“The truth is, in the country of the blind,
The one-eyed man is considered to be crazy as hell.”
--Robin Palmer, Ex Officio, The Weather Underground
"The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."
-- Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others."
--Frederick Douglass, his address on West Indian Emancipation (1857)
1. Preface
What is this 'Symmetrical Analysis' I speak of? It is the will toward seeing social, political, economic, and historical issues and reality not in isolation from one another. Thus, it is the act of refusing to accept the popular, media moderated practice of judging our reality and our freedom as any single sort of EFFECT; rather, our reality and freedom are the result of a collection of ALL of these material components. What is economic is political, and what is political has social ramifications. What exists must have its roots in history. Nothing makes sense unless all of these components are considered.
Yes, thinking requires effort. It is a form of labor. It is a form, in fact, of STRUGGLE. As Frederick Douglass warned us about struggle, it is a thing we must engage in, and must do so despite fear and pain and even death, for it is a necessary process if we are to preserve our freedom. Freedom, as has been lately observed with great alacrity, "Is a conversation by free men about being free."
2. Thugs Я Us: To Overturn the Nation State
The thugs (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Pentagon Advisor Richard Perle, Honorary Thug Bill Kristol, Gunga Din-Sambo Ahmed Chalabi, Honorary White Man Condoleeza Rice, John Ashcroft, Sad Sack Colin Powell, etc.) who had for eight years worked steadily at destroying our democracy, our Constitution, and our precious civil rights, have gone into eclipse following the election of President Obama.
But mark me well: their eclipse, like the eclipse of the moon, parallels any other celestial eclipse in that the thing eclipsed has not truly departed; it is merely now invisible, out of range, lacking its former luminescence and influence. Things in eclipse by astronomical definition always return sooner or later.
Let it not be forgoten that independent journalist, Doug Thompson, broke the story back in 2005 that Bush had openly expressed contempt for the Constitution in an oval office meeting attended by several congressional leaders, including conservative congressman Bob Barr, who, incidentally, veered far to the left of the Bush administration in 2005, becoming a vehement spokesman for civil liberties and a steadfast critic of Bush; could the events of that meeting as recounted by Thompson, have influenced Barr to recognize how the Republican adminstration was a chief enemy of human freedom and individual rights?
(see http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml to read Thompson's article in full).
Thompson reported:
...Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.
Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell-shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.
GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
"I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."
"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
I've talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."
-Doug Thompson, "Bush on the Constitution"....
The ever present danger of these beasts returning (in the case of Rumsfeld and Cheney, for instance, any future return will be their fourth time taking a run at destroying America: both men served in the Nixon, Reagan, and in the Bush I administrations in various positions and in various advisory capacities) means that our individual freedom, as guaranteed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Constitution, Emancipation Proclamation, and extending all the way back into English Common Law and the Magna Carta itself (remember: Bush Jr. actually overturned the writ of Habeas Corpus not only in its expression in our Constitution but had, through the Patriot Act, attacked the very roots of discovery, evidentiary justice, and rights of the accused as set forth in the Magana Carta signed by English King John in 1215!) was and still is, in its weakned state, in danger of dying in our lifetimes.
We had best keep Obama's feet to the flame.
So what exactly ARE these rights expressed as 'individual freedom'? The evolution of the nation-state between 1200 and 1600 AD was undeniably a causal factor in the birth of individual freedom under the law, freedom being exactly what is being largely lost in present-day America after what can best be understood as a 911 provoked regime change that took place here in the United States.
Freedom as a function of the rise of the nation-state is indeed in the process of being razed also in many other of the Western democracies, which are poised to fall like dominoes to the designs of America’s current ruling cadre of corporate brigands and thugs (i.e., the Exxon/Haliburton/Carlisle-Group/Blackwater/Kellogg, Brown, and Root tribe). The ‘brigands’ who used 911 as a pretext to begin a process of reanimating feudalism, slavery, and essentialist notions of race, had also begun a process of erasing the very notion of social justice predicated upon principles of intrinsic human and individual rights. This particular brigandage began as a small but feral cabal of right wing ideologues and administrators who’ve done Ronald Reagan’s dream of eliminating the nation-state one better by launching a rhetorical coup to seize the means of ideological, social, political, and finally economic production in the U.S. I say that the timing of the Wall Street economic collapse was no coincidence: it corresponded with the growing certainty last Fall that Barak Obama was destined to become the next president.
This process of ideological, socio-political, and economic unraveling was obviously conceived by American corporate thugs, as always, to be carried out in those very stages (ideological, social, political, and economic) and is was being executed by the Bushistos in that prescribed order. Such was the order of operations for earlier authoritarian thugs, e.g., the German National Socialists in Deutschland; the right wing of the Peronist power bloc in Argentia; Tito in Yugoslavia; Radovan Karadžić in former Yugoslavia/Bosnia-Hercegovina/Republika Srpska; the Francoists in Spain; and the Batista regime in Cuba. All these regimes followed or employed to various effect the methods of anti-Statism in their climb to and maintenance of authoritarian power.
Both Naomi Wolf’s “Ten Steps to Fascism” from her text, The End of America, and Professor Theodore M. Vestal’s writings on the characteristics of authoritarianism in several texts including his "Ethiopia: A Post-Cold War African State", discuss the various incremental changes in consciousness, in popular discourse, and in political institutions and social and public policy that inexorably shift modern populations away from social democracy (or even away from socialism in the case of Weimar Germany) and toward authoritarianism/fascism.
Among these incremental paradigm shifts is the establishment of what Professor Vestal calls ‘pervasive bureaucracy staffed by the regime, and what he calls the ‘creation of allegiance through various means of socialization’. Bushistos had heavily stacked formerly democratic, public policy bureaucracies with Republican/corporate shills while arbitrarily funding and empowering a huge new authoritarian bureaucracy (known as the Office of Homeland Security). They meanwhile had established a bogus, propaganda apparatus known as ‘Fox News’ in order to re-socialize the American mind, while compromising public education via the privatizing of schools, the imposition an anti-pedagogical testing regime to replace liberal curricula. They had meanwhile blanketed the mass media with right wing ‘noise’ (see "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy", by former Bushido turned critic of Bush, David Brock). For her part, Wolf, in her “ten steps” ominously warns against the establishment of ‘a thug class’ (step #3), which of course, had been fulfilled by the Bushisto/corporate palace guard known as Blackwater Corporation, a mercenary army and corporation CEO’d/commanded by Bush family lackey, Erik Prince, who founded Blackwater right here in Michigan, my home state.
It bears mentioning, in fact, that Prince’s pedigree as candidate for Bush thugmeister reaches back to his little known tour as an intern in the Bush Sr. White House in 1992. His company, which he founded in 1997, is one of the chief war profiteering corporations to benefit from the U.S. Iraq occupation (as editorials and reportage in The Arab American News have pointed out, it is indeed an illegal occupation, not a ‘war’).
The upshot was the determined, and to a startling degree successful creation, by authoritarians, of a society-wide form of cognitive dementia in conjunction with a systematic diminution of the effectiveness or of the very purpose of democratic institutions, democratic government apparatuses, and the compromising and even overturning of the very means by which democracy is achieved: that is, the destruction of popular elections and of the electoral process.
Specifically, in order to eliminate the bases of civil society in its praxis of human and individual rights, to eliminate democracy, and to eliminate electoral values, it is first necessary to eliminate the collective expectation of these things in our minds. Having achieved this psychic excision, the next tactic was to eliminate its accoutrements. The coup was bloodless (if you don’t count the deaths during 911, in Najif, in Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, etc.)
3. New Colonialism: Race and the Slave Trade She Rode (back) In On
William Kristol, Newt Gingrich, Donald Rumsfeld, Gary Schmitt, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Trent Lott, et al., as well as corporate funders (DeVos and Prince) and think tanks such as The Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Scaife Foundation and The New Citizenship Project, have all waged this coup in order to recondition collective consciousness.
Historians like Richard Bean typically understand ‘nation-states’ (i.e. Bean’s essay, "War and the Birth of the Nation-State", from Journal of Economic History, Vol. 33, #1, March, 1973) as entities that have organized the forces of western ‘civilization’. By his definition statism distinctly positions itself against, or after, feudalism and monarchism proper. It nurtured ‘civilization’ and its accoutrements: egalitarianism, humanism, early mercantilist energies, post-Athenian/Post-Periclesian democracy, collective administration, and individual/minority rights. Statism literally gave succor in Central Europe to the post-Romanesque notion of individual freedom and individual rights.
This is so even while Statism admittedly was a force for repression of ethnic difference, local autonomy, and pluralism i.e., the 19th century Italian phenomenon of 'Il Risorgimento'. It must be admitted that the Risorgimento though it generally involved the birth of nationalist sentiments that drove out Austrian, Napoleonic, and Habsburgean foreign rule in Italy, particularly in the Italian-speaking northeast, nevertheless was a movement that contained and crushed dissent from annexed states and among defiant regionalist movements. Secessionists, particularly the Sicilians, protested and revolted against the centralized, authoritarian Italian state, and late 19th century resistance to Statism was particularly strong among the southern peasants who refused to accept the Risorgimento government. It goes without saying that certain Spanish, Arabic, and Greater Metropolitan African elements within the southern population continued to see areas such as Sicily, Messina, and Corsica as distinct, independent entities. The savage repression of regional autonomy and difference across the Italian peninsula was part and parcel of Italian evolution toward statism.
Still, statism across Europe in toto, created a social milieu in which social cruelties and barbarisms (such as slavery) could no longer be transparent, but became opaque. Unlike the milieu of ancient Rome, of ancient Carthage, or ancient Persia and Egypt/Kemet, the new milieu and age that followed the 13th century forced signing by King John of the Magna Carta and that included the 18th century rationalism and empiricism of the enlightenment and Renaissance (both of African origin, say many historians such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Martin Bernal) was one in which slavery needed a new justification since it arose out of a new impetus.
Certainly, even the archaic and antique periods of Europe, followed by the classical period and then the dark ages, all featured African influence, but the unique aspect of the African and Asian influences of the enlightenment itself was the drive toward democracy (first in Greece, then in Rome, and later in France and the Americas) that this particular period (from AD 1400-1800) entailed slavery was both a continued barbarism in Europe even after the enlightenment, a peculiarly altered practice because of the enlightenment and the statism that accompanied it (since slavery became a more mechanistic, corporate practice, as well as an aberrant practice whose days were necessarily numbered due to the very mercantilist and statist forces--under waning monarchism and feudalism--that drove the slave trade through those forces’ support of the slave trade).
The classical period had been one in which slavery had three clear and widely acknowledged justifications:
1. Slavery was a result of war—a form of pillage (a defeated enemy was understood to be subject to a portion of the defeated population being taken as slaves).
2. Slavery was a result of fiat—the will of a king (those subject to the monarchist rule of a king, emperor, or a Caesar, were understood to be subject to the whim of that ruler, who could declare one to be enslaved, or remove one’s freedom to the point of virtual slavery).
3. Slavery was the result of a debt—an indenture of indefinite length (a debtor might be subject to policy, procedure, or law, all of which might decree that his freedom be forfeited for a limited term of service, or for any term up life, in compensation for a debt).
By contrast to these acknowledged justifications for enslavement, the advent of the Transatlantic, Triangular Slave Trade was a break with all known standards of behavior, and this paradigm shift required a justification. Race became that justification. The invention then, of the ideology of ‘Race’ (and of ‘white’ supremacy), is contemporaneous with the creation of corporations and the rise of a global slave trade organized not by kings, not by states, and not by generals, but by corporations.
The global slave trade was unique in that it was highly systematized, mechanistic (in the sense that it established interlocking and complex patterns, policies and procedures commercial in nature that could create repetition of expenditure, storage, processing of ‘goods’, sales, and profits in a pattern meant to operate into perpetuity), and purely commercial in nature, with operations motivated and enabled through investment and strict profit margins. It was an immense, global, and nearly unprecedented mass relocation of millions of Africans, not after conquest in war, not through fiat, and not for repayment of a debt, but for no other reason than gross profit of the type that came into being after mercantilism and the birth of corporations.
To justify such mass theft not only of human labor but also of natural resources (such theft eventually becoming the project of global colonialism through which Europe ravaged Africa and Asia) necessitated the invention of a mythology of the sub humanity of Africans.
This was in direct contrast to the previous, classical conceptions of ethnicity and nationality (as opposed to ‘race’) which were the conceptions by which nations identified themselves and identified other nations. An Egyptian in ancient Rome was understood to be a resident of the nation of Egypt, while a Roman was understood to be a resident of Rome, or a descendant of a certain ethnic community native to Italy. Likewise, an Ossian, or German, or Greek, or Numidian, or Nubian would be understood as a member of those associated nations, tribes, or communities. The notion of ‘race’ per se, as we now understand it, did not exist, and so then neither did racism.
Racism, like brigandage, rape, war, monarchist cruelty, unrestrained pillage, or order by the whim of warlords, was essentially mitigated by the rise of the nation-state, and thus, at the behest particularly of corporations, race became a justification for the establishment of an exception to the growing protection of individual and collective justice that nation states tended to exert.
We habitually assert such claims about the beneficent potential of nation-states, notwithstanding legitimate anarchist critiques of statism. Nations, every bit as readily as monarchies, possess the strong potential, and even the tendency, to inflict war, oppression, plunder, and abuse upon other states, and even upon their own citizens. Yet, the undeniable history of the rise of the nation-state between 1200 and 1600 verifies the concordant, even resultant rise of the forces of egalitarianism, law, social constraints upon brigandage, and cultural freedom.
There was, however, an inevitability to the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, given the reality of the pure profit motive adopted by the nascent and the early corporations. The creation of the modern concept of ‘racism’ was rooted in the advent of the corporation. The formation and ‘chartering’ of the Stora Kopparbërg in Sweden (AD 1347), of the Dutch East India Corporation (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie ) in The Netherlands (AD 1602), the and the granting by the British Crown of a monopoly to the British East India Corporation (AD 1600) commenced the history of corporate profit motive that led to the spread of the corporate model, the invention of the trust company and of limited partnerships in the 19th century, corporate fascism in the 20th century, and the current 21st century model of the multinational hegemonic corporations, such as Blackwater, and without borders or national identity (the incorporeal corporation).
4. Seeing The New Colonialism
Donald Rumsfeld’s presumptive Jewish identity notwithstanding, he was, in 2003, the Bush administration’s herald of New Fascism and of New Colonialism. During a series of rambling, psychically dizzying press briefings throughout the latter nine months of 2003 (the invasion of Iraq had commenced on March 20th, 2003) Rumsfeld introduced to a pacified White House Press Corps the theory and battlefield practice of ‘The Rumsfeld Doctrine’; a post modern rejection of heavy, tank-style attacks in favor of lighter armor, more rapid, more effective, fast moving columns carrying scant numbers of troops deep into enemy territory for the purpose of surveilling enemy positions in order to call in massive air strikes and then move on, eschewing secure bivouacs or fortress-like entrenchment.
Rumsfeld’s preening, neologistic, nonsense ridden diatribes in these press conferences (“There are known knowns…there are known unknowns…but there are also unknown unknowns: there are things we do not know we don’t know.”) marked a launch point for the only recently overturned (if we can actually trust that Obama's election overturned it), ongoing U.S. project of New Fascism.
Step one in this process, a process we are currently living through, was the re-introduction of Old World Colonialism (post-post Colonialism, if you wish, or Neo-Colonialism, or, as I prefer to call it, ‘New Colonialism’, for it hardly matters by what name we call the rose; it would stink as much).
Step two had proven itself to be the systematic desensitization of the U.S. population to the debasing of human rights, the founding of a pugnacious foreign policy based upon endless war, the founding of a torture state, and the destruction from within of democratic institutions.
Step three, it seems clear, would have been the imposition of massive social, economic, and political collapse, necessitating the impositio, presumably, of military rule, of a police state, and of society-wide surveillance and suspension of individual freedom.
A question to haunt us: has step three been averted thanks to Obama? And if so, for how long? Eight years is the legal extent of his presence in the White House. Without vigorous and harsh prosecutions and punishment meted out to the war criminals and thugs who hyjacked our democracy for eight years, will those now in eclipse return to finish their work?
Only time will tell.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Symmetrical Analysis in the Time of Myopia: Seeing the New Colonialism; Seeing Genealogies of the Triangle Slave Trade; Seeing Ghosts
Obama Rides the Same Old Policies (column reprinted from The Arab American News)
The
A r a b A m e r i c a n N e w s
Obama rides the same old policies in Palestine
By Rayfield A. Waller
Saturday, 03.21.2009, 01:19am
President Obama has ridden in on the winds of change, promising diplomacy rather than belligerence as U.S. foreign policy; but he has yet to speak clearly against the policy of underdevelopment and "removal" Israel deploys against Palestinians living under occupation.
Unfortunately, Obama's voice overseas, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is mouthing policies nearly identical to those of the Bush White House; so much so that the Palestinian newspaper, Al Quds, has editorialized against her, calling her "‘Condoleezza Clinton," a reference to Bush's Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. In her recent trip to the Middle East Clinton offered Israel only words of appeasement even as the ominous figure of an incoming Israeli prime minister who loudly opposes Palestinian statehood — Bebe Netanyahu — is making it clear that more conflict and less diplomacy will likely be Israel'’s course. What are we to call Israel's policy? We ought to call it what it is: Palestinian Removal.
The violence carried out by Israeli forces against Gaza in December has yet to be condemned by the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Israel has stepped up the frequency of evictions carried out against Palestinian families and the razing of Arab homes in occupied East Jerusalem while building new settlements there.
Clinton's clear message at a Gaza reconstruction conference in Sharm el Shiek, Egypt, on March 12, was not a repudiation of Palestinian Removal, but an announcement that the U.S. will withhold recognition and support for the democratically elected Hamas. In the face of Israel's continued strangulation of Arab civilian society by encroachment in Jerusalem, by embargo against Gaza, and by the use of bulldozers and tanks rather than diplomacy to settle Arab/Israeli conflict, Clinton clarified American foreign policy in the Middle East now that Obama is in the saddle: a promise of $900 million, "not a dime" of which will go to Hamas, so as to ensure the eventual creation of a Palestinian state that will be "peaceful and responsible."
Is this Orwellian doublespeak Obama's "change we can believe in?"
Even as Gaza's survivors digest the devastation of, in approximate numbers, 22,000 buildings destroyed, 1,300 dead, 500 or more injured, and 300 or more Palestinian children killed by Israel's planned, mechanized, and targeted attack in December upon civilians and upon civil infrastructure, it seems that yet another American administration rears up in the White House and in Congress to turn a blind eye toward huge sums of our tax dollars funding Israel's Removal Program against Arabs in the West Bank, Golan, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. With Netanyahu's ascension to power, increased Israeli hostility against Lebanon and Syria seems likely, despite Clinton's overtures toward dialogue with Syria. Netanyahu's track record as a hawk doesn't suggest he will support the U.S. in unilateral dialogue with his Arab neighbors.
Does Obama plan to continue the U.S. policy of supporting Israel's "security" through direct weapons sales, huge subsidies and favored nation trade status, and by providing billions of U.S. dollars in aid to Israel? In 2008, Israel received $2.4 billion in military financing, according to The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), which dwarfs the $900 million promised to Palestine on March 12. The Congress has averaged the (comparatively paltry) figure of 100 million U.S. dollars annually in aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA); the new pledge of money to rebuild Gaza and cover budget shortfalls for the PA will be controlled by the U.S. Agency for International Development, earmarked for what Clinton called "institutional reforms and economic development."
Such a statement seems outlandish; as if American foreign policy is, as it has always been where Palestine is concerned, detached from reality: infrastructure projects, the meat and bread of any "economic development" and now necessary to rebuild Gaza, funded by the U.S. while far more USAID dollars continue to go to funding Israeli destruction of that same infrastructure, is not the diplomacy Obama promised but merely the continuation of the mendacity that U.S. policy toward Arab-Israeli peace has always shown itself to be.
Unless Obama changes irrational expenditures of monies said to "secure" Israel, and favors instead a sane, diplomatic approach to peace that includes rather than excludes parties at ground level, not only will Israel continue to be less secure, but Palestinian lives will continue to be sacrificed. Destruction of cohesive Palestinian daily life and culture is Israeli policy. Israeli bulldozers wreck homes rather than building this "economic development" Clinton speaks of. The Removal Policy will only pick up speed and funding from soon-to-be Prime Minister Netanyahu. The reigns of American foreign policy now belong to Obama.
If he chooses to ride the same old nag of Bush's policies, he will be riding not the winds of change but a whirlwind into continued conflict and bloodshed, and the blood will now be on his hands.
Professor Waller is on the adjunct faculty of the department of Africana Studies at Wayne State University. He is a freelance journalist, and contributing writer to Progreso Weekly and The Michigan Citizen.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The Implications of Gender Critique In the film, The Matrix (transcript of a lecture delivered at Florida International University in March, 2001)
1.What is Feminism?
Good afternoon. We will begin by defining feminism.
Feminism is humanism. That is, feminism as a political and a social movement is a humanist movement. It is one of the more crucial strands within a collective history of liberation struggle here in America. Along with Unionism, the Amerindian and First Nation struggles, the Black liberation struggle, the anti-war movement, the ethnic rights struggle, the free speech movement, the sexual liberation struggle, the socialist movements, and the public rights movements, feminism in all its guises and ethnic permutations has sought to humanize modern western societies. Its influence has expressed itself by calling for and working toward the goal of liberating women from the domination they suffer at the hands of a western political economy, simply said.
The western political economy is built upon the exploitation of women's work, and upon the surveillance, domination and control of women's bodies--their sexuality and their autonomy--this is how patriarchy functions. Both politics and economics are realms of male dominance. Men seize and maintain power, privilege, and autonomy through their domination of these two realms and by denying women access to these two realms—the political and the economic realms. That denial of access serves to maintain gender segregation and gender slavery (the unstable gains of American, bourgeois feminists not withstanding).
As a project, then, to claim legal, political, social, and economic rights for women, feminism has struggled against this patriarchal arrangement in the west, and its influence has extended, in the past twenty five years, to 'non-western' and 'non-aligned' nations and societies such as those in Asia, Micronesia, Latin America, Afrika, and Eastern Europe.
2.What is Humanism?
Without resorting to a long winded historical analysis of the Hellenic, ancient Greek roots of ‘humanism’ as the rejection of theism-centered and monarchist or militarist social organization, we can say that humanism in the west has arisen, since the founding of America and again since modernism, and most recently since the formation of the United Nations Charter and the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," as a philosophy and a strategy devoted to creating public space, independent thought, individual and human rights, democracy (also a Hellenic construction), freedom of speech and of association, and legal protection from domination.
Under previously empowered theistic, monarchist, and militarist political systems and social powers, gods, kings, popes, and generals ruled human existence with their own arbitrary impunity. What democratically elected Archon, Themistocles (Θεμιστοκλῆς; c. 524–459 BC ) and the other rulers of Athens Greece conceived, and what Socrates had earlier sharpened through his relentless attack upon and critique of Athenian democracy, was a new way of looking at human social structures and human existence in the west: a system of social organization which would value every single individual human being rather than merely valuing religious dogma, power, and conquest.
Implicit in this concept is the invention of the civil society (not the idiotic, 'civil' society spoken of by reactionaries like Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich--as in, 'civility and good behavior,' but the 'civil' written of by Plato in his Republic). The civil society, by definition at least, forces religion, patriarchy and monarchy, and military and policing forces TO THE MARGINS of the culture. As Thomas Jefferson argued, when helping to frame the new national democracy of the American republic, the civil society upholds, protects and defends the citizenry--its rights, its health, its welfare and freedom. This it does, as John Adams argued in Philadelphia during the drafting of the declaration of independence, through public institutions, through public authority, and through the repression of private interests and of capitalist power blocs under the guiding and regulatory powers of democratically elected government. Benjamin Franklin expressed similar ideas claiming that all of this would be ordained, propagated and maintained through public literacy, journalism, and education. As he wrote in one of his satirical rhymes:
Whoever thinks a country can be,
both ignorant and free,
Wants what never was,
and never can be.
3.Feminst "Reading"
Feminism is humanism. It supplies one of the most illuminating and empowering ways (for women, and also for conscious men) of reading texts--one among a multiplicity of ways of reading, to be sure, but one which can be especially enlightening when applied to film-text. Texts are anything we can 'read' and through reading, theorize. Books are texts, films are texts, paintings, songs, symphonies and architectures are texts, this classroom is a text, the cityscape of Miami seen from ten miles overhead, is a text. Your body is a text. All these things can be read, and because all these things can be 'read', they can all be theorized.
Jonathan Culler, professor of literary theory in the English department at Cornell University writes that there are four main attributes of 'theory', and the reading of literature and literary texts:
1.Theory is interdiciplinary.
2.Theory is analytical and speculative.
3.Theory is a critique of 'common sense'--what is assumed to be 'natural.'
4.Theory is reflexive--it makes us think about HOW we think about things, and the categories and methods we employ when we think about things, such as texts.
"As a result," writes Culler, in his book, Literary Theory:
Theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it is endless. It is not something that you could ever master. Not a particular group of texts you could learn so as to "know theory. (Culler, 15)
This implies an idea which is completely counter to what has become the dominant idea of universities in the 21st century--that the point of thinking is to discover 'answers.' That the point of education is to gain 'mastery,' which is reflected in bogus 'certification' of one's authority to say, 'I'm educated' simply because one has a degree; as if one had gone off to see the Wizard and upon confessing one's lack of a brain, were to have the Wizard hand one a 'diploma' and pronounce one to no longer be a scarecrow.
No, in fact (and it is a fact upon which all of democratic, civil and humanist society is built, in fact) THINKING IS ITSELF AN END IN ITSELF--the point of thinking is thinking. Without this simple precept, we would even now be transported back to medievalism; to feudalism. I would be "nigger," there would be no women here on the campus of Florida International University, and there might well be a national guard division stationed on campus to repel public access by the poor and working class citizens of nearby Sweetwater, if those citizens are unable to pay the entrance fee of tuition.
In short, strategies for reading literary and cinematic texts, for reading cinema as text, are part of a long American tradition, since modernism, of democratic thinking. Thinking politically, thinking economically, thinking historically. Feminist reading seeks to give us tools to think about the political, economic and historical experience, roles and possibilities of women as subjects of texts. By implication then, it also gives us tools to think about the place and possibilities of masculinity in all that. It offers a radical gender critique.
4.Reading Ideas of Gender in The Matrix
Feminist strategies for reading texts such as films, suggest that The Matrix is a deeply questioning film. It questions:
(1)Our most fundamental assumptions about our own economic reality through symbolizing capitalism as an endless dream of ignorant and contented slavery;
(2)Our assumptions about and our conception of, the patriarchal social order;
(3)Our uncritical acceptance of the reductive ideology of 'naturalism,' of 'so-called, 'human nature' and of the retro-Newtonian concept of mechanistic, manifest social organization (which is the idea that all human beings 'naturally' organize themselves according to a 'manifest destiny' of inborn compulsions such as the will toward greed, competition, and aggression--the will toward patriarchy and domination of the female body);
(4)Our assumptions about gender (and race) as a category which defines essence, identity and possibility, through the radical reversal of sexist/racist hierarchies (The Oracle and Morpheus are the top of a hierarchy despite the fact that as a Black woman and Black man, characters in an American film narrative, their usual position would be a servile and a dehumanized one. Meanwhile, they both represent an even more radical reversal of our ideas of domination and our assumptions that domination is or ought to be contained within patriarchy and matriarchy as hierarchical modes of human relation;
And finally,
(5)Our assumptions about masculinity and its place in the social order. The relation between masculinity and the social order is exposed as one of slavery. The film achieves this exposure through its exploration and reversal of American assumptions about masculinity in bourgeois human relations such as the middle-class utilitarian family structure, friendship, and love. The film achieves this exposure also through a discreet reversal of role play in the interaction between Trinity and Neo.
For Further Thought:
The Razor's Edge
-demonstrates the deeper levels of meaning and identity in the history of the European working class (the origins of socialism and of unionism).
Marlon Brando’s role as Vito Corleogne
-demonstrates the classical, American Fuedalist/Calvinist/Puritain conception of the function of masculinity.
The Sopranos
-demonstrates the idea (a racist idea) of Italian (ethnic) masculinity, although the Sopranos is doing a very close-to-the-chest CRITIQUE of it as socially constructed by isolationism, and a larger culture of brutality and masculinity (how much of this is 'traditional' and how much of it is constructed by Capitalism and by Catholicism??)
The Thin Red Line
-demonstrates the richness of the world surrounding the social order and the symbolic order, as well as offering the idea of escape from them, transgression of them, and exposes the severe pain and unease that even assimilated men feel outside of it.
-Issues of NATURE, the FEMALE and of CHAOS and CORPORATE CAPITAL as James Jones presented them in his original novel and Terrence Malick explores them in his film adaptation, are crucial to confronting patriarchy and to constructing a feminist analysis of gender.
The Matrix
-Trinity as 'action hero' displaces male aggression and dominance of the social order she struggles against.
-Neo's dissatisfaction with his place in the social order, indeed, with the very reality of the social order, makes it possible for him to escape from that social order once he discovers the world that lies outside of his own simulacrum.
-What lies outside the simulacrum is the real world (‘the desert of the real’, as Morpheus says, after Baudrillard).
-Trinity reverses masculine/feminine assumptions
-The alternative to patriarchy is genuine fatherhood (unconditional love, mentorship, protection of the innocent and guardian of freedom) symbolized by Morpheus
-The scene in “The Thin Red Line” in which Captain Staros is rebuked and threatened by Cornel Tall, is co-relative to the scene in The Matrix in which Neo is interrogated by the LITERAL symbolic order (once he is arrested by Agent Smith)!
-The climactic 'fight scene' in The Matrix displaces race, gender, and power—it replaces patriarchy, aggression and libido with the THINKING and PHILOSOPHY of liberation.
Good afternoon. We will begin by defining feminism.
Feminism is humanism. That is, feminism as a political and a social movement is a humanist movement. It is one of the more crucial strands within a collective history of liberation struggle here in America. Along with Unionism, the Amerindian and First Nation struggles, the Black liberation struggle, the anti-war movement, the ethnic rights struggle, the free speech movement, the sexual liberation struggle, the socialist movements, and the public rights movements, feminism in all its guises and ethnic permutations has sought to humanize modern western societies. Its influence has expressed itself by calling for and working toward the goal of liberating women from the domination they suffer at the hands of a western political economy, simply said.
The western political economy is built upon the exploitation of women's work, and upon the surveillance, domination and control of women's bodies--their sexuality and their autonomy--this is how patriarchy functions. Both politics and economics are realms of male dominance. Men seize and maintain power, privilege, and autonomy through their domination of these two realms and by denying women access to these two realms—the political and the economic realms. That denial of access serves to maintain gender segregation and gender slavery (the unstable gains of American, bourgeois feminists not withstanding).
As a project, then, to claim legal, political, social, and economic rights for women, feminism has struggled against this patriarchal arrangement in the west, and its influence has extended, in the past twenty five years, to 'non-western' and 'non-aligned' nations and societies such as those in Asia, Micronesia, Latin America, Afrika, and Eastern Europe.
2.What is Humanism?
Without resorting to a long winded historical analysis of the Hellenic, ancient Greek roots of ‘humanism’ as the rejection of theism-centered and monarchist or militarist social organization, we can say that humanism in the west has arisen, since the founding of America and again since modernism, and most recently since the formation of the United Nations Charter and the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," as a philosophy and a strategy devoted to creating public space, independent thought, individual and human rights, democracy (also a Hellenic construction), freedom of speech and of association, and legal protection from domination.
Under previously empowered theistic, monarchist, and militarist political systems and social powers, gods, kings, popes, and generals ruled human existence with their own arbitrary impunity. What democratically elected Archon, Themistocles (Θεμιστοκλῆς; c. 524–459 BC ) and the other rulers of Athens Greece conceived, and what Socrates had earlier sharpened through his relentless attack upon and critique of Athenian democracy, was a new way of looking at human social structures and human existence in the west: a system of social organization which would value every single individual human being rather than merely valuing religious dogma, power, and conquest.
Implicit in this concept is the invention of the civil society (not the idiotic, 'civil' society spoken of by reactionaries like Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich--as in, 'civility and good behavior,' but the 'civil' written of by Plato in his Republic). The civil society, by definition at least, forces religion, patriarchy and monarchy, and military and policing forces TO THE MARGINS of the culture. As Thomas Jefferson argued, when helping to frame the new national democracy of the American republic, the civil society upholds, protects and defends the citizenry--its rights, its health, its welfare and freedom. This it does, as John Adams argued in Philadelphia during the drafting of the declaration of independence, through public institutions, through public authority, and through the repression of private interests and of capitalist power blocs under the guiding and regulatory powers of democratically elected government. Benjamin Franklin expressed similar ideas claiming that all of this would be ordained, propagated and maintained through public literacy, journalism, and education. As he wrote in one of his satirical rhymes:
Whoever thinks a country can be,
both ignorant and free,
Wants what never was,
and never can be.
3.Feminst "Reading"
Feminism is humanism. It supplies one of the most illuminating and empowering ways (for women, and also for conscious men) of reading texts--one among a multiplicity of ways of reading, to be sure, but one which can be especially enlightening when applied to film-text. Texts are anything we can 'read' and through reading, theorize. Books are texts, films are texts, paintings, songs, symphonies and architectures are texts, this classroom is a text, the cityscape of Miami seen from ten miles overhead, is a text. Your body is a text. All these things can be read, and because all these things can be 'read', they can all be theorized.
Jonathan Culler, professor of literary theory in the English department at Cornell University writes that there are four main attributes of 'theory', and the reading of literature and literary texts:
1.Theory is interdiciplinary.
2.Theory is analytical and speculative.
3.Theory is a critique of 'common sense'--what is assumed to be 'natural.'
4.Theory is reflexive--it makes us think about HOW we think about things, and the categories and methods we employ when we think about things, such as texts.
"As a result," writes Culler, in his book, Literary Theory:
Theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it is endless. It is not something that you could ever master. Not a particular group of texts you could learn so as to "know theory. (Culler, 15)
This implies an idea which is completely counter to what has become the dominant idea of universities in the 21st century--that the point of thinking is to discover 'answers.' That the point of education is to gain 'mastery,' which is reflected in bogus 'certification' of one's authority to say, 'I'm educated' simply because one has a degree; as if one had gone off to see the Wizard and upon confessing one's lack of a brain, were to have the Wizard hand one a 'diploma' and pronounce one to no longer be a scarecrow.
No, in fact (and it is a fact upon which all of democratic, civil and humanist society is built, in fact) THINKING IS ITSELF AN END IN ITSELF--the point of thinking is thinking. Without this simple precept, we would even now be transported back to medievalism; to feudalism. I would be "nigger," there would be no women here on the campus of Florida International University, and there might well be a national guard division stationed on campus to repel public access by the poor and working class citizens of nearby Sweetwater, if those citizens are unable to pay the entrance fee of tuition.
In short, strategies for reading literary and cinematic texts, for reading cinema as text, are part of a long American tradition, since modernism, of democratic thinking. Thinking politically, thinking economically, thinking historically. Feminist reading seeks to give us tools to think about the political, economic and historical experience, roles and possibilities of women as subjects of texts. By implication then, it also gives us tools to think about the place and possibilities of masculinity in all that. It offers a radical gender critique.
4.Reading Ideas of Gender in The Matrix
Feminist strategies for reading texts such as films, suggest that The Matrix is a deeply questioning film. It questions:
(1)Our most fundamental assumptions about our own economic reality through symbolizing capitalism as an endless dream of ignorant and contented slavery;
(2)Our assumptions about and our conception of, the patriarchal social order;
(3)Our uncritical acceptance of the reductive ideology of 'naturalism,' of 'so-called, 'human nature' and of the retro-Newtonian concept of mechanistic, manifest social organization (which is the idea that all human beings 'naturally' organize themselves according to a 'manifest destiny' of inborn compulsions such as the will toward greed, competition, and aggression--the will toward patriarchy and domination of the female body);
(4)Our assumptions about gender (and race) as a category which defines essence, identity and possibility, through the radical reversal of sexist/racist hierarchies (The Oracle and Morpheus are the top of a hierarchy despite the fact that as a Black woman and Black man, characters in an American film narrative, their usual position would be a servile and a dehumanized one. Meanwhile, they both represent an even more radical reversal of our ideas of domination and our assumptions that domination is or ought to be contained within patriarchy and matriarchy as hierarchical modes of human relation;
And finally,
(5)Our assumptions about masculinity and its place in the social order. The relation between masculinity and the social order is exposed as one of slavery. The film achieves this exposure through its exploration and reversal of American assumptions about masculinity in bourgeois human relations such as the middle-class utilitarian family structure, friendship, and love. The film achieves this exposure also through a discreet reversal of role play in the interaction between Trinity and Neo.
For Further Thought:
The Razor's Edge
-demonstrates the deeper levels of meaning and identity in the history of the European working class (the origins of socialism and of unionism).
Marlon Brando’s role as Vito Corleogne
-demonstrates the classical, American Fuedalist/Calvinist/Puritain conception of the function of masculinity.
The Sopranos
-demonstrates the idea (a racist idea) of Italian (ethnic) masculinity, although the Sopranos is doing a very close-to-the-chest CRITIQUE of it as socially constructed by isolationism, and a larger culture of brutality and masculinity (how much of this is 'traditional' and how much of it is constructed by Capitalism and by Catholicism??)
The Thin Red Line
-demonstrates the richness of the world surrounding the social order and the symbolic order, as well as offering the idea of escape from them, transgression of them, and exposes the severe pain and unease that even assimilated men feel outside of it.
-Issues of NATURE, the FEMALE and of CHAOS and CORPORATE CAPITAL as James Jones presented them in his original novel and Terrence Malick explores them in his film adaptation, are crucial to confronting patriarchy and to constructing a feminist analysis of gender.
The Matrix
-Trinity as 'action hero' displaces male aggression and dominance of the social order she struggles against.
-Neo's dissatisfaction with his place in the social order, indeed, with the very reality of the social order, makes it possible for him to escape from that social order once he discovers the world that lies outside of his own simulacrum.
-What lies outside the simulacrum is the real world (‘the desert of the real’, as Morpheus says, after Baudrillard).
