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Tupac and the Fall on the Road to Calvary Page 2 of 4 Of course, that's not the only comparison, or even necessarily the most important one that could be made between Tupac and the great rock rebels. Fools are reluctant to admit Tupac to full equality in this matter, because that would mean admitting other things. For instance, that Tupac equaled the greats in the emotional intensity and rhythmic power of his records. Or that the majority of Tupac's songs were uplifting, positive, respectful of women, and concerned with encouraging young black men not to commit crime, which he generally portrayed as a foolish and ugly thing even when it's seductive or unavoidable. It would require admitting that Tupac was sent to prison for a crime that white rock stars have committed, and continue to commit, with absolute impunity. It would require acknowledging that although Tupac did once shoot two men, it was in self-defense; they were off-duty Georgia cops who had drawn down on him in the after-midnight streets of Atlanta. It would require recognizing that Tupac is not the only rock star with unsavory associates. But refusing to allow Tupac to enter the lists of rock's fallen greats is the least of the sins fools make when talking about them. These fools, who include just about every writer I've read on the subject, spend all their time avoiding a simple truth: Tupac was not a murderer; he got murdered. He was not the criminal this time; he was the victim of a shooting. But of course, if you tell the story that way, you can't come out and say, as the media from Newsweek to The Village Voice have done, that this thuggish young nigger got what's coming to him. On that basis, so did Jesus, who preferred the company of whores, thieves, tax cheats (from the government end), and other miscreants. Not that Tupac was anything like Jesus. But those Bible stories exist to try to teach us nat about Jesus so much as about forgiveness and compassion. What cases like Tupac's prove, over and over again, is that we live in a time and a place where the concept of forgiveness does not exist. Our society isn't about forgiveness, it's about vengeance--which, it's tempting to say, is one reason it turns out so much art like Tupac's, and so little like Raphael's. But that wouldn't be a terribly accurate thing to say, either. In the first place, Raphael's society is our society--the hideous American cultural landscape of today grew straight up out of the culture that produced the Renaissance, and the colonialism that brought Tupac's ancestors and my own to America. And while it may be true that Raphael’s world valued harmony and order far more than ours, that's mostly true of its artistic productions--for most peopte, who had no access to art at all, the Renaissance world was a miserably impoverished and dangerous place to dwell. It may be true, as John Berger puts it in his new book, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (Prestel, $24.50), that "our century [is]...always searching for rage and wisdom, rather than harmony.” But it is not the decline of belief in God or the holy Roman Catholic church or the clinical application of the artistic values of the Renaissance that has made it so. It is rather the way we have allowed the other side--the colonizing, predatory, "nature red in tooth and claw" Oct 18 1996 08:48 AM