Weird, what you hear listening through headphones

Like listening to Rage Against the Machine, for instance:

[3-2-2] What is that I hear in "Wake Up"?

Right around 4:38, some whispering starts in the background. Zack is reading a portion of a COINTELPRO document. COINTELPRO was the FBI's COunterINTELligence PROgram, which functioned during the 60's and 70's to covertly disrupt civil rights organizations such as the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, the SDS, the Women's movement, Martin Luther King, etc. The document he is reading outlines FBI goals to disrupt black civil rights actions and states, in part:

"Prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a 'messiah;' he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position... King could be a real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed 'obedience' to 'white liberal doctrines' of nonviolence and embrace black nationalism..." "Prevent violence on the part of the black nationalist groups. This is primary importance, and is, of course, a goal of the Counterintelligence Program. Through counterintelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence..."

And so on. The full document, and thousands more were made public only recently through the Freedom of Information Act, can be accessed in Ward Churchill and Jim Vandel Wall's book, _The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent_, South End Press, Boston (MA), 1990. Page 110.

That's from December 2000; you can find bits and pieces of the COINTELPRO papers on the 'net these days, if you look.

I'm guessing -- just guessing here, mind you -- that right-wingers who like the Matrix movies aren't paying much attention to this sort of thing.

I'm sure this ties into the Mark Morford piece, Britney Spears Doesn't Bang Are you on the National Rifle Assn's huge, celeb-heavy blacklist? Do you want to be?, that I saw in this morning's Drawing a Blank mailing

This ain't just any blacklist, mind. This isn't BushCo carefully marking down, in his most favoritest red crayon, the hundreds of millions of names of those who oppose mindless imbecilic wars. This isn't Lynne Cheney making note of all media outlets that have pointed out how her daughter is a devout lesbian and sending each of them nasty little notes threatening to refuse them access to Dick's secret underground love bunker.

This is an epic, absurd, wondrous, seething, beautifully detailed 19-page beast of a thing, a true monster list packed with the names of an incredible assortment of top-shelf celebs and organizations and columnists and artists and activists and publications and corporations from all corners of the culture. Are you on the list? No? What are you waiting for?