-Trinity reverses masculine/feminine assumptions
-The alternative to patriarchy is genuine fatherhood (unconditional love, mentorship, protection of the innocent and guardian of freedom) symbolized by Morpheus
-The scene in “The Thin Red Line” in which Captain Staros is rebuked and threatened by Cornel Tall, is co-relative to the scene in The Matrix in which Neo is interrogated by the LITERAL symbolic order (once he is arrested by Agent Smith)!
-The climactic 'fight scene' in The Matrix displaces race, gender, and power—it replaces patriarchy, aggression and libido with the THINKING and PHILOSOPHY of liberation.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Barak Obama is no Dennis Kucinich, or Paul Wellstone, but He'll Do, I Guess
"Everybody is trying to figure out the process, get registered and understand the politics, to get involved, to be a part of all this, and it's happening! It's happening, in our lifetime."
-Ngia Lawrence
"The structural reality of electoral politics vis-a-vis the much broader democratic necessity of mass-based political education and mobilization is precisely the tension between unavoidable contradictions and constraints that are the automatic result of engaging people to organize on behalf of much larger goals than merely getting someone elected."
-Professor Kofi Natambu
"I suppose it's race you're talking about? Imaginary Blackness and imaginary whiteness? Excuse me, but where does that leave me?"
-Dr. Yvonne Singh
“Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”
-Saul Alinski
ONE.
"Change you can trust"? My leftist Black, Jewish, and Italian-American mentors from my Detroit elementary schoolling up through my graduate education at Cornell had always taught me to recognize the bitter truth Saul Alinski preached: 'change' is a terrible thing. It requires bloodshed at the most, and demands the deaths of sacred cows and the discomfiture of power elites at least. So, the psychic disonance of the phrase, "change you can trust" put me off when I first heard the Obama campaign use it.
Yes, I confess that it took me some time to get with the Obama program.
TWO.
Now, on the eve of 'Little Super Tuesday'--the Texas and Ohio primaries, I support Barak H. Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, but like about 20-30% of his supporters, I didn't start out as an Oba-mite. As a supporter of Kucinich (D-Ohio) in the 2004 presidential election, and then a supporter of John Edwards (D-NC) in this one, I had found Obama's progressive-light patter and his John Kennedy redux demeanor a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g. I was annoyed too, by the band wagon jumping I perceived Black friends and fellow Black intellectuals to be engaging in by jumping onto an Obama good feeling express and talking as if a bourgeois social democratic centrist could, by dent of our collective wishful thinking, be taken as a progressive. I mean for Chrissakes, the man said things like this:
What exactly did he mean? He was always heavy on the figurative language ("the doors of opportunity") on vague, progressive sounding abstractions ("...with just a change in priorities..."), and meanwhile he liberally peppered his discourse with what sounded alot like conservative codes meant to appeal to what media flaks call his milk-source, the 'independents' presumably, who some of those flaks and even some legitimate analysts say are really just faithless republicans and soft headed 'libertarians'. Perhaps those conservative codes ("No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems") are slipped into his discourse to appease those who probably don't trust talk of 'change' if the talk is not of a libertarian complexion. The twenty-to-thirty percenters, those independents, republicans ("Obamacans"? yuck), and libertarians, are reportedly joined by so-called 'swing voters' of which I guess I am one: people who don't remain loyal to the two corporate political parties at the top of the food chain but who know better than to look to a Green Party gaining a significant foothold in America before the year 2040, and who 'swing' between the two parties from election to election, or who 'swing' from candidate to candidate, at local, state, and national levels. In short, who knows, I wondered, what this man means?
THREE.
Obama's nod to US politics' obligatory crypto rejection of socialism worried me. I'm with Thom Hartmann; I think government can solve my damn problems and should. Democratic electoral, government should, that is. In a democracy I am the government, right? Is Exxon gonna solve my problems? Is Dupont? I think we all know that Haliburton sure won't. These runaway corporate fiefdoms exerting their wills over my government--and therefore over me--are the problem. As Hartmann rationally reminds us on his Air America radio program, socialism is not a dirty word. The government is not some foreign invader, as that old fart, Ronald Reagan used to meander around muttering ("The nine most terrifying words in the English language," Reagan used to demure, "Are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.' "). Government, Hartmann argues, practises a practical socialism every day and does so quite efficiently and much to our approval, by providing fire department, post office, and social security services. If politicians in the traditional mold (mould?) feel that they must renounce socialism, it's a manifest hypocrisy when they do so since they don't renounce the US mail, meat inspection, FAA standards for airlines, their grandmother's social security check, or the neighborhood fire fighters ready to extinguish any blazes that might erupt inside said politicians' homes.
I was not at first for Obama because realpolitik Obama is squarley rooted in centrist position. His voting record in the senate, his speeches, and his books all bespeak this utilitarian fact. He was vague and symbolic a year ago in his Feb 2007 speech in Springfield, Illinois announcing his candidacy:
Meanwhile, John Edwards, in anouncing his own candidacy chose to do it in the still ravaged New Orleans 9th Ward, standing amidst the debris that was still scattered in the devestated streets. Throughout his campaign he promised if elected to enact a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, and promised to spend our wealth not on corporate wars but on domestic social problems. He gave speeches and Q&A's across the country, standing atop steam shovels, bull dozers, farming combines, on makeshift platforms in the yards of factories, and in impoverished communities. More than simply offering another byzantine and numbingly detailed health care plan, he, unlike Obama and Clinton, took the further rhetorical step of denouncing the pharmaceutical campanies making obscene profits off the health care mess in America. His was an insurgent, populist campaign, and he said so: "This campaign will be a grass-roots, ground-up campaign, where we ask people to take action."
In his June, 2006 "Take Back America Conference" remarks in Washington, DC, Obama said,
Just as I feel that Edwards' constant rhetorical attacks on the true enemies of the American people (i.e., corporations) were illustrative of his aborted campaign and of his possible presidency, I felt that Obama's keynote address, his candidacy announcement, and his "Take Back America" remarks were all typical of his fatuous rhetoric. Obama says, "Our faith has been shaken." Not mine, thanks, I'm agnostic. Obama says, "The people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe." Believe in what? I believe in a windfall profits tax, and labor law reforms, and a seat in the cabinet for a secretary of worker rights, and price and dividend control, and rescinding the patriot act, and how about a superfund to clean up radioactive and chemical spills across the U.S., and how about getting rid of the ruinous Taft-Hartley Act, and while we're at it, we need a full employment bill, and we need to finally pass the ERA (neither Obama nor Clinton truly speak up for women's rights if neither will even utter that acronym). We need to enforce the EPA laws, the anti-trust laws, and the authority of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. I believe in legislation to establish a living wage. I believe in reinstituting the Fairnes Doctrine, and I believe in a progressive tax that would eliminate most corporate welfare, corporate shelters, and offshore corporate shells. The first thing I believe a president should do in January, 2009 is to outlaw Haliburton corporation's escape with our stolen tax dollars to Dubai. That, I believe.
Obama, it seemed to me, was too busy drawing on crypto religious-right codes in talking about 'belief', to utter any overtly socialist noises--the noises Kucinich and Edwards regularly voiced on behalf of a mass democracy. Obama's stump speeches had been just as rhetorically suspect to me. "I've got ten point plans all OVER my website," he recently shouted to one of his rockstar stadium sized crowds in response to reports that Hillary Clinton had accused him, spuriously, of having no 'plan' for something or other. Funny; between the two senators, Clinton and Obama, they have taken some 900 votes, and according to Meet The Press analysts (on the Sunday, March 2 2008 Boradcast) they voted exactly alike 90% of those votes. They are in some ways a two-headed wrestling match, each head battling the other while sharing the same body of ideology. They carp at each other over mundane details while both refusing to name names.
Yeah. That's just it. Kucinich named names and announced necessary socialist solutions to the rot that has become of American social and economic reality. Edwards went so far as to define the real class conflicts that define American life, and named the corporations that need to be beheaded. He was downright (gasp!) Marxist at times in his call to lift up the masses in order to save the middle class: trickle up as opposed to trickle down.
FOUR.
On the eve of Little Super Tuesday, I now support Obama, nevertheless.
The alternative, now that Edwards is gone, is what seems to me more and more like a Hillary Clinton continuation of the politics of what I call "Bushido" (like some fuedal Japanese masochistic warrior code, Bush-ism entails the gleeful willingness to slit one's own belly open for the sake of tax cuts, war, ballooning budgets, and of social spending cuts).
Though I now support Obama, I feel much what Alexander Cockburn expressed in his Feb 18 2008 column in The Nation, where he wrote, "I'll forgive Obama a couple of his hot-air speeches just for wiping out the Clintons in South Carolina." And yes, like many other Black intellectuals my age and my political cut (yes, I admit it, I'm a Marxist), part of why I reluctantly clambered up onto the crowded Obama wagon was an abiding low-level disgust I've always felt with the conceits of what I call The Clintonia Stankonia that has, let's face it, Always been there, a sour smell to those of us who've supported the Clintons. I was a columnist and reporter for the Ithaca Times in upstate New York the year that Clinton won the Democratic nomination for his first presidential bid, and I recall publishing in my newspaper one of the hundreds of cautionary 'slick Willie' pieces being published at the time throughout the country. My own piece took Bill Clinton to task for his truculence and rhetorical opportunism, and for his DLC-bred conservatism. I voted for him, but many of us who voted for him didn't trust him, and it turned out there was good reason to hold one's nose that year while pulling the lever for the democrats. As Christopher Hayes wrote in a recent issue of The Nation,
FIVE.
There is an abiding arrogance and sense of entitlement displayed by Senator Hillary Clinton in her bid for the democratic nomination. She is disturbingly truculent in her willingness to use the very same attack ads and dirty ad hominem tactics against Obama that were used by the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" against her and her husband during the Clinton administration (including the recent, disorientingly rediculous charge she made that Obama 'plaigerized' Duval Patrick's words, and that Obama is somehow dishonest and reprobate merely for presuming to challenge her policy positions). The Clinton Way obtains, and it carries with it the sour smell of mendacity. Joshua Green, in his recent Atlantic Monthly piece, "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up", addresses that arrogance of the Clinton Way--That Way, which, for me, watching It , smelling It, began my process of moving toward supporting Obama. Green writes of that mendacious attitude of the Clintons being,
Then, there was the less covered remark made by Hillary that nevertheless spooked me: in a moment of supposed 'vulnerabilty' she weepily spoke of how 'some people think elections are a game,' implying that if one is progressive and does not support her then one is not being serious. "Some of us are ready [for power] and some of us are not," she intoned. It is a familiar Clintonia-Stankonia message. BET Founder and Black media millionaire Bob Johnson carried the Stankonia message in Black face, saying at a rally that Obama can only be taken seriously if the election were a movie. "This is real," Johnson stressed, staying on message for The Stank. The implication was that Clinton is real, Obama is not.
Therein perhaps lies the key to why those of us who, although reluctantly, have clambered up onto the Obama wagon. Clintonia emphasises that same old tired zero sum gaming; the idea that any ally (such as Lani Guiniere), any near-core belief (such as protection of the Fairness Doctrine), can and should be jettisoned in the name of winning and of protecting The Kingdom won. Along the way, the Clintons polarize and bifurcate (left and right, us and them, top and bottom), and the old trickle down theory of power lives with fierce tenacity in them (the Clintons, products of the DLC era are definitely top down politicians who see constituencies, aids, appoitees and the like as their soldiers, their rank and file meant to follow marching orders so that we can benefit from the scraps left from their victory feast). It sours one's desire to support them whole heartedly. Though he won't speak of it, this just might be what soured Al Gore so much, leading to the cold shoulder he gave and got to and from the Clintons through the last of the administration, through Hillary's run for the senate, and through Gore's run for president that seemed to operate outside of the golden glow of The Kingdom. Gore seemed to have lost heart in the end, perhaps even to have been broken hearted. It may have been the Lewinsky scandal, which, reportedly, Gore never got over being disappointed about, or it may have been the gradual betrayel of so many of the social policies Gore held dear. For whatever reason, Gore lost heart.
It is not the heart that Clintonia aims for, but the feet: we must accompany them on their long march, conceived at Yale and begun with the governorship of Arkansas, as foot soldiers in the Stankonia army: from Hope to the governor's mansion in litle rock, to the White House to the Senate and finally now the White House again.
It's all been one long campaign for them, never ending and played as a blood sport, if Joe Klein's 1996 book fictionalizing the Clintons, "Primary Colors" is on the mark. If it isn't, then certainly James B. Stewart's 1997 non fiction book, "Blood sport: The President and his Adversaries," about the Whitewater affair, for all its sensationalizing of the Clintons' war against their legion of enemies, penetrates to a crucial, uncomfortable truth about the Clintons: they fight, succeed, thrive, and perform best when they are wounded, hounded, and beseiged. Meanwhile, those loyal to them often are maimed and bloodied by, even fall beneath the onslaught (whatever else "Blood Sport" isn't, as Michael Isikoff dismisses it in his 1996 National Review rebuke of Stewart, one thing it is, is a glimpse into the grand guigonol sufferings of Clinton loyalists, Jim and Susan McDougal, who by the media and legal abuse they took over Whitewater, paid for their loyalty to the Clintons by Jim's certainly exacerbated illness and his subsequent death, and by Susan's years of incarceration and persecution at the hands of Dark Lord, Ken Starr.
SIX.
And it gets worse. One could get lost venturing down the dark corridoors of Clintonia Stankonia bloodletting. These two have indeed been the target of almost psychotic hatred, and perhaps as psychotically, have adapted to it and learned to channel it, process it, even draw strenght from it. Doubt me on this? Read The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, from 2000, by two of America's better investigative journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. This book adds the tragic Web Hubbell to the list of victims of Clintons' enemies (he lost his career and serves a 21 month prison sentence). Then there is the truly tragic death of Vince Foster, apparently a suicide, possibly driven to such despair over the Stankonia price one payed for proximity to The Kingdom that he took his own life.
It it there I choose to stop. There are some things I really don't want to know or understand about the price the Clintons have paid and still pay, one suspects for their decision to go into public life and public service. Perhaps it is a price that has forever marked them, and perhaps it is a price that makes them hunting hawks to Barak Obama's Bluebird of Happiness. Perhaps I find myself supporting Obama just out of fear for him. Does he know what he has gotten himself into by going up against The Kingdom and perhaps becoming the first politicain to truly, soundly beat them?
I brushed off that one very stanky hint of this Clinton arrogance that has surely then grown out of their great public pain, when Bill made an ass of himself here in Detroit at Rosa Parks' funeral by dressing down the Black audience for what he deemed their attitude of disrespect. I defended him though doing so left a sour taste in my mouth. In retrospect it seems the "First Black President" didn't aprove of how Black folks here chose to mourn. Or, more likely, the first White president to have been thoroughly blackened by abuse, was letting show that capacity of his for a cold rage--it seeps from the edges of Clintonia; and however justified by the price the Clintons have paid, one must ask one's self: is it time, after nearly twenty years of Clintons and Bushes in power, to lay this pain to rest, to move on past the haunted political landscape of these past two decades, to, dare I say it, embrace 'change we can trust'?
Finally, it is Obama's effect on the democratic landscape that convinced me to leave forever the pain haunted land of stank. no more Troopergate, not more 'vast right wing conspiracy' if we go with Obama. Barak Obama's campaign has catalized a large increase in votership, in youth participation in the electoral process, and bi-party (as opposed to 'bipartisan') crossover among primary voters. In short, he energizes people on the left, who, like most sane persons, would rather look forward to something (the Obama populism) than labor under something (the Clinton legacy). African American professor, author, cultural critique, and publisher, Kofi Natambu urged me in correspondence to look to this populist element of the Obama campaign, rather than focusing exclusively on Obama the man. I had written to Kofi:
Kofi's response was thoughtful, and in fact turned my own thinking around. He responded to my email message and in his message took me to task for my political short sightedness. He reminded me of the reality of electoral politics. Beyond the mundane business of practical and theoretical politics, i.e., getting a particular politician elected, is the question, Kofi reminded me, of mass political organization. Organizing the masses can be enbaled or even inspired by a given political leader, and by necessity in America, it will nearly always be a liberal, bourgeois leader--such as Robert Kennedy, or . In Obama's case, an entire network of youth activists has grown up around the candidate. Even more crucial, his is a candidacy that for whatever reasons inspires a broad range of political constituencies that are coming together in an historically significant movement that can be harnassed for progressive purposes. Obama mobolizes a broad range of progressive coalitions seeking free speech, electoral reform, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, social reform, and corporate reform.
In the wake of Kofi's reminding me of the unavoidable problematics and contradictions involved in electoral politcs for the sake of mobilizing the masses (across the country, across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and region, such mobilization is taking place not around Clinton, and, to my grief, not around Edwards, and to his own grief, not around Ralph Nader, but around Obama), it began to occur to me that, yes, there has been a progressive vanguard in this country for a long time now--one of its major nodes bing the pacific northwestern states, and one of its major nodes of ideology being the anti-globalist movement. After "The Battle of Seattle" and the "Battle of Miami"; after countless skirmishes in American cities over NAFTA, the IMF, and the attacks on the G-7, where had that activism and counsciousness gone after 9-11 and the media black out of all forms of progressive grass roots poiltics, 911 having provided a pretext for the government-corporate elites to institute a political dark ages in America? They had not gone aywhere. They had not been asleep. They had been waiting for a vehicle through which to reemerge. For now, Obama is that vehicle. As Kofi wrote me, "No matter who is the nominee--Obama or Clinton--since our preferential ideological choice--Edwards--doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of actually gaining the nomination--we must continue to struggle for and actively demand that these politicians own up to the structural and philosophical IMPLICATIONS, if not the ACTUAL CONTENT of what they say. So the real job before is much greater and much more important than merely deciding "who" gets the nomination, and thus the opportunity to "run" for President. As activists, as intellectuals, as workers, as thinkers, as CITIZENS we have much bigger fish to fry. Because no matter "who gets in" from the limited field of what is frankly two rather highly compromised NEOLIBERALS at best (Obama & Hillary) WE STILL HAVE TO MAKE DEMANDS OF THEM AND PUT FORWARD OUR OWN AGENDA(S)."
Kofi reminded me of the words of the great cultural critic and Caribbean revolutionary, C.L.R. James, from his 1960 text, Modern Politics":
Yes, we have our work cut out for us, is what Kofi demands we remember: it is not Obama who matters, but all of us here in this America that has been taken from us by a reactionary coup. It is our responsibility to take back America, as they say on Air America Radio, and to use whatever means necessary to do so. Up to and including taking back the Democratic party and rebuilding it in our own image, the image of the masses, from the inside out. Tom Hartman daily calls for this strategy to be implemented "Democracy begins with you--" Hartmna says, "Tag, you're it!" Obama is a vehicle. It's up to us to take the wheel.
Veteran left activist and theorist Grace Boggs was interviewed by one of America's best and last real journalists, Amy Goodman, on Jan 22, and pointed out the same deeper issues that Kofi argues us to recognize:
Let's give Christopher Hayes and Patricia Williams some final words. In his aforementioned Nation column he writes,
-Ngia Lawrence
"The structural reality of electoral politics vis-a-vis the much broader democratic necessity of mass-based political education and mobilization is precisely the tension between unavoidable contradictions and constraints that are the automatic result of engaging people to organize on behalf of much larger goals than merely getting someone elected."
-Professor Kofi Natambu
"I suppose it's race you're talking about? Imaginary Blackness and imaginary whiteness? Excuse me, but where does that leave me?"
-Dr. Yvonne Singh
“Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”
-Saul Alinski
ONE.
"Change you can trust"? My leftist Black, Jewish, and Italian-American mentors from my Detroit elementary schoolling up through my graduate education at Cornell had always taught me to recognize the bitter truth Saul Alinski preached: 'change' is a terrible thing. It requires bloodshed at the most, and demands the deaths of sacred cows and the discomfiture of power elites at least. So, the psychic disonance of the phrase, "change you can trust" put me off when I first heard the Obama campaign use it.
Yes, I confess that it took me some time to get with the Obama program.
TWO.
Now, on the eve of 'Little Super Tuesday'--the Texas and Ohio primaries, I support Barak H. Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, but like about 20-30% of his supporters, I didn't start out as an Oba-mite. As a supporter of Kucinich (D-Ohio) in the 2004 presidential election, and then a supporter of John Edwards (D-NC) in this one, I had found Obama's progressive-light patter and his John Kennedy redux demeanor a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g. I was annoyed too, by the band wagon jumping I perceived Black friends and fellow Black intellectuals to be engaging in by jumping onto an Obama good feeling express and talking as if a bourgeois social democratic centrist could, by dent of our collective wishful thinking, be taken as a progressive. I mean for Chrissakes, the man said things like this:
No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they
sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can
make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that
the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And
they want that choice.
[Barak Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention
Keynote Address]
What exactly did he mean? He was always heavy on the figurative language ("the doors of opportunity") on vague, progressive sounding abstractions ("...with just a change in priorities..."), and meanwhile he liberally peppered his discourse with what sounded alot like conservative codes meant to appeal to what media flaks call his milk-source, the 'independents' presumably, who some of those flaks and even some legitimate analysts say are really just faithless republicans and soft headed 'libertarians'. Perhaps those conservative codes ("No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems") are slipped into his discourse to appease those who probably don't trust talk of 'change' if the talk is not of a libertarian complexion. The twenty-to-thirty percenters, those independents, republicans ("Obamacans"? yuck), and libertarians, are reportedly joined by so-called 'swing voters' of which I guess I am one: people who don't remain loyal to the two corporate political parties at the top of the food chain but who know better than to look to a Green Party gaining a significant foothold in America before the year 2040, and who 'swing' between the two parties from election to election, or who 'swing' from candidate to candidate, at local, state, and national levels. In short, who knows, I wondered, what this man means?
THREE.
Obama's nod to US politics' obligatory crypto rejection of socialism worried me. I'm with Thom Hartmann; I think government can solve my damn problems and should. Democratic electoral, government should, that is. In a democracy I am the government, right? Is Exxon gonna solve my problems? Is Dupont? I think we all know that Haliburton sure won't. These runaway corporate fiefdoms exerting their wills over my government--and therefore over me--are the problem. As Hartmann rationally reminds us on his Air America radio program, socialism is not a dirty word. The government is not some foreign invader, as that old fart, Ronald Reagan used to meander around muttering ("The nine most terrifying words in the English language," Reagan used to demure, "Are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.' "). Government, Hartmann argues, practises a practical socialism every day and does so quite efficiently and much to our approval, by providing fire department, post office, and social security services. If politicians in the traditional mold (mould?) feel that they must renounce socialism, it's a manifest hypocrisy when they do so since they don't renounce the US mail, meat inspection, FAA standards for airlines, their grandmother's social security check, or the neighborhood fire fighters ready to extinguish any blazes that might erupt inside said politicians' homes.
I was not at first for Obama because realpolitik Obama is squarley rooted in centrist position. His voting record in the senate, his speeches, and his books all bespeak this utilitarian fact. He was vague and symbolic a year ago in his Feb 2007 speech in Springfield, Illinois announcing his candidacy:
In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle,
that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching
for what's possible, building that more perfect union. [Obama, 2007]
Meanwhile, John Edwards, in anouncing his own candidacy chose to do it in the still ravaged New Orleans 9th Ward, standing amidst the debris that was still scattered in the devestated streets. Throughout his campaign he promised if elected to enact a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, and promised to spend our wealth not on corporate wars but on domestic social problems. He gave speeches and Q&A's across the country, standing atop steam shovels, bull dozers, farming combines, on makeshift platforms in the yards of factories, and in impoverished communities. More than simply offering another byzantine and numbingly detailed health care plan, he, unlike Obama and Clinton, took the further rhetorical step of denouncing the pharmaceutical campanies making obscene profits off the health care mess in America. His was an insurgent, populist campaign, and he said so: "This campaign will be a grass-roots, ground-up campaign, where we ask people to take action."
In his June, 2006 "Take Back America Conference" remarks in Washington, DC, Obama said,
The world has changed. And as a result, we've seen families work harder for less and our jobs go overseas. We've seen the cost of health care and child care and gasoline skyrocket. We've seen our children leave for Iraq and terrorists threaten to finish the job they started on 9/11. But while the world has changed around us, too often our government has stood still. Our faith has been shaken, but the people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe again. It's the timidity - the smallness - of our politics that's holding us back right now. The idea that some problems are just too big to handle, and if you just ignore them, sooner or later, they'll go away. That if you give a speech where you rattle off statistics about the stock market being up and orders for durable goods being on the rise, no one will notice the single mom whose two jobs won't pay the bills or the student who can't afford his college dreams. That if you say the words "plan for victory" and point to the number of schools painted and roads paved and cell phones used in Iraq, no one will notice the nearly 2,500 flag-draped coffins that have arrived at Dover Air Force base. Well it's time we finally said we notice, and we care, and we're not gonna settle anymore. [Barak Obama, June, 2006]
Just as I feel that Edwards' constant rhetorical attacks on the true enemies of the American people (i.e., corporations) were illustrative of his aborted campaign and of his possible presidency, I felt that Obama's keynote address, his candidacy announcement, and his "Take Back America" remarks were all typical of his fatuous rhetoric. Obama says, "Our faith has been shaken." Not mine, thanks, I'm agnostic. Obama says, "The people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe." Believe in what? I believe in a windfall profits tax, and labor law reforms, and a seat in the cabinet for a secretary of worker rights, and price and dividend control, and rescinding the patriot act, and how about a superfund to clean up radioactive and chemical spills across the U.S., and how about getting rid of the ruinous Taft-Hartley Act, and while we're at it, we need a full employment bill, and we need to finally pass the ERA (neither Obama nor Clinton truly speak up for women's rights if neither will even utter that acronym). We need to enforce the EPA laws, the anti-trust laws, and the authority of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. I believe in legislation to establish a living wage. I believe in reinstituting the Fairnes Doctrine, and I believe in a progressive tax that would eliminate most corporate welfare, corporate shelters, and offshore corporate shells. The first thing I believe a president should do in January, 2009 is to outlaw Haliburton corporation's escape with our stolen tax dollars to Dubai. That, I believe.
Obama, it seemed to me, was too busy drawing on crypto religious-right codes in talking about 'belief', to utter any overtly socialist noises--the noises Kucinich and Edwards regularly voiced on behalf of a mass democracy. Obama's stump speeches had been just as rhetorically suspect to me. "I've got ten point plans all OVER my website," he recently shouted to one of his rockstar stadium sized crowds in response to reports that Hillary Clinton had accused him, spuriously, of having no 'plan' for something or other. Funny; between the two senators, Clinton and Obama, they have taken some 900 votes, and according to Meet The Press analysts (on the Sunday, March 2 2008 Boradcast) they voted exactly alike 90% of those votes. They are in some ways a two-headed wrestling match, each head battling the other while sharing the same body of ideology. They carp at each other over mundane details while both refusing to name names.
Yeah. That's just it. Kucinich named names and announced necessary socialist solutions to the rot that has become of American social and economic reality. Edwards went so far as to define the real class conflicts that define American life, and named the corporations that need to be beheaded. He was downright (gasp!) Marxist at times in his call to lift up the masses in order to save the middle class: trickle up as opposed to trickle down.
FOUR.
On the eve of Little Super Tuesday, I now support Obama, nevertheless.
The alternative, now that Edwards is gone, is what seems to me more and more like a Hillary Clinton continuation of the politics of what I call "Bushido" (like some fuedal Japanese masochistic warrior code, Bush-ism entails the gleeful willingness to slit one's own belly open for the sake of tax cuts, war, ballooning budgets, and of social spending cuts).
Though I now support Obama, I feel much what Alexander Cockburn expressed in his Feb 18 2008 column in The Nation, where he wrote, "I'll forgive Obama a couple of his hot-air speeches just for wiping out the Clintons in South Carolina." And yes, like many other Black intellectuals my age and my political cut (yes, I admit it, I'm a Marxist), part of why I reluctantly clambered up onto the crowded Obama wagon was an abiding low-level disgust I've always felt with the conceits of what I call The Clintonia Stankonia that has, let's face it, Always been there, a sour smell to those of us who've supported the Clintons. I was a columnist and reporter for the Ithaca Times in upstate New York the year that Clinton won the Democratic nomination for his first presidential bid, and I recall publishing in my newspaper one of the hundreds of cautionary 'slick Willie' pieces being published at the time throughout the country. My own piece took Bill Clinton to task for his truculence and rhetorical opportunism, and for his DLC-bred conservatism. I voted for him, but many of us who voted for him didn't trust him, and it turned out there was good reason to hold one's nose that year while pulling the lever for the democrats. As Christopher Hayes wrote in a recent issue of The Nation,
Clinton's fundamentally defensive conception of how to defuse the Republicans on national security (neutralizing their hawkishness with one's own) is an example of a larger problem, rooted in the fact that so many of her circle served in her husband's Administration. Their political identities were formed in the crucible of crisis, from the Gingrich insurgency to the Ken Starr inquisition. The overriding imperative was survival against massive odds, often with a hostile public, press or both. Like an animal caught in a trap that chews off its leg to wriggle away, the Clinton crew by the end of its tenure had hardly any limbs left to propel an agenda. The benefit of this experience, much touted by the Clintons, is that they know how to fight and how to survive. But the cost has been high: those who lived through those years are habituated to playing defense and fighting rear-guard actions. We know how progressives fared under Clintonism: they were the bloodied limbs left in the trap. Clintonism, in other words, is the devil we know. [Christopher Hayes, The Nation, Feb 18, 2008]
And we know, and know, and know, as we watch the incipient paternalism and arrogance that has flowed from the Hillary Clinton campaign, from Hilary's brittle, cold attitude toward t, he voters as she organizes from the right in terms of policy formation, touting the same old Clinton gang from her husband's administration, plus new "Hillaryland" aids brought into The Kindom for Hillary's senate campaign. Some of those personages are of course Mark Penn, Dwight Jewson, the fired Patti Solis Doyle, Mandy Grunwald, Harold Ickes, (and, I strongly suspect, James Carville, on the downlow, shilling for Clinton under the radar), and various other former West Wing advisors and 'Hillaryland' aids. Solis Doyle had coined the term, "Hillaryland" to describe the staff and entourage around Hillary during the Clinton administration and after. These familiar Clinton Kingdom courtiers were and are the ones who carried out the Clinton Way: rhetorical spin, message management, focus groups, polling regimes, media doctoring of image, and message placement. Michael Tomsky's book, "Hillary's Turn," on the senate campaign Hillary mounted in 2000, stresses the continuity of the Clinton Way from the administration to the senate campaign.
FIVE.
There is an abiding arrogance and sense of entitlement displayed by Senator Hillary Clinton in her bid for the democratic nomination. She is disturbingly truculent in her willingness to use the very same attack ads and dirty ad hominem tactics against Obama that were used by the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" against her and her husband during the Clinton administration (including the recent, disorientingly rediculous charge she made that Obama 'plaigerized' Duval Patrick's words, and that Obama is somehow dishonest and reprobate merely for presuming to challenge her policy positions). The Clinton Way obtains, and it carries with it the sour smell of mendacity. Joshua Green, in his recent Atlantic Monthly piece, "Inside the Clinton Shake-Up", addresses that arrogance of the Clinton Way--That Way, which, for me, watching It , smelling It, began my process of moving toward supporting Obama. Green writes of that mendacious attitude of the Clintons being,
An arrogance that I think is the key to understanding all that has gone
wrong for the Clinton campaign....Such arrogance led directly to the idea
that Clinton could simply project an air of inevitability and be assured her
party’s nomination. If she wins—as she very well might—it will be in spite of
her original approach. As one former Clinton staffer put it to me last
spring: “There was an assumption that if you were a major donor and wanted
to be an ambassador, go to state dinners with the queen—unless you were an
outright fool, you were going to go with Hillary, whether you liked her or not.
The attitude was ‘Where else are they going to go?’ ” [Joshua Green, Atlantic
Monthly, Feb 18, 2008]
Where else indeed. Go to their separate websites and read, read, read until your eyes glass over, and you'll discover that, policy-wise at least, there's not a ducat's worth of difference between the finer points of Clinton's numbingly detailed proposals and Obama's just as detailed and just as numbing wonkery. They're both post-DLC democrats, after all. In the debates the two have tended to carp at one another not over macro-theoretical differences in conception and execution (no conflicting methodologies calling up contrasts between the perspectives of exemplars of the American left such as samuel Gompers, Franklin Rooseveldt, Shirley Chisolm, Delores Huerta, Walter Reuther, and Fannie Lou Haimer) but over petty, micro-tonal grace notes which are the only things really that are pass for distinguishing factors in the sing-song sameness of two democrats who basically read from the same score. Obama approaches the center from the left, Clinton from the right, but they both meet in the middle; the middle-America, middling miasma of what democrates are, sans the courage and the vision of a Wellstone (D-MN), a Maxine Waters (D-CA), Edwards (D-NC), Kucinich (D-OH), a Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL), a Bernie Sanders (D-VT), a Shelia Jackson Lee (D-TX), or Barney Frank (D-MA), best of the democratic party, none of whom were given cabinet positions in the Clinton White House.
And so, Bill Clinton's recent, embarassingly patronizing rebuke of Obama turned my eye toward 'where else' we might be able to go. Bill charged that Obama's claim of having a different position on the war than Hillary is 'a fairytale,' saying, "give me a break" when asked about Hillary's voting to give Bush authority to attack Iraq.i "It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates," Clinton complained, "Trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, numerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution?' " Picyunne though this thin difference is, perhaps Bill is correct to point out Obama's seeming contradiction. Perhaps I am being naive in my own assumption that Obama was simply being honest in '04 and is now simply demonstrating that he has grown more alienated from the Bush regime. Perhaps I'm equally naive to wish that Hillary would have found it in within herself to be more alienated from Bush than her voting record suggests. Maybe Bill is right that again, there's not a ducat's worth of difference between his wife and the man from Illinois. Yet, the smirk that hovered on Bill's lips as he spoke those words, his attitude, which I felt conveyed the deep seated Clinton belief that only they can reasonably or legitimately lay claim to political power and that those who support them would be fools to consider anyone else, well, it galled me. Not his defense of his wife, but his arrogance as he did it--that is what made me recoil.
Then, there was the less covered remark made by Hillary that nevertheless spooked me: in a moment of supposed 'vulnerabilty' she weepily spoke of how 'some people think elections are a game,' implying that if one is progressive and does not support her then one is not being serious. "Some of us are ready [for power] and some of us are not," she intoned. It is a familiar Clintonia-Stankonia message. BET Founder and Black media millionaire Bob Johnson carried the Stankonia message in Black face, saying at a rally that Obama can only be taken seriously if the election were a movie. "This is real," Johnson stressed, staying on message for The Stank. The implication was that Clinton is real, Obama is not.
Therein perhaps lies the key to why those of us who, although reluctantly, have clambered up onto the Obama wagon. Clintonia emphasises that same old tired zero sum gaming; the idea that any ally (such as Lani Guiniere), any near-core belief (such as protection of the Fairness Doctrine), can and should be jettisoned in the name of winning and of protecting The Kingdom won. Along the way, the Clintons polarize and bifurcate (left and right, us and them, top and bottom), and the old trickle down theory of power lives with fierce tenacity in them (the Clintons, products of the DLC era are definitely top down politicians who see constituencies, aids, appoitees and the like as their soldiers, their rank and file meant to follow marching orders so that we can benefit from the scraps left from their victory feast). It sours one's desire to support them whole heartedly. Though he won't speak of it, this just might be what soured Al Gore so much, leading to the cold shoulder he gave and got to and from the Clintons through the last of the administration, through Hillary's run for the senate, and through Gore's run for president that seemed to operate outside of the golden glow of The Kingdom. Gore seemed to have lost heart in the end, perhaps even to have been broken hearted. It may have been the Lewinsky scandal, which, reportedly, Gore never got over being disappointed about, or it may have been the gradual betrayel of so many of the social policies Gore held dear. For whatever reason, Gore lost heart.
It is not the heart that Clintonia aims for, but the feet: we must accompany them on their long march, conceived at Yale and begun with the governorship of Arkansas, as foot soldiers in the Stankonia army: from Hope to the governor's mansion in litle rock, to the White House to the Senate and finally now the White House again.
It's all been one long campaign for them, never ending and played as a blood sport, if Joe Klein's 1996 book fictionalizing the Clintons, "Primary Colors" is on the mark. If it isn't, then certainly James B. Stewart's 1997 non fiction book, "Blood sport: The President and his Adversaries," about the Whitewater affair, for all its sensationalizing of the Clintons' war against their legion of enemies, penetrates to a crucial, uncomfortable truth about the Clintons: they fight, succeed, thrive, and perform best when they are wounded, hounded, and beseiged. Meanwhile, those loyal to them often are maimed and bloodied by, even fall beneath the onslaught (whatever else "Blood Sport" isn't, as Michael Isikoff dismisses it in his 1996 National Review rebuke of Stewart, one thing it is, is a glimpse into the grand guigonol sufferings of Clinton loyalists, Jim and Susan McDougal, who by the media and legal abuse they took over Whitewater, paid for their loyalty to the Clintons by Jim's certainly exacerbated illness and his subsequent death, and by Susan's years of incarceration and persecution at the hands of Dark Lord, Ken Starr.
SIX.
And it gets worse. One could get lost venturing down the dark corridoors of Clintonia Stankonia bloodletting. These two have indeed been the target of almost psychotic hatred, and perhaps as psychotically, have adapted to it and learned to channel it, process it, even draw strenght from it. Doubt me on this? Read The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, from 2000, by two of America's better investigative journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. This book adds the tragic Web Hubbell to the list of victims of Clintons' enemies (he lost his career and serves a 21 month prison sentence). Then there is the truly tragic death of Vince Foster, apparently a suicide, possibly driven to such despair over the Stankonia price one payed for proximity to The Kingdom that he took his own life.
It it there I choose to stop. There are some things I really don't want to know or understand about the price the Clintons have paid and still pay, one suspects for their decision to go into public life and public service. Perhaps it is a price that has forever marked them, and perhaps it is a price that makes them hunting hawks to Barak Obama's Bluebird of Happiness. Perhaps I find myself supporting Obama just out of fear for him. Does he know what he has gotten himself into by going up against The Kingdom and perhaps becoming the first politicain to truly, soundly beat them?
I brushed off that one very stanky hint of this Clinton arrogance that has surely then grown out of their great public pain, when Bill made an ass of himself here in Detroit at Rosa Parks' funeral by dressing down the Black audience for what he deemed their attitude of disrespect. I defended him though doing so left a sour taste in my mouth. In retrospect it seems the "First Black President" didn't aprove of how Black folks here chose to mourn. Or, more likely, the first White president to have been thoroughly blackened by abuse, was letting show that capacity of his for a cold rage--it seeps from the edges of Clintonia; and however justified by the price the Clintons have paid, one must ask one's self: is it time, after nearly twenty years of Clintons and Bushes in power, to lay this pain to rest, to move on past the haunted political landscape of these past two decades, to, dare I say it, embrace 'change we can trust'?
Finally, it is Obama's effect on the democratic landscape that convinced me to leave forever the pain haunted land of stank. no more Troopergate, not more 'vast right wing conspiracy' if we go with Obama. Barak Obama's campaign has catalized a large increase in votership, in youth participation in the electoral process, and bi-party (as opposed to 'bipartisan') crossover among primary voters. In short, he energizes people on the left, who, like most sane persons, would rather look forward to something (the Obama populism) than labor under something (the Clinton legacy). African American professor, author, cultural critique, and publisher, Kofi Natambu urged me in correspondence to look to this populist element of the Obama campaign, rather than focusing exclusively on Obama the man. I had written to Kofi:
Kofi;
I am on a personal level very troubled by the Obama campaign not in and of itself but for the deep ideological underdevelopment it exposes in African American popular thought. The uncritical, utopian, and downright parochial attitudes and reactions of the working class and the masses reveals itself in the attitude that voting for Obama is a fullfillment of 'the dream' (whatever that is) and that all Black people ought to be uncritically, unquestionaingly overjoyed about and committed to Obama as a (finally, yes) viable Black presidential candidate.
And when contrasted against any (emphasis--ANY) of the Republican candidates, yes, Obama looks pretty good, and I'd vote for him in a heartbeat. Because he's a sane alternative to them, and because he's Black like me (more or less like me). However, he is not currently a nominee for president, he is running in the democratic primaries leading up to the democratic convention where that party (a party I do not belong to) will choose its candidate for the general election. As a primary candidate, to anyone reading news sources, anyone with a historical sense, and anyone who considers Obama's voting record as a fairly conservative Chicago machine insurgent senator, Obama leaves far too much to be desired. Of course, prominent Blacks in the left union movement, in trade union political organizations and from the old guard Black power movement (sources like Black Commentator, have documented these marginalized Black intellectual and political voices) have been openly voicing criticisms of Obama.
Contrasted to John Edwards, who was also a senator and who has a far more progressive voting record in the senate than does Obama, Obama is revealed to be a fairly empty signifyer. He delivers a rhetorical, empty message of cultural and racial unity and vaguely progressive proposals such as single-payer health care (albeit heavily controlled by top heavy government management rather than transfer payments through heavily taxing the wealthy) and withdrawal from Iraq (without a single word of criticism about the huge, so-called 'embassy' being built there for the purpose of future US hegemony in the region, nor a promise that he will end the CIA activities in the region, end the torture and murder of Arabs by the US military/corporate/intelligence apparatus, or end the illegal incursions across the boarder into Iran, and general counter-democratic manipulation of Arab states in the region. He won't swear against any future or further neo-colonial adventurism there). In short, for someone chanting, "Change you can trust" the Brother ain't talking about changing a damn thing as president.
Edwards, however, has gone on record during his nearly invisible campaign against all of these things, and has thrown in a proposal for a socialist universal health care system, citing Canada by name. Edwards has on top of that, called out by name the corporations he plans to bring to heel should he be elected. Edwards' voting record (pro working class, pro democracy and local power and control, anti-corporate and anti-intelligence regime in terms of foreign policy) begs us to entertain the possibility that he might be telling the truth about what kind or president he'd be.
Thus, we can see, in the disparity between how Edwards and Obama are treated/covered, that class is far more salient than race in this country. While the blatantly racist media cover a clown and fascist like Huckleby with more attention to detail and respect than they do Obama, still the media betrays its deeper raison d’être: to suppress class consciousness. Ironically, the white man, Edwards, has had his possible working class base undercut by the Black man's--Obama'--bourgeois message. Obama cuts right off the top of Edwards' base the Black and Latino and to some surprising extent even the long lost former democratic white working class constituency that would have rallied to a socialist message in terms not of race, but of unions, access to legal process, health care for the poor, full employment, an end to all wars, free education, full literacy, return to anti-trust, fairness doctrine, and NLRB standards.
Meanwhile, Black people, perennially unsophisticated politically, unaware of the
details of history (even recent history ) are as short sighted, no, blind in their support of Obama as they were in their naive embrace of a war criminal who rather than being hailed as a 'role model' for Black women should instead by tried in the World Court in the Hague for crimes against humanity (it is Condi Rice, of course, to whom I refer).
The troubling thing? As a Black man I am expected to take none of this into account and uncritically turn my back on the civil liberties, global freedom, and
unionist/socialist heritage of my people (Paul Robeson, Randal Robinson, Harry
Belafonte, Angela Davis, Iris Young, Fanny Lou Haimer, Mumia Abu Jamal, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier--our Native American Brother, Denmark Vessy...well, you get me). I am expected to embrace Obama with no thoughts in my head and no fire in my belly.
I'm for a green party candidate, or for the Black female candidate who is currently fourteen years old living in Sandusky Ohio playing with her I-Pod and listening to Hugh Masekela who will some day be at the head of the Peoples' Independence Party with Howard Zinn and Studs Terkel as Emeriti advisors and Lani Guinier as campaign manager, Otherwise, I'll vote defensively for whoever the democratic nominee is, simply because we need to get the left hand of darkness out of the whitehouse before they kill the Earth. It would be nice if that default vote had a black face, but would be even nicer if he/she could be an insurgent humanist rather than a Chicagoan. It would be nicest of all if one could speak openly in public of one's criticisms of that Chicagoan without fear of being called a 'self hating Black man.'
Where is Boo Radley when you really need him?
Ray Waller
Kofi's response was thoughtful, and in fact turned my own thinking around. He responded to my email message and in his message took me to task for my political short sightedness. He reminded me of the reality of electoral politics. Beyond the mundane business of practical and theoretical politics, i.e., getting a particular politician elected, is the question, Kofi reminded me, of mass political organization. Organizing the masses can be enbaled or even inspired by a given political leader, and by necessity in America, it will nearly always be a liberal, bourgeois leader--such as Robert Kennedy, or . In Obama's case, an entire network of youth activists has grown up around the candidate. Even more crucial, his is a candidacy that for whatever reasons inspires a broad range of political constituencies that are coming together in an historically significant movement that can be harnassed for progressive purposes. Obama mobolizes a broad range of progressive coalitions seeking free speech, electoral reform, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, social reform, and corporate reform.
In the wake of Kofi's reminding me of the unavoidable problematics and contradictions involved in electoral politcs for the sake of mobilizing the masses (across the country, across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and region, such mobilization is taking place not around Clinton, and, to my grief, not around Edwards, and to his own grief, not around Ralph Nader, but around Obama), it began to occur to me that, yes, there has been a progressive vanguard in this country for a long time now--one of its major nodes bing the pacific northwestern states, and one of its major nodes of ideology being the anti-globalist movement. After "The Battle of Seattle" and the "Battle of Miami"; after countless skirmishes in American cities over NAFTA, the IMF, and the attacks on the G-7, where had that activism and counsciousness gone after 9-11 and the media black out of all forms of progressive grass roots poiltics, 911 having provided a pretext for the government-corporate elites to institute a political dark ages in America? They had not gone aywhere. They had not been asleep. They had been waiting for a vehicle through which to reemerge. For now, Obama is that vehicle. As Kofi wrote me, "No matter who is the nominee--Obama or Clinton--since our preferential ideological choice--Edwards--doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of actually gaining the nomination--we must continue to struggle for and actively demand that these politicians own up to the structural and philosophical IMPLICATIONS, if not the ACTUAL CONTENT of what they say. So the real job before is much greater and much more important than merely deciding "who" gets the nomination, and thus the opportunity to "run" for President. As activists, as intellectuals, as workers, as thinkers, as CITIZENS we have much bigger fish to fry. Because no matter "who gets in" from the limited field of what is frankly two rather highly compromised NEOLIBERALS at best (Obama & Hillary) WE STILL HAVE TO MAKE DEMANDS OF THEM AND PUT FORWARD OUR OWN AGENDA(S)."
Kofi reminded me of the words of the great cultural critic and Caribbean revolutionary, C.L.R. James, from his 1960 text, Modern Politics":
-CLR James
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Yes, we have our work cut out for us, is what Kofi demands we remember: it is not Obama who matters, but all of us here in this America that has been taken from us by a reactionary coup. It is our responsibility to take back America, as they say on Air America Radio, and to use whatever means necessary to do so. Up to and including taking back the Democratic party and rebuilding it in our own image, the image of the masses, from the inside out. Tom Hartman daily calls for this strategy to be implemented "Democracy begins with you--" Hartmna says, "Tag, you're it!" Obama is a vehicle. It's up to us to take the wheel.
Veteran left activist and theorist Grace Boggs was interviewed by one of America's best and last real journalists, Amy Goodman, on Jan 22, and pointed out the same deeper issues that Kofi argues us to recognize:
GRACE LEE BOGGS: Well, I think that—I think it’s wonderful, by the way, that both Hillary and Obama are running and that they’re frontrunners in this campaign, because I think they help us to see that it’s not a question of race or gender, it’s a question of whether we encourage the movement and unleash the movement of people from below or whether we try to run things from above, from the White House. And though I consider myself a feminist, I have to look at what Hillary stands for in terms of top-down leadership. And I have to understand—have to look at Obama and see that
younger people, a new generation is emerging and looking for the kind of healing that this country needs, that he has unleashed that, though his policies are not that different from Clinton’s. But he has unleashed an energy in the young people particularly, which has great promise. And he has also helped to unfreeze the unity that existed among blacks. He has helped us to see that all blacks are not the same. I think that people have become—that in the
interest of unity, blacks who have not actually been in the same place—some of them are in the White House and some of them are in the Supreme Court and some of them are in the Congress, and others are groping with very fundamental questions of daily life. And that that split actually exists in the country, that it actually exists in the community, but this campaign has helped us to see, to begin to grapple with that difference.AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Grace Lee Boggs. She is in Detroit, Michigan. You are not usually deeply involved in electoral politics, yet here you are deeply believing in the significance of what’s happening this year. What has changed? And did you ever have hope in other electoral years, in other presidential—times of presidential elections?
GRACE LEE BOGGS: I’ve never had this much hope. I’ve never had—because I think this one is unique. You know, policy-wise, I think Dennis Kucinich is much more on the right track. In fact, I support him. But he does not have that particular combination of a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother that can help unleash different energies. You know, sometimes—he can’t help it, of course, but sometimes it takes a certain person to do that. And I don’t think it’s not—to me, it’s not so important, the electoral politics. How they will develop, I don’t know. But when I felt that energy of young people, and I feel it around here, and I think of what Fanon said about each generation emerging out of obscurity must define its mission and fulfill or betray it. We’re living at one of those tide times....Barack Obama used a phrase in his speech at Ebenezer,
which I think we have to sort of embrace. He said we have to lead “by example.” That’s what we have to do. He can do it—maybe he can. I don’t know. But we had charismatic leaders in the ’60s, and they almost all got gunned down. And if we depend so much on charismatic leaders, not only are they in danger, but we do
not exercise our capacities in relationship to our situations to create the world anew. And that’s where we are...What I’m trying to do
is encourage the capacities, the energy, the creativity, the imagination, that exists in people at the grassroots to redefine and rebuild our society. If we want to live in freedom from terror, we have to begin looking at ourselves, redefining who we are, redefining who this country is and reassessing what it is within our capacity to do.
[Democracy Now, NPR Radio, Broadcast Jan 22, 2008]
Let's give Christopher Hayes and Patricia Williams some final words. In his aforementioned Nation column he writes,
[Christopher Hayes, The Nation, Feb 18, 2008]Obama's rhetoric tells a story of politics that is distinct from both the
one told by Beltway devotees of bipartisanship and comity and from the
progressive activists' story of a ceaseless battle between the forces of
progress and those of reaction. If it differs from what I like to hear, it
is also unfailingly targeted at building the coalition that is the raison
d'être of Obama's candidacy. Consider this passage from Obama's stump
speech:"I've learned in my life that you can stand firm in your principles while still
reaching out to those who might not always agree with you. And although the
Republican operatives in Washington might not be interested in hearing what we have to say, I think Republican and independent voters outside of Washington
are. That's the once-in-a-generation opportunity we have in this election."
Obama makes a distinction between bad-faith, implacable enemies
(lobbyists, entrenched interests, "operatives") and good-faith ideological
opponents (Republicans, independents and conservatives of good conscience).
He wants to court the latter and use their support to vanquish the former.
This may be improbable, but it crucially allows former Republicans (Obama
Republicans?) to cross over without guilt or self-loathing. They are not asked to renounce, only to join. Obama's diagnosis of the obstacles to progress is twofold. First, that the division of the electorate into the categories created by the right's
culture warriors is the primary means by which the forces of reaction resist
change. Progress will be made only by rejecting or transcending those
categories. In 1971 a young Pat Buchanan urged Richard Nixon to wield race
as what would come to be known as a wedge issue. "This is a potential throw
of the dice," he wrote, "that could...cut the Democratic Party and country
in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half." Obama seeks to
stitch those halves back together.Second, that the reason progressives have failed to achieve our goals over
the past several decades is not that we didn't fight hard enough but that we
didn't have a popular mandate. In other words, the fundamental obstacle is a
basic political one: never having the public squarely on our side and never
having the votes on the Hill.
Williams writes, also in The Nation, about several 'dreams' that might hypothetically arise in our fitful sleep now that we are so near the morning after the long night of Bushido. It is her oronic "Dream Number Two" that I'll share here:
Dream No. 2: Barack Obama is extolling the love, fortitude and courage of
the woman who raised him "as a single mother." At first, the crowd imagines
he's said "black single mother." There is a pause, then a quick reconfiguration. Oh, yeah, his single mother was white. It startles. As the throngs look at one
another in wonder, they begin to see Lebanese-American single mothers and
Taiwanese-American single mothers and Irish-American single mothers. They see that black single mothers--even the ones on welfare!--have a lot in common with all kinds of other mothers. Working mothers of all stripes are magically gilded with halos around their heads, illuminated as those who perform the hardest juggling acts, whose devotion is tested every minute of every day and who still don't earn but seventy cents for every dollar a man earns. Close-up of
awe-struck faces as this realization hits a broad swath of the population.
Voters decide not enough is trickling down from Enron and the oil companies.
They join to revise the distribution of tax benefits; they join unions; they
lobby for quality daycare. Eyes spill tears of appreciation and contrition. All
boats start to rise. [Patricia Williams, The Nation, Feb 25, 2008]
Boats might rise. And not to mix metaphors, this sort of Audacity of Hope is the promise of a chastening and purifying fire that seems to burn in the center of the Obama movement even if not the Obama campaign. The man is a movement, yes, because of the motion of all our feet and our hearts. I'm on. I'm aboard.
My dear friend and fellow sufferer from our grad school days at Cornell, Regina Rodriguez of Obama's home turf--Chicago, is Mexican American, and I think of her and of her fierce progressivism (she too, supported Kucinich in 2004, and supports Obama now) when I read hastily thought out editorials about how Mexican Americans are racist, and may not want to support a Black man. Those same editorialists were arguing the exact opposite when Hillary fired her Latina campaign manager recently, saying Latinos were 'up in arms' over Hillary's appearing to be insensitive to Latinos, and that Obama would surely benefit from that. The vagaries of racial discourse and its subtly brutal offensiveness toward all "Others" in the Black/White dramaturgy, are what Patricia Williams is satirizing.
My dear friend and fellow sufferer from our grad school days at Cornell, Professor and working actor in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Yvonne Singh, who must daily negotiate an American culture rigidly polarized between what she calls 'imaginary Blackness and imaginary whiteness,' would and did laugh a lusty, victorious laugh at Patricia Williams' satire. Behind the humor lies the promise: a new world, or at least a new United States of Hegemony; one that finally slips the surly bonds of our fitful nightmare of (contructed) racial identity to emerge into a dawn of egalitarian struggle. Finally.
The fire this time.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
My "Audition"
Hey, just some silly, shallow fun for those who read my blog: my "audition" for an animated Taco Bell commercial. How do I look?
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Without You
This is a post about the video for the Dirty Vegas song, "Days Go By" . Below, at the end of this post, is a link to the Youtube version of the video.
It was released years ago, and I was living and teaching in Florida at the time, at Florida International University.
I was walking through a department store in West Miami, and walked by a bank of TV sets on sale, electronic doodads, cell phones, video games, whatnot, and this video, "Days Go By" was playing on one of the wide screen TVs.
Very cinematic piece: a Black man in a business suit, yet, oddly, also wearing beat up old sneakers (high top 'Chucks'?) with duct tape wrapped around one sneaker, arrives out front of a diner somewhere in what looks like West Los Angeles, California. Palm trees ubiquitous and somewhat cadaverous in the back ground, traffic, sun beating down. It's a lightweight suit. Tie. Suspenders underneath. He's carrying a boom box and a folded up section of cardboard. He lays the cardboard down on the ground. The music from his boombox is a very mournful sort of corrido--a Mexican song of lament and grief. It has a very African beat, driving beat, but not mindless thumping--a heartbeat. Organic. Soulful. He starts to dance on the cardboard--break dancing, the robot, the electric slide, Arabic pirouette. Passersby stop, and watch him, wondering what is going on here, and engaged, made curious by the beauty of it.
A woman says to a man standing there "There he goes again." The looks at her. A sub titular text flashes over the images--"He shows up same day every year, and dances from sunrise to sunset." It is the woman whispering to the man about the dancer. "I heard," the woman and the subtitle (in the longer version of the video) continues as the dancer dances, "It's some kind of ritual. He used to dance here back in the day." Another man walks up, watching. He contributes to the discussion, saying, "They were in love. But he couldn't stop. So one day she left. No one knows where she went. I heard she got struck by lightening." The woman says, "I thought she got hit by a truck." The man says, "Yeah, well, whatever, she just didn't show up." The subtitle then intrudes again, over the image of the dancer: "Now he dances to bring her back. End of story."
All the while the Black dancer is dancing gracefully, with a striking kind of dignity; a ritualized, stylized dancing with elements of break dance, locking, street dance, and Arabic dance. In one startling passage of the video (a wonderfully done transition shot rather than a more conventional cut) he transforms into his younger self in sweat clothes, achieved by the older man jumping backward out of the frame and the younger dancer jumping back in: old, red sneakers with tape repair and the pant legs of a suit are replaced by brand new sneakers, and the legs of sweatpants. Thence, there comes a short flashback sequence of him as a boy with the lost lover.
The lyrics of the song are also being sung throughout all of this (very multi-media):
You are still a whisper on my lips/A feeling at my fingertips/That's pulling at my skin/
You leave me when I'm at my worst/Feeling as if I've been cursed/Bitter cold within/
Days go by and still I think of you/Days when I couldn't live my life without you/Days go by and still I think of you/Days when I couldn't live my life without you/Without you/Without you
A subtext of the video narrative is the intermittent cut to the members of the group, Dirty Vegas themselves, who are sitting in shadow, under the awning of a bodega, across the street from the dancer, watching. The quality of their gaze is in fact quite intense; it is as if they are seeking an essence, but not in the usual, racist, exoticizing of Black culture that White pop groups indulge. Rather, they seem to be moved by what they see, and are very much watching, and unlike the other watchers who are much closer to the dancer, Vegas seems to also be SEEING. The distinction between WATCHING and SEEING permeates the spiritus of this video, making a profound point about the nature and culture of multiculturalism-- the reality, not the bullshit product of mass media babble. The sense of insight and of compassion that is the gaze of the video itself is the next frame outward from the gave that is the gaze of Dirty Vegas. The gaze of the sidewalk audience is a third level of the gaze, while there is even an intimation that the dancer himself exerts a gaze, and has a POV (his gaze fixes momentarily, upon people in the sidewalk audience as one of them makes a more overtly dumb comment) but he never breaks his reflexivity; he dances and maintains his primary concentration upon that dance, while offering a mask of detachment to the outside world. One other moment of his breaking through that frame of spectation focused upon him, from which he is seemingly detached, is when he suddenly shoots his gaze across the street at the members of Dirty Vegas who are watching him. This is ambiguous, however, for a sudden cut shows him now looking at the younger version of his lost love, whose ghost stands before him. The denouement of the narrative then has him transforming again into his younger self, creating the impression that they two are reunited, but, no. He walks away, as the younger self, carrying the boom box with him, but alone. She is gone.
I remember that I was frozen by the spectacle of this video. I saw it as performance art. It was galvanizing. Everybody in the store around me near enough to see and hear this video stopped like me, watching. This achieved an eerie sort of performance art effect reminiscent of the kind of existential effects of the works of Warhol, Duchamp, or of Judy Chicago: dig, there was a supraliminal frame added to the several frames of spectatorship INSIDE the video, and that was this last frame OUTSIDE the video--the frame constituted by myself and the people in the department store who were stopping to look at the video. I noticed how we were mirroring the sidewalk audience INSIDE the spacetime of the video (Life imitating art?). Like the people inside the video watching the dancer, people in the store watching the video, looked wistful, even touched by the video's spectacle and narrative. Mostly Cuban Americans and Haitians, of course, because this was West Miami.
I felt sort of pierced by it this video. I was in love with and living with an Italian-American girlfriend (Peri Giovannucci) at the time; a very stable long-term relationship, but this image of the dancing Black man made me feel a hollow place in me where I missed Black women I had loved in the past.
Anyway, I recently saw this video again when it became widely available for download on the Internet--it's a cult video apparently.
It still creates in me a surprisingly strong feeling of ennui. Dirty Vegas is as much a performance art group as a pop group, a very interesting group of people. Their presence in the video, in the shadow of a street bodega, is fascinating. Are there intimations of the omniscient POV of the gaze of the ancient dramatist, Euripides, who often appeared as a character in his own dramas, bearing symbolically the gaze of the author?
DIRTY VEGAS VIDEO, "Days Go By":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oqmhVNk3Hg
It was released years ago, and I was living and teaching in Florida at the time, at Florida International University.
I was walking through a department store in West Miami, and walked by a bank of TV sets on sale, electronic doodads, cell phones, video games, whatnot, and this video, "Days Go By" was playing on one of the wide screen TVs.
Very cinematic piece: a Black man in a business suit, yet, oddly, also wearing beat up old sneakers (high top 'Chucks'?) with duct tape wrapped around one sneaker, arrives out front of a diner somewhere in what looks like West Los Angeles, California. Palm trees ubiquitous and somewhat cadaverous in the back ground, traffic, sun beating down. It's a lightweight suit. Tie. Suspenders underneath. He's carrying a boom box and a folded up section of cardboard. He lays the cardboard down on the ground. The music from his boombox is a very mournful sort of corrido--a Mexican song of lament and grief. It has a very African beat, driving beat, but not mindless thumping--a heartbeat. Organic. Soulful. He starts to dance on the cardboard--break dancing, the robot, the electric slide, Arabic pirouette. Passersby stop, and watch him, wondering what is going on here, and engaged, made curious by the beauty of it.
A woman says to a man standing there "There he goes again." The looks at her. A sub titular text flashes over the images--"He shows up same day every year, and dances from sunrise to sunset." It is the woman whispering to the man about the dancer. "I heard," the woman and the subtitle (in the longer version of the video) continues as the dancer dances, "It's some kind of ritual. He used to dance here back in the day." Another man walks up, watching. He contributes to the discussion, saying, "They were in love. But he couldn't stop. So one day she left. No one knows where she went. I heard she got struck by lightening." The woman says, "I thought she got hit by a truck." The man says, "Yeah, well, whatever, she just didn't show up." The subtitle then intrudes again, over the image of the dancer: "Now he dances to bring her back. End of story."
All the while the Black dancer is dancing gracefully, with a striking kind of dignity; a ritualized, stylized dancing with elements of break dance, locking, street dance, and Arabic dance. In one startling passage of the video (a wonderfully done transition shot rather than a more conventional cut) he transforms into his younger self in sweat clothes, achieved by the older man jumping backward out of the frame and the younger dancer jumping back in: old, red sneakers with tape repair and the pant legs of a suit are replaced by brand new sneakers, and the legs of sweatpants. Thence, there comes a short flashback sequence of him as a boy with the lost lover.
The lyrics of the song are also being sung throughout all of this (very multi-media):
You are still a whisper on my lips/A feeling at my fingertips/That's pulling at my skin/
You leave me when I'm at my worst/Feeling as if I've been cursed/Bitter cold within/
Days go by and still I think of you/Days when I couldn't live my life without you/Days go by and still I think of you/Days when I couldn't live my life without you/Without you/Without you
A subtext of the video narrative is the intermittent cut to the members of the group, Dirty Vegas themselves, who are sitting in shadow, under the awning of a bodega, across the street from the dancer, watching. The quality of their gaze is in fact quite intense; it is as if they are seeking an essence, but not in the usual, racist, exoticizing of Black culture that White pop groups indulge. Rather, they seem to be moved by what they see, and are very much watching, and unlike the other watchers who are much closer to the dancer, Vegas seems to also be SEEING. The distinction between WATCHING and SEEING permeates the spiritus of this video, making a profound point about the nature and culture of multiculturalism-- the reality, not the bullshit product of mass media babble. The sense of insight and of compassion that is the gaze of the video itself is the next frame outward from the gave that is the gaze of Dirty Vegas. The gaze of the sidewalk audience is a third level of the gaze, while there is even an intimation that the dancer himself exerts a gaze, and has a POV (his gaze fixes momentarily, upon people in the sidewalk audience as one of them makes a more overtly dumb comment) but he never breaks his reflexivity; he dances and maintains his primary concentration upon that dance, while offering a mask of detachment to the outside world. One other moment of his breaking through that frame of spectation focused upon him, from which he is seemingly detached, is when he suddenly shoots his gaze across the street at the members of Dirty Vegas who are watching him. This is ambiguous, however, for a sudden cut shows him now looking at the younger version of his lost love, whose ghost stands before him. The denouement of the narrative then has him transforming again into his younger self, creating the impression that they two are reunited, but, no. He walks away, as the younger self, carrying the boom box with him, but alone. She is gone.
I remember that I was frozen by the spectacle of this video. I saw it as performance art. It was galvanizing. Everybody in the store around me near enough to see and hear this video stopped like me, watching. This achieved an eerie sort of performance art effect reminiscent of the kind of existential effects of the works of Warhol, Duchamp, or of Judy Chicago: dig, there was a supraliminal frame added to the several frames of spectatorship INSIDE the video, and that was this last frame OUTSIDE the video--the frame constituted by myself and the people in the department store who were stopping to look at the video. I noticed how we were mirroring the sidewalk audience INSIDE the spacetime of the video (Life imitating art?). Like the people inside the video watching the dancer, people in the store watching the video, looked wistful, even touched by the video's spectacle and narrative. Mostly Cuban Americans and Haitians, of course, because this was West Miami.
I felt sort of pierced by it this video. I was in love with and living with an Italian-American girlfriend (Peri Giovannucci) at the time; a very stable long-term relationship, but this image of the dancing Black man made me feel a hollow place in me where I missed Black women I had loved in the past.
Anyway, I recently saw this video again when it became widely available for download on the Internet--it's a cult video apparently.
It still creates in me a surprisingly strong feeling of ennui. Dirty Vegas is as much a performance art group as a pop group, a very interesting group of people. Their presence in the video, in the shadow of a street bodega, is fascinating. Are there intimations of the omniscient POV of the gaze of the ancient dramatist, Euripides, who often appeared as a character in his own dramas, bearing symbolically the gaze of the author?
DIRTY VEGAS VIDEO, "Days Go By":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oqmhVNk3Hg
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Perri Approves
In these dark times of proto/neo/crypto fascism, I often feel that no one can read anymore, that there is no more multi-vocality, that the master tropes and the master languages have all drowned out the vox populi, that subaltern voice that says, "hey, the emperor ain't got no clothes on!" (or, as Austin Powers says, stripping away the veneer of our so-cherished self deception, "It's a man, Baby!"). In these dark times of Fox TV induced mass hypnosis and Opra Winfrey induced crass non-gnosis, it seems that no one appreciates a good Miles Davis solo, that nobody gives a shit that Marlon Brando elevated himself from the level of nefesh to that of chaya in his brilliant furioso terce rima performance in "The Missouri Breaks" (say whaaat?--yeah, I know, sounds like I'm talking crazy, don't it? Only those familiar with Kabbalic text will get that 'levels of soul' thing with nefesh and chaya? I'm talking out of my head again, right? I'm being difficult, huh?).
But, guess what? Dr. Perri Giovannucci has given me the seal of approval on my "response to Coach". She wrote to me, saying:
So, the rest of the pharisees out there can all go jump, you feel me? I can speak in as many voices as I want to, so there. Somebody approves, so screw you if you don't. Language is a glove, and if it fits, you must acquit. I am free to try on voices, flex my fingers, try on another one, make a fist, put on yet another, and wave goodbye. I done got some props from my ex breezy up in here, and I intend to continue to represent! As St. JErome said, Amor ordinem nescit and as Santa Clause's Old Lady said to the elves to keep up their spirits in hard times like these, adeste fidelis. So, adeste fidelis to those of yawl who know what I'm talking about, and the rest can eat shiznit.
Dig?
But, guess what? Dr. Perri Giovannucci has given me the seal of approval on my "response to Coach". She wrote to me, saying:
"The mere fact that I use language to communicate ideas does not make me language's bitch." Oh my God, [Ray,] these must be the most brilliant words in the English language today! How Foucauvian! How Barthesian! I LOVE IT!!! I would place it in the footer of my email template so that it would go out on every email I send -- except that I'm looking for a job and have to communicate in a properly bourgeois manner with all the proper bourgeois out there!! But I warn you now, I will steal this and use it every chance I get! Way to go, Waller! You go, boyfriend! Love, P.
So, the rest of the pharisees out there can all go jump, you feel me? I can speak in as many voices as I want to, so there. Somebody approves, so screw you if you don't. Language is a glove, and if it fits, you must acquit. I am free to try on voices, flex my fingers, try on another one, make a fist, put on yet another, and wave goodbye. I done got some props from my ex breezy up in here, and I intend to continue to represent! As St. JErome said, Amor ordinem nescit and as Santa Clause's Old Lady said to the elves to keep up their spirits in hard times like these, adeste fidelis. So, adeste fidelis to those of yawl who know what I'm talking about, and the rest can eat shiznit.
Dig?
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
A Response to 'Coach' Regarding My 'Worldview'
Coach wrote:
Professor Waller, I enjoyed your interview on the Atheist Hour. You showed your ability to reason under fire, which is a very tough thing to do. I was quite surprised to hear that you do not have a worldview. A worldview is a collection of beliefs that one holds as one's presuppositions. A person interprets all the evidence gathered through her senses in the light of her worldview. I would say that it is impossible, as a sentient being, to not have a worldview: "The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group." (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=worldview) How can someone not have a worldview.
My Reply:
Coach;
Now, would you say this claim of yours (that it is not possible to not have a worldview) is a self-evident claim? Is it an a priori claim? Or, is it a predicament of language (I tend to think that the illusion language gives us that we are actually organizing the universe into definable catagories often misleads us into thinking we are making sense of things when in reality we are not making sense because there is no sense to be made)? I assume that you are too intelligent (I like your use of the indefinite pronoun, 'she' which implies that you are either a woman and thus a superior intellect, or a man who is sensitive to language) to say that your claim is biological (that way lay Hitler).
I'll tell you why I refuse to accept the idea that I must have a 'worldview', which I had hoped I'd implied strongly enough on the pastor's show, but of course, again, language often double crosses or at least fails us. I am PROFOUNDLY suspicious of this claim, in English, mind you, that I must have what you called "a collection of beliefs that one holds as one's presuppositions". First of all, why should I assume that they are MY presuppositions? Aren't they the presuppositions of the society and social sub group(s) to which I belong and which have conditioned my ideas, thoughts, values, and the like? In a sense, really, one cannot EVER have a worldview of one's own, since one's worldview is always that of some arbitrary social milieu.
Please don't imagine that I am just playing with language here, either, because I am quite serious. Logically, you will claim that having just said all I've said, I have in fact declared a worldview. Aha! See the slippery nature of language? How it defeats us? Linguistically, I cannot in fact claim to not have a worldview because the way in which grammar works will conspire to make me affirm the negative claim I make in the very act of making it. I will undo my own claim in uttering it. That's only a linguistic reality, however, I'd argue. And I'll take this idea even further: why should I not demand to be unmolested by the typically unsubtle English of "worldview"? What about the french, "approche globale", which translates as 'worldview' but notice how the French term eliminates the English-implied imperious gaze from above or without, in recline, and how the French language turns the phrase into an active rather than passive description--a 'global approach' not a 'view' as if from a rise or a remove. Then there is the wonderful Italian, "visione del mondo", which means something like 'vision of this world'. As is always the case with Italian, there is far more of a sense of poetry, imagination, and what Spanish speakers call "mente" (reflection, reflexivity) in this phrase.
You see, like so much else that happened between the pastor and me in our discussion, he compulsively tried to force, to superimpose his beliefs, his assumptions, his language, and HIS 'worldview' (concretized, fixed, and handed down from on high) onto me without my permission or even my own input. This is typical of contemporary American Christians of the Protestant type, I have found in my interactions with a wide range of people, including all sorts of Christians. Indeed, every religious group seems to have elements of this sort of force and domination at least at its edges or enscounced in its fundamentalists.
I don't have a worldview. I reject that idea, as is my right--I reject it's Anglophilic mentation and point of view, as well as the cultural smallness of its usage. Such is my right. The mere fact that I use language to communicate ideas does not make me language's bitch.
Warmly,
Professor Ray Waller
Professor Waller, I enjoyed your interview on the Atheist Hour. You showed your ability to reason under fire, which is a very tough thing to do. I was quite surprised to hear that you do not have a worldview. A worldview is a collection of beliefs that one holds as one's presuppositions. A person interprets all the evidence gathered through her senses in the light of her worldview. I would say that it is impossible, as a sentient being, to not have a worldview: "The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group." (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=worldview) How can someone not have a worldview.
My Reply:
Coach;
Now, would you say this claim of yours (that it is not possible to not have a worldview) is a self-evident claim? Is it an a priori claim? Or, is it a predicament of language (I tend to think that the illusion language gives us that we are actually organizing the universe into definable catagories often misleads us into thinking we are making sense of things when in reality we are not making sense because there is no sense to be made)? I assume that you are too intelligent (I like your use of the indefinite pronoun, 'she' which implies that you are either a woman and thus a superior intellect, or a man who is sensitive to language) to say that your claim is biological (that way lay Hitler).
I'll tell you why I refuse to accept the idea that I must have a 'worldview', which I had hoped I'd implied strongly enough on the pastor's show, but of course, again, language often double crosses or at least fails us. I am PROFOUNDLY suspicious of this claim, in English, mind you, that I must have what you called "a collection of beliefs that one holds as one's presuppositions". First of all, why should I assume that they are MY presuppositions? Aren't they the presuppositions of the society and social sub group(s) to which I belong and which have conditioned my ideas, thoughts, values, and the like? In a sense, really, one cannot EVER have a worldview of one's own, since one's worldview is always that of some arbitrary social milieu.
Please don't imagine that I am just playing with language here, either, because I am quite serious. Logically, you will claim that having just said all I've said, I have in fact declared a worldview. Aha! See the slippery nature of language? How it defeats us? Linguistically, I cannot in fact claim to not have a worldview because the way in which grammar works will conspire to make me affirm the negative claim I make in the very act of making it. I will undo my own claim in uttering it. That's only a linguistic reality, however, I'd argue. And I'll take this idea even further: why should I not demand to be unmolested by the typically unsubtle English of "worldview"? What about the french, "approche globale", which translates as 'worldview' but notice how the French term eliminates the English-implied imperious gaze from above or without, in recline, and how the French language turns the phrase into an active rather than passive description--a 'global approach' not a 'view' as if from a rise or a remove. Then there is the wonderful Italian, "visione del mondo", which means something like 'vision of this world'. As is always the case with Italian, there is far more of a sense of poetry, imagination, and what Spanish speakers call "mente" (reflection, reflexivity) in this phrase.
You see, like so much else that happened between the pastor and me in our discussion, he compulsively tried to force, to superimpose his beliefs, his assumptions, his language, and HIS 'worldview' (concretized, fixed, and handed down from on high) onto me without my permission or even my own input. This is typical of contemporary American Christians of the Protestant type, I have found in my interactions with a wide range of people, including all sorts of Christians. Indeed, every religious group seems to have elements of this sort of force and domination at least at its edges or enscounced in its fundamentalists.
I don't have a worldview. I reject that idea, as is my right--I reject it's Anglophilic mentation and point of view, as well as the cultural smallness of its usage. Such is my right. The mere fact that I use language to communicate ideas does not make me language's bitch.
Warmly,
Professor Ray Waller
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Max Castro’s Definition of 'Multiculturalism' is Dead Wrong
"Miami is where neon goes to die"
-Lenny Bruce
As someone who has done time in Miami (City of the padded shoulders, I call her--I lived there for nearly a decade), I still feel tied to the place, try as I might to clear my head of the art deco faces and poolside souls that float along Bird Road, sit stark still in sweaty exile in the stalled traffic of Highway One in South Miami, and hurtle down the Dolphin Expressway inside the freezer-cooled, sealed consciousness of Mercedes.
Even the supermarket parking lots are done in pink motif.
But Elian Gonzales be damned, it's in my blood for the rest of my life, that place, and I'll always miss Hialeah, and the Japanese dive I hung out at with Tony and Perri on Douglas Rd., and the blue skies like the face of Prozac, and so it is for any of us who ever lived there in paradise for a time. I am dying a slow death from three years now of missing real cafe cubano, my beloved media noches, and Little Havana's garish ethnic arrogance that spills West from the shadows of downtown skyscrapers along Eighth Street to crash right through the pretentious charms of Coral Gables with its nerve to exist right in the middle of Miami and yet have streets with names like Galeano and Phoenetia and Ponce DeLeon in sharp contrast to the rest of Miami whose streets are numbers not names (Coral Gables is my former 'hood', a place where GM executives, former Guatemala CIA-backed torturers and airline executives retire to) and on and on westward until it is no longer Little Havana in body but only in spirit, past the "Pasta Factory", past a hundred dollar stores and outdoor laundromats run by plaid wearing older gentlemen named Ignacio, past Florida International University (where I used to teach--greetings, Don Watson, I miss you, Jefe!) before hurtling in spirit into the maw of the everglades to die in the open jaws of an alligator.
Elian be damned, I miss that place, for all its corruption, hideous cruelty, and shameless insanity. Imagine LA without the restraint (yeah. it's that insane).
So when things happen there, I have an opinion about it. A while back, a Black Miami politician named Arthur Teele committed suicide in the lobby of the Miami Herald by putting a gun to his head and shooting himself after telling the security guard there to tell a Herald reporter named Jim Defede to tell his (Teele's) wife that he loved her.
No. I' am not making this up. It's better than both the screenplay and the novel I wrote about Miami while I was there, so I wish I HAD made it up.
Max Castro wrote about this incident, and the political corruption that infected Teele and led him astray and toward this uniquely Mimai (neon) method of self annihilation. But Miami is MY city too. Part of me sees it as my home, Pastor Cook help me. When I read the piece in Progreso Weekly by Castro, once-and-future columnist for the Miami Herald, I had an opinion of my own. I take exception to one small aspect of what he writes, though I agree with his general attack on Miami corruption. Below is a response I wrote and sent to Progreso editors. Don't know if they will publish my response to Castro or not.
But you get to read it here. Ain't you lucky.
1-15-06
To the Editors of Progreso Weekly:
I disagree with Miami journalist Max Castro that Arthur Teele's death is proof of the 'multicultural' nature of corruption in Miami. Castro claims that,
Is Castro serious? I lived several wonderful, frightening, incredible, horrific, beautiful, and insane years in Miami and every year I lived there as an undervalued, underpaid, and powerless university professor in a racist and anti-intellectual city, only served to strengthen my conviction, from my Black perspective, that three things are inescapably true about Miami:
1. That there are few places on Earth more astonishingly beautiful than Miami—from the weather, the endless sky, and the dreamlike blue ocean, to the quality of the light that I woke up to every morning and the clarity of the stars in that tropical celestial sphere every night.
2. That the utter cruelty, brutality, venality and corruption, the materialism, and self aggrandizement not only of politicians and the wealthy, but infecting all levels of social life in Miami all the way down to the working class and the poor, is breath taking and disheartening enough to kill the optimism of even the most devoted of Samaritans.
3. That my own people, Black people, are virtually invisible in the echelons of every single institution of power in Miami, from civil to economic to intellectual, other than the roles they play there as in every other modern American city, as the inevitable gladiators of the sports industry, the singers and dancers of the entertainment industry, as a handful of corrupt politicians, and as a small portion of the Black clergy that is comfortably connected to mass media influence.
‘Multicultural’ is not a word I would ever apply to the Black experience in Miami, not even in terms of crime. Arthur Teele’s horrific death is but another nail for the box I’ve buried my Miami experience in; his death does exemplify exactly the “story about “another Black Man Done in by Media and the Establishment, as some would like to portray it” that Castro says it isn’t.
Teele, a Black Miami city councilperson indicted on ethics charges, accused the Miami police of stalking him, was despairing of the negative publicity he was receiving in the Miami local media due to rumors that he had been involved in extra-marital homosexual activities. After the apparently sympathetic writings of Miami Herald reporter, Jim Defede, who questioned the actions of Miami police in his Herald column, Teele apparently felt that Defede was someone he could appeal to and trust. On the last day of his life, Teele called Defede to talk about his despair, and ultimately ended up going to the Miami Herald’s offices where he shot himself to death in the newspaper’s lobby.
Max Castro’s article, published in Progreso (Progreso Weekly, Aug 4-10, 2005) claims that this tragedy exposes the paradisiacal image of Miami as being no more than a veneer over a ‘darker’ Miami; a Miami of deep corruption, a Miami of ‘multicultural’ vice:
True, so true. The long list of multicultural names of the corrupt that Castro mentions in his article, however, includes people who definitely did not end up dead in a pool of blood on the floor of the lobby of the Herald.
And there's the rub. Yes, Black men participate in America's corruption, and among Black Miamians are Blacks who are venal, selfish, racist, and materialist, and it seems that even in Miami, some Black leaders manage to rise to the top of the corruption heap; and in fact that is exactly when American corruption stops being a trough and becomes, in Max Castro's words, a VISE--that crushes the heads of Black men, I might add.
It's the oldest sub-plot in the American epic: just when Blacks (or browns, or yellows, or women) begin to successfully play the corrupt but lucrative American political and economic 'game' the rules change, or, in the case of Teele, the allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. In the American lexicon, it's not 'corruption' until Black, brown and yellow hands begin to do it.
Lest we forget, the weapon of alleged sexual scandal was wielded even against our most (seemingly) upstanding Black leaders, such as M. L. King, who, shortly before his assassination was threatened by the FBI with the release of photographs of himself allegedly having sex with women other than his wife. According to declassified COINTELPRO files, we know that such photographs were reportedly sent to King's wife by J. Edgar Hoover. As I sit in Detroit writing this, on the anniversary of MLK's birth, It is not difficult at all to imagine, regardless of evidence of Teele's corrupt activities such as money laundering (in fact perhaps because of them), that he too, may have been victimized by law enforcement officials seeking to destroy his legitimacy within the Black community.
Teele's claims of being followed by police officers, seemingly accepted as true by Jim Defede, and Teele's abrupt disintegration into dementia and then into suicidal despair seem all too familiar from where I sit, in Detroit, as a Black man in America. Right here in Detroit not long ago a prominent member of the Black community, a political leader in the state democratic party, Melvin Hollowell, was publicly disgraced by charges of sexual misconduct. As Detroit’s local independent weekly, the Metro Times reported:
Mister Hollowell had to resign his position as a leader in the state democratic party as a result of his public humiliation.
Am I defending corruption? No. I'm simply pointing out the second oldest sub-plot in the American epic: when the Negro ends up dead his death itself becomes proof of how 'equal' we all supposedly are if not in any other way (and indeed, the "State of Black America Report," the Bureau of Statistics, FBI crime reports, national morbidity and mortality rates, and all other objective measures of Black life in this hell of urban America shows that we are not equal in any other way), then at least we are equal in terms of corruption.
Bull. As a former resident of Miami for eight years, living there as a Black professor, writer, journalist, and intellectual, I had long maintained that the hypocritical double standard that former Miami Mayor Joe Suarez was held to (they went so far as to question his manhood in the pages of the Miami weekly, New Times, which I publicly denounced the Times for doing--my letter of protest was printed in the Times) was a double standard that demonstrated that Whites in Miami saw no contradiction in 100 years of white corruption being rewarded (i.e. the elevation of corrupt oligarchs like Henry Flagler to the status of gods) while Latino corruption (or even the appearance of it, as was often the case with Suarez) is bitterly denounced. Must Max Castro be reminded that the St. Augustine Record, in 2002 reported these fateful words:
while this is a headline at Mr. Teele's death:
Would Max seriously claim that these two Miami big shots, Flagler and Teele, are comparable as examples of the multicultural nature of American corruption (and of its spoils)?
I doubt it.
-Lenny Bruce
As someone who has done time in Miami (City of the padded shoulders, I call her--I lived there for nearly a decade), I still feel tied to the place, try as I might to clear my head of the art deco faces and poolside souls that float along Bird Road, sit stark still in sweaty exile in the stalled traffic of Highway One in South Miami, and hurtle down the Dolphin Expressway inside the freezer-cooled, sealed consciousness of Mercedes.
Even the supermarket parking lots are done in pink motif.
But Elian Gonzales be damned, it's in my blood for the rest of my life, that place, and I'll always miss Hialeah, and the Japanese dive I hung out at with Tony and Perri on Douglas Rd., and the blue skies like the face of Prozac, and so it is for any of us who ever lived there in paradise for a time. I am dying a slow death from three years now of missing real cafe cubano, my beloved media noches, and Little Havana's garish ethnic arrogance that spills West from the shadows of downtown skyscrapers along Eighth Street to crash right through the pretentious charms of Coral Gables with its nerve to exist right in the middle of Miami and yet have streets with names like Galeano and Phoenetia and Ponce DeLeon in sharp contrast to the rest of Miami whose streets are numbers not names (Coral Gables is my former 'hood', a place where GM executives, former Guatemala CIA-backed torturers and airline executives retire to) and on and on westward until it is no longer Little Havana in body but only in spirit, past the "Pasta Factory", past a hundred dollar stores and outdoor laundromats run by plaid wearing older gentlemen named Ignacio, past Florida International University (where I used to teach--greetings, Don Watson, I miss you, Jefe!) before hurtling in spirit into the maw of the everglades to die in the open jaws of an alligator.
Elian be damned, I miss that place, for all its corruption, hideous cruelty, and shameless insanity. Imagine LA without the restraint (yeah. it's that insane).
So when things happen there, I have an opinion about it. A while back, a Black Miami politician named Arthur Teele committed suicide in the lobby of the Miami Herald by putting a gun to his head and shooting himself after telling the security guard there to tell a Herald reporter named Jim Defede to tell his (Teele's) wife that he loved her.
No. I' am not making this up. It's better than both the screenplay and the novel I wrote about Miami while I was there, so I wish I HAD made it up.
Max Castro wrote about this incident, and the political corruption that infected Teele and led him astray and toward this uniquely Mimai (neon) method of self annihilation. But Miami is MY city too. Part of me sees it as my home, Pastor Cook help me. When I read the piece in Progreso Weekly by Castro, once-and-future columnist for the Miami Herald, I had an opinion of my own. I take exception to one small aspect of what he writes, though I agree with his general attack on Miami corruption. Below is a response I wrote and sent to Progreso editors. Don't know if they will publish my response to Castro or not.
But you get to read it here. Ain't you lucky.
1-15-06
To the Editors of Progreso Weekly:
I disagree with Miami journalist Max Castro that Arthur Teele's death is proof of the 'multicultural' nature of corruption in Miami. Castro claims that,
The Teele tragedy is not a story about “Another Black Man Done in by Media and
the Establishment,” as some would like to portray it. It is a tale about the
equal opportunity, gloriously multicultural and immensely seductive nature of
our corruption. It’s the one area in which we in Miami have achieved absolute
parity. Arrogance and greed, your name is Humberto Hernández, Demetrio Pérez,
Howard Gary, Cesar Odio, Alex Daoud, Miriam Alonso, Alberto Gutman, Miller
Dawkins, Jimmy Burke, Donald Warshaw, Dan Paul and…Arthur Teele, may he rest in peace. Black and white, Anglo and Latino, Jew and Gentile, there are no barriers
to misfeasance and malfeasance here, no need for affirmative action or
set-asides where graft is concerned. (Castro, Progreso Weekly, Aug, 2005)
Is Castro serious? I lived several wonderful, frightening, incredible, horrific, beautiful, and insane years in Miami and every year I lived there as an undervalued, underpaid, and powerless university professor in a racist and anti-intellectual city, only served to strengthen my conviction, from my Black perspective, that three things are inescapably true about Miami:
1. That there are few places on Earth more astonishingly beautiful than Miami—from the weather, the endless sky, and the dreamlike blue ocean, to the quality of the light that I woke up to every morning and the clarity of the stars in that tropical celestial sphere every night.
2. That the utter cruelty, brutality, venality and corruption, the materialism, and self aggrandizement not only of politicians and the wealthy, but infecting all levels of social life in Miami all the way down to the working class and the poor, is breath taking and disheartening enough to kill the optimism of even the most devoted of Samaritans.
3. That my own people, Black people, are virtually invisible in the echelons of every single institution of power in Miami, from civil to economic to intellectual, other than the roles they play there as in every other modern American city, as the inevitable gladiators of the sports industry, the singers and dancers of the entertainment industry, as a handful of corrupt politicians, and as a small portion of the Black clergy that is comfortably connected to mass media influence.
‘Multicultural’ is not a word I would ever apply to the Black experience in Miami, not even in terms of crime. Arthur Teele’s horrific death is but another nail for the box I’ve buried my Miami experience in; his death does exemplify exactly the “story about “another Black Man Done in by Media and the Establishment, as some would like to portray it” that Castro says it isn’t.
Teele, a Black Miami city councilperson indicted on ethics charges, accused the Miami police of stalking him, was despairing of the negative publicity he was receiving in the Miami local media due to rumors that he had been involved in extra-marital homosexual activities. After the apparently sympathetic writings of Miami Herald reporter, Jim Defede, who questioned the actions of Miami police in his Herald column, Teele apparently felt that Defede was someone he could appeal to and trust. On the last day of his life, Teele called Defede to talk about his despair, and ultimately ended up going to the Miami Herald’s offices where he shot himself to death in the newspaper’s lobby.
Max Castro’s article, published in Progreso (Progreso Weekly, Aug 4-10, 2005) claims that this tragedy exposes the paradisiacal image of Miami as being no more than a veneer over a ‘darker’ Miami; a Miami of deep corruption, a Miami of ‘multicultural’ vice:
magical realism had given way to noir, and the paper’s front page featured a
photo of Arthur Teele sprawled on the floor of the Herald building, his head in
a pool of blood. Wednesday morning’s festive, folkloric take on Miami was
overtaken by the night’s events, which lay bare another side of the city, an
ugly and brutal one, and the reality of real power versus the purported power of
the pen. The real city (Castro, Progreso Weekly)
True, so true. The long list of multicultural names of the corrupt that Castro mentions in his article, however, includes people who definitely did not end up dead in a pool of blood on the floor of the lobby of the Herald.
And there's the rub. Yes, Black men participate in America's corruption, and among Black Miamians are Blacks who are venal, selfish, racist, and materialist, and it seems that even in Miami, some Black leaders manage to rise to the top of the corruption heap; and in fact that is exactly when American corruption stops being a trough and becomes, in Max Castro's words, a VISE--that crushes the heads of Black men, I might add.
It's the oldest sub-plot in the American epic: just when Blacks (or browns, or yellows, or women) begin to successfully play the corrupt but lucrative American political and economic 'game' the rules change, or, in the case of Teele, the allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. In the American lexicon, it's not 'corruption' until Black, brown and yellow hands begin to do it.
Lest we forget, the weapon of alleged sexual scandal was wielded even against our most (seemingly) upstanding Black leaders, such as M. L. King, who, shortly before his assassination was threatened by the FBI with the release of photographs of himself allegedly having sex with women other than his wife. According to declassified COINTELPRO files, we know that such photographs were reportedly sent to King's wife by J. Edgar Hoover. As I sit in Detroit writing this, on the anniversary of MLK's birth, It is not difficult at all to imagine, regardless of evidence of Teele's corrupt activities such as money laundering (in fact perhaps because of them), that he too, may have been victimized by law enforcement officials seeking to destroy his legitimacy within the Black community.
Teele's claims of being followed by police officers, seemingly accepted as true by Jim Defede, and Teele's abrupt disintegration into dementia and then into suicidal despair seem all too familiar from where I sit, in Detroit, as a Black man in America. Right here in Detroit not long ago a prominent member of the Black community, a political leader in the state democratic party, Melvin Hollowell, was publicly disgraced by charges of sexual misconduct. As Detroit’s local independent weekly, the Metro Times reported:
Two weeks ago, the Detroit Free Press published two long,
front-page stories that graphically destroyed the career of — and probably
immensely damaged the life of — Melvin Butch Hollowell, a man who is not an
elected official or on the public payroll, and who has been convicted of
nothing.
He has, in fact, been charged with only a low-grade
misdemeanor. But they ran these stories, with large headlines (“Hollowell
accused of picking up hooker” and “Police report: Woman says Hollowell paid her
$60 for sex”) because they involved a prominent person and gave them an excuse
to write what amounted to soft porn disguised as journalism.
The newspaper described the supposed sex act in especially graphic detail in its
earlier outstate editions, basing the account on what the “known prostitute,”
also identified as a heroin addict, told police. (Hollowell denied doing
anything except stopping to help a woman he thought was in trouble.) (Jack
Lessenberry, Metro Times, 9/1/2004)
Mister Hollowell had to resign his position as a leader in the state democratic party as a result of his public humiliation.
Am I defending corruption? No. I'm simply pointing out the second oldest sub-plot in the American epic: when the Negro ends up dead his death itself becomes proof of how 'equal' we all supposedly are if not in any other way (and indeed, the "State of Black America Report," the Bureau of Statistics, FBI crime reports, national morbidity and mortality rates, and all other objective measures of Black life in this hell of urban America shows that we are not equal in any other way), then at least we are equal in terms of corruption.
Bull. As a former resident of Miami for eight years, living there as a Black professor, writer, journalist, and intellectual, I had long maintained that the hypocritical double standard that former Miami Mayor Joe Suarez was held to (they went so far as to question his manhood in the pages of the Miami weekly, New Times, which I publicly denounced the Times for doing--my letter of protest was printed in the Times) was a double standard that demonstrated that Whites in Miami saw no contradiction in 100 years of white corruption being rewarded (i.e. the elevation of corrupt oligarchs like Henry Flagler to the status of gods) while Latino corruption (or even the appearance of it, as was often the case with Suarez) is bitterly denounced. Must Max Castro be reminded that the St. Augustine Record, in 2002 reported these fateful words:
Flagler worth $100 million at death
On May 27, 1913, just a week after his death, the will of Henry M. Flagler - who was said to be worth $100 million - was made public.
The document created a trust designed to keep his businesses running and to ensure the continuance of Flagler's policy in Northeast Florida.
while this is a headline at Mr. Teele's death:
Arthur Teele Dies After Self-Inflicted Gunshot
POSTED: 6:32 pm EDT July 27,
2005
UPDATED: 12:07 pm EDT July 28, 2005
MIAMI -- Former City Commissioner
Arthur E. Teele Jr., recently indicted on corruption charges, died after
shooting himself in the lobby of The Miami Herald building Wednesday,
authorities said.
Teele shot himself in the head shortly after 6
p.m., police said. The Herald said it happened just after he asked a security
guard if he could see columnist Jim DeFede.
"He said to tell
DeFede to tell his wife he loves her," the security guard, Feliz Nazco, told the
Herald.
Delrish Moss, the Miami police spokesman, said Teele
died at 7:50 p.m. at Ryder Trauma Center. (NBC6, South Floria---NBC6.net)
Would Max seriously claim that these two Miami big shots, Flagler and Teele, are comparable as examples of the multicultural nature of American corruption (and of its spoils)?
I doubt it.
Pastor Gene Cook's Show, "The Atheist's Hour"
Well, here I am back after so long an absence--I don't look after this blog like I should, sort of like I am about my Marxism. It's always there, in the back of my heart and mind, but sometimes I go long periods of time not examining it. My beloved ex, Perri, points out to me that I'm really an anarchist, in other words, I like freedom so much I even yearn for freedom from my own thoughts, beliefs, and words. I yearn even to be free of my self. So, I often ignore me. Leads to lack of sleep, ill health, fatigue, not enough time spent with friends, and neglect of one's own blog.
Ah, well.
Another thing I ultimately am, and I'm more sure of it than ever, is agnostic. Not atheist, which I can't help but regard as the other side of the same coin as theism, but agnostic. I don't believe we puny humans (as Klatu would call us) can or will ever know the nature of the existence of God or Gods, and we cannot either confirm or refute the existence of God or gods. We just simply don't know enough of anything to even begin to test, seek out, or verify/repudiate such a thing as a creator of the universe. By the way, I doubt we are even correct in our assumption that there IS a "universe". That word is a conceptualization, a name, that we affix to the pitifully limited portion of the spacetime continua we think we can percieve. Electro-magnatism, gravity, the strong and weak forces, poor little Einstein, the smartest of all we puny hairless monkeys trying to create a 'unified field theory' to account for these ideas (ideas that probably are laughably far from the 'real', the actual '(T)truth' of existence, anyway) and Stephen Hawking gliding around in his steel auto-didacto chair, his spooky, synthesized voice mocking even the assumption that we CAN ever 'know' anything.
I was interviewed a couple nights ago by Pastor Gene Cook, a Man-of-God whom I must confess (pun unentended) I like, and whose radio show, "The Aetheist's Hour" plays on 'Unchained Radio' out of California--San Diego. Quite an experience to be grilled by a 'believer' and by the various 'believers' who called in during my segment with the pastor. You can dowload my interview at the Unchained website:
http://unchainedradio.com/nuke/index.php
but be warned, you'll have to register with the website first. Registration to become a user is free. Callers called up and challenged me about my a-theism, and about my uses of languguage, and it was no walk in the park. I had to defend myself. It was a good experience. Made me have to think consciously and by the seat of my pants about what I think and what I wish to defend. I gather I must come off to some people as uncertain WHAT I think. People kept telling me I have a certain 'world-view', which I feel a visceral repugnace about: what is a 'world-view' and which 'world' were they accusing me of viewing? If I hold one view at this instant does that preclude me from holding some entirely other view the next? Is that in fact, a view in itself? Does that question even make sense?? As Heisenberg wrote:
Ah, well.
Another thing I ultimately am, and I'm more sure of it than ever, is agnostic. Not atheist, which I can't help but regard as the other side of the same coin as theism, but agnostic. I don't believe we puny humans (as Klatu would call us) can or will ever know the nature of the existence of God or Gods, and we cannot either confirm or refute the existence of God or gods. We just simply don't know enough of anything to even begin to test, seek out, or verify/repudiate such a thing as a creator of the universe. By the way, I doubt we are even correct in our assumption that there IS a "universe". That word is a conceptualization, a name, that we affix to the pitifully limited portion of the spacetime continua we think we can percieve. Electro-magnatism, gravity, the strong and weak forces, poor little Einstein, the smartest of all we puny hairless monkeys trying to create a 'unified field theory' to account for these ideas (ideas that probably are laughably far from the 'real', the actual '(T)truth' of existence, anyway) and Stephen Hawking gliding around in his steel auto-didacto chair, his spooky, synthesized voice mocking even the assumption that we CAN ever 'know' anything.
I was interviewed a couple nights ago by Pastor Gene Cook, a Man-of-God whom I must confess (pun unentended) I like, and whose radio show, "The Aetheist's Hour" plays on 'Unchained Radio' out of California--San Diego. Quite an experience to be grilled by a 'believer' and by the various 'believers' who called in during my segment with the pastor. You can dowload my interview at the Unchained website:
http://unchainedradio.com/nuke/index.php
but be warned, you'll have to register with the website first. Registration to become a user is free. Callers called up and challenged me about my a-theism, and about my uses of languguage, and it was no walk in the park. I had to defend myself. It was a good experience. Made me have to think consciously and by the seat of my pants about what I think and what I wish to defend. I gather I must come off to some people as uncertain WHAT I think. People kept telling me I have a certain 'world-view', which I feel a visceral repugnace about: what is a 'world-view' and which 'world' were they accusing me of viewing? If I hold one view at this instant does that preclude me from holding some entirely other view the next? Is that in fact, a view in itself? Does that question even make sense?? As Heisenberg wrote:
The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.
--Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927
The right to think anything and everything at once. That's what I stand for, that's what I defend. Not meaning to sound like Marcel Duchamp, but I'm afraid that's what it really boils down to for me: I'm a marxist, an agnostic, a Duchampian radical Incompleteness Theorum/Uncertainty Principle supporter (viva Kurt Godel and Werner Heisenberg!), and most of all, I suppose, an anarchsit.
Perri knows me.
Friday, June 24, 2005
God Help Us All
I recently got an e-mail message from my beloved ex girlfriend, Perri writing from Miami ('beloved' because unlike most men I am willing to admit that our ex-girlfriends usually deserved better than we could give them when they were with us, and because I'm damned glad Perri is willing to still be my friend). She was writing about the latest episode in the soap opera of cultural malice that is deforming American public life. I had heard about it already: that one of the icons of American feminist discourse, Erica Jong, had been treated like shite [kacke] by graduating seniors at the College of Staten Island during her address to them at their graduation ceremony.
To add insult to injury, there had been a particularly ungallant commentary written about the incident by Michelle Maskaly, a columnist for the epiphenomenal (you know, mental events are totally unconnected to material reality, and such?) newspaper, Staten Island Advance. Perri’s disgust over this sturm und drang was a notch higher than mine inasmuch as she had been moved to send an e-mail message to Maskaly. Maskaly’s column had read:
Whew. So goes the progress of a once-democratic society through the guts of a beggar, to paraphrase Hamlet, but here now is Perri’s message to the sagacious Ms. Maskaly:
Bravo for Perri, though it does not appear that the Staten Island Advance has published her response to Maskaly, and though I fear public culture will only get worse in America. Women, Blacks, Latinos, Gays, Lesbians, and mein Gott, even the differently abled (physically challenged) are being demonized now by phalanxes of beer spouting, belly button brandishing Bush Kinder who want to party, not think about pesky little historical details such as the efficacy of the feminsit movement, the question of the validity of the Iraq occupation/genocide, or the public debate over political ethics or lack of same in our barely elected politicians.
And so, how de rigeur it is now to be stupid, bestial, gauche, and ignorant, and to be arrogant and self satisfied about what a pig one is.
The most disturbing thing I myself had already read in news reports about this incident, in which some of these so-called 'students' (walking beer mugs is more appropriate a description than 'students' for some of the present day anti-intellectual children on American college campuses--I ought to know, a few of them turn up in my classes--I'm a professor of English) started tossing a beach ball around as Jong was speaking, was that one oafish parent saying, "She gave a political speech when she was supposed to be doing a pep talk…Some graduates wanted to throw stuff at her. Whoever heard of a commencement speaker talking about body bags?"
"A pep talk"? That's what a commencement speaker ought to be now--a halftime cheerleader, a pep-talker? What's more disturbing about this oaf's statement? The fact that he's so stupid he doesn't know that during the Vietnam era there were thousands of campus commencement addresses against war, hegemony, sexism, racism, and patriarchal assholes like himself, or the fact that right now, in this current Vietnam-2 era (Iraq), the same thing is going on all over the U.S.; that commencement speakers are, just like Ms. Jong, addressing the issue of the coming needless deaths of many young people just like his own fool-spawn, who, if the oaf offspring is male, and even perhaps if it is female, may just end up coming home to him in a bodybag?
Shan't he feel disappointed about his investment having been spent in vain? He will have shelled out $4,308 per year in tuition in-state, or $8,908 out-of-state, which are the expenditure stats for parents of CSI students. See U.S. News & World Report at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/directory/brief/drglance_29040_brief.php to verify how much Pop got hopped on by Oaf Jr. Ah, well, his little oaf will at least get a free burial care of Uncle Sam if it comes to that.
Jong, like any intellectual, was committed to the truth of what she had to say, and not to the idea of being liked by the audience. I know from experience as a lecturer, teacher, and performing artist that there's a world of difference between sitting in a dark room hunched over a computer keyboard eking out rants, opinions, and spiteful comments as a weblogger and standing in front of a live audience all focused on your physical self ("How do you feel about critics who don't like your creative choices?" Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsallis was asked by a documentary interviewer. "I don't care," he responded. "See, I'm a Jazz musician. I know what it's like to walk out onto a stage and play some stuff that people don't want to hear, but I play it anyway, because it's what I have to say.") Erica Jong's calm and determination to continue despite the audience's derision and detachment was not unlike a good Jazz musician, a fine chef, a faithful revolutionary, or, oh, I dunno, an intellectual during the rise of Fascism in Germany after the end of the Weimar Republik (if the lederhosen fit, Amerika's fresh young graduates so eager to be off to the patriotik wars will wear them).
Jeez, I would say something about the irony of it all, but we live in the time of the aftermath of irony, don't we? Irony, like democracy, intellect, and civil society, are dead as doorknobs.
It's enough to make you fall into reminiscing about the era of the Clinton Presidency (Mike Malloy, of Air America Radio likes to refer to Clinton as “the best Republican President we ever had”). I have been calling the era of Clinton "The Interregnum".
An interregnum is often a period of relative calm, civility, and/or artistic and social freedom just after the decline of a highly organized, sophisticated republic and just before the rise of an empire, a tyrant, or a totalitarian monarchy (for example, ancient Athens after the decline of the 500's, BCE, Pythagorean and democratic republic and just before the rise of the Thirty Tyrants and the martyrdom of Socrates).
God help us all.
To add insult to injury, there had been a particularly ungallant commentary written about the incident by Michelle Maskaly, a columnist for the epiphenomenal (you know, mental events are totally unconnected to material reality, and such?) newspaper, Staten Island Advance. Perri’s disgust over this sturm und drang was a notch higher than mine inasmuch as she had been moved to send an e-mail message to Maskaly. Maskaly’s column had read:
CSI graduation: Pomp and circumstance, boos and hisses
Author Erica Jong alienates some with the tone, length of her commencement speech
By Michelle Maskaly
Best-selling author Erica Jong was booed and told to "Shut up!" and "Go Home!" during her 40-minute speech yesterday at the College of Staten Island's commencement exercises.
As Ms. Jong, best known for her 1973 novel "Fear of Flying," talked about everything from truth in advertising to truth in politics and the shallowness of public relations -- but said precious little about graduation -- some of the thousands in attendance on the great lawn at the college's Willowbrook campus stood up and began to object loudly. A little less than halfway through her speech, some graduates began tossing around an inflatable beach volleyball. Some even got up from their chairs, just yards from her podium, to go chat with friends and family who were seated behind them. Ms. Jong, however, was unfazed.
She continued to speak as though everyone were listening attentively. "I'm a writer," said the author of eight novels. "I spend days and nights playing with words, trying to make sense of them. Telling the truth has never been easy. It's gotten harder." She complained that getting to the truth is tougher than ever because "words have been corrupted."
"Advertisers, politicians, celebrities, they all think they have a good reason to tell us the opposite of what they mean," Ms. Jong said. "They advertise products like Viagra that could blind you or hormone pills that could cause breast cancer. "Politicians speak the opposite of what they mean. They say clear skies when they mean pollution. They say collateral damage when they mean killing civilians." The public, said Ms. Jong, "writes off many lies as PR (public relations)" and has stopped expecting the truth. "Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes pledging their love to Oprah when they really mean PR," Ms. Jong said. "Do we really need wellness when we have health? News is what they don't issue in press releases."
Ms. Jong's remarks were met with some vehement disapproval. "She gave a political speech when she was supposed to be doing a pep talk," said the father of a CSI graduate who declined to give his name. "Some graduates wanted to throw stuff at her. Whoever heard of a commencement speaker talking about body bags?" Dorothy, a 48-year-old mother of a CSI graduate, categorized Ms. Jong's speech as "all-around bashing. "It was disgusting, despicable," said the Fort Wadsworth woman, who would not give her surname.
"She called politicians liars, called us all liars. She trashed America. Mostly, she just wanted to talk. It was personal spewing. There was nothing about graduation." In a statement issued through a spokesman yesterday afternoon, Dr. Marlene Springer, president of CSI, said: "We are delighted to have had such a noted author at our commencement. Her message, that we need to look closely at words and (that) their power is important, I'm sure our audience understands."
Ms. Jong taught literature and freshman English as a professor at the City University of New York in the 1960s. Her son-in-law, Matthew Greenfield, is a tenured English professor at CSI. In a press advisory about graduation issued by the college May 31, Ms. Springer lauded Ms. Jong for caring "deeply about her commitments." "Her presence is sure to be compelling, provocative and motivational," she said in the advisory. Ms. Jong encouraged the graduates to take what they have learned in the classroom and apply it to the world around them, and not to take words at face value. "Whoever controls the words is framing the debate," Ms. Jong said.
"You will be able to be framers of the debate rather than the people sitting there and listening to the conversation. Listen to what is said and question authority. I want you graduates to get mad when you're deliberately lied to."
[reprinted here from The Staten Island Advance without any permission whatsoever from anybody]
Whew. So goes the progress of a once-democratic society through the guts of a beggar, to paraphrase Hamlet, but here now is Perri’s message to the sagacious Ms. Maskaly:
Dear Ms. Maskaly, I'm sorry to say that I found your article about Erica Jong's graduation address at CIS to be reductive and biased.
You don't seem to have made any attempt to try to understand what her speech was about or its importance for the new graduates who are poised to enter their chosen professions. I don't say that you have to agree with Ms. Jong -- but simply that your article does little more than replicate some of the hostility which some members of the audience showed to this esteemed author and intellectual. Perhaps intellectual is the key word here. If the audience was anti-intellectual, that doesn't mean that you should be as well.
Your article would have done more justice to Ms. Jong and to the event of her speaking, hostile as it was, if you had at least tried to show some of the stakes of the talk and its reception. Otherwise you run the risk of sounding just as reactionary and small-minded as the disruptive graduates -- and, apparently, their parents as well -- at the ceremony. Small-mindedness and anti-intellectual reduction are not befitting of a journalist, don't you think? I'm sure that was one of the points of Ms. Jong's speech.
You might have learned something from her, had you made the effort to pay attention.
Respectfully yours,
Perri Giovannucci, PhD
University of Miami,
Coral Gables, Fl.
Bravo for Perri, though it does not appear that the Staten Island Advance has published her response to Maskaly, and though I fear public culture will only get worse in America. Women, Blacks, Latinos, Gays, Lesbians, and mein Gott, even the differently abled (physically challenged) are being demonized now by phalanxes of beer spouting, belly button brandishing Bush Kinder who want to party, not think about pesky little historical details such as the efficacy of the feminsit movement, the question of the validity of the Iraq occupation/genocide, or the public debate over political ethics or lack of same in our barely elected politicians.
And so, how de rigeur it is now to be stupid, bestial, gauche, and ignorant, and to be arrogant and self satisfied about what a pig one is.
The most disturbing thing I myself had already read in news reports about this incident, in which some of these so-called 'students' (walking beer mugs is more appropriate a description than 'students' for some of the present day anti-intellectual children on American college campuses--I ought to know, a few of them turn up in my classes--I'm a professor of English) started tossing a beach ball around as Jong was speaking, was that one oafish parent saying, "She gave a political speech when she was supposed to be doing a pep talk…Some graduates wanted to throw stuff at her. Whoever heard of a commencement speaker talking about body bags?"
"A pep talk"? That's what a commencement speaker ought to be now--a halftime cheerleader, a pep-talker? What's more disturbing about this oaf's statement? The fact that he's so stupid he doesn't know that during the Vietnam era there were thousands of campus commencement addresses against war, hegemony, sexism, racism, and patriarchal assholes like himself, or the fact that right now, in this current Vietnam-2 era (Iraq), the same thing is going on all over the U.S.; that commencement speakers are, just like Ms. Jong, addressing the issue of the coming needless deaths of many young people just like his own fool-spawn, who, if the oaf offspring is male, and even perhaps if it is female, may just end up coming home to him in a bodybag?
Shan't he feel disappointed about his investment having been spent in vain? He will have shelled out $4,308 per year in tuition in-state, or $8,908 out-of-state, which are the expenditure stats for parents of CSI students. See U.S. News & World Report at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/directory/brief/drglance_29040_brief.php to verify how much Pop got hopped on by Oaf Jr. Ah, well, his little oaf will at least get a free burial care of Uncle Sam if it comes to that.
Jong, like any intellectual, was committed to the truth of what she had to say, and not to the idea of being liked by the audience. I know from experience as a lecturer, teacher, and performing artist that there's a world of difference between sitting in a dark room hunched over a computer keyboard eking out rants, opinions, and spiteful comments as a weblogger and standing in front of a live audience all focused on your physical self ("How do you feel about critics who don't like your creative choices?" Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsallis was asked by a documentary interviewer. "I don't care," he responded. "See, I'm a Jazz musician. I know what it's like to walk out onto a stage and play some stuff that people don't want to hear, but I play it anyway, because it's what I have to say.") Erica Jong's calm and determination to continue despite the audience's derision and detachment was not unlike a good Jazz musician, a fine chef, a faithful revolutionary, or, oh, I dunno, an intellectual during the rise of Fascism in Germany after the end of the Weimar Republik (if the lederhosen fit, Amerika's fresh young graduates so eager to be off to the patriotik wars will wear them).
Jeez, I would say something about the irony of it all, but we live in the time of the aftermath of irony, don't we? Irony, like democracy, intellect, and civil society, are dead as doorknobs.
It's enough to make you fall into reminiscing about the era of the Clinton Presidency (Mike Malloy, of Air America Radio likes to refer to Clinton as “the best Republican President we ever had”). I have been calling the era of Clinton "The Interregnum".
An interregnum is often a period of relative calm, civility, and/or artistic and social freedom just after the decline of a highly organized, sophisticated republic and just before the rise of an empire, a tyrant, or a totalitarian monarchy (for example, ancient Athens after the decline of the 500's, BCE, Pythagorean and democratic republic and just before the rise of the Thirty Tyrants and the martyrdom of Socrates).
God help us all.
Saturday, May 28, 2005
none of the perpetrators have been caught
" !!!!PAY ATTENTION!!! "
It is just this sort of psychotic shout that often begins the foolish communiqués I am moved to write about here and now.
These communiqués constantly slip past my spam guard and come to me in the form of uninvited e-mail forwards (with my own captive e-mail address buried among hordes of many others; the addresses of strangers). The particular e-mail forward in question starts off with that particular psychotic shout.
The psychotic shout was followed by these words:
The Latest Scam:The way the scam works is, a man slips into a women's restroom andsneaks into a stall. He waits until there is only one woman in therestroom in a neighboring stall. The criminal then stands on the toiletand points a hand gun into the next stall, demanding the woman's valuables.After getting her cash and jewelry, he demands that she remove all ofher clothing and kick them out of the stall. The thief tosses theclothing into a shopping bag, hangs an out of order sign on the restroomdoor, and slips back into the mall.
Oh, my. I should immediately alert my mother, my daughter, all my female friends to this dastardly activity, shouldn't I?? In fact, the e-mail forward urges me to do just that:
PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. This has so far been a nearly perfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught. Don't let this happen to another woman.
Yeah, women should not ever go into a public restroom to take a piss. Too dangerous. In fact, they should line up outside public restrooms and one at a time they should go in with their husbands, boyfriends, significant masculine others, or oh, I don't know, maybe go in with strong, brave men (Gulf War veterans, perhaps) who might hire out their manly services as 'public women's room valets' to accompany each woman individually into the enemy-infested public restroom to take a piss in safety. Right, Truth Seeker? Huh? Hehhh? Yeah, sure.
I am puzzled by what it is that drives we Americans to use the incredibly powerful technology of the internet as no more than a petty tin can on a string to transmit propaganda: infantile, adolescent, and mundane gossip, public safety tips, muck, and dirty laundry (actually, I’m not that puzzled. I figure it’s a mixture of narcissism and shallow denial--all symbolized by that nitwit popular saying Americans love so much--'have a nice day').
We e-mail this sort of trash across the Web rather than communicate with one another about reality (by 'reality' I mean not 'crime-blotter' gossip about scams, not local TV nitwit news 'tips' about how to avoid pan handlers and con artists, and not warnings about the dire need for women to be shouted at and warned about how not get robbed at the mall, but REALITY.
Let me re-introduce the concept of reality to you: it's the very basis of consciousness in a civil society--you remember civil society, don't you, Truth Seeker? Public education, public institutions, public health, public liberties, and public discourse all buttressed by voting rights, wage and price controls, freedom of assembly, and maybe even every now and then public protest. In other words, politics, history economics, geo-politics, news of the world outside the borders of this prison we call the United States, or even, (gasp) REAL SOCIAL INSIGHT).
Why is it that I never receive uninvited forwards about that sort of thing, telling women to NOT be afraid to go into public restrooms but rather to reject shopping malls altogether in favor of locally owned, community-based, shopping centers that cycle dollars back into the communities rather than shoveling their money down the gaping maw of the multi nationals that own and operate shopping malls that take women's dollars out of the city, out of the state, then out of the country to fund the building of more sweat shops and maquiladoras in Mexico and American Samoa, where women have far greater worries than getting robbed at the mall (where they have to worry about being raped by their foreman if they fall below quota turning out those Nike running shoes that cost Nike 75 cents per shoe to manufacture though they cell them for more than 100 dollars per pair once they arrive at the mall)?
Here’s something from the internet (Reuters) that I found interesting, that women are doing other than cowering in fear of public toilets:
International Women's Day Marked in Iraq
[March 8, 2004] International Women’s Day was marked in Iraq today with protests by several hundred Iraqi women demanding more rights (Reuters 3/8/04). Women in Iraq are facing violence, poverty, unemployment, and substandard water, food and medicine. Kidnapping and rape have increased dramatically in the post-war period. For the most part, women no longer go out in public unless an armed male relative accompanies them. And women may be losing in the political arena as well. The interim constitution signed today, while appearing to be supportive of women’s rights, may clash with provisions in the constitution which make Islam the fundamental religion and a guiding source for legislation. If interpreted conservatively, women’s rights may be restricted in the future.
What moves me to say all this is that the above forward and many other uninvited forwards I've received of late are becoming increasingly mundane, petty, infantile, and stupid gossip about safety tips, and various other useless communications which amount to people killing time with a medium (e-mail) that we could better put to use communicating with one another about the fact that we now live in a country run by the criminally insane (Bush, Woolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and the rest); a country that has discarded democracy in favor of fascism. A glorified "Nike- town".
That reality has made ALL our lives less safe, less secure, less certain, and worst of all, most offensive of all, it is now dangerous as hell to travel outside the U.S. since the entire world is disgusted and appalled by the tyranny of the United States, and likely to want to beat American citizens traveling abroad about the face and neck.
This most pathetic of these recent forwards (see the entire text of the forward, unedited, pasted below) is one which urges women to be afraid to go to rest rooms at malls because men are lurking inside women's rooms waiting to rob them, steal their clothes, and leave them naked inside the stalls. If I may do a bit of Derridian deconstruction here, the forward uses suspiciously boilerplate language that sounds as if it were lifted from local news reports (why is it that the robber uses a 'handgun' and not a 'gun' or 'pistol'? Could it be because 'crime-blotter' reports in local newspapers always use the term, 'handgun'?). There is no specificity to it:
This has so far been a nearly perfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught.
If none of the 'perpetrators' (the use of police procedural language here is odd) have been caught then how are we to know there are several of them, and not just one? Are we to assume that these crimes are taking place in so many malls that it could not possibly be only one person? Of course we are. The lack of a city, state, or even time period in this text (its rhetorical uses of timelessness and spatial ambiguity) creates the impression that this is in fact a ubiquitous occurrence. It's everywhere. Thus, no need to cite statistics, examples, locations, or any of the other details that would make this objective or credible information.
Presumably, women ought to stay home, only travel, even in daylight hours, in groups or with men to 'protect' them, and should be ever and always afraid. Yeah. Right. And of course, the people who mass mail this crap everywhere are obviously so naive, so gullible, that they don't stop to think that this country is now FULL of these kind of urban myths meant to further frighten and intimidate the majority population (women and people of color) into submission, fear, silence, and a sense of powerlessness as the REAL threat to women (which is a Hitlerian president in Washington slowly gnawing away at women's rights, women's liberties, and women's control over their own bodies) goes on committing his crimes against us all without accountability. I have YET to receive an uninvited forward denouncing the destruction of abortion rights, attacks on Roe V. Wade, and the elimination of unions.
The destruction of unions alone has been the major source of disintegration of economic power in the lives of women, since unions (nurses' unions, garment workers' unions, food service unions, teachers' unions, hotel workers' unions, etc.) have directly or indirectly accounted for some 90% of the accumulated wealth American women achieved between the 1940's (when women eventually came to make up some 70% of the industrial workforce and even after men returned from the war, remained between 25 and 36% of the industrial workforce) and 1980, the year that the Reagan backlash began eating away at forty decades of American women's economic gains.
I don't think women should live in fear of public restrooms, unless of course, they think that their greatest abusers, Ronald Regan and George W. Bush might be lurking in there waiting for them to strip them naked and steal their purses.
Oh, yeah, that's right: they've done that very thing to America's women already, haven't they? Stripped them naked, and stolen their purses. And just as the stupid forward says, 'none of the perpetrators have been caught'.
You have a nice day, now.
___________________________________________
THE STUPID FORWARD, Unedited:
Subject: FW: Warning-be aware / Ladies Please Read !!!!! - PayAttention!!!!!!!!! -
PayAttention!!!!
Please read and pass on to every women you know. Be Blessed. Subject: FW: Fw: Warning-be aware / Ladies Please Read !!!!!
The Latest Scam:
The way the scam works is, a man slips into a women's restroom andsneaks into a stall. He waits until there is only one woman in therestroom in a neighboring stall. The criminal then stands on the toiletand points a hand gun into the next stall, demanding the woman's valuables.After getting her cash and jewelry, he demands that she remove all ofher clothing and kick them out of the stall. The thief tosses theclothing into a shopping bag, hangs an out of order sign on the restroomdoor, and slips back into the mall. The out of order sign ensures no one willsoon come to the woman's rescue.
It usually takes an hour or two for thewoman to work up! the nerve to leave the restroom in the nude, givingthe criminal ample time to make his get away. The woman is left nakedand humiliated in a mall full of strangers.The best defense, say police, is to never go into a shopping mallrestroom alone, as only women who are by themselves are targeted.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. This has so far been a nearlyperfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught. Don't letthis happen to another woman.
It is just this sort of psychotic shout that often begins the foolish communiqués I am moved to write about here and now.
These communiqués constantly slip past my spam guard and come to me in the form of uninvited e-mail forwards (with my own captive e-mail address buried among hordes of many others; the addresses of strangers). The particular e-mail forward in question starts off with that particular psychotic shout.
The psychotic shout was followed by these words:
The Latest Scam:The way the scam works is, a man slips into a women's restroom andsneaks into a stall. He waits until there is only one woman in therestroom in a neighboring stall. The criminal then stands on the toiletand points a hand gun into the next stall, demanding the woman's valuables.After getting her cash and jewelry, he demands that she remove all ofher clothing and kick them out of the stall. The thief tosses theclothing into a shopping bag, hangs an out of order sign on the restroomdoor, and slips back into the mall.
Oh, my. I should immediately alert my mother, my daughter, all my female friends to this dastardly activity, shouldn't I?? In fact, the e-mail forward urges me to do just that:
PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. This has so far been a nearly perfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught. Don't let this happen to another woman.
Yeah, women should not ever go into a public restroom to take a piss. Too dangerous. In fact, they should line up outside public restrooms and one at a time they should go in with their husbands, boyfriends, significant masculine others, or oh, I don't know, maybe go in with strong, brave men (Gulf War veterans, perhaps) who might hire out their manly services as 'public women's room valets' to accompany each woman individually into the enemy-infested public restroom to take a piss in safety. Right, Truth Seeker? Huh? Hehhh? Yeah, sure.
I am puzzled by what it is that drives we Americans to use the incredibly powerful technology of the internet as no more than a petty tin can on a string to transmit propaganda: infantile, adolescent, and mundane gossip, public safety tips, muck, and dirty laundry (actually, I’m not that puzzled. I figure it’s a mixture of narcissism and shallow denial--all symbolized by that nitwit popular saying Americans love so much--'have a nice day').
We e-mail this sort of trash across the Web rather than communicate with one another about reality (by 'reality' I mean not 'crime-blotter' gossip about scams, not local TV nitwit news 'tips' about how to avoid pan handlers and con artists, and not warnings about the dire need for women to be shouted at and warned about how not get robbed at the mall, but REALITY.
Let me re-introduce the concept of reality to you: it's the very basis of consciousness in a civil society--you remember civil society, don't you, Truth Seeker? Public education, public institutions, public health, public liberties, and public discourse all buttressed by voting rights, wage and price controls, freedom of assembly, and maybe even every now and then public protest. In other words, politics, history economics, geo-politics, news of the world outside the borders of this prison we call the United States, or even, (gasp) REAL SOCIAL INSIGHT).
Why is it that I never receive uninvited forwards about that sort of thing, telling women to NOT be afraid to go into public restrooms but rather to reject shopping malls altogether in favor of locally owned, community-based, shopping centers that cycle dollars back into the communities rather than shoveling their money down the gaping maw of the multi nationals that own and operate shopping malls that take women's dollars out of the city, out of the state, then out of the country to fund the building of more sweat shops and maquiladoras in Mexico and American Samoa, where women have far greater worries than getting robbed at the mall (where they have to worry about being raped by their foreman if they fall below quota turning out those Nike running shoes that cost Nike 75 cents per shoe to manufacture though they cell them for more than 100 dollars per pair once they arrive at the mall)?
Here’s something from the internet (Reuters) that I found interesting, that women are doing other than cowering in fear of public toilets:
International Women's Day Marked in Iraq
[March 8, 2004] International Women’s Day was marked in Iraq today with protests by several hundred Iraqi women demanding more rights (Reuters 3/8/04). Women in Iraq are facing violence, poverty, unemployment, and substandard water, food and medicine. Kidnapping and rape have increased dramatically in the post-war period. For the most part, women no longer go out in public unless an armed male relative accompanies them. And women may be losing in the political arena as well. The interim constitution signed today, while appearing to be supportive of women’s rights, may clash with provisions in the constitution which make Islam the fundamental religion and a guiding source for legislation. If interpreted conservatively, women’s rights may be restricted in the future.
What moves me to say all this is that the above forward and many other uninvited forwards I've received of late are becoming increasingly mundane, petty, infantile, and stupid gossip about safety tips, and various other useless communications which amount to people killing time with a medium (e-mail) that we could better put to use communicating with one another about the fact that we now live in a country run by the criminally insane (Bush, Woolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and the rest); a country that has discarded democracy in favor of fascism. A glorified "Nike- town".
That reality has made ALL our lives less safe, less secure, less certain, and worst of all, most offensive of all, it is now dangerous as hell to travel outside the U.S. since the entire world is disgusted and appalled by the tyranny of the United States, and likely to want to beat American citizens traveling abroad about the face and neck.
This most pathetic of these recent forwards (see the entire text of the forward, unedited, pasted below) is one which urges women to be afraid to go to rest rooms at malls because men are lurking inside women's rooms waiting to rob them, steal their clothes, and leave them naked inside the stalls. If I may do a bit of Derridian deconstruction here, the forward uses suspiciously boilerplate language that sounds as if it were lifted from local news reports (why is it that the robber uses a 'handgun' and not a 'gun' or 'pistol'? Could it be because 'crime-blotter' reports in local newspapers always use the term, 'handgun'?). There is no specificity to it:
This has so far been a nearly perfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught.
If none of the 'perpetrators' (the use of police procedural language here is odd) have been caught then how are we to know there are several of them, and not just one? Are we to assume that these crimes are taking place in so many malls that it could not possibly be only one person? Of course we are. The lack of a city, state, or even time period in this text (its rhetorical uses of timelessness and spatial ambiguity) creates the impression that this is in fact a ubiquitous occurrence. It's everywhere. Thus, no need to cite statistics, examples, locations, or any of the other details that would make this objective or credible information.
Presumably, women ought to stay home, only travel, even in daylight hours, in groups or with men to 'protect' them, and should be ever and always afraid. Yeah. Right. And of course, the people who mass mail this crap everywhere are obviously so naive, so gullible, that they don't stop to think that this country is now FULL of these kind of urban myths meant to further frighten and intimidate the majority population (women and people of color) into submission, fear, silence, and a sense of powerlessness as the REAL threat to women (which is a Hitlerian president in Washington slowly gnawing away at women's rights, women's liberties, and women's control over their own bodies) goes on committing his crimes against us all without accountability. I have YET to receive an uninvited forward denouncing the destruction of abortion rights, attacks on Roe V. Wade, and the elimination of unions.
The destruction of unions alone has been the major source of disintegration of economic power in the lives of women, since unions (nurses' unions, garment workers' unions, food service unions, teachers' unions, hotel workers' unions, etc.) have directly or indirectly accounted for some 90% of the accumulated wealth American women achieved between the 1940's (when women eventually came to make up some 70% of the industrial workforce and even after men returned from the war, remained between 25 and 36% of the industrial workforce) and 1980, the year that the Reagan backlash began eating away at forty decades of American women's economic gains.
I don't think women should live in fear of public restrooms, unless of course, they think that their greatest abusers, Ronald Regan and George W. Bush might be lurking in there waiting for them to strip them naked and steal their purses.
Oh, yeah, that's right: they've done that very thing to America's women already, haven't they? Stripped them naked, and stolen their purses. And just as the stupid forward says, 'none of the perpetrators have been caught'.
You have a nice day, now.
___________________________________________
THE STUPID FORWARD, Unedited:
Subject: FW: Warning-be aware / Ladies Please Read !!!!! - PayAttention!!!!!!!!! -
PayAttention!!!!
Please read and pass on to every women you know. Be Blessed. Subject: FW: Fw: Warning-be aware / Ladies Please Read !!!!!
The Latest Scam:
The way the scam works is, a man slips into a women's restroom andsneaks into a stall. He waits until there is only one woman in therestroom in a neighboring stall. The criminal then stands on the toiletand points a hand gun into the next stall, demanding the woman's valuables.After getting her cash and jewelry, he demands that she remove all ofher clothing and kick them out of the stall. The thief tosses theclothing into a shopping bag, hangs an out of order sign on the restroomdoor, and slips back into the mall. The out of order sign ensures no one willsoon come to the woman's rescue.
It usually takes an hour or two for thewoman to work up! the nerve to leave the restroom in the nude, givingthe criminal ample time to make his get away. The woman is left nakedand humiliated in a mall full of strangers.The best defense, say police, is to never go into a shopping mallrestroom alone, as only women who are by themselves are targeted.
PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. This has so far been a nearlyperfect crime, as none of the perpetrators have been caught. Don't letthis happen to another woman.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
A Book Review
It's been a while since I've updated this blog--been teaching, writing, hustling, forming new friendships, dissolving old ones (or, more accurartely, watching with regret while old friendships have dissolved under the incredible deformative powers of Bushnomics' reactionary social devolution and abuse).
These are hard times.
Yet, in my absence, I have encountered and been touched by so many amazing people. One of those people is John Saba--a humanist and mysitc. He is a Lebanese-American who lives just outside of Detroit in the city of Livonia, Michigan.
Michigan, like America, is very reactionary right now. The largest Arababic/Muslim/Middle-Eastern population in America is located here in the Detroit area, in the city of Dearborn, and the large Arab-American population is an occasion for anti-Arab racism among Detroiters--even Black Detroiters. This is saddening, and outrageous. I do all I can as a university professor, journalist, artist, and intellectual, to oppose anti-Arab racism, and to my shame and dismay, many of my own race exhibit this bigotry, when what we ought to be exhibiting is solidarity with those who are now suffering the racism and abuse we have historically had to suffer in America.
As many people will know, a prominent Arab-American citizen of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was unjustly arrested by the FBI following the 911 attacks, held in confinement away from his family and even his legal counsel for more than a year, then, finally deported, even though no evidence against him was ever produced by the government. Despite the efforts of his neighbors and friends in Ann Arbor, and the efforts of defenders throughout the United States, this poor man never received justice. So much for the assumption we all had and now feel less secure about, that Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan, swaddling place of the old "Students for a Democratic Society," and home of Tom Hayden, is a progressive city.
But back to John Saba. I interviewed him for the newspaper I work for here, "The Michigan Citizen," and although anyone who wishes to can view the published review at michigancitizen.com along with all the other journalism I've done for Michigan Citizen, I want to share that review with any readers of this website who come to my corner of it. John Saba, a proud Arab-American, and a man who professes compassion for the oppression of Black people, is an example of the diversity, humanity, and beauty of Arab-Americans.
As I sit here in my office on campus I think how there are many such examples here in the Detroit area. Right across the hall from me happens to be the office of a fellow professor, Alex Shami, who also happens to be of Lebanese origin, who is a valued academic and community figure here in Detroit. John Saba is not unique.
I feel I've let down my friend, Regina Rodriguez, who inspired me to begin this blog. I haven't kept up my writing here as I promised her I would. So, this is my return, and I will make more time in the future to share my thoughts with readers, and as always, it's all dedicated to Regina, with love...
“You are the Tabernacle of God”
Author: Dr-of-Divinity, John M. Saba, Jr.; Leadfoot Press; Detroit, 2004; 112 pgs.
By Rayfield A. Waller
Of Christian-Lebanese descent, Minister John Saba of Livonia is deeply spiritual. He told The Michigan Citizen he has ministered in prisons and homeless shelters in Detroit and other cities. He’s taken the gospel of Christ to street people, drug addicts, and the poor. He dropped out of medical school to study ways to heal the body rather than profit from illness.“I was working on human cadavers,” he recalls, “and after my first year of that I felt a little freakish — nothing they were teaching me would stay in my head. I believed God had a higher plan for me. I became interested in the body and nutrition.”
“You are the Tabernacle of God,” from Detroit’s “Leadfoot Press, is the result of Saba’s long, ecclectic search for that higher plan. The book is a series of carefully, minutely researched meditations on divinity and the body, an eccentric but endlessly fascinating decoding of biblical text. He uses as his tools ancient Judaism, The Apocrypha, Sophism, the mystery systems, and technologies such as acoustics, chemistry, genetics, and mathematics. Precedents for Saba’s absorbing book are both ancient and modern.His method is what I call ‘techgnosticism’: a dazzling and dizzying display of various esoteric, sacred, and scientific knowledges melded into one; a radiant synthesis of higher spiritual and intellectual precept.
The book evokes in the reader a euphoria of perception. This being the culmination of 66 years, a career in real estate, nutritional supplement sales in a company he founded, 42 years of marriage to Jeanine Saba--his ‘closest friend’, and 20 odd years of intense private research in science and spirituality with the Bible and Hebrew scriptures as his basis (taking his seminary degree in 2000). The book demands as much fearlessness and mind-wracking work of a chemist or a biologist who reads it as it would of any student of divinity. The man is deep.“You are the Tabernacle” is based on Saba’s idea that our human body corresponds to the biblical ‘Tabernacle of Moses,’ which he says was “built and torn down in the Sianai dessert thousands years before modern religion.
“It doesn’t matter though,” he says, “What type of religion we speak of—the Spirit of God dwells inside all of them, and dwells inside each of us. When we all come together as one we form the tabernacle of God. Because of the utter complexity of God, we can only see bits and pieces of him in the world and ourselves. Part of us is in each one of us, and we are all him.”It gets even deeper. Saba’s book meticulously lays out commentary on biblical quotes, concordances on the history of the Holy Land, and formulas decoding geometric symbolism in the architecture of the ancient Tabernacle, comparing it to the architecture of the body’s skeletal, circulatory, organismal, and reproductive systems. Along the way, he offers intense and surprisingly technical discussions of acoustics (the Solfeggio Scale of the Gregorian Chant), genetic structure (comparing the DNA double helix to ‘Jacob’s Ladder’), ancient Ionian and Pythagorian math, and his theory that the frequency of sound (implying sound is the voice of God) can be used to heal disease.
Saba is a victim of a bizzare incident as an infant. An intruder at his family’s celebration of his christening inserted a needle into the infant Saba’s neck. The needle worked its way slowly into his heart’s myocardium muscle. Despite several surgeries that rendered his childhood handicapped and haunted by pain, the needle was never successfully removed. He now lives, he says, with a literal ‘needle in my heart.’
Yet, his faith is intact.
“I came up as a handicapped child, which taught me compassion; for Black people, for Native Americans, all oppressed people. I journeyed to Canada for the National Day of Prayer to ask permission from First Nation Tribes to pray over their land. You know why the Rouge River was called ‘rouge’? Because it once ran red with blood — Indian blood. As for my own pain, it’s only my body, this outer junk, and bondage in this prison called flesh.”Detroit, he says, “is a spiritual center — the spiritual energy here is of an important frquency. That is why I tell everyone to pray for Detroit.”
“Tabernacle” is available from www.leadfootpress.com. 313.575.9317
These are hard times.
Yet, in my absence, I have encountered and been touched by so many amazing people. One of those people is John Saba--a humanist and mysitc. He is a Lebanese-American who lives just outside of Detroit in the city of Livonia, Michigan.
Michigan, like America, is very reactionary right now. The largest Arababic/Muslim/Middle-Eastern population in America is located here in the Detroit area, in the city of Dearborn, and the large Arab-American population is an occasion for anti-Arab racism among Detroiters--even Black Detroiters. This is saddening, and outrageous. I do all I can as a university professor, journalist, artist, and intellectual, to oppose anti-Arab racism, and to my shame and dismay, many of my own race exhibit this bigotry, when what we ought to be exhibiting is solidarity with those who are now suffering the racism and abuse we have historically had to suffer in America.
As many people will know, a prominent Arab-American citizen of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was unjustly arrested by the FBI following the 911 attacks, held in confinement away from his family and even his legal counsel for more than a year, then, finally deported, even though no evidence against him was ever produced by the government. Despite the efforts of his neighbors and friends in Ann Arbor, and the efforts of defenders throughout the United States, this poor man never received justice. So much for the assumption we all had and now feel less secure about, that Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan, swaddling place of the old "Students for a Democratic Society," and home of Tom Hayden, is a progressive city.
But back to John Saba. I interviewed him for the newspaper I work for here, "The Michigan Citizen," and although anyone who wishes to can view the published review at michigancitizen.com along with all the other journalism I've done for Michigan Citizen, I want to share that review with any readers of this website who come to my corner of it. John Saba, a proud Arab-American, and a man who professes compassion for the oppression of Black people, is an example of the diversity, humanity, and beauty of Arab-Americans.
As I sit here in my office on campus I think how there are many such examples here in the Detroit area. Right across the hall from me happens to be the office of a fellow professor, Alex Shami, who also happens to be of Lebanese origin, who is a valued academic and community figure here in Detroit. John Saba is not unique.
I feel I've let down my friend, Regina Rodriguez, who inspired me to begin this blog. I haven't kept up my writing here as I promised her I would. So, this is my return, and I will make more time in the future to share my thoughts with readers, and as always, it's all dedicated to Regina, with love...
“You are the Tabernacle of God”
Author: Dr-of-Divinity, John M. Saba, Jr.; Leadfoot Press; Detroit, 2004; 112 pgs.
By Rayfield A. Waller
Of Christian-Lebanese descent, Minister John Saba of Livonia is deeply spiritual. He told The Michigan Citizen he has ministered in prisons and homeless shelters in Detroit and other cities. He’s taken the gospel of Christ to street people, drug addicts, and the poor. He dropped out of medical school to study ways to heal the body rather than profit from illness.“I was working on human cadavers,” he recalls, “and after my first year of that I felt a little freakish — nothing they were teaching me would stay in my head. I believed God had a higher plan for me. I became interested in the body and nutrition.”
“You are the Tabernacle of God,” from Detroit’s “Leadfoot Press, is the result of Saba’s long, ecclectic search for that higher plan. The book is a series of carefully, minutely researched meditations on divinity and the body, an eccentric but endlessly fascinating decoding of biblical text. He uses as his tools ancient Judaism, The Apocrypha, Sophism, the mystery systems, and technologies such as acoustics, chemistry, genetics, and mathematics. Precedents for Saba’s absorbing book are both ancient and modern.His method is what I call ‘techgnosticism’: a dazzling and dizzying display of various esoteric, sacred, and scientific knowledges melded into one; a radiant synthesis of higher spiritual and intellectual precept.
The book evokes in the reader a euphoria of perception. This being the culmination of 66 years, a career in real estate, nutritional supplement sales in a company he founded, 42 years of marriage to Jeanine Saba--his ‘closest friend’, and 20 odd years of intense private research in science and spirituality with the Bible and Hebrew scriptures as his basis (taking his seminary degree in 2000). The book demands as much fearlessness and mind-wracking work of a chemist or a biologist who reads it as it would of any student of divinity. The man is deep.“You are the Tabernacle” is based on Saba’s idea that our human body corresponds to the biblical ‘Tabernacle of Moses,’ which he says was “built and torn down in the Sianai dessert thousands years before modern religion.
“It doesn’t matter though,” he says, “What type of religion we speak of—the Spirit of God dwells inside all of them, and dwells inside each of us. When we all come together as one we form the tabernacle of God. Because of the utter complexity of God, we can only see bits and pieces of him in the world and ourselves. Part of us is in each one of us, and we are all him.”It gets even deeper. Saba’s book meticulously lays out commentary on biblical quotes, concordances on the history of the Holy Land, and formulas decoding geometric symbolism in the architecture of the ancient Tabernacle, comparing it to the architecture of the body’s skeletal, circulatory, organismal, and reproductive systems. Along the way, he offers intense and surprisingly technical discussions of acoustics (the Solfeggio Scale of the Gregorian Chant), genetic structure (comparing the DNA double helix to ‘Jacob’s Ladder’), ancient Ionian and Pythagorian math, and his theory that the frequency of sound (implying sound is the voice of God) can be used to heal disease.
Saba is a victim of a bizzare incident as an infant. An intruder at his family’s celebration of his christening inserted a needle into the infant Saba’s neck. The needle worked its way slowly into his heart’s myocardium muscle. Despite several surgeries that rendered his childhood handicapped and haunted by pain, the needle was never successfully removed. He now lives, he says, with a literal ‘needle in my heart.’
Yet, his faith is intact.
“I came up as a handicapped child, which taught me compassion; for Black people, for Native Americans, all oppressed people. I journeyed to Canada for the National Day of Prayer to ask permission from First Nation Tribes to pray over their land. You know why the Rouge River was called ‘rouge’? Because it once ran red with blood — Indian blood. As for my own pain, it’s only my body, this outer junk, and bondage in this prison called flesh.”Detroit, he says, “is a spiritual center — the spiritual energy here is of an important frquency. That is why I tell everyone to pray for Detroit.”
“Tabernacle” is available from www.leadfootpress.com. 313.575.9317
Monday, September 27, 2004
Laughter is the Best Obituary: Leni Reifenstahl and the Cult of Shamelessness
“Alles was an etwas erinnert, ist Denkmal.”
(‘Everything that reminds us of something is a memorial.’)
- Rudolf Ulrich
I woke one morning last July here in Detroit to hear and NPR broadcaster announcing the death of Walter Frentz, “Hitler’s Cameraman,” and former Luftwaffe film technician. Frentz entered Hitler’s inner circle of associates during the final years of the Reich. He died at age 96 on July 6 in the south German town of Ueberlingen, the announcer specified. During his career with the Reich Frentz visually documented the Nazism’s most powerful and infamous figures; he directed at least one film on a commission he obtained directly from Herr Hitler.
Frentz’s early days as a student in the city of Berlin in the 30’s, were remarkable for the fortunate associations he enjoyed: he met and befriended Albert Speer, who would be “Hitler’s Architect”; He likewise befriended Leni Reifenstahl, who would be “Hitler’s Director” as well as being Frentz’s future mentor. Frentz later worked at Ufa Films, the German film company now famous for having housed and nurtured a cabal of future Nazi cinema’s intelligentsia.
NPR’s report of this unremarkable death caught my attention partly because those of us who have made a study of film history will recall Frentz having worked with the far more celebrated and infamous Reifenstahl on two of her most well-known films. He was her hand-held cameraman on Sieg Des Glaubens ("Victory of the Faith"—1933/34) and Triumph des Willens (“Triumph of the Will”—1934). Frentz worked with her again on one or both of the film pair, Olympia 1. Teil–Fest der Volker (1936/38) and Olympia 2. Teil-Fest der Schönheit (1936/38), a two-part documentary of the Berlin Olympics. He was commissioned on his own by Hitler to do the Nazi propaganda film, Haende am Werk ("Hands at Work"—1936).
Apropos of Rudolph Ulrich (who provided, posthumously, the epigram affixed above), the death of Frentz ‘reminded me of something’, and was therefore of course memorial. The announcement of the death of Frentz reminded me of a similar morning in Miami, on September 9, 2003 when I woke to the voice of an NPR correspondent announcing the death of "Hitler's film maker", Leni Riefenstahl, at age 101.
Hearing of Reifenstahl’s death, who had in her latter days transformed herself into an underwater photographer rather than a documentary artist framing Nazi armies, I had found myself laughing.
When one considers the absurdity, longevity and sheer celebrity of Leni Riefenstahl’s life, the life of a brilliant woman artist whose legacy was forever twisted and sullied by her intimate association with the Third Reich, who outlived Hitler and most of her fellow Nazi groupies, who for fifty years kept popping up in the world media declaring first her disagreement with the racial supremacy doctrines of Nazism, then her regret at having been a Nazi, and then quite shamelessly declaring her refusal to go on apologizing for her own 'youthful indiscretions', considering all of this, perhaps my rueful laughter was the most appropriate response to her long, wasted life, and her ignoble death.
Ignoble, precisely because it was not a death which found her the celebrated Aryan cine frau bestride an awed world under the boot of Nazism; because she was not, upon her death, an intimate of world conquerors, nor the dicumentarianatrix of masculine power, the role she might have imagined for herself as early as her days with Ufa. Rather, she was an old woman whose latter work had featured not grand, mythic mise en scene of endless jackbooted phalanxes storming the Champs Elysees, but underwater flowers against a backdrop of depthless murk.
The Associated Press published this account of Reifenstahl’s Nazi association:
Riefenstahl, born in 1902 to an upper middleclass Berlin family, was an artistic dancer in Munich, Berlin, and Prague. But that was only the first of what biographers have called, 'the five lives' of Riefenstahl. After reportedly being thrown into a Nietzschean trance when she saw a German film on mountain climbing in the 1920's, she felt drawn to cinema art. She sought out the 'best' filmmakers in Germany, who happened also to be proto-Nazis (Nazis would be known soon being 'the best', notwithstanding the mediocrity of Goebbels), and so fell in with the German National Socialist Party.
For her 'second life' she became an actress in their films: she tracked down Herr Doktor Arnold Fanck, director of the film that had made her swoon, and presumably danced for him in private. Thus, she charmed her way first into Hitler's outer circles of artists, writers, and filmmakers, then, eventually, into the inner circles of Hitler's heart: he made her official documentarianatrix of the Nazi party.
By 1933, at age 31, she was living out her 'third life' filming the documentaries she is best known for, Triumph des Willens, her documentary film about the 1934 Nazi party congress (a testosteronic cine fantastique replete with fascist rallies, marches, and regimented spectacle), and then Olympia, the Third Reich glorifying documentary record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Her subsequent 1938 triumphal tour of America—particularly Hollywood—was marred only by the advent of Kristallnacht on November 9. When news of the burning of Jewish synagogues, beatings of Jews in the streets by gangs of SA thugs, the police, and other civic officials, and persecution of Jewish shopkeepers across Germany reached the adoring reporters gathered outside Reifenstahl’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, her plans to distribute her award winning films fell through. This of course put a damper on her thus far glorious third life.
It should be noted though, that prior to her sailing back to Germany in disgrace, Walt Disney did grant her a furtive and private interview, and that the LA Times gave her absolutely rave reviews. Disney, though a Nazi sympathizer himself, had backed out of promises to let her screen her films for him in private.
By the 40's of course, her fortunes fell even further, along with the fortunes (and heads) of a great many of 'the best'. The ordeal of going through the Nuremberg trials, an experience which necessitated her briefly having to share a cell block with some of the former big names of the Third Reich, may have been the result of American intelligence suggesting she had allowed her Reich buddies to force concentration camp prisoners to act as labor and as extras in her (it now seems ironically titled) film, Tiefland ("Low Country").
Riefenstahl escaped hanging when the American occupation forces (seemingly in contradiction to American Intelligence) decided that as an artist she should simply be 'de-Nazified' and released; but she soon found herself arrested by the French, who in their own Cartesian way were less forgiving of wayward artists who’d mingled with demons than were the Jeffersonian Americans. The French humiliated her by confiscating her film negatives, her property and possessions, and promptly re-trying her.
They eventually released her, marking her a 'fellow traveler' and Nazi sympathizer whose crimes did not quite rise to the level of earning her a hangman's noose, even if she had earned the distinction of being, ala Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, an artist of severely flawed taste in patrons.
Universally reviled and unable to continue her film career, she spent the 50’s and 60's developing her 'fourth life.' Having fallen into another Nietzschean swoon after reading Hemingway's "The Green Hills of Africa" in her 50's, Reifenstahl decided to go to Sudan to become a still photographer, and produced a series of photographic essays on her favorite African tribe, "The Nuba." Her work focused particularly on the nude bodies of the tall, muscular, and beautiful Nuba men. The overtly and somewhat oddly anthroeugenic tone of the gaze in her work has largely gone uncommented upon by critics, at least in English.
Her ‘fifth life’ was one in which she took to doing underwater photography, learning to scuba dive despite her advanced age (she was reportedly 71 years old by then, though some sources report that she was already in her 80’s). By the 1970's, a controversial discourse had arisen over Reifenstahl: was she an artist worthy of consideration simply by merit of her art, or was she a monstrously flawed woman who’d marred her own artistic contribution with her close association with a few of modern times’ most demonic political figures? As Stefen Steinberg reported on Sept 15, 2003:
The last days of her fifth and final life were filled with her love of, and desire to protect, aquatic life (quite a sharp contrast, this irruption of caring, one must conclude, to her earlier disinterest in the preservation of Jewish, Slavic, Gay, Communist, Anarchist, genetically ‘undesirable’, Lesbian, and Armenian, human life). She joined Greenpeace, and spent her professional energies on the photography of underwater environments. Her fans, keen to reinforce this kinder, gentler ex Nazi, are fond of quoting a statement she made to Cahiers du Cinema shortly after the war, as evidence of her divine dis-involvement in the quotidian realities of a material world:
A more telling quote, however, might be her statement, recounted by Matthias Schreiber and Susanne Weingarten in Die Spiegel in 1997 in their Realität interessiert mich nicht - Leni Riefenstahl über ihre Filme, ihr Schönheitsideal, ihre NS-Verstrickung und Hitler’s Wirkung auf die Menschen (Spiegel 18.08.1997):
and blood, she can apologize to them, and wait to hear their verdict."
On the morning I learned of her death I laughed. I laughed at a cold, brutal, sad truth occasioned by the death of one of the twentieth century's 'best' artists and filmmakers: that artists cannot, any more than politicians or generals can, escape taking responsibility for the things they do, the people they support, or the ideologies they devote their artworks to.
Now, some years later, with the death of the far less renowned, far less artistically gifted, and far less reviled cameraman, Walter Frentz, I am once again struck by the leveling force of evil; a force that is irresistible such that it can move even the immovable object of the cult of shamelessness. Evil can tear down not only lives and love, but can even tear down meaning, value, and significance that might have been garnered and wielded by artists such as Reifenstahl, and yes, Frentz. For, in death as in life, both were equally guilty of betraying their own talents, their own art, and by extension guilty of betraying art itself.
Perhaps the fact that Hitler was a frustrated visual artist ought to somehow illuminate the irony, tragedy, and deeper implications of all this.Yet, what I must conclude is that the ultimate tragedy, as always, is that of the victims of Nazism, and not with the venal, hapless, stupid, selfish, or mediocre fascists, artists or not, who enabled Nazism’s rampage.
(‘Everything that reminds us of something is a memorial.’)
- Rudolf Ulrich
I woke one morning last July here in Detroit to hear and NPR broadcaster announcing the death of Walter Frentz, “Hitler’s Cameraman,” and former Luftwaffe film technician. Frentz entered Hitler’s inner circle of associates during the final years of the Reich. He died at age 96 on July 6 in the south German town of Ueberlingen, the announcer specified. During his career with the Reich Frentz visually documented the Nazism’s most powerful and infamous figures; he directed at least one film on a commission he obtained directly from Herr Hitler.
Frentz’s early days as a student in the city of Berlin in the 30’s, were remarkable for the fortunate associations he enjoyed: he met and befriended Albert Speer, who would be “Hitler’s Architect”; He likewise befriended Leni Reifenstahl, who would be “Hitler’s Director” as well as being Frentz’s future mentor. Frentz later worked at Ufa Films, the German film company now famous for having housed and nurtured a cabal of future Nazi cinema’s intelligentsia.
NPR’s report of this unremarkable death caught my attention partly because those of us who have made a study of film history will recall Frentz having worked with the far more celebrated and infamous Reifenstahl on two of her most well-known films. He was her hand-held cameraman on Sieg Des Glaubens ("Victory of the Faith"—1933/34) and Triumph des Willens (“Triumph of the Will”—1934). Frentz worked with her again on one or both of the film pair, Olympia 1. Teil–Fest der Volker (1936/38) and Olympia 2. Teil-Fest der Schönheit (1936/38), a two-part documentary of the Berlin Olympics. He was commissioned on his own by Hitler to do the Nazi propaganda film, Haende am Werk ("Hands at Work"—1936).
Apropos of Rudolph Ulrich (who provided, posthumously, the epigram affixed above), the death of Frentz ‘reminded me of something’, and was therefore of course memorial. The announcement of the death of Frentz reminded me of a similar morning in Miami, on September 9, 2003 when I woke to the voice of an NPR correspondent announcing the death of "Hitler's film maker", Leni Riefenstahl, at age 101.
Hearing of Reifenstahl’s death, who had in her latter days transformed herself into an underwater photographer rather than a documentary artist framing Nazi armies, I had found myself laughing.
When one considers the absurdity, longevity and sheer celebrity of Leni Riefenstahl’s life, the life of a brilliant woman artist whose legacy was forever twisted and sullied by her intimate association with the Third Reich, who outlived Hitler and most of her fellow Nazi groupies, who for fifty years kept popping up in the world media declaring first her disagreement with the racial supremacy doctrines of Nazism, then her regret at having been a Nazi, and then quite shamelessly declaring her refusal to go on apologizing for her own 'youthful indiscretions', considering all of this, perhaps my rueful laughter was the most appropriate response to her long, wasted life, and her ignoble death.
Ignoble, precisely because it was not a death which found her the celebrated Aryan cine frau bestride an awed world under the boot of Nazism; because she was not, upon her death, an intimate of world conquerors, nor the dicumentarianatrix of masculine power, the role she might have imagined for herself as early as her days with Ufa. Rather, she was an old woman whose latter work had featured not grand, mythic mise en scene of endless jackbooted phalanxes storming the Champs Elysees, but underwater flowers against a backdrop of depthless murk.
The Associated Press published this account of Reifenstahl’s Nazi association:
Despite critical acclaim for her later photographs of the African Nuba people
and of undersea flora and fauna, she spent more than half her life trying to
live down the films she made for Hitler and…[live down] having admired the
tyrant who devastated Europe and all but eliminated its Jews. Even as late as
2002, she was investigated for Holocaust denial after she said she did not know
that Gypsies taken from concentration camps to be used as extras in one of her
wartime films died in the camps. (AP, Sept 10, 2003)
Riefenstahl, born in 1902 to an upper middleclass Berlin family, was an artistic dancer in Munich, Berlin, and Prague. But that was only the first of what biographers have called, 'the five lives' of Riefenstahl. After reportedly being thrown into a Nietzschean trance when she saw a German film on mountain climbing in the 1920's, she felt drawn to cinema art. She sought out the 'best' filmmakers in Germany, who happened also to be proto-Nazis (Nazis would be known soon being 'the best', notwithstanding the mediocrity of Goebbels), and so fell in with the German National Socialist Party.
For her 'second life' she became an actress in their films: she tracked down Herr Doktor Arnold Fanck, director of the film that had made her swoon, and presumably danced for him in private. Thus, she charmed her way first into Hitler's outer circles of artists, writers, and filmmakers, then, eventually, into the inner circles of Hitler's heart: he made her official documentarianatrix of the Nazi party.
By 1933, at age 31, she was living out her 'third life' filming the documentaries she is best known for, Triumph des Willens, her documentary film about the 1934 Nazi party congress (a testosteronic cine fantastique replete with fascist rallies, marches, and regimented spectacle), and then Olympia, the Third Reich glorifying documentary record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Her subsequent 1938 triumphal tour of America—particularly Hollywood—was marred only by the advent of Kristallnacht on November 9. When news of the burning of Jewish synagogues, beatings of Jews in the streets by gangs of SA thugs, the police, and other civic officials, and persecution of Jewish shopkeepers across Germany reached the adoring reporters gathered outside Reifenstahl’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, her plans to distribute her award winning films fell through. This of course put a damper on her thus far glorious third life.
It should be noted though, that prior to her sailing back to Germany in disgrace, Walt Disney did grant her a furtive and private interview, and that the LA Times gave her absolutely rave reviews. Disney, though a Nazi sympathizer himself, had backed out of promises to let her screen her films for him in private.
By the 40's of course, her fortunes fell even further, along with the fortunes (and heads) of a great many of 'the best'. The ordeal of going through the Nuremberg trials, an experience which necessitated her briefly having to share a cell block with some of the former big names of the Third Reich, may have been the result of American intelligence suggesting she had allowed her Reich buddies to force concentration camp prisoners to act as labor and as extras in her (it now seems ironically titled) film, Tiefland ("Low Country").
Riefenstahl escaped hanging when the American occupation forces (seemingly in contradiction to American Intelligence) decided that as an artist she should simply be 'de-Nazified' and released; but she soon found herself arrested by the French, who in their own Cartesian way were less forgiving of wayward artists who’d mingled with demons than were the Jeffersonian Americans. The French humiliated her by confiscating her film negatives, her property and possessions, and promptly re-trying her.
They eventually released her, marking her a 'fellow traveler' and Nazi sympathizer whose crimes did not quite rise to the level of earning her a hangman's noose, even if she had earned the distinction of being, ala Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, an artist of severely flawed taste in patrons.
Universally reviled and unable to continue her film career, she spent the 50’s and 60's developing her 'fourth life.' Having fallen into another Nietzschean swoon after reading Hemingway's "The Green Hills of Africa" in her 50's, Reifenstahl decided to go to Sudan to become a still photographer, and produced a series of photographic essays on her favorite African tribe, "The Nuba." Her work focused particularly on the nude bodies of the tall, muscular, and beautiful Nuba men. The overtly and somewhat oddly anthroeugenic tone of the gaze in her work has largely gone uncommented upon by critics, at least in English.
Her ‘fifth life’ was one in which she took to doing underwater photography, learning to scuba dive despite her advanced age (she was reportedly 71 years old by then, though some sources report that she was already in her 80’s). By the 1970's, a controversial discourse had arisen over Reifenstahl: was she an artist worthy of consideration simply by merit of her art, or was she a monstrously flawed woman who’d marred her own artistic contribution with her close association with a few of modern times’ most demonic political figures? As Stefen Steinberg reported on Sept 15, 2003:
To her last days, Riefenstahl…disputed the significance of her role
in promoting Nazi Germany. In memoirs and interviews, she constantly claimed she
was “naïve,” a non-political person who never joined the Nazi party and was only
interested in her art, someone who only did what many others did, and so on. In
interviews after the war, she asserted that the driving force in her life was
the search for “beauty and harmony”—“reality does not interest me.” [1] Her
career clearly shows, however, that far from being just an innocent victim of
Nazi political propaganda, she was instrumental in creating a charade of “beauty
and harmony” for the most barbaric and reactionary regime in modern history.
(World Socialist Website: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/rief-s15.shtml)
The last days of her fifth and final life were filled with her love of, and desire to protect, aquatic life (quite a sharp contrast, this irruption of caring, one must conclude, to her earlier disinterest in the preservation of Jewish, Slavic, Gay, Communist, Anarchist, genetically ‘undesirable’, Lesbian, and Armenian, human life). She joined Greenpeace, and spent her professional energies on the photography of underwater environments. Her fans, keen to reinforce this kinder, gentler ex Nazi, are fond of quoting a statement she made to Cahiers du Cinema shortly after the war, as evidence of her divine dis-involvement in the quotidian realities of a material world:
“I can simply say that I feel spontaneously attracted by everything
that is beautiful... It comes from the unconscious and not from my knowledge...
Whatever is purely realistic, slice of life, which is average, quotidian doesn’t
interest me... I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is
living. I seek harmony.”
A more telling quote, however, might be her statement, recounted by Matthias Schreiber and Susanne Weingarten in Die Spiegel in 1997 in their Realität interessiert mich nicht - Leni Riefenstahl über ihre Filme, ihr Schönheitsideal, ihre NS-Verstrickung und Hitler’s Wirkung auf die Menschen (Spiegel 18.08.1997):
"When the ashes of the Warsaw Ghetto rise again as fleshQuestion: ‘When you photograph a Greek temple and at the side there
is a pile of rubbish, would you leave the rubbish out?’
Riefenstahl: ‘Definitely, I am not interested in reality.'
In considering the now global, still revolving debate over whether or not Reifenstahl sufficiently ‘apologized’ for associating with Nazism through her later, more gentle life and later more facile work, and when, if ever, she will be forgiven, it is clear that Reifenstahl still does occupy a peculiar historical position buttressed by a cult of shameless admirers. It is the very
same historical position that Herr Albert Speer had himself occupied for quite some time following Nuremberg. Speer has only recently been deposed from that position. It is, to name the thing, the position of sublime detachment. This peculiar detachment from past association with horror can accrue to certain figures even after death. It bestows unsullied freedom from the harsher judgments of history regarding the figure’s past support for or even participation in mass brutality.
That support and participation is minimized by fervent supporters as being mere indiscretion. It is a position enjoyed into posthumous perpetuity by Speer, Heidegger, Paul de Man, and lately Ronald Reagan, to name a few.
Yet, Somewhere in my wandering research after Reifenstahl’s death I stumbled across a bbs internet site devoted to holocaust survivors, which contained this (apparently anonymous) trenchant reply to the question of when her apology will be accepted:
and blood, she can apologize to them, and wait to hear their verdict."
On the morning I learned of her death I laughed. I laughed at a cold, brutal, sad truth occasioned by the death of one of the twentieth century's 'best' artists and filmmakers: that artists cannot, any more than politicians or generals can, escape taking responsibility for the things they do, the people they support, or the ideologies they devote their artworks to.
Now, some years later, with the death of the far less renowned, far less artistically gifted, and far less reviled cameraman, Walter Frentz, I am once again struck by the leveling force of evil; a force that is irresistible such that it can move even the immovable object of the cult of shamelessness. Evil can tear down not only lives and love, but can even tear down meaning, value, and significance that might have been garnered and wielded by artists such as Reifenstahl, and yes, Frentz. For, in death as in life, both were equally guilty of betraying their own talents, their own art, and by extension guilty of betraying art itself.
Perhaps the fact that Hitler was a frustrated visual artist ought to somehow illuminate the irony, tragedy, and deeper implications of all this.Yet, what I must conclude is that the ultimate tragedy, as always, is that of the victims of Nazism, and not with the venal, hapless, stupid, selfish, or mediocre fascists, artists or not, who enabled Nazism’s rampage.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Regina Rodriguez
Regina Rodriguez is the sister I always wished I'd had.
That doesn't mean I don't love my own sisters, Katherine and Regina Rene. They're both intelligent, beautiful, and hard-working, like good working-class sisters ought to be. The only thing is that both of them are very typical working-class Black women with bourgeois aspirations in that they both are very preoccupied with money, status, security, and conventionality. They and the rest of my family love me, but both of them and most of my family too, are a mystified by the fact that I have college degrees but that I never used them to get a good, cut throat corporate job: I have no Mercedes, I don't live in the suburbs of Detroit and have no plans to ever do so (Regina has been in a suburban apartment for a few years now). I don't spend much money on clothes, and I don't own a pastel tuxedo for weddings (I don't even go to weddings and if I did go to weddings, the last one I would want to go to would be a working-class Afrikan-American wedding. Before you assume that statement is self-hating just think about the fact that I mentioned 'pastel tuxedos' just a moment ago. Yeah. Get my point?).
I work as a low-paid journalist ( a step down from the professor posts I held at several universities and walked away from recently--not that 'professor' wasn't already questionable in my sisters' minds, but at least I made more money). I spend all my time reading books, going to museums and films, and sitting in my apartment writing.
My sisters' attitude toward me is vaguely disapproving. I can tell what they and others in my family are thinking: is this why we struggled to make a way in America, guarding our Mandinka/Malian/Choctaw Indian heritage? So that Ray can be a bum? Is this why we rose from slavery, survived the Ku Klux Klan, suffered through Jim Crow? Is this why our family, the Wallers and the Dukeses, left Alabama and migrated to the North to sweat in the factories, steel mills, and streets of Detroit? So Ray can sit around reading books?
Regina probably doesn't remember, but I asked her this question one day thirteen years ago or something like that, standing with her in the kitchen of "Stuart Little", the group house where she lived with various other neo-hippies, vegetarians, pacifists, and humanists, at the edge of Cornell University's campus. She lived there for years, back when we were graduate students at Cornell. At one point before I left Cornell I lived in my own collectivist, socialist group house--"The Watermargin" down on West Campus at the foot of Libe slope. When I asked Regina the question, a question I knew she could relate to because she too, had grown up on the shoulders of her own Mayan-Aztec ancestors, and ethnic grandparents and parents who fought civil rights battles, overcame racism, and struggled to send her to school and support her in her journey off to an Ivy League paradise.
"Did our ancestors suffer, sacrifice and struggle just so we could come here and read books, Regina?" I asked her.
She stopped chopping vegetables, turned to me, and stared at me with that blank, dark-eyed gaze of her's, and after a long moment, said, "Damn, Ray. I don't know." Then she turned back to chopping vegetables for the dinner she was cooking that night for the house.
That was the lesson Regina, my sister, was always teaching me: that the answer to the question of life is life itself, is to live. Breathe (as Marcel Duchamp would say), listen to music, and dance. Philosophy is only as good as what it can do for you. Like Emma Goldman, Regina was always the kind of woman who wouldn't want to participate in any revolution that wouldn't allow her to dance. There were times I would be standing in line with dozens of other graduate students outside of a lecture hall waiting to see some luminary like Jacques Derrida, Ali Mazrui, or Tama Janowitz. Off down the line I would hear funk music. I would look in the direction of the jams and see Regina, in her red dress, her boom box sitting on the ground, blasting funk music, and Regina would be dancing. Students, faculty, and the errant, peripatetic intellectual dead-heads that used to shuttle back and forth between Ivy League campuses following the luminaries, would all be staring stupidly at her, not joining in, but not able to look away from her either. She was so alive, so lacking a shit to give about them all that they just had to look.
She sat through those seminars, classes and lectures just like me, taught by people like Henry Louis "Skip" Gates (he was my doctoral chair, and I think he might have been Regina's too, for a while), Biodun Jeyifo, Jonathan Culler (for such a brilliant, famous man, he was also a kind man, and a Harrison Ford look-alike), Satya Mohanty (give some people a colonized British accent and they think they ain't colored no more), and Wole Soyinka (Soyinka, a humble and gentle man, that Nobel prize winning rascal; he was somewhat like Regina--he'd wander the campus in that blue jean jacket of his, in worn pants and shoes, demanding of every face in the crowd he thought he recognized from his graduate seminar classes, in that Downing Street and Savile Row British accent of his, 'You there! See here, where's Skip Gates' office??' He was definitely an unassuming man, British accent notwithstanding). She sat through all those classes, studied with a bunch of those famous people, so she was not anti-intellectual, or any less smart than the rest of us. She just had no patience for bullshit, and she was very, very preoccupied not with becoming a professor and getting tenure and a corner office, but with being alive.
She and I shared secrets, hung out, laughed, and backed each other up. We did a few things that nobody knows about but us, and could have ended up in jail if anyone had found out. Despite she and I both being in relationships with other people, I thought for a while that I was in love with Regina. But the closer I got to her, and the more I loved her, the more I realized that she was simply the sister I'd always wanted. She was my buddy, my confessor, my partner, my homegirl. She too, had been consecrated in the fire of President Johnson's "Great Society," and she too, had felt the heat of revolutionary culture around the edges of her childhood in California. With me, it had been my childhood in Michigan. With her, it was La Raza she grew up under the protection of. With me, it had been Black Power.
She was all about courage; about being herself, speaking in her own voice, wearing her own face, no matter what. I took that courage with me when I finally left Cornell, took it everywhere I went. Though Regina and I were not in touch for a decade, she was always with me, I took her with me in my heart. She went with me to Paris and the fifth arrondissement, to Durban and the Transkei bridge, and to Toronto up and down Dundas Street, and to Brixton where I ran into some cats who'd been in Cornell's Africana Studies program and who asked me, "Whatever happened to that little woman with the big heart, that friend of yours, Regina?"
One day I sat on Libe Slope with her under that beautiful blue, high above sea-level sky which disappeared off into the distance over West Campus and seemed to drop downward onto Ithaca Route 13, way down below at the bottom the hill. Off further were the mountains, gleaming in the sunlight. She was crying, because of some stupid, cruel, racist thing that had been said to her by some petrified, dried-up, classist hag on the faculty who felt it her precious duty to put a dark haired, dark eyed brown Chicana down lest that Chicana, and all the other pickaninnies on campus began thinking we were as important or that our cultures were as important as Chaucer or whatever. Regina seemed to bring out cruelty in some people, because she was so unwilling to stop being alive. Because so many of them had become zombies and wanted to use young people to replicate their academic, zombie culture. After I'd become a professor myself I was even more appalled to see this process on university campuses than I'd been to see it as a graduate student.
I held Regina in my arms as she cried, and felt all that life, passion, and vulnerability. One thing I'd come to understand about and learn from Regina was that vulnerability is always the price we pay for courage, and not just the courage of rushing into a burning house to rescue babies, but the far more difficult courage of walking around speaking in your own voice, unashamed. When you allow yourself to be vulnerable, somebody will always come along trying their best to break your back just because they think they see an opportunity to do so. She had been a model for courage to me for all the years we were together on that campus. So I held her, and lied to her that everything would be okay, and in that moment I had the sister I had always wanted. The sister I could look up to, and depend on, and stand by, who'd always stand by me.
I'll always remember the times I would drop Regina off at Stuart Little on the way home to my apartment. Just before I would turn to head off down the steep 45 degree angle hill that led down off the hill downtown to Ithaca and my place on West Buffalo Street, she would call out to me, "stay black", and I would call back, "stay brown", and then I'd head off down the hill.
Happy Birthday, Regina, and stay brown.
That doesn't mean I don't love my own sisters, Katherine and Regina Rene. They're both intelligent, beautiful, and hard-working, like good working-class sisters ought to be. The only thing is that both of them are very typical working-class Black women with bourgeois aspirations in that they both are very preoccupied with money, status, security, and conventionality. They and the rest of my family love me, but both of them and most of my family too, are a mystified by the fact that I have college degrees but that I never used them to get a good, cut throat corporate job: I have no Mercedes, I don't live in the suburbs of Detroit and have no plans to ever do so (Regina has been in a suburban apartment for a few years now). I don't spend much money on clothes, and I don't own a pastel tuxedo for weddings (I don't even go to weddings and if I did go to weddings, the last one I would want to go to would be a working-class Afrikan-American wedding. Before you assume that statement is self-hating just think about the fact that I mentioned 'pastel tuxedos' just a moment ago. Yeah. Get my point?).
I work as a low-paid journalist ( a step down from the professor posts I held at several universities and walked away from recently--not that 'professor' wasn't already questionable in my sisters' minds, but at least I made more money). I spend all my time reading books, going to museums and films, and sitting in my apartment writing.
My sisters' attitude toward me is vaguely disapproving. I can tell what they and others in my family are thinking: is this why we struggled to make a way in America, guarding our Mandinka/Malian/Choctaw Indian heritage? So that Ray can be a bum? Is this why we rose from slavery, survived the Ku Klux Klan, suffered through Jim Crow? Is this why our family, the Wallers and the Dukeses, left Alabama and migrated to the North to sweat in the factories, steel mills, and streets of Detroit? So Ray can sit around reading books?
Regina probably doesn't remember, but I asked her this question one day thirteen years ago or something like that, standing with her in the kitchen of "Stuart Little", the group house where she lived with various other neo-hippies, vegetarians, pacifists, and humanists, at the edge of Cornell University's campus. She lived there for years, back when we were graduate students at Cornell. At one point before I left Cornell I lived in my own collectivist, socialist group house--"The Watermargin" down on West Campus at the foot of Libe slope. When I asked Regina the question, a question I knew she could relate to because she too, had grown up on the shoulders of her own Mayan-Aztec ancestors, and ethnic grandparents and parents who fought civil rights battles, overcame racism, and struggled to send her to school and support her in her journey off to an Ivy League paradise.
"Did our ancestors suffer, sacrifice and struggle just so we could come here and read books, Regina?" I asked her.
She stopped chopping vegetables, turned to me, and stared at me with that blank, dark-eyed gaze of her's, and after a long moment, said, "Damn, Ray. I don't know." Then she turned back to chopping vegetables for the dinner she was cooking that night for the house.
That was the lesson Regina, my sister, was always teaching me: that the answer to the question of life is life itself, is to live. Breathe (as Marcel Duchamp would say), listen to music, and dance. Philosophy is only as good as what it can do for you. Like Emma Goldman, Regina was always the kind of woman who wouldn't want to participate in any revolution that wouldn't allow her to dance. There were times I would be standing in line with dozens of other graduate students outside of a lecture hall waiting to see some luminary like Jacques Derrida, Ali Mazrui, or Tama Janowitz. Off down the line I would hear funk music. I would look in the direction of the jams and see Regina, in her red dress, her boom box sitting on the ground, blasting funk music, and Regina would be dancing. Students, faculty, and the errant, peripatetic intellectual dead-heads that used to shuttle back and forth between Ivy League campuses following the luminaries, would all be staring stupidly at her, not joining in, but not able to look away from her either. She was so alive, so lacking a shit to give about them all that they just had to look.
She sat through those seminars, classes and lectures just like me, taught by people like Henry Louis "Skip" Gates (he was my doctoral chair, and I think he might have been Regina's too, for a while), Biodun Jeyifo, Jonathan Culler (for such a brilliant, famous man, he was also a kind man, and a Harrison Ford look-alike), Satya Mohanty (give some people a colonized British accent and they think they ain't colored no more), and Wole Soyinka (Soyinka, a humble and gentle man, that Nobel prize winning rascal; he was somewhat like Regina--he'd wander the campus in that blue jean jacket of his, in worn pants and shoes, demanding of every face in the crowd he thought he recognized from his graduate seminar classes, in that Downing Street and Savile Row British accent of his, 'You there! See here, where's Skip Gates' office??' He was definitely an unassuming man, British accent notwithstanding). She sat through all those classes, studied with a bunch of those famous people, so she was not anti-intellectual, or any less smart than the rest of us. She just had no patience for bullshit, and she was very, very preoccupied not with becoming a professor and getting tenure and a corner office, but with being alive.
She and I shared secrets, hung out, laughed, and backed each other up. We did a few things that nobody knows about but us, and could have ended up in jail if anyone had found out. Despite she and I both being in relationships with other people, I thought for a while that I was in love with Regina. But the closer I got to her, and the more I loved her, the more I realized that she was simply the sister I'd always wanted. She was my buddy, my confessor, my partner, my homegirl. She too, had been consecrated in the fire of President Johnson's "Great Society," and she too, had felt the heat of revolutionary culture around the edges of her childhood in California. With me, it had been my childhood in Michigan. With her, it was La Raza she grew up under the protection of. With me, it had been Black Power.
She was all about courage; about being herself, speaking in her own voice, wearing her own face, no matter what. I took that courage with me when I finally left Cornell, took it everywhere I went. Though Regina and I were not in touch for a decade, she was always with me, I took her with me in my heart. She went with me to Paris and the fifth arrondissement, to Durban and the Transkei bridge, and to Toronto up and down Dundas Street, and to Brixton where I ran into some cats who'd been in Cornell's Africana Studies program and who asked me, "Whatever happened to that little woman with the big heart, that friend of yours, Regina?"
One day I sat on Libe Slope with her under that beautiful blue, high above sea-level sky which disappeared off into the distance over West Campus and seemed to drop downward onto Ithaca Route 13, way down below at the bottom the hill. Off further were the mountains, gleaming in the sunlight. She was crying, because of some stupid, cruel, racist thing that had been said to her by some petrified, dried-up, classist hag on the faculty who felt it her precious duty to put a dark haired, dark eyed brown Chicana down lest that Chicana, and all the other pickaninnies on campus began thinking we were as important or that our cultures were as important as Chaucer or whatever. Regina seemed to bring out cruelty in some people, because she was so unwilling to stop being alive. Because so many of them had become zombies and wanted to use young people to replicate their academic, zombie culture. After I'd become a professor myself I was even more appalled to see this process on university campuses than I'd been to see it as a graduate student.
I held Regina in my arms as she cried, and felt all that life, passion, and vulnerability. One thing I'd come to understand about and learn from Regina was that vulnerability is always the price we pay for courage, and not just the courage of rushing into a burning house to rescue babies, but the far more difficult courage of walking around speaking in your own voice, unashamed. When you allow yourself to be vulnerable, somebody will always come along trying their best to break your back just because they think they see an opportunity to do so. She had been a model for courage to me for all the years we were together on that campus. So I held her, and lied to her that everything would be okay, and in that moment I had the sister I had always wanted. The sister I could look up to, and depend on, and stand by, who'd always stand by me.
I'll always remember the times I would drop Regina off at Stuart Little on the way home to my apartment. Just before I would turn to head off down the steep 45 degree angle hill that led down off the hill downtown to Ithaca and my place on West Buffalo Street, she would call out to me, "stay black", and I would call back, "stay brown", and then I'd head off down the hill.
Happy Birthday, Regina, and stay brown.
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Viva Brando!
1. For Brando
With Marlon Brando dead, I’ve a dull ache in my chest at the thought of a man of such genius, energy and talent having joined the long line of souls who’ve passed through this place on their way back to the dust that all flesh is heir to. If Marlon can die, I thought when I heard the news, if Marlon can lay down and die then it really is true that we all, we writers, artists, musicians, and the like, are someday really going to lay down for that long dirt nap. So we aren't immortal after all, are we?
Sure, Orson Welles dying with Kikki in his arms back in 1985 was a kick in the head, but we had always suspected, hadn’t we, even way back around the time of A Touch of Evil (1966), that Orson was just such stuff as bye-bye was made of? Orson's life was always a way too hot medium. He was intense and reckless, an enfant terrible burning up years of creativity with hustling and globe trotting with that state of panic he was always in; always trying to raise funds to make his movies by hook or crook, fighting the noose around his neck but somehow always tied to the very forces that he’d rebelled against. He payed a long, hard price for having stuck his young thumb into William Randolph Hearst’s wealthy eye with Citizen Kane (1941). And in the end, once he'd grown fat, he was like a burned out acetyline torche—spent, resigned, creeping around Burbank in that stage shawl of his, clutching a huge unlit Cuban cigar, a ghost sitting on Johnny Carson’s couch even if still in possession of a sharp wit and venemon.
Compared to Orson, Marlon's life though, was a cool medium. There was never a noose around Marlon’s neck. He was not tied to anyone or to anything, at least not as a cinematic artist he wasn’t, and never could be. He was never in ‘rebellion’, he merely played rebels on screen. He never cared enough about cinema or about Hollywood and the money-men running it to bother to rebel. Where on some level Orson always wanted in his heart of hearts to be taken seriously, even to be accepted on his own terms, Brando never gave a rat’s ass who did or did not accept him. He made his own terms, and he lived with them, on his own. Rather than being in rebellion against stati quo, he was in and maintained always a profound sense of disinterest, like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Dean Martin, Doris Lessing, and Miles Davis. That’s what made Marlon 'dangerous': his will toward freedom. And once he had grown fat he was still 'dangerous'. We still talked about him, speculated about his intentions. We held our breath waiting for him to 'come back' (and he did, twice, when he acted a post modern patiche of Vito Corleone in The Freshman (1990) with Mathew Broderick and when he acted his own dissipation in The Score (2001) with Deniro). Sean Penn still hung out with him on Marlon’s Pacific island. He was never brought to heel by the pezzonovante (Italian, translation: 90mm gun--'big shot') who tried all his life to domesticate him. He didn’t crawl into court when his son, Christian bit off a prison sentence for murder, but rather held his head up with dignity and humanity as he testified before the jury as a character witness. Critics still venerated him, and he never lowered himself to living as a has-been in the Hollywood colony of retirees who would wander down the steep, goatway of Mulholland Drive in early model Bentleys to turn up pasty faced on Johnny’s couch.
He came out of retirement for the last time to do The Score, an overtly allegorical story about a retired thief (Deniro) forced out of retirement by a young upstart thief (the powerful, then young Ed Norton) in order to steal a priceless (get this) scepter. The overt allegorical material has to do of course with the lineage of the grandfather (Brando), the son (Deniro), and the grandson (Norton). The resonance is obvious but nevertheless poignant thanks to the generosity of Deniro and Brando, whose scenes strip bare the old thief's (that is to say, the actor's, the father's) anxiety over usurpation. The scepter represents, of course, the primal, and sovereign claim to patriarchal authority, youth, and power. It is the son’s by natural right (Ed Norton's natural right), and the father and grandfather both know it. Even as they plot together to defeat the boy-thief Deniro and Brando know they are only buying time which must be repaid. Deniro and Brando both play on the implied anxiety of loss of celebrity, of youth, of life force. Even fat, Brando languidly twists the heads off his scenes and, in Brando fashion, turns mundanity and cliché inside out, investing the role and his lines with a self reflexive display of what a has-been would be like as an underworld mover and shaker all out of moves with nothing left but the shakes. With Deniro giving him plenty of room without a hint of genuflection, Marlon invests his lines with a laconic anomie. As he uses his own body, his own dissipation and fatigue to draw a character whose bathos underscores the pitiable end that thieves and actor alike must sooner or later accept if they fail to die young, as James Dean did.
But it isn’t really pity Brando is trying to conjur with the performance, it’s dread. In the character Brando sketches here (for it is just a sketch, not a wrenching, fully realized Method creation of the type Brando had constructed in his youth) we recognize the mortality we all have got to take a gut full of someday, and a Method actor like Brando clearly couldn’t have passed up the chance to tap into even this final portion of his life and to burn it as creative fuel—to burn even his own aging, mortal body, his own loss of vanity, dignity, and pride. This quiet, mundane role is, for all the mundanity of it, one of the the scariest screen performance I ever saw him in, almost as scary as Orson Welles’ incredibly courageous performance in A Touch of Evil (1958), wherein he bares his own personal vulnerabilty, rot, and aging pain. Brando’s grandfather thief is a sort of companion to the aching vulnerabilty of his earlier characterization, in Aurther Penn’s The Chase (1966), of an ethical small town police chief who undergoes a gang beating by corrupt citizens outraged at his ethics.
That gang beating in fact raises the semiotic of gang rape, and gives pictorial representation to a type of feminine vulnerability in Brando which I suspect was always an undertone to his film image as well as an element in the odd cruelty that critics and fans alike heaped upon him during his career (a symbological misogeny?). There was a soulful trait to him, at times even a pulchritude and full-lipped handsomeness to Brando in his youth—a beauty just dangerously short of female which was, as with Dean and Sal Mineo before him, a key to his ability to tap into deep seated audience responses. To this day his work taps into both our capacity to love him and to hate him. It was something he played upon not to enhance his ‘celebrity’ but rather to enhance his ability to construct characters we couldn’t help but feel something about—ergo the sadness he can evoke with his characterization of the grandfather thief, his final role.
* * *
It occurs to me that many of the myths about Brando will ineluctably be rolled out now, but he has made his final escape—he won’t hear any of in death just as he ignored it all in life. Because he remained aloof from it all, he died free and clear, his own man, his own human being. So it is left to us who admired his art to respond to the dehumanized, demonized, simulation Brando the Hollywood power structure will be rolling out in the wake of Brando's escape, supported by the mass media and entertainment journalism. Let’s start with the myth that Brando was a ‘failed genius’ who squandered his gifts; an actor with a tragically flawed filmography. With this first set of myths we’ll look at, critics and fans were prone to see Brando’s filmography as uneven, as sloppy. As an actor he was seen as being in some cases, and more and more after the 50's, wild, foolish, undisciplined, self-indulgent, doing work which failed to fulfill he potential genius, and which would have come to more merit if only someone had been better able to take him in hand, to control his raw energies. When one think about it this line of reasoning sounds a much like the attitude Vatican flaks took toward Michelangelo when he refused to act as they wanted him to, doesn’t it?
2. Post Modernity and Brando’s Film Roles
First of all, Godfather (1972) and Apocolypse Now (1979), while brilliant roles, were and are not true markers of the depth and the breadth of Brando’s work, nor are they the truest keys to understanding the greater implications of the evolution of his project as an actor. Brando, like Thomas Pynchon, Stanley Kubrick, Richard Pryor, and Dean Martin, was a post modern artist. If one does not know why I should choose to conflate these particular and diverse artists and does not understand why Dean Martin would included, one ought to study Umberto Eco, Venturi, Frederick Jameson, and well, to listen to Dino, Sammy, and Frankie.
Godfather and Apocalypse though they had certain post modern elements, were not films that could have contained or absorbed Brando’s deliberate, post modern distortions, not in the sense that Burn! (1970), The Missouri Breaks (1976), or Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) could. Nor did Brando deign to distort these two roles in a post modern manner, as he had distorted many of his earlier roles. He deliberately did not carry out post modern distortions of his acting of Corleone and of Kurtz, and I believe that this was so because he and director Francis Ford Coppola must have decided that the characters ought to be played with an orthodox dramatic treatment. The gestalts of The Godfather and of Apocolypse Now were more important to their cinematic a-ffect and execution than was the single element of Brando’s acting of his own individual characters. The Godfather in particular, was an ensemble work of art consisting of multiple contributions from a host of powerful actors, and from several technical artists.
That is to say the dialectical conjunction of screenwriting and direction (Puzo and Coppola), production design (Dean Tavoularis), editing, mise-en-scene, soundtrack, score (Nino Rota), and editing was equally crucial in creating a whole artwork. Brando as a result did not innovate very much in the two roles most often identified with him. Because he played these roles very straight, Hollywood and the mass media have always displayed a willingness to mytholize the two portrayels. These two films were eventual commercial and critical successes, yes, but Brando had already done the bulk (though not all) of his most radical and most challenging work by the time the two films came along, and so in a very real sense, the roles of Vito Corleone and Colonel Kurtz were, like his scenes with Dinero in The Score, merely examples of the traces of his more radical self.
Again, Brando was a post modernist. Early on. I mean fresh out of the Stella Adler method acting stable. He was post modern even in the original stage production of Streetcar. Many critics early on, and some even now mistakenly call Brando the inheritor of the inarticulate rage and angst of James Dean, but despite the outward resemblences between them (after all, Dean too, came out of Adler’s Method mill) Brando was neither inarticulate nor was he angst ridden or raging. He merely played those things. Dean lived them. Thus Dean turned his Porsche Spider over on September 30, 1955 turned it into mangled wreckage, and in the process killed himself. Brando’s cinematic portrayels of plakangst were always rationalized, planned, and executed as artistic statements or even as artistic experiments or artistic whims. His art was not crazed, wild, or self-indulgent, because he never took film or himself that seriously in the first place. Though he could play very orthodox, Adlerian and Stanislovskian roles, as in the film version of Streetcar (1951), The Chase (1966), and On the Waterfront (1954), and though he could even play classical with the best Shakespearian actors, as in Julius Caesar (1953), he conciously twisted, distorted, and turned inside-out many of the characters he played and many of the lines he delivered. At least some of the time and particularly early in Brando’s career critics felt the need to take (or simply were too stupid to avoid taking) this as being evidence of Brando’s ‘primal energy,’ his ‘youthful power’ and ‘masculine energy’, as if he were the reincarnation of Dean, or brother to the unbalanced, emotionally disheveled Sal Mineo (another Hollywood, agnst ridden martyr).
Later, of course, and in direct proportion to the degree that they were invested in the supposed ‘integrity’ and ‘coherence’ of the particular characters Brando had played, distorted, or deconstructed, critics felt the need to denounce this ‘wild energy’ as ‘self desructive’ and to denounce Brando himself as a reckless killer of dramatic a-ffect and of the dramatic quality of the films he ‘wrecked’ with his ‘antics.’ He was depicted as willfully destroying his own artform.
Even the brilliant and insightful film critic, Pauline Kael who invented literate American film criticism with her insistance upon intellectual rigor in the analysis of cinema just as if it were an artform on par with painting, dance, literature, and music (artforms that film in fact subsumes in a dialectical gestalt) denounced Brando as a ‘self parodying comedian’ for his post modern antics on screen in Mutiny on the Bounty, though she later rescinded her denunciation after seeing him in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), saying of Brando’s performance, “"Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form". In reaction to Mutiny however she’s written of Brando, in a March 1966 Atlantic Monthly article entitled, “Marlon Brando: An American Hero” that the ideal 1950’s Brando had disappeared and that the disappearrance ought to be mourned becaused of the virtues of what the 50’s Brando had represented:
Brando represented a reaction against the post-war mania for security. As a protagonist, the Brando of the early fifties had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster leader and the outlaw. He was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap. (In England it was thought that The Wild One would incite adolescents to violence.) There was a sense of excitement, of danger in his presence, but perhaps his special appeal was in a kind of simple conceit, the conceit of tough kids. (©. 1966 P. Kael)
The irony here of course is that the very qualities Kael here romantically idealizes in Brando (the James Dean-esque, Method inspired rebellion against authority, the excitement, and the quality of being ‘strong enough not to take the crap’) are the very qualities that drove him to leave the 50’s behind, and to deconstruct the Method, to parody his earlier persona. Brando, unlike the Dean of the 50's, did not die, did not turn over his car. In fact he climbed off the motorcycle of The Wild One (1953), unzipped the leather jacket and went on, something that entailed his going beyond Dean and Stella Adler. Kael further writes of Mutiny on the Bounty that,
In the action sequences he's uninteresting, not handsome or athletic enough to be a stock romantic adventure hero. He seems more eccentric than heroic, with his bizarre stance, his head held up pugnaciously, his face unlined in a peculiar bloated, waxen way. He's like a short, flabby tenor wandering around the stage and not singing: you wonder what he's doing there. (©. 1966 P. Kael)
Which is Ironic, actually, because if one thinks a bit about it one realizes that given both the class history and maritime history of Great Britain, Brando's choices in playing Fletcher Christian this way could arguably be said to ring true. It is at least possible to imagine that Christian might have been a spoiled, priviledged aesthete. British officers, who wielded the power of life and death over seamen in the British navy due to strict class priviledge in the time period Mutiny focuses upon might very well come off to us now as frilly, pouting, and effete (Brando's Mr. Christian). Likewise, Christian, a truly highborn British officer could certainly be imagined as a man who might be in conflict with a lowborn superior officer like Bligh, who might resent his junior officer being simultaneously his social better. Thus, Bligh the pompous bully. At the very least, the dramatic tension Brando's portrayal creates takes a cliché role and injects it with energy that is even now memorable. And that is the point: Brando often sought to create tension through counter point, obtusion, negative capability, and through unexpected treatments of his roles. He varied tone, rhythm, pace, and pitch, sometimes abrasively so, in the way a jazz musician would, using improvisation, humor, and even atonality to destroy and recreate his roles, and destroy and recreate ours and his own expectations of those roles. In the jazz aesthetic, which values rigorous technical ability yet also decisively priviledges the innovative over the orthodox, this is called improvisation and interpolation. Like Miles Davis did at times, Brando would do the equivalent of turning his back on the audience.
Looking up at that broad back on the wide screen, Kael is as offended as her counterpart jazz critics were over Miles Davis. To add epitaph to injury, she goes on further to say of Brando's very next role in The Ugly American (1963), that "When he submerges himself in the role, the movie dies on the screen." Both Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Ugly American, indeed, were inaugural performances for Brando, introducing that parodic, "head held up pugnaciously, face unlined in a peculiar bloated, waxen way" as well as the prominence of "his bull neck, so out of character," as Kael calls it and as the neck first appears in Ugly American. This parodic use of his own body became a sort of trademark look for the larger parodic project Brando invented for himself in the 1960's. It became also, the image that a thousand cartoonists, critics, and detractors reduced Brando to in their rush to declare him a burn-out, a sell-out, and a has-been. Mutiny, in which Brando plays British naval officer Christian as a sort of peeved and put upon fop rather than a strong, virile tragic hero as, say, Clark Gable had played him earlier, is one of the signal moments of the agony critics expressed over Brando's antics. Further, the sincerely classical actor Trevor Howard's interpretation of Captain Bligh's brutal demeanor was based on Howard's attempt to play Captain Bligh's class antagonism, arising from Bligh's identity as an insecure, lowborn Brit who has risen to class legitimacy but is not quite confident enough in his authority and so must underline his military power with cruelty. Howard's is a nuanced, insightful performance, one which critics felt made Brando's reductio ad absurdum all the more insufferable inasmuch as it ruins Howard's more manly display of orthodox acting skills.
Perhaps what is most disappointing about Kael's admittedly understandable chagrin with Brando's choices is the unfortunate truth that, for all her candor, wit, and penetrating insight, for all her intellectual girth, Kael's 60's critique of Brando nevertheless offers an example of the critic typically lagging behind the artist: Brando took an artist's leap out far past the scope of Kael and her critic's vision, and into a post modern consciousness that she perhaps did not reach until 9 years later when she raved about the very same mercurial, parodic, bull-necked (and bare-assed) Brando of Last Tango In Paris. Still, Kael definitely wrote for an entire generation of critical response (albeit far more articulately than most of the critics she spoke for) when she wrote that,
Brando's career illustrates something much more basic: the destruction of meaning in movies: Perhaps Brando has been driven to this self-parody so soon because of his imaginative strength and because of that magnetism that makes him so compelling an expression of American conflicts. His greatness is in a range that is too disturbing to be encompassed by regular movies (©. 1963 P Kael).
That leads to the second set of myths critics and fans erected around Brando and his work: that he was insane, unstable, emotionally disturbed, that he was, in short, indistinguishable as a person from the film roles he created.
3. Post Modernity and Brando's Psyche
While the Hollywood system, backed by critics of varying sophistication needed to pretend that the essence of the meaning of Brando's work was to be found in the fact that he'd begun his career as some sort of furious and brutal savage who stunned audiences with a primordial energy in The Wild One, the truth, as I have argued above, was far more interesting than that and far more complex. Brando was a thoughtful man and a thoughtful artist who sought, like a jazz musician would, to overcome cliché, to create new ways of feeling and thinking in his work, and to synthesize new cinematic experience and indeed, to simply have a good time in the act of play. All this he did through what was partly a new approach to The Method and its technique of plundering the actor's psyche.
What I mean in fact is that The Method, which allowed actors who studied and practiced it to create intense cinematic possibilities through the use of the technique of 'emotional recall' and through the application of raw emotion the actor has delved into her own memories and neuroses to find, was, for all its energy and innovation, a dead end for Brando. He knew, one suspects, one should think he absolutely did know in fact, that James Dean had taken the more obvious, raw, and more powerful points of Method acting to it's ultimate and extreme end with Giant (1956-released after Dean's death) and with Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Brando was smart enough to know that he could not and should not wish to, replicate, out shout, out miserate, and out contort James Dean's emotionally wrenching, over-the-top kamikaze performances. If James Dean was Charlie Parker (with Sal Mineo perhaps as Dean's Chick Webb) then Brando was certainly, as I've already implied, a lot like Miles Davis. Though Miles was present at the birth of Bebop he had no desire to spend his artistic career in the wake of the meteoric vector of his compatriot, Charles Parker. As he himself has indicated in interviews and in his autobiography, Miles saw little value in continuing with classic Bebop after Bird's death, though critics all expected him to carry on Bird's project. Bebop's conceptual, aesthetic, and technical possibilities had been exhausted for for Miles, and so not so much abandoning it but deconstructing it, he used the pieces to make something new. Miles abstracted Bop, slowed it to a crawl, and ultimately tossed it away in order to create 'Cool.' The artistic parallel between Miles and Bird, and Brando and Dean seems clear.
I won't attempt to argue that Brando was not a troubled, emotionally brittle man, nor that there was not a sort of bathos in his morbid obesity at the end of his life. I won't even point out the obvious truth that many actors of his generation who forged his or her self on the crucible of the emotionally devastating Adlerian version of The Method exhibited lifelong excesses of emotional turmoil, many of them dying of it (Dean, Marilyn Munroe, and Mineo most visible among the casualties). Instead, I'll argue something more human, having to do with a more mundane and ordinary truth: that like most artists, and certainly like most artists who become wealthy, world famous and worshipped as icons at a very young age, Brando exhibited signs of megalomania, paranoia, obssessiveness, emotional infantilism, and, as he grew older, dissipation. I would argue however, that none of this adds up to his having been in any way illegitimate as a cinematic artist, any more than Miles Davis' own idiosyncrasies, bizarre behavior, misogyny, and bouts of agoraphobia meant that he was somehow lesser in his musicianship. His musicianship was fine, though just as with Brando, critics accused him of losing his chops, of degenerating into a has-been and sell-out, and of betraying jazz first when he abandoned Bop and adopted Cool, and then again and again as he moved on through more metamorphoses to play electric, and to play Fusion.
Indeed, as with nearly every other citizen of complexity, value, and large spirit America's 20th century was blessed with, Brando's deeper complexity and significance both as an artist and as a man of conscience, is silenced amidst the noise of obnoxious and cynical ridicule of his personal life: bad father, abusive husband, and failed celebrity. Tinker, tailor, deadbeat, fatty, is the declension steadfastly held against him, it seems.
Dave Zirin, editor of the Prince George's Post, explodes that cynicism quite deftly in his recent eulogy, "Our Marlon Brando", published on July 2, by CommonDreams.org:
The Brando I want to remember, especially now, is the actor who pulled back in the 1960s to focus on supporting the Civil Rights Movement and the broader struggles against war and oppression. In 1959, he was a founding member of the Hollywood chapter of SANE, an anti-nuclear arms group formed alongside African-American performers Harry Belafonte and Ossie Davis.
In 1963, Brando marched arm in arm with James Baldwin at the March on Washington. He, along with Paul Newman, went down South with the freedom riders to desegregate inter-State bus lines. In defiance of state law, Native Americans protested the denial of treaty rights by fishing the Puyallup River on March 2, 1964. Inspired by the civil rights movement sit-ins, Brando, Episcopal clergyman John Yaryan from San Francisco, and Puyallup tribal leader Bob Satiacum caught salmon in the Puyallup without state permits. The action was called a fish-in and resulted in Brando's arrest.
When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Brando announced that he was bowing out of the lead role of a major film and would now devote himself to the civil rights movement. Brando said "If the vacuum formed by Dr. King's death isn't filled with concern and understanding and a measure of love, then I think we all are really going to be lost."
He gave money and spoke out in defense of the Black Panthers and counted Bobby Seale as a close friend and attended the memorial for slain prison leader George Jackson. Southern theater chains boycotted his films, and Hollywood created what became known as the 'Brando Black List' that shut him out of many big time roles.
After making a comeback in Godfather, Brando won his second Oscar. Instead of accepting what he called "a door prize," he sent up Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse befuddled presenter Roger Moore and issue a scathing speech about the Federal Government's treatment of Native Americans.
Even in the past several years, he has lent his name and bank account to those fighting the US war and occupation in Iraq.
So how do we remember Brando? He was a celebrity, an artist, an activist, and at the end an isolated and destroyed old man.
It is tragic that we live in a world where most people's talents never get to see the light of day. It is equally tragic that those like Brando who actually get the opportunity to spread their creative wings, can be consumed and yanked apart in process. (©. 2004, D. Zirin)
The political dimension of the lives of American artists is habitually occluded, lost, and denied; hidden from our consideration and buried even before the artists themselves are. Indeed, the political dimension of the lives of just about everyone of significance in America (even of politicians!) is hidden from our consideration in order to foster a trivial, commercial culture of consumption of celebrity, and to facilitate the chronic memory loss Americans suffer from. It is what makes us all so monstrous in the eyes of the rest of the world: like belligerent children we inflict damage and pain upon those around us but then are mortified and confused by the hostility and disgust directed at us by those who feel hurt, neglected, and wronged by our crude abuses, abuses we cannot even manage to remember. How much more mortified must the French, the Russians, The Chinese, and the Arabs feel about our inability to recognize their histories, their cultures, their artists given the fact that we cannot even recognize our own? After all, no less luminary a philosopher than Jean-Paul Sartre, in his 1947 essay, "Jazz in America" had announced the existential dimension of jazz which, if one reads the essay closely, would at least contextualize if not explain Miles Davis' future personality disorders and his future antics with regard to jazz form. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir saw in jazz not am exotic, primal form arisen from primitive voodoo nor a dead, staid classical music, but a living, complex existential art form of global significance tied to philosophy, history, psychology, economics, humor, and even to biography. Thus, the French preoccupation not with measuring artists against public expectation and moral cant, but against the details of the artist's own life and material reality.
I disagree with Zirin in only one respect. It is not so much that we live in a world "where most people's talents never get to see the light of day." Instead, it is very certain that we live in a country (the United States) driven by a degenerate Capitalist profit motive that erects a fetishistic cult of 'celebrity', diverting our attention and that of adherants abroad, away from depth, meaning, and historical detail in order to train us to consume. Among the things we thoughtlessly consume as merchandise, is the depth and human complexity of our artist's lives, particularly our great artists.
Of course, It little matters to Brando now that we consumed him rather than understanding and appreciating him. He is where we can no longer harm him now.
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Remember Heidegger
Back in 2002-2003 I was a professor of English at Barry University. 'Professor' was actually a sort of honorary, titular identity for me then; more like 'professor-at-large,' because by 2002 I'd left my orthodox faculty position at Florida International University (FIU) in West Miami to go to Barry, located in Miami Shores. I was not really teaching anymore at Barry. I had grown disgusted with being in the classroom due to the growing illiteracy and politically reactionary attitudes of students who came to class resenting the idea of democracy and of public discourse, and determined to avoid free thought. I was also disgusted by administrators who were growing more and more brazen in their attempts to redact, censor and control the classroom curricula of professors.
Barry is a private Catholic college in Miami Shores, Florida. I went there because Barry allowed me to work as a tutor and graduate level academic consultant to students doing term papers, portfolios, and dissertations. I worked a bit on campus in a "Writing Center" there, but I was able to do most of my work online. I could choose to not even set foot on campus if I did not want to.
I was disgusted with professors and with being one, though everyone then, and even now, seemed and seems to spontaneously call me "professor" when they encounter me, even people who don't know me, as if that identity were somehow tattooed onto my head. It's peculiar. But then, my own demeanor, my rhetoric, and my attitude are probably such that, given the severe lack of any frame of reference in American culture for encountering people who read books and are public intellectuals and philosophers, 'professor' is likely the only context into which people can place those who argue (as opposed to bickering), who debate, and who analyze culture, politics, and history.
Even Socrates, dirty, ragged bum that he was, walking the streets of ancient Athens barefoot as a public philosopher as he did, would probably be dubbed 'professor Socrates' were he to stand on a given street corner in America babbling about the problem of forms or the infinite regress. That is, if he were not arrested and forced into a homeless shelter.
At any rate, it was back in the period of 2002-2003 that a sort of half-baked debate erupted between myself and a friend, Cuban-American Professor, Tony Rionda.
* * *
That debate was over the fascism of German philosopher and professor, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger lived from 1889 to 1976. He was born in Messkirch, Baden, on September 22, 1889. He was a fascist.
The debate crackled between Tony and I as we walked around the streets of Miami, at restaurants and café tables across the city, and via e-mail messages. Most of the debate is gone now, disappeared forever into thin air, which is the fate of most personal conversations and oral exchanges. There was no slavish, doting peon like Plato around to dogmatically write down everything Tony and I said to each other for future reference.
Some of the e-mail messages between he and I on the subject of Heidegger still exist, however. down below, those messages are reproduced and only lightly edited for sense (e-mail is a facinating medium: it has the spontaneity and personal tone of conversation which may be witty, sparkling, and vibrant, yet inasmuch as it is written down, it often presents a visual effect of dumbness. There are usually misspellings, half-finished thoughts, and strange, often surrealistic mixing of metaphors, twisted grammar, and tortured syntax). I have not edited most of those absurdities, so that the original ebb and flow of our thoughts are retained. I only edited what would not have made any sense at all were I not to have done corrections (private codes and symbols or jokes between Tony and I, for instance).
At the time we wrote these messages to each other Tony was teaching in the English department at FIU. We had been faculty together there, and we shared a circle of friends who were professors, intellectuals, and cultural workers. Tony and I often found ourselves sitting across the table from each other in various Japanese, Cuban, Chinese, and Thai restaurants around Miami, and at these gatherings someone was always talking, arguing, or debating something or other. Given that most of us were no longer allowed to do this in class or on campus due to the steady creep of corporate realism into the curricula of universities, we were arriving at the point where a restaurant was one of the few places where we could actually act like intellectuals and argue ideas.
As for me, I had remained defiant of the corporatized administrators at the universities where I taught, and I was in constant conflict with those administrators because I was ignoring their rules and strictures. I did and said in the classroom whatever I deemed appropriate to the task of teaching critical thought, literacy, and material analysis. I was labeled an anarchist/Marxist/black nationalist due to my refusal to knuckle under to the power structure of the university. I refused to even acknowledge their supposed 'power'. For all that, I was always one of the most popular professors with politically aware, engaged students. There are for more engaged students on American university campuses that our blind and dumb media might lead one to believe.
I suspect that Tony in fact felt goaded by what many people regarded as my intellectual radicalism. As a Cuban-American living in the city of Miami, a very culturally and politically conservative, even reactionary Cuban-American controlled city, he fancied himself a free thinking intellectual, yet in many ways, I would always tell him, he was failing to challenge himself or his cultural milieux, or so I felt then. Our debate was struck through, therefore with very fascinating, even illuminating racial, cultural, political, and economic dialectical conflicts that often were not openly articulated. My own messages come off as overly serious, maybe even Marxist (gasp!). Tony comes off, probably unfairly, as lazy, when in reality I think most of his writings in the exchange are actually a series of masks. Many of us practice masking in our discursive encounters, taking on voices and repeating formulas in order to avoid the risk of exposure or vulnerability. If anything is significant about the debate whose leftover bits are printed below, it is that reading such records of intellectual debates tell us so much not about the writers but about the cultures they speak from and of.
It is for those reasons that I decided to reproduce the leftover bits here. I did not get Tony's permission to publish his words, though I did inform him years ago that I was saving them for future use, including possible publication, which he did approve.
Perhaps readers will find the following interesting; psychologically even if not culturally. Or maybe the reader will find the following totally uninteresting. So be it. Well, you know what Freud said: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
_________________________________
Sept 23, 2003, Tony Rionda wrote:
Hi Ray,
I have my semesters divided up into waves and particles and you caught me at a wave stage. Soon I will be back to particle status (all papers graded, just coasting and doing what I want), then I will address your email and read Perri's. I had no idea that you did not know about the Heidegger Nazi controversy.
Most who like H do and have a very "president's men" attitude about it. Anyhow, I remembered that I have a book that deals with these issues. It includes H's infamous Rectoral (?) address and his Der Spiegel interview. It is followed by essays by his students on the matter. He had a problem with one of his Jewish students, Jona (?) who is famous for writing about Existentialism and Gnosticism, but I don't remember if he went as far as turning him in.
In a few weeks I will fetch it from my friend's house and lend it to you. And, no. I don't expect to spend too much time talking about Heidegger. Say hi to Perri.
--Tony
Sept 23, 2003, Ray Waller wrote:
Tony;
Well, you know, I think Nazism actually is more a wave than a particle. We like to pretend that it is located in Germany in the 30's when in actuality it is a continuity--it is now very much rooted in the United States, and soon enough we will be doing all the very same things the Nazi academics did (if we are not doing it already, given the atrocities our government(s) has/have sponsored in Latin America, the Caribbean, North Africa, etc. Already, American college textbooks are full of fascistic pseudo history and propaganda, and our students are as jingoistic and 'patriotic' as the German youth were near the bitter endof the Weimar Republik).
Having read up now on Heidegger, I put that information together withthe information I had drilled into me at Cornell by a Professor Bathrick, who taught a kickass course called "Nazi Culture". That course taught me that Nazism was so widespread and gained so much legitimacy in the culture of Schiller and Mozart and Goethe not because the Germans were evil people, but because Nazism was shrewdly designed by a collection of political thugs (such as the ones now running our government) who cynically, step by methodical step, NATURALIZED nazi culture so that by the time people woke up to the severe, incremental distortion of politics, economics, culture, education, and even family, (sound familiar) it was too late.
I quit teaching in fact, not so much because the universities are fascist as because the universities are now about midway along the same route of Nazification as a PROCESS that Germany took in the early 1930's (lies in textbooks, the valorization of past nationalist wars of conquest, the sickening mytholization of old veterans of the previous, 'great war', corrupt, and cowardly academics who are not questioning the corporate takeover of curricula, the dumbing down of student intellect, the spread of contempt for art and philosophy in favor of 'blood thinking', and casual racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-semitism--in the form of patronizing, 'Jew-grubbing/Israel worshipping'(in the phrase of Dr. Jim Nadell) masking thinly the underlying viscious contempt in our society for Israelis, Jews, and particularly intellectual Jews)
Unless one is into hokey, 'moralistic' outrage toward people like Heidegger, which I myself do not indulge in--I do not believe in the existence of a 'personal God' and so I prefer ethics to morality--then one would naturally see Heidegger as sympromatic of something much deeper and far more familiar to us, than as a moral abberation. Besides, how the hell could any AMERICAN have the nerve to speak of moral outrage, given the uncounted crimes against humanity on our hands which actually dwarf the scant 13 years and ten million lives of Nazism's run? When I say Americans I include you and me. Lord knows, BLACK people are included, thanks to both Farrrakhan (populist Black bigotry) and Condoleeza (official, Black bourgeois fascism).
I guess I just try hard to remain connected to material reality, being the great grandson of a literal, actual SLAVE (my great grandmother was born a slave on an Alabama plantation and I met her in the 1970's before she died at more than 100 years old), and try to avoid he kind of dementia that passes as analysis and discourse in America. Americans have achieved an advanced case of schizophrenia and profound dementia associated with the very sociopathology that the Fench certainly recognize in us--in fact, the whole world recognizes it at this point, because we have finally produced our very own Nazi PArty (the Republikanische--the Republicans).
Yeah, "OLD EUROPE" has the blood of Colonialism and the very FIRST nazism on its hands, but anybody who has bothered to READ thirty damn years of history (Frank Snepp, Gore Vidal, Bertram Gross, Ward Churchill, Henry A. Wallace, Angela Davis, etc., etc.) knows that the inheritance (technological, cultural, even geneological) of the Nazi party was handed down directly from bombed out Berlin to Washington DC by way of the OSS which later became the CIA and FBI (Old Dulles, and Old Hoover).
Given all that, why the hell would I get worked up about Heidegger's bullshit before getting upset about the bullshit past and future, of those FIU 'professors' I used to call my colleagues. And that's not moral outrage I'm expressing. Black men who are into 'moral' outrage (like that friendly fascist, Bill Cosby, for instance) are the ones who end up as Colin Powell. Give me James Brown abd Dexter Gordon any day.
By the way, Dexter, living in France in the sixties, said to a French journalist, "America is so very sick that I fear she shall never wake up to her own brutality. Particularly with so many qestionable fellows whispering lies to her about how fine and good she is. She is not. She is a witch, my good man. And anyone who wishes to lose their soul, is welcome to her."
Dex's words are not at all undone by his eventual move back to the US. Typically, Black artists moved to France, lived there several years to recuperate, to build self determination, to make some actual money for the first time, to lay down some new roots, gain a wider, international audience, and then came back to the US for the first time with real safety and power. They usually kept right on being vocal about American fascism, too (like Dizzy Gillespie was late in his life, which is actually what ended the friendship between him and Bill Cosby. Cos' wasn't gonna stand still for niggers insulting his beloved Fatherland).
What Dex had to say about American fascism was nothing compared to what Abbie Lincoln (when she was living in France) said about Americans, and of course, Richard Wright (in France), Bud Powell (in France), Chester Himes (while in France and in Germany), Cecil Brown (while in Germany! Dig the big ass clue to some deeper truths involved in THAT irony, huh?), Buddy Bolden (while in France), and even Louis Armstrong (while visiting England--see, the truth about how vocal negroes like ME have always been about American fascism has been censored from the public record. What Americans get to hear from Pops is not his 'London Denunciations' of Hitlerian American government crimes against jazz musicians, but his smarmy, bathetic rendition of "What a Wonderful World"---ohhhhh, yeeeeeeahhhhhhhh.....), and the list goes on and on.
So you see, my original testiness with you over Heidegger was not a white liberal cop-out since I ain't a white liberal, nor could I ever be--America would never let me be. Just because Colin has deluded himself into thinking he's white does not mean his butt is not still Black. No, my testiness was in a context, historical and cultural. To talk about anything related to me outside of that contextr would be insane, brain dead, a-historical and--well, a university discussion seminar.....Well, you know what I mean.
-Rayfield
Sept 24, 2003 - Tony Rionda wrote:
I'm not morally indignant over H. The question is to what degree his philosophy justifies Nazism. One of his students, for example, points out that Heidegger's early philosophy extolled commitment without specifying commitment to what. Hence, he claims to not have been at all surprised at his Nazi involvement. I believe he was Nazi till the end. If that is the case, then how can he offer such a radical critique of modernity and have been so totally untouched by it himself, personally? Could anyone have been that Schizoid? I don't believe so. When I deal with the US I do see the Nazi streak in it. However, I consider it to be quite overt and fairly limited (but am open to changing my mind). What I fear with Europe and H is that there is a much more insidious form of Nazism.. One that is never acknowledged as such, and that passes itself of as something new and different. Hence, ensnares even those who claim to be sophisticated intellectuals. As Angelou has pointed out, Europe was very accepting of Baldwin and Wright, but who wouldn't be accepting of blacks if they were all like that? If Europe couldn't even handle living with a bunch of Jews what would they have done with the descendants of slaves?
Now what European intellectual hasn't put down the US? Freud said the US was big, but a big mistake. Einstein complained about his mistake of having come here because of the "freedom thing." I believe that Europe doesn't like us because we are not all white. And, that much of what many here think is left wing criticism from Europe is actually right wing in disguise. I didn't think anyone saw it that way, but recently I saw Benard Henri Levy (had never heard of him before) on Charlie Rose saying that the French anti-American feeling comes from the right and not the left as many Americans believe. I would say that is true for other European states.
Last, I don't believe you will ever get rid of racism or Fascism. The best we can do is get it out in the open and try to keep it from getting out of hand, like we do with disease.
Having said that, I am not sure of the degree problem. I mean, we could be running a fever these days and must try to bring it down to a more tolerable level. But there is a difference in procedure if you accept the containment theory than if you go with the all or nothing view.
--Tony
Sept 24, 2003, Ray Waller wrote:
Tone-
Are you going to bother to define, even for yourself, exactly what the hell you mean by "Heidegger's (early) philosophy"? You were a philosophy major! Your professors taught you better than that. You are talking about philosophical discourse in the chunk-handed way that students do--the ubiquitous and naive assigning of possessive locutions to authors and thinkers as if those people own their writings and their thoughts. Also, you are stubbornly repeating the same fallacy (affirming the consequent) over and over again, as if it were an irresistable compulsion rather than an actual analysis.
WHICH of H' s ideas about commitment SPECIFICALLY are you referring to? To be precise, WHICH of the five-or-so specific theories I mentioned in my e-mail message to you last month are you (or was H's student) referring to when you say 'commitment'? What exactly do you MEAN by 'commitment" it sounds almost as if you are making assumptions about the concept in an almost Anselmian sense. Or Aquinas, against the radical delimitationism of Descartes.
Which reminds me, it never really did make much sense for any of us to go about even using the term 'modernity' or 'modernism' with such confidence, because the modern impulse really began in the 1200's, if not earlier--this is exactly the original impetus behind Post Modernism, right? Frederick Jamison, in discussing architecture makes the point that through architecture we can recognize the falsety of epochs, and the CONTINUITY of philosophical ideas (remember what I was saying about continuity vs, particularism in my last e-mail?) In short, the very same dispute between Andre Breton (modern) and Richard Wagner (Classicist) was always already going on between Aquinas (Classicist) and Descartes (POST-modernist). Are you a closet Scholastic?
Remember how in undergrad Shakespear class the professors made a big deal out of the 'mystery' of the rage against the storm scene in "KingLear"? A bizzarely modernist scene which somehow pops up in the middle of an Elizabethan auhtor's works? How? Why? Shakespeare, they taught us, was in no other way modernist, yet this scene presages modernity (rejection of Nature, God, predestination, and the humanist urge against fate. blah blah). Of course, as we got older, and as we became grad students we came to recognize that this is a typical flattening of the continuity of history and culture.
Hell, what were the Hellenic Greeks, but moderns? What was Athens, if not the first modernist city in the West? What was Shakespear if not an inheritor of Hellenic tradition?
Seeing him this way, it becomes possible to suddenly see other so-called 'anomolies' in his othersie Elizabethan ouvre: the radical disunity of Hamlet's psyche (post modernist, which I think even Stanley Fish has suggested); the odd irruptions of modernist amoralism in "Richard II"; the startling, disturbing, even bestial anarchism and wholly ANTI-elizabethan impulse behind "Titus Andronicus" (post-modernism), a play which in some ways anticipates Fassbinder!
Don't be so intellectually lazy, Tony. Hasn't Perri taken you to task time and time again for just that? Maybe you were a little hasty in giving away so many of your books a few years back--BOOKS, man. That is our meat and matter as intellectuals, not bank accounts, cigars, and TIAA CREF portfolios.
Clearly we would have to sit down and have a face-to-face talk about these subjects. I find that your last message is full of half-baked critiques, and outright platitudes, and considering the dire nature of our culture right now, I think I fear for YOU as much as I fear for ME in reading how far your analysis falls short of material rigor. Just one point though: I've spent time in France, and it is straight up baboon reasoning to say that anti-Americanism comes from the French Right and that's that.
For God's sake, the French left is stocked with people whose parents were brutalized by American CIA agents during the cold war (see the books of Le Carre, and even some of Graham Green's writing, both of whom fictionalize the more or less open history of American brutality toward Europe beginning with the Marshall Plan)...geez, it's like saying there's a sun in the sky to say that Europeans are not simply peeved with America, but FRIGHTENED of America, and it would be demented (and a typical example of the 20th century's use of anti-black and latin racism to hide from political and cultural truths that have nothing to do with race) to say that Europeans are afraid of America because it has negroes in it.
That is so unbelievably dumb, which describes Charlie Rose and the awkward intellectual fumbling that goes on between he and his 'guests' to a tee.
For instance, nearly 3 million Europeans (Germans, Italians, French, and Spaniards) engaged in some of the most massive street protests in European history between 1988 and 1998 over the sheer terror they felt about nuclear waste, nuclear fallout, and nuclear war! See Helen Caldicott's latest book about details on this massive movement, which itself fed into the younger European anti-globalist movement currently driving the success of European Green Party politics.
I could go on. But I won't. This is an example of exactly what I wrote to you: to understand anything, it is necessary to examine history, not TV news drivel. The principle way in which we do that, as intellectuals, is through BOOKS. I cited several books and authors in my last message, and I cited some more just now. What is wrong with discourse in America right now, and what in fact makes it fascist is the disappearance of history, and of historians and BOOKS.
Also, what it the world are you talking about, Richard Wright and James Baldwin? I cited some fifteen various Black artists in one of my recent messages. I am not sure what you could possibly mean by saying 'if they were all like that'. Gee, I always thought we WERE 'all like that,' though we don't all live up to it--isn't that what anyone's culture ultimately is about? Identity? Who wouldn't love white people if they were "all like" Noam Chomsky and Emma Goldman? But of course, it's terribly dumb and bigoted to subject a whole race of people to some arbitrary idea like that. White people have no obligation to all be like those two people, nor can we banish those whites who fail to rise to the level of those two people to the margins of dispised whiteness. Most of the white people I know and love DON'T rise to that level, and they are all the more human, interesting, and challenging as human beings precisely because they don't.
Well, be that as it may, I have to say I think that it is an insult to the French to imply that they are so shallow and stupid as to be a culture whose complexity of disaffection could be boiled down to an action news report caption saying that they are really right wingers in disguise. It must be the cheese? Finally, American fascism will indeed be 'out in the open' soon enough. When a cancer grows large enough, it always ends up bursting through the skin. See Albert Speer's "inside the third Reich." He was a Nazi, but he wrote this crucial book which offers invaluable insight into the process by which Nazism grows, and grows, and then finally bursts through the skin.
-Rayfield
Sept 24, 2003, Ray Waller wrote:
PS, Tone-
By the way, you ought to know that James Baldwin is a poor example to use of negrows who went to Europe and was a hit. He was a miserable failure in Europe, and the Europeans were quite disgusted with his hardned, little frog-faced ass. He nearly starved to death in Paris, and wandered around the Isle St Louis behind Wright begging for money.
He was ill tempered, self-loathing, and spiteful while there, and Wright tried to distance himself from him while the Parisians were flatly appalled by his wretchedness. He had similar experiences while living in Switzerland or some such godawful place, in a Chateau above a little Swiss Village where they treated him like he was the Frankenstein monster; and he acted the part, in fact. His wretchedness in Switzerland was a continuation of the horrific rage, despair and self loathing he had undergone while living in upstate New York which had driven him, in his words, to come perilously close to hurling a pitcher of beer at the face of a white female barmaid. It was at that point that he felt he needed to get out of America and move to Europe.
Hey, all this is in his writing, and in the various better biographies of Baldwin. You know, I don't insult you by mentioning the same two Cuban writers that all ignorant Americans know (of)--Zoey what's her face, and Jose Marti. I've actually read Cuban authors (in addition to the deep love African Americans feel for Jose Marti, we also look up to Nicolas Guillen, and I personally like the young Cuban-American playwright, Nilo Cruz, and...well, lots of others).
My point is that you should go off somewhere and read some books if all you can do is repeat the tired old stuff of academic white dudes who couldn't pull off a Socratic session if you spotted them six triremes and a hundred and twenty oarsmen to row them. Like for instance, the only two African American writers you (seem) to know are Wright and Baldwin (so that tired assRalph Ellison can't be far behind) and you think I'm not going to take a shot at you?
My mentors would put you on your ass so fast your media noche would spin, my brother. Okay, so what's my REAL point? Am I just being macho, or just being vindictive? Well, it's like this: my prime mentor, Kofi Natambu taught me that it's wrong to kick the cane out from under a blind or crippled man. It's in bad tatse, too. But if you catch a cat who's walking around PRETENDING to be blind or crippled, when you KNOW he can read and stand on his own two feet, you kick him.
Talk to you soon, Brother.
Ray
Sept 28, 2003, Tony Rionda wrote:
Baldwin was not accepted by Europeans because he was gay, he was open about it, and he partied. He was not a "good European". like Wright. In fact, Baldwin is the only black author I have read to any extent. The incident you descriibe is in Native Son, and is also described by Baldwin himself in a documentary about him. He threw a glass of water at a waitress (and smashed a mirror) because she wouldn't serve him, because of segregation. That is when he went to Europe, because he realized he would kill someone if he didn't.
Baldwin has helped me to better understand myself, something few authors have ever done for me, and even fewer people. I would have been dissapointed if he was loved in Europe. He was a parriah. But I will always love him, like a brother.
Marti is a waste of time. I read him because I had to, but did not enjoy his writings much. I think he is only of historical interest.
The only Cuban author I have read and ejoyed is Jose Lezama Lima. I think, am not sure, that he is a darling of the revolution. In any case, in only a few pages, "La_Expression Americana, he does some amazing things! I have rarely felt the sense of liberation that I feel when I read that essay. I fear, however, that it might not translate well. There is still much for me to learn about myself, personally and intellectually, from him. Even, if I never get to adopt his philosophy.
My idea of black intellectuals is West and Gates. The latter is much more to my taste. I have read about four of his essays. The Kitchen was really a pleasure to read and I am grateful for his brief, but enlightening exposition of European intellectual's lack of insight into the new world and its inhabitants.
You are the only Kneegrow, intellectual or not, that I have had any extensive contact with, in Miami or anywhere else. I still have to catch up on reading your Heidegger and "black intellectual" messages, as well as, Perri's, "she can hear me" message. However, I am limited as to what I can read because my spare time is devoted to reading linguistics. The other stuff I read by either working them into my courses (Native Son, Hamlet, King Richard III, among others) or just for curiosity, depending on the time constraint.
However, I do not belong to that European intellectual tradition that you do. If I were to read an Existentialist, other than Nietzsche, which I don't read as an Existentialist, I would pursue Jaspers. Once in a while, I read his intro to Existentialism. However, I sometimes get into reading Heidegger, if only for a few days, usually when I am on vacation at Christmas. I must confess that I get nothing out of reading either Heidegger or Jaspers, i.e, nothing that furthers my understanding of myself or the world around me. Yet, for some reason, I sometimes feel like giving them a new chance. Unlike, say Kierkegaard, whom I will probably never read again. In fact, it's possible that I will never read Nietzsche agaiin, come to think of it.
It's hard to get a Cuban to shut up . . .
--Tony
Sept 28, 2003 - Ray Waller wrote:
Tony;
Well, at least now you're getting specific. I'm not sure that one ought to say a poet is 'only' of historical interest--that's a pretty high mark to hit indeed! See the collection of Central American poets from the 80's, Volcan: Poems from Central America. The editors were Murgia, Alejandro & Paschke, Barbara. It was published by City Lights Books 1983. Remember that Pablo Neruda was often referred to as 'of historical (or poliical) significance only, and boy, what a strange thing to say, as if a fistful of gold is somehow inherently inferior to a fistful of diamonds. Both are handy in a recession.
Besides, both Marti and Neruda were heartbreakingly beautiful lyric poets when they wanted to be. This is a talent you don't get much in 19th and 20th century revolutionary poets, and these two were just plain good poets.
Don't you think it would be good to read a little more widely in Black literature? If you had, maybe you wouldn't make that same, tired old white liberal claim: that Black, working class (post Aesthetic, in fact, is what we are referring to here) Black intellectualism is 'European'. Like dullard white hipsters who kept thinking that Rock music is the 'white' opposite of Jazz, which is the 'black' music. Too many foolish assumptions to even go into there, so let's just say that kind of thinking is foolish (both American history AND the history of the Black and the Irish are way more complex than that--if you have to ask 'why Irish' by the way, you'll never know).
Classical music, for instance. So called 'European' concert music is actually national peasant musics adapted by people like Smetna (Germany). Rimsky-Korsakov (Russia), Rossinni (Italy), and Ravel (Spain). The "European" tone poem is rooted in the Cossack Muzurka. So the first thing we have to do is let go of that lame old misconception about what EUROPE is (see Reginald Martin's "New Black Aesthetic"), and then we'll be able to clearly see Black thought, Black aesthetics, and Black arts in a clear light free of cultural arrogance.
So don't 'shut up,' keep talking. And try to pull your head out of your linguistics every now and then in order to keep up with what's happening in the culture around you. REMEMBER HEIDEGGER.
-Ray
Barry is a private Catholic college in Miami Shores, Florida. I went there because Barry allowed me to work as a tutor and graduate level academic consultant to students doing term papers, portfolios, and dissertations. I worked a bit on campus in a "Writing Center" there, but I was able to do most of my work online. I could choose to not even set foot on campus if I did not want to.
I was disgusted with professors and with being one, though everyone then, and even now, seemed and seems to spontaneously call me "professor" when they encounter me, even people who don't know me, as if that identity were somehow tattooed onto my head. It's peculiar. But then, my own demeanor, my rhetoric, and my attitude are probably such that, given the severe lack of any frame of reference in American culture for encountering people who read books and are public intellectuals and philosophers, 'professor' is likely the only context into which people can place those who argue (as opposed to bickering), who debate, and who analyze culture, politics, and history.
Even Socrates, dirty, ragged bum that he was, walking the streets of ancient Athens barefoot as a public philosopher as he did, would probably be dubbed 'professor Socrates' were he to stand on a given street corner in America babbling about the problem of forms or the infinite regress. That is, if he were not arrested and forced into a homeless shelter.
At any rate, it was back in the period of 2002-2003 that a sort of half-baked debate erupted between myself and a friend, Cuban-American Professor, Tony Rionda.
* * *
That debate was over the fascism of German philosopher and professor, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger lived from 1889 to 1976. He was born in Messkirch, Baden, on September 22, 1889. He was a fascist.
The debate crackled between Tony and I as we walked around the streets of Miami, at restaurants and café tables across the city, and via e-mail messages. Most of the debate is gone now, disappeared forever into thin air, which is the fate of most personal conversations and oral exchanges. There was no slavish, doting peon like Plato around to dogmatically write down everything Tony and I said to each other for future reference.
Some of the e-mail messages between he and I on the subject of Heidegger still exist, however. down below, those messages are reproduced and only lightly edited for sense (e-mail is a facinating medium: it has the spontaneity and personal tone of conversation which may be witty, sparkling, and vibrant, yet inasmuch as it is written down, it often presents a visual effect of dumbness. There are usually misspellings, half-finished thoughts, and strange, often surrealistic mixing of metaphors, twisted grammar, and tortured syntax). I have not edited most of those absurdities, so that the original ebb and flow of our thoughts are retained. I only edited what would not have made any sense at all were I not to have done corrections (private codes and symbols or jokes between Tony and I, for instance).
At the time we wrote these messages to each other Tony was teaching in the English department at FIU. We had been faculty together there, and we shared a circle of friends who were professors, intellectuals, and cultural workers. Tony and I often found ourselves sitting across the table from each other in various Japanese, Cuban, Chinese, and Thai restaurants around Miami, and at these gatherings someone was always talking, arguing, or debating something or other. Given that most of us were no longer allowed to do this in class or on campus due to the steady creep of corporate realism into the curricula of universities, we were arriving at the point where a restaurant was one of the few places where we could actually act like intellectuals and argue ideas.
As for me, I had remained defiant of the corporatized administrators at the universities where I taught, and I was in constant conflict with those administrators because I was ignoring their rules and strictures. I did and said in the classroom whatever I deemed appropriate to the task of teaching critical thought, literacy, and material analysis. I was labeled an anarchist/Marxist/black nationalist due to my refusal to knuckle under to the power structure of the university. I refused to even acknowledge their supposed 'power'. For all that, I was always one of the most popular professors with politically aware, engaged students. There are for more engaged students on American university campuses that our blind and dumb media might lead one to believe.
I suspect that Tony in fact felt goaded by what many people regarded as my intellectual radicalism. As a Cuban-American living in the city of Miami, a very culturally and politically conservative, even reactionary Cuban-American controlled city, he fancied himself a free thinking intellectual, yet in many ways, I would always tell him, he was failing to challenge himself or his cultural milieux, or so I felt then. Our debate was struck through, therefore with very fascinating, even illuminating racial, cultural, political, and economic dialectical conflicts that often were not openly articulated. My own messages come off as overly serious, maybe even Marxist (gasp!). Tony comes off, probably unfairly, as lazy, when in reality I think most of his writings in the exchange are actually a series of masks. Many of us practice masking in our discursive encounters, taking on voices and repeating formulas in order to avoid the risk of exposure or vulnerability. If anything is significant about the debate whose leftover bits are printed below, it is that reading such records of intellectual debates tell us so much not about the writers but about the cultures they speak from and of.
It is for those reasons that I decided to reproduce the leftover bits here. I did not get Tony's permission to publish his words, though I did inform him years ago that I was saving them for future use, including possible publication, which he did approve.
Perhaps readers will find the following interesting; psychologically even if not culturally. Or maybe the reader will find the following totally uninteresting. So be it. Well, you know what Freud said: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
_________________________________
Sept 23, 2003, Tony Rionda wrote:
Hi Ray,
I have my semesters divided up into waves and particles and you caught me at a wave stage. Soon I will be back to particle status (all papers graded, just coasting and doing what I want), then I will address your email and read Perri's. I had no idea that you did not know about the Heidegger Nazi controversy.
Most who like H do and have a very "president's men" attitude about it. Anyhow, I remembered that I have a book that deals with these issues. It includes H's infamous Rectoral (?) address and his Der Spiegel interview. It is followed by essays by his students on the matter. He had a problem with one of his Jewish students, Jona (?) who is famous for writing about Existentialism and Gnosticism, but I don't remember if he went as far as turning him in.
In a few weeks I will fetch it from my friend's house and lend it to you. And, no. I don't expect to spend too much time talking about Heidegger. Say hi to Perri.
--Tony
Sept 23, 2003, Ray Waller wrote:
Tony;
Well, you know, I think Nazism actually is more a wave than a particle. We like to pretend that it is located in Germany in the 30's when in actuality it is a continuity--it is now very much rooted in the United States, and soon enough we will be doing all the very same things the Nazi academics did (if we are not doing it already, given the atrocities our government(s) has/have sponsored in Latin America, the Caribbean, North Africa, etc. Already, American college textbooks are full of fascistic pseudo history and propaganda, and our students are as jingoistic and 'patriotic' as the German youth were near the bitter endof the Weimar Republik).
Having read up now on Heidegger, I put that information together withthe information I had drilled into me at Cornell by a Professor Bathrick, who taught a kickass course called "Nazi Culture". That course taught me that Nazism was so widespread and gained so much legitimacy in the culture of Schiller and Mozart and Goethe not because the Germans were evil people, but because Nazism was shrewdly designed by a collection of political thugs (such as the ones now running our government) who cynically, step by methodical step, NATURALIZED nazi culture so that by the time people woke up to the severe, incremental distortion of politics, economics, culture, education, and even family, (sound familiar) it was too late.
I quit teaching in fact, not so much because the universities are fascist as because the universities are now about midway along the same route of Nazification as a PROCESS that Germany took in the early 1930's (lies in textbooks, the valorization of past nationalist wars of conquest, the sickening mytholization of old veterans of the previous, 'great war', corrupt, and cowardly academics who are not questioning the corporate takeover of curricula, the dumbing down of student intellect, the spread of contempt for art and philosophy in favor of 'blood thinking', and casual racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-semitism--in the form of patronizing, 'Jew-grubbing/Israel worshipping'(in the phrase of Dr. Jim Nadell) masking thinly the underlying viscious contempt in our society for Israelis, Jews, and particularly intellectual Jews)
Unless one is into hokey, 'moralistic' outrage toward people like Heidegger, which I myself do not indulge in--I do not believe in the existence of a 'personal God' and so I prefer ethics to morality--then one would naturally see Heidegger as sympromatic of something much deeper and far more familiar to us, than as a moral abberation. Besides, how the hell could any AMERICAN have the nerve to speak of moral outrage, given the uncounted crimes against humanity on our hands which actually dwarf the scant 13 years and ten million lives of Nazism's run? When I say Americans I include you and me. Lord knows, BLACK people are included, thanks to both Farrrakhan (populist Black bigotry) and Condoleeza (official, Black bourgeois fascism).
I guess I just try hard to remain connected to material reality, being the great grandson of a literal, actual SLAVE (my great grandmother was born a slave on an Alabama plantation and I met her in the 1970's before she died at more than 100 years old), and try to avoid he kind of dementia that passes as analysis and discourse in America. Americans have achieved an advanced case of schizophrenia and profound dementia associated with the very sociopathology that the Fench certainly recognize in us--in fact, the whole world recognizes it at this point, because we have finally produced our very own Nazi PArty (the Republikanische--the Republicans).
Yeah, "OLD EUROPE" has the blood of Colonialism and the very FIRST nazism on its hands, but anybody who has bothered to READ thirty damn years of history (Frank Snepp, Gore Vidal, Bertram Gross, Ward Churchill, Henry A. Wallace, Angela Davis, etc., etc.) knows that the inheritance (technological, cultural, even geneological) of the Nazi party was handed down directly from bombed out Berlin to Washington DC by way of the OSS which later became the CIA and FBI (Old Dulles, and Old Hoover).
Given all that, why the hell would I get worked up about Heidegger's bullshit before getting upset about the bullshit past and future, of those FIU 'professors' I used to call my colleagues. And that's not moral outrage I'm expressing. Black men who are into 'moral' outrage (like that friendly fascist, Bill Cosby, for instance) are the ones who end up as Colin Powell. Give me James Brown abd Dexter Gordon any day.
By the way, Dexter, living in France in the sixties, said to a French journalist, "America is so very sick that I fear she shall never wake up to her own brutality. Particularly with so many qestionable fellows whispering lies to her about how fine and good she is. She is not. She is a witch, my good man. And anyone who wishes to lose their soul, is welcome to her."
Dex's words are not at all undone by his eventual move back to the US. Typically, Black artists moved to France, lived there several years to recuperate, to build self determination, to make some actual money for the first time, to lay down some new roots, gain a wider, international audience, and then came back to the US for the first time with real safety and power. They usually kept right on being vocal about American fascism, too (like Dizzy Gillespie was late in his life, which is actually what ended the friendship between him and Bill Cosby. Cos' wasn't gonna stand still for niggers insulting his beloved Fatherland).
What Dex had to say about American fascism was nothing compared to what Abbie Lincoln (when she was living in France) said about Americans, and of course, Richard Wright (in France), Bud Powell (in France), Chester Himes (while in France and in Germany), Cecil Brown (while in Germany! Dig the big ass clue to some deeper truths involved in THAT irony, huh?), Buddy Bolden (while in France), and even Louis Armstrong (while visiting England--see, the truth about how vocal negroes like ME have always been about American fascism has been censored from the public record. What Americans get to hear from Pops is not his 'London Denunciations' of Hitlerian American government crimes against jazz musicians, but his smarmy, bathetic rendition of "What a Wonderful World"---ohhhhh, yeeeeeeahhhhhhhh.....), and the list goes on and on.
So you see, my original testiness with you over Heidegger was not a white liberal cop-out since I ain't a white liberal, nor could I ever be--America would never let me be. Just because Colin has deluded himself into thinking he's white does not mean his butt is not still Black. No, my testiness was in a context, historical and cultural. To talk about anything related to me outside of that contextr would be insane, brain dead, a-historical and--well, a university discussion seminar.....Well, you know what I mean.
-Rayfield
Sept 24, 2003 - Tony Rionda wrote:
I'm not morally indignant over H. The question is to what degree his philosophy justifies Nazism. One of his students, for example, points out that Heidegger's early philosophy extolled commitment without specifying commitment to what. Hence, he claims to not have been at all surprised at his Nazi involvement. I believe he was Nazi till the end. If that is the case, then how can he offer such a radical critique of modernity and have been so totally untouched by it himself, personally? Could anyone have been that Schizoid? I don't believe so. When I deal with the US I do see the Nazi streak in it. However, I consider it to be quite overt and fairly limited (but am open to changing my mind). What I fear with Europe and H is that there is a much more insidious form of Nazism.. One that is never acknowledged as such, and that passes itself of as something new and different. Hence, ensnares even those who claim to be sophisticated intellectuals. As Angelou has pointed out, Europe was very accepting of Baldwin and Wright, but who wouldn't be accepting of blacks if they were all like that? If Europe couldn't even handle living with a bunch of Jews what would they have done with the descendants of slaves?
Now what European intellectual hasn't put down the US? Freud said the US was big, but a big mistake. Einstein complained about his mistake of having come here because of the "freedom thing." I believe that Europe doesn't like us because we are not all white. And, that much of what many here think is left wing criticism from Europe is actually right wing in disguise. I didn't think anyone saw it that way, but recently I saw Benard Henri Levy (had never heard of him before) on Charlie Rose saying that the French anti-American feeling comes from the right and not the left as many Americans believe. I would say that is true for other European states.
Last, I don't believe you will ever get rid of racism or Fascism. The best we can do is get it out in the open and try to keep it from getting out of hand, like we do with disease.
Having said that, I am not sure of the degree problem. I mean, we could be running a fever these days and must try to bring it down to a more tolerable level. But there is a difference in procedure if you accept the containment theory than if you go with the all or nothing view.
--Tony
Sept 24, 2003, Ray Waller wrote:
Tone-
Are you going to bother to define, even for yourself, exactly what the hell you mean by "Heidegger's (early) philosophy"? You were a philosophy major! Your professors taught you better than that. You are talking about philosophical discourse in the chunk-handed way that students do--the ubiquitous and naive assigning of possessive locutions to authors and thinkers as if those people own their writings and their thoughts. Also, you are stubbornly repeating the same fallacy (affirming the consequent) over and over again, as if it were an irresistable compulsion rather than an actual analysis.
WHICH of H' s ideas about commitment SPECIFICALLY are you referring to? To be precise, WHICH of the five-or-so specific theories I mentioned in my e-mail message to you last month are you (or was H's student) referring to when you say 'commitment'? What exactly do you MEAN by 'commitment" it sounds almost as if you are making assumptions about the concept in an almost Anselmian sense. Or Aquinas, against the radical delimitationism of Descartes.
Which reminds me, it never really did make much sense for any of us to go about even using the term 'modernity' or 'modernism' with such confidence, because the modern impulse really began in the 1200's, if not earlier--this is exactly the original impetus behind Post Modernism, right? Frederick Jamison, in discussing architecture makes the point that through architecture we can recognize the falsety of epochs, and the CONTINUITY of philosophical ideas (remember what I was saying about continuity vs, particularism in my last e-mail?) In short, the very same dispute between Andre Breton (modern) and Richard Wagner (Classicist) was always already going on between Aquinas (Classicist) and Descartes (POST-modernist). Are you a closet Scholastic?
Remember how in undergrad Shakespear class the professors made a big deal out of the 'mystery' of the rage against the storm scene in "KingLear"? A bizzarely modernist scene which somehow pops up in the middle of an Elizabethan auhtor's works? How? Why? Shakespeare, they taught us, was in no other way modernist, yet this scene presages modernity (rejection of Nature, God, predestination, and the humanist urge against fate. blah blah). Of course, as we got older, and as we became grad students we came to recognize that this is a typical flattening of the continuity of history and culture.
Hell, what were the Hellenic Greeks, but moderns? What was Athens, if not the first modernist city in the West? What was Shakespear if not an inheritor of Hellenic tradition?
Seeing him this way, it becomes possible to suddenly see other so-called 'anomolies' in his othersie Elizabethan ouvre: the radical disunity of Hamlet's psyche (post modernist, which I think even Stanley Fish has suggested); the odd irruptions of modernist amoralism in "Richard II"; the startling, disturbing, even bestial anarchism and wholly ANTI-elizabethan impulse behind "Titus Andronicus" (post-modernism), a play which in some ways anticipates Fassbinder!
Don't be so intellectually lazy, Tony. Hasn't Perri taken you to task time and time again for just that? Maybe you were a little hasty in giving away so many of your books a few years back--BOOKS, man. That is our meat and matter as intellectuals, not bank accounts, cigars, and TIAA CREF portfolios.
Clearly we would have to sit down and have a face-to-face talk about these subjects. I find that your last message is full of half-baked critiques, and outright platitudes, and considering the dire nature of our culture right now, I think I fear for YOU as much as I fear for ME in reading how far your analysis falls short of material rigor. Just one point though: I've spent time in France, and it is straight up baboon reasoning to say that anti-Americanism comes from the French Right and that's that.
For God's sake, the French left is stocked with people whose parents were brutalized by American CIA agents during the cold war (see the books of Le Carre, and even some of Graham Green's writing, both of whom fictionalize the more or less open history of American brutality toward Europe beginning with the Marshall Plan)...geez, it's like saying there's a sun in the sky to say that Europeans are not simply peeved with America, but FRIGHTENED of America, and it would be demented (and a typical example of the 20th century's use of anti-black and latin racism to hide from political and cultural truths that have nothing to do with race) to say that Europeans are afraid of America because it has negroes in it.
That is so unbelievably dumb, which describes Charlie Rose and the awkward intellectual fumbling that goes on between he and his 'guests' to a tee.
For instance, nearly 3 million Europeans (Germans, Italians, French, and Spaniards) engaged in some of the most massive street protests in European history between 1988 and 1998 over the sheer terror they felt about nuclear waste, nuclear fallout, and nuclear war! See Helen Caldicott's latest book about details on this massive movement, which itself fed into the younger European anti-globalist movement currently driving the success of European Green Party politics.
I could go on. But I won't. This is an example of exactly what I wrote to you: to understand anything, it is necessary to examine history, not TV news drivel. The principle way in which we do that, as intellectuals, is through BOOKS. I cited several books and authors in my last message, and I cited some more just now. What is wrong with discourse in America right now, and what in fact makes it fascist is the disappearance of history, and of historians and BOOKS.
Also, what it the world are you talking about, Richard Wright and James Baldwin? I cited some fifteen various Black artists in one of my recent messages. I am not sure what you could possibly mean by saying 'if they were all like that'. Gee, I always thought we WERE 'all like that,' though we don't all live up to it--isn't that what anyone's culture ultimately is about? Identity? Who wouldn't love white people if they were "all like" Noam Chomsky and Emma Goldman? But of course, it's terribly dumb and bigoted to subject a whole race of people to some arbitrary idea like that. White people have no obligation to all be like those two people, nor can we banish those whites who fail to rise to the level of those two people to the margins of dispised whiteness. Most of the white people I know and love DON'T rise to that level, and they are all the more human, interesting, and challenging as human beings precisely because they don't.
Well, be that as it may, I have to say I think that it is an insult to the French to imply that they are so shallow and stupid as to be a culture whose complexity of disaffection could be boiled down to an action news report caption saying that they are really right wingers in disguise. It must be the cheese? Finally, American fascism will indeed be 'out in the open' soon enough. When a cancer grows large enough, it always ends up bursting through the skin. See Albert Speer's "inside the third Reich." He was a Nazi, but he wrote this crucial book which offers invaluable insight into the process by which Nazism grows, and grows, and then finally bursts through the skin.
-Rayfield
Sept 24, 2003, Ray Waller wrote:
PS, Tone-
By the way, you ought to know that James Baldwin is a poor example to use of negrows who went to Europe and was a hit. He was a miserable failure in Europe, and the Europeans were quite disgusted with his hardned, little frog-faced ass. He nearly starved to death in Paris, and wandered around the Isle St Louis behind Wright begging for money.
He was ill tempered, self-loathing, and spiteful while there, and Wright tried to distance himself from him while the Parisians were flatly appalled by his wretchedness. He had similar experiences while living in Switzerland or some such godawful place, in a Chateau above a little Swiss Village where they treated him like he was the Frankenstein monster; and he acted the part, in fact. His wretchedness in Switzerland was a continuation of the horrific rage, despair and self loathing he had undergone while living in upstate New York which had driven him, in his words, to come perilously close to hurling a pitcher of beer at the face of a white female barmaid. It was at that point that he felt he needed to get out of America and move to Europe.
Hey, all this is in his writing, and in the various better biographies of Baldwin. You know, I don't insult you by mentioning the same two Cuban writers that all ignorant Americans know (of)--Zoey what's her face, and Jose Marti. I've actually read Cuban authors (in addition to the deep love African Americans feel for Jose Marti, we also look up to Nicolas Guillen, and I personally like the young Cuban-American playwright, Nilo Cruz, and...well, lots of others).
My point is that you should go off somewhere and read some books if all you can do is repeat the tired old stuff of academic white dudes who couldn't pull off a Socratic session if you spotted them six triremes and a hundred and twenty oarsmen to row them. Like for instance, the only two African American writers you (seem) to know are Wright and Baldwin (so that tired assRalph Ellison can't be far behind) and you think I'm not going to take a shot at you?
My mentors would put you on your ass so fast your media noche would spin, my brother. Okay, so what's my REAL point? Am I just being macho, or just being vindictive? Well, it's like this: my prime mentor, Kofi Natambu taught me that it's wrong to kick the cane out from under a blind or crippled man. It's in bad tatse, too. But if you catch a cat who's walking around PRETENDING to be blind or crippled, when you KNOW he can read and stand on his own two feet, you kick him.
Talk to you soon, Brother.
Ray
Sept 28, 2003, Tony Rionda wrote:
Baldwin was not accepted by Europeans because he was gay, he was open about it, and he partied. He was not a "good European". like Wright. In fact, Baldwin is the only black author I have read to any extent. The incident you descriibe is in Native Son, and is also described by Baldwin himself in a documentary about him. He threw a glass of water at a waitress (and smashed a mirror) because she wouldn't serve him, because of segregation. That is when he went to Europe, because he realized he would kill someone if he didn't.
Baldwin has helped me to better understand myself, something few authors have ever done for me, and even fewer people. I would have been dissapointed if he was loved in Europe. He was a parriah. But I will always love him, like a brother.
Marti is a waste of time. I read him because I had to, but did not enjoy his writings much. I think he is only of historical interest.
The only Cuban author I have read and ejoyed is Jose Lezama Lima. I think, am not sure, that he is a darling of the revolution. In any case, in only a few pages, "La_Expression Americana, he does some amazing things! I have rarely felt the sense of liberation that I feel when I read that essay. I fear, however, that it might not translate well. There is still much for me to learn about myself, personally and intellectually, from him. Even, if I never get to adopt his philosophy.
My idea of black intellectuals is West and Gates. The latter is much more to my taste. I have read about four of his essays. The Kitchen was really a pleasure to read and I am grateful for his brief, but enlightening exposition of European intellectual's lack of insight into the new world and its inhabitants.
You are the only Kneegrow, intellectual or not, that I have had any extensive contact with, in Miami or anywhere else. I still have to catch up on reading your Heidegger and "black intellectual" messages, as well as, Perri's, "she can hear me" message. However, I am limited as to what I can read because my spare time is devoted to reading linguistics. The other stuff I read by either working them into my courses (Native Son, Hamlet, King Richard III, among others) or just for curiosity, depending on the time constraint.
However, I do not belong to that European intellectual tradition that you do. If I were to read an Existentialist, other than Nietzsche, which I don't read as an Existentialist, I would pursue Jaspers. Once in a while, I read his intro to Existentialism. However, I sometimes get into reading Heidegger, if only for a few days, usually when I am on vacation at Christmas. I must confess that I get nothing out of reading either Heidegger or Jaspers, i.e, nothing that furthers my understanding of myself or the world around me. Yet, for some reason, I sometimes feel like giving them a new chance. Unlike, say Kierkegaard, whom I will probably never read again. In fact, it's possible that I will never read Nietzsche agaiin, come to think of it.
It's hard to get a Cuban to shut up . . .
--Tony
Sept 28, 2003 - Ray Waller wrote:
Tony;
Well, at least now you're getting specific. I'm not sure that one ought to say a poet is 'only' of historical interest--that's a pretty high mark to hit indeed! See the collection of Central American poets from the 80's, Volcan: Poems from Central America. The editors were Murgia, Alejandro & Paschke, Barbara. It was published by City Lights Books 1983. Remember that Pablo Neruda was often referred to as 'of historical (or poliical) significance only, and boy, what a strange thing to say, as if a fistful of gold is somehow inherently inferior to a fistful of diamonds. Both are handy in a recession.
Besides, both Marti and Neruda were heartbreakingly beautiful lyric poets when they wanted to be. This is a talent you don't get much in 19th and 20th century revolutionary poets, and these two were just plain good poets.
Don't you think it would be good to read a little more widely in Black literature? If you had, maybe you wouldn't make that same, tired old white liberal claim: that Black, working class (post Aesthetic, in fact, is what we are referring to here) Black intellectualism is 'European'. Like dullard white hipsters who kept thinking that Rock music is the 'white' opposite of Jazz, which is the 'black' music. Too many foolish assumptions to even go into there, so let's just say that kind of thinking is foolish (both American history AND the history of the Black and the Irish are way more complex than that--if you have to ask 'why Irish' by the way, you'll never know).
Classical music, for instance. So called 'European' concert music is actually national peasant musics adapted by people like Smetna (Germany). Rimsky-Korsakov (Russia), Rossinni (Italy), and Ravel (Spain). The "European" tone poem is rooted in the Cossack Muzurka. So the first thing we have to do is let go of that lame old misconception about what EUROPE is (see Reginald Martin's "New Black Aesthetic"), and then we'll be able to clearly see Black thought, Black aesthetics, and Black arts in a clear light free of cultural arrogance.
So don't 'shut up,' keep talking. And try to pull your head out of your linguistics every now and then in order to keep up with what's happening in the culture around you. REMEMBER HEIDEGGER.
-Ray
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Back to School
I think it's time to get Olde School up in here.
Because I am insulted every time I hear someone in the media or in the streets, or even in the halls of the various universities I've taught at uttering the words, "the failure of liberalism" or "the failure of the public education system." The moronic argument goes something like this: that LBJ's liberal, 'Great Society' programs such as the "War On Poverty", the urban education initiative, and Affirmative Action threw money at social problems such as poverty, racism, sexism, and illiteracy, rather than...well, rather than enforcing 'values' or something like that, some vaguely Reaganesque crap, and so the programs 'failed'. Public education 'failed.' The War On Poverty 'failed.'
Oh, Really.
Then where did I come from? How do these shallow, reactionary blowhearts account for a tall, large, Black male from a Detroit ghetto (me) who received health care in his childhood so that he didn't die from the TB, pneumonia, and malnutrition that one in seven of the people in his family had tended to die of just one generation earlier, just ten years before the election of John F. Kennedy? How account for the fact that this ghetto child learned history, biology, sociology, chemistry, Shakespeare, music, civics, geometry, macro-economics, human reproduction, simultaneous offense and defense in football, cinematic analysis, home economics, psychology, etc., all before college?
In the years that I taught at the university level, many of my students, Black, white, and other, came to college straight out of high school so bone stupid that they lacked essential knowledge and basic literacy skills that I'd acquired by the time I'd finished jr. high school.
Where did I, and at least 40 other black men and women my age whom I've met over the years who also went through the public education of the LBJ/Nixon years, get a merit scholarship to a state university and then win a fellowship to go to an Ivy League school (Cornell University)? How did I teach at two private schools (University of Miami and Barry University), and why, if public education and liberal democracy failed, have I become a published writer and journalist?
Because...ready for this? The public education system did not fail. Believe it or not, throwing money at social problems, or at just about any damn thing else you can name, does a hell of a lot to end suffering and to enhance the success and well being of whatever or whoever you hit with the money you threw. You better believe that all the money Henry Ford tossed at his sons contributed mightily to their health, education, and welfare. Wealth equals well being. It facilitates power, self actualization, and material development. The rich are not miserable at all. I know. I went to school with them. What the rich are is well fed, clean, healthy, and well dressed. And they sure as hell don't die of gum disease that poverty has allowed to develop into mouth cancer.
Take the Marshall Plan, for example. $11,820,700,000, and $1,505,100,000 in loans, were spent over a four year period in Europe following the war to rebuild the infrastructure, institutions, environment, and political apparatuses that had been destroyed by WWII. This almost obscenely exorbitant tossing of money at a very real problem (urban destruction, mass starvation, social collapse, and the looming threat of political disintegration in the major European cities) worked quite well at solving the problem.
Marshall Plan Expenditures between April 3, 1948 and June 30, 1952, according to the Statistics & Reports Division of the Agency for International Development, formed a crucial component of the Truman Doctrine, which was President Truman's attempt to shore up Europe against the 'threat' of Chinese (and later Russian) Communism. A starving, brutalized, ill educated, tragically crippled European population would never make good allies in the continuing war against Marxism that Truman visualized and which later in fact became the 'Cold War'. So, you see, the Marshall Plan, incredibly successful in it's execution and application, was not undertaken out of benevolence, but out of political expediency. Perhaps that is why a similar plan has not been conceived to do for Cleveland, Philly, Detroit, and Montgomery what had been done and worked so well for Paris, Rome, and London.
One example within the United States of this sort of buying off of social unrest that was comparable to Truman's motivation to appease a European population in danger of slipping into intractable rebellion against capitalism, was in fact the War On Poverty itself, undertaken largely in response to the threat of endless race riots, feminist agitation, civil rights agitation, urban rebellions, Black nationalist inspired mass disobedience, and even radical Marxist and Maoist consciousness which increased exponentially among the poor and working class Blacks, Latinos and women of the 1960's and 1970's. The model for this of course had been the far more sweeping, and far more long lasting "New Deal" policies of the Roosevelt administration, attempting to buy off the American working class and to appease the forces agitating throughout the 1930's for open class war against America, Inc.
The War On Poverty, though far less expansive in scope, far less unitary, and far less ambitious in expenditures than either the New Deal or the Marshall Plan, nevertheless led to the spending of billions of dollars (or more accurately the redistribution of those billions) over the period of a few years of actual implementation and two decades of the programs' effects on people's lives. The genius and the ultimate human effectiveness of the Johnson Plan was not so much in its gross expenditure, but in Johnson's far more transformative restructuring of federal government and of social institutions themselves, all of which had a powerful impact on the individual lives of the poor at an immediate, individual level and in long term implication.
Johnson brought the poverty rate from 22 percent to 13 percent - largely through the modification or creation and entrenchment of state bureaucracies such as AFDC (Aid to Families of Dependent Children), whose payments to dependent families such as my own, he drove up to $577 for a family of four (in 1980 dollars). Infant mortality among the impoverished had remained constant from 1950 to 1965, and fell by one-third after 1965 due to Johnson having expanded federal programs to deliver medical and nutritional support to the poor. Medicaid and Medicare altered the fact that 20 percent of the poor had never seen a doctor or dentist, and had never been exposed to the FDA minimum daily nutritional requirements model. When Johnson left office the number had gone from 20 percent to only 8 percent. Poor families consigned to having to live in housing of the rural areas and of the inner cities with no indoor plumbing, no heat, no insulation, and no ventilation, went from 20 percent in 1960 to only 11 percent by 1970.
In 1961, at the end of Eisenhower's presidency, there were 45 so-called "social programs". The number rose to 435 by 1969. Federal expenditure on such programs which delivered meals to school children, clothing and medicine and housing to the poor, and state institutionalization of health, education, and welfare, went from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $25.6 billion by 1968.
What the poor got a taste of you see, a taste only mind you, was the reality I just explained to you regarding the rich: the rich are well fed, clean, healthy, and well dressed. And they sure as hell don't die of gum disease that poverty has allowed to develop into mouth cancer. Did programs which extended these privileges of health, education and welfare 'fail'??
No. Want to know what failed? The United States did, gentle reader. The democratic party, and the spineless university faculties who rolled over for Reaganomics, and the corrupt local politicians who abandoned their urban constituencies, and the gutless women and Blacks who opted for middle class comfort rather than continued social protest did. The corrupt union leadership did. Jimmy Carter did. America Inc. did.
Crucial components of Johnson's War On Poverty were desegregation, a restructuring of the educational system the Voting Rights Act, Affirmative Action, and Fair Housing legislation. The War On Poverty was a tripod: one leg was food, health care, and housing. The second leg was affirmative action to rectify a hundred years of structural economic impoverishment. The third leg was education. Due to the betrayal of the education component of the plan, the short term benefits (to me, for example) did not translate into long term social transformation.
The ruling class overturned democratic liberalism and public education because it was successful, because the G.I. Bill allowed hundreds of thousands of 1st and 2nd generation white ethnics (this means you, you Italians, Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, etc.) who'd been locked out of the mainstream of the institutions and the economy to gain access to education following WWII.
The ruling class (The Trilateral Commission, the pentagon, the corporate sponsors of McEducation ('would you like fries with that business degree?') and the co-opted senators who serve them overturned democratic liberalism because Blacks and women, on the treads of the feminist and civil rights movements were allowed into state universities (into law schools, medical schools, and political science programs, not just agriculture, nursing, and education) in massive numbers from the 60's on, reversing one hundred years of social control by a monied elite, and because affirmative action, which was not a system of preferences as LBJ conceived it but rather a redistribution of social and economic opportunity in such a way as to engineer equality for women and so-called 'minorities', changed the reality of a White, male 12 percent within the population controlling 85 percent of the country's social, intellectual, and economic capital.
Though it was mostly White women who benefited economically as a group from affirmative action, both women and Blacks undeniably benefited socially and intellectually in what Howard Zinn has called the greatest reversal of social capital and the most effective undercutting of social hierarchy and or political elitism in the history of the west. Of course, where social and intellectual equality exist, it cannot be long before economic equality will be achieved as well anyway.
Which is why the Reagan administration began an era (continued throughout the hideous Bush years, with a slight break under Clinton, then roaring right back into gear under President Doofuss Jr.) of relentless, remorseless attacks on unions, on funding for federal enforcement of civil and constitutional rights, on public education, public health, public access, public power, public assembly, and public media.
So yeah. Please don't say that public education 'failed', not around me, as if I were a ghost or invisible, as if my very life had not been spared by it and as if these thoughts inside my head were not actually happening(thoughts which I am able to formulate, organize, and express because I was given the gift of literacy by scores of wonderful, white ethnic public school teachers who swarmed into the country's ghettos in the 60's and 70's to teach in the public schools, allowing me to be able to push a verb effectively against a noun). It was good enough for the monied elite who attended Harvard for a hundred years, so why, pray tell, would it not be just as useful, just as beneficial, and just as empowering for the grandson of a Black, Alabama dirt farmer (my grandfather, Charner Dukes, Jr.) to be allowed to stroll amidst the ivy?
Public education 'failed'?? The War On Poverty worked just fine for me, thanks. I recall the steel jawed bite of that beast easing off me and my family considerably under LBJ.
Dig: the infant mortality rates, death rates from child malnutrition, homeless rates, and illiteracy rates among Black Americans were significantly reduced during the period of 1960-1977. The massive and needless bureaucracy that came along with the incredibly empowering social and educational programs of the 60's did a lot to retard that forward progress, but the progress was nevertheless real. That progress was arrested only by the advent of the brutally backward economics of Reagan (may he rest in pieces). But don't tell me that something that saved me from poverty, illness, illiteracy and death 'failed'.
I'm insulted by the ignorance and the unction of such a claim. This is a new Dark Age in which Americans assess reality not on the basis of historical and material analysis or even by evaluating opposing arguments, but by the consumption of visual imagery, and the regurgitation of jingoistic bytes.
Though I was originally inspired to create a web log ('blog') by my friend and partner in ethnic trangression, Regina Rodriguez, I think I will go on writing this thing simply to contribute to what I hope will be the public record of this Dark Age once the last Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Powell has finally dropped dead and we get our society back.
Olde School.
Just another internet blog that only the Germans will read very closely? (hello, Berlin!) What is "Olde School"? It's a deliberate attempt at memory. It's remembering John Lenon, Arlo Guthrie and his daddy Woody, Paul Robeson, Joe Hill, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Aunt Emma Goldman, James Brown, Robert Kennedy in the last year of his life, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Public Enemy, John Belushi, Kofi Natambu, Buckminster Fuller, Maslow, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Stimsonian democracy, Amiri Baraka, Orson Welles, Stella Adler, Jim Starlin (whodat??) Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Joe Louis, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra demanding that Sammy Davis Jr. be allowed to walk into the front door of the Sands alongside them, Pam Grier in "Coffy", The Pentagon Papers, Xam Cartier, Marvin Gaye, Helen Caldicott, the real Martin King (the one who considered renouncing civil disobedience just before he was shot in the neck) and oh, yes...Heisenberg and his incompleteness theorem.
Step off, DMX (mediocre). Step off, Jay-z (no content). Step off, Colin Powell and Condi Rice (Mr. Step and Ms. Fetchit). Step off, Bill Cosby (Uncle Tom). Step off, Laura Bush (Texas hick and neo-con moll). Olde School is in the house. Someday they'll dust off the radioactive debris and uncover this blog and see that somebody was thinking in the dark days of the 'war-shington' oil barony just prior to the advent of the anti-Christ and the tribulation (the anti-Christ being of course Dick Cheney, and the tribulation being all those nasty Soylent Green burgers they will be forcing us to eat once genetic engineering has destroyed the nutritional value of all our natural food sources). Our descendants will dig beneath that radioactive rubble and find blogs that prove that the 'silent majority was not so silent. They will find our words.
Or maybe not.
Waller is a professor, writer, and journalist. He writes for The "Michigan Citizen", a weekly newspaper in Detroit found at www.michigancitizen.com and is a columnist for "Corporate Mofo", and online journal found at www.corporatemofo.com. More of his journalism can be found in the archives of the Miami online bilingual journal of political and cultural affairs, "Progreso Weekly", found at www.progresoweekly.com. He is a regular guest on the Miami radio talk show, "Shock to the System" on WAXY AM 790. WAXY can be found at www.waxy.com
Because I am insulted every time I hear someone in the media or in the streets, or even in the halls of the various universities I've taught at uttering the words, "the failure of liberalism" or "the failure of the public education system." The moronic argument goes something like this: that LBJ's liberal, 'Great Society' programs such as the "War On Poverty", the urban education initiative, and Affirmative Action threw money at social problems such as poverty, racism, sexism, and illiteracy, rather than...well, rather than enforcing 'values' or something like that, some vaguely Reaganesque crap, and so the programs 'failed'. Public education 'failed.' The War On Poverty 'failed.'
Oh, Really.
Then where did I come from? How do these shallow, reactionary blowhearts account for a tall, large, Black male from a Detroit ghetto (me) who received health care in his childhood so that he didn't die from the TB, pneumonia, and malnutrition that one in seven of the people in his family had tended to die of just one generation earlier, just ten years before the election of John F. Kennedy? How account for the fact that this ghetto child learned history, biology, sociology, chemistry, Shakespeare, music, civics, geometry, macro-economics, human reproduction, simultaneous offense and defense in football, cinematic analysis, home economics, psychology, etc., all before college?
In the years that I taught at the university level, many of my students, Black, white, and other, came to college straight out of high school so bone stupid that they lacked essential knowledge and basic literacy skills that I'd acquired by the time I'd finished jr. high school.
Where did I, and at least 40 other black men and women my age whom I've met over the years who also went through the public education of the LBJ/Nixon years, get a merit scholarship to a state university and then win a fellowship to go to an Ivy League school (Cornell University)? How did I teach at two private schools (University of Miami and Barry University), and why, if public education and liberal democracy failed, have I become a published writer and journalist?
Because...ready for this? The public education system did not fail. Believe it or not, throwing money at social problems, or at just about any damn thing else you can name, does a hell of a lot to end suffering and to enhance the success and well being of whatever or whoever you hit with the money you threw. You better believe that all the money Henry Ford tossed at his sons contributed mightily to their health, education, and welfare. Wealth equals well being. It facilitates power, self actualization, and material development. The rich are not miserable at all. I know. I went to school with them. What the rich are is well fed, clean, healthy, and well dressed. And they sure as hell don't die of gum disease that poverty has allowed to develop into mouth cancer.
Take the Marshall Plan, for example. $11,820,700,000, and $1,505,100,000 in loans, were spent over a four year period in Europe following the war to rebuild the infrastructure, institutions, environment, and political apparatuses that had been destroyed by WWII. This almost obscenely