It's inevitable. This is what the America wants.
Give up hope you liberal swine. You're dead. Give in. Don't even try to fight.
Hope is dead. Give up hope."
The democrats are also to blame, said Biafra.
"Republicans stand for greed, bigotry, and corruption," he said. "The
Democrats stand for feeling guilty about greed, bigotry, and corruption,
sprinkling a few crumbs down to the poor so long as the poor don't start
getting enough power to control their own lives and influence national policy,
protect a few calendar-friendly endangered species, and clearcut Montana and
Idaho instead of the redwoods. That's the way the Democrats work."
He had a few final words.
"A lot of even this interview has been framed by what corporate media wants us
to think our neighbors' priorities really are, and I don't think that's really
true. There's not an overwhelming mandate for an extreme right wing
Gingrichian mandate when less than half the people registered to vote to begin
with. It was something like nineteen percent of the people voted. That's not
a mandate. Don't be fooled by that. If nobody you run into has anything good
to say about the Contract on America that may be your first clue that not that
many people ever supported it to begin with. It's just furthering the
corporate agenda to turn America into a banana republic."
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