The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face… - Cornel West

In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in the culture industries — television, radio, video, music. Like all Americans, African Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort. These images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values — love, care, service to others — handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward of self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America.

Only the accountability of an informed citizenry and the intractability of a just rule of law can thwart the nihilism of imperial elites — here or anywhere else.

You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.