Love's in Need of Love Today

Thoughts on a Stevie Wonder song about love; thoughts on how our culture becomes genocidal in love's absence

I was going to write about Wu-Tang Clan’s “Shame on a Nigga” (who tried to run game…) when as if by divine intervention I heard Stevie Wonder’s “Love’s in Need of Love Today” lucid and precise in my mind like a childhood memory straining for influence over a scorned over-serious thought pattern. It could be humiliating, to be trapped between rage, confusion and unyielding love, to feel all of these emotions toward the very same moment in history which is the present yearning toward its future self hoping to reach her—but what if we let ourselves be this vulnerable? It feels like love is feigning the losing position for cover, playing dead so the patrolling militias spare its catatonic body that it may witness the catastrophe surrounding it, holding its breath with hard wet eyes. It feels like madness dominates the earth and every prevailing agenda serves the military industrial complex and whatever is called the West is becoming an unequivocal and unrelenting merchant of death. 

My bloodlines, on both sides, the Black and the Sicilian, were brought here to clean up after the genocide that made North America possible and habitable for these exiled and homeless merchants who needed to extract new land from ancient cultures to have a home. Their project could be seen as imaginative if it had imagined more than a killing floor replaced by a lush and insistent manufacturer of counterfeit dreams. Allegedly, they hated one another, Sicilians and Blacks, but they were in love and needed one another. I myself am proof of their mutual desire and need for one another. I live by the law of my name, in Harmony, which exhibits this need and refuses to release me from a life of celebrating and examining its realization. I tricked them into expressing the need for one another’s love through me, as me. Nonetheless, alienated but together, we were the clean-up crew sent to do crime and entertainment until the new version of this land was all the world remembered and the lifestyle of the indigenous people was supplanted with ours. We were captured and brought here to be slaves and collect bribes and breed a workforce and be beautiful symbols of promise after struggle. We do our jobs so well we transcend them and now I’m lawless, limitless, criminal minded and in love with abdicating expected roles for invented ones. I invent new ways to express love. Sometimes I blame myself or this land my people were sent to heal for lacking the capacity to integrate my inventions, but mostly I keep going. I keep naming genocides from every side knowing that I’ve had access to too many vantages at once and the fact that I can name them all makes it my duty to call their names in the line up, to line them up in poems and inquisitions. 

But I don’t want to study war no more. Love is in need of love today. The song, in Stevie’s sweetest and most devastatingly pleading tone, carries a hint of grimace at its own urgency. It prefaces its central call with newsboy-esque innocence, as if the hook is a headline. Will you recuse love, will you be the ultimate prince charming and express the feeling that is most forbidden during a conflict? It’s a gospel at the start, and the opening choir makes you gasp as if entering a black pentecostal church for the first time unaware of how prestine love worship can be. The way I know how to express love now, with the blood of former slaves and mafias and singers and clean up crews coursing through me, is through what I see as basic moral courage. Not heroism, no claims to heroics, just the will to say what must be said when it matters most, to the best of my ability.  

I’m not afraid to say I don’t agree with genocidal violence ongoing in Gaza. I believe that since the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which, absurdly, the British gave claim to the land Palestinians live on to self-proclaimed Zionists, with no mention of the existence of the Palestinian people, that genocide has been the tacit intent. A whole ethnic group was treated as collateral in this flippant transaction formalized with a terse letter penned by British elite. And I don’t agree with the massacre of Israeli festival goers that allegedly sparked this escalation of the decades-long conflict either. But I do think it is being used, all of the victims have been used as political pawns. All of us are being used this way by merchants of death. And despite what these sad salesmen say, all life is sacred. All of it can and will be loved  by the divine. Holy Wars are colonial wars and I do not believe that any God cries out to worshippers to commit genocide. I never thought that in the 21st century, it could prove so easy to try and wipe out an entire population, or that those who pretend to understand what love is would look away when it disappeared, pretending they never needed the only thing that could ever sustain them. This is what makes people disappear into themselves and never find their way back out, never want to see another mirror, never return to emotional coherence because to come to they’d have to face what they have done to love, and therefore to their own souls.

Love is very peaceful, Stevie ad-libs like a human alibi, in a hushed tone, toward the end of his treatise. The line cuts and bleeds, it asks you what you think you are doing serving the opposite of love, what gives you the right to discourage the most powerful emotion on earth, the only satisfactory resolution for anything? I don’t have answers, but I know I’m watching moral cowardice and moral courage battle one another, I’m watching 99 percent of the most visible and audible voices in our culture say nothing, and a few people speak up relentlessly against what I now believe is a looping human tendency toward genocide in many and varying and co-terminal forms, a tendency that is a threat to the survival of love and the so-called human race.

I’m not afraid to admit that as much as I want to be brave I also want to be rescued from the need to stand up to genocide, I’d like to be saved from this by the abolition of genocidal thinking. I want all of the love and contradiction I embody to carry me to where it is law. And in many ways it has, in that I am here, making rules for myself, following myself to that place that I have only seen in my mind, changing my mind about where it might be every day. The sample for Wu-Tang’s anthem of shame and retaliation, is Thelonious Monk’s version of Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy.” It’s trapped in the seductive anger and ignominy like cascading laughter in the opposite direction, tumbling and toiling with itself like a play-fight between friends. Monk has that way of being the mockingbird figure in black music and here he giggles at long held revenge fantasies, suggesting they are what we should be ashamed of, not the acts that inspired them. You mean you can’t get over being wronged for long enough to fall in love with the world? Really? Personally, as proof that people can not only get over it but defy it and alchemize the antagonistic consciousnesses into their own autonomous music, I’m over it. What is said to have wronged and oppressed me also made my existence possible. It is forgiven. The aggressors’ atonement is earned by my commitment to beauty, joy, and truth in my own daily life. I want it to be as simple and venusian as this, as Stevie Wonder makes it seem. I want to oversimplify collective rehabilitation, I want to delude myself back into unabashed idealism. It isn’t and may never be this simple again though, maybe love and peace are their own propaganda and all of us are secretly out for blood but one consequence of unrepentant genocide is that from its clutches, you’ll never catch the delighted fantasy hidden between your justifications for hatred and eventually, uninterrupted, there will be no one left to hate but yourselves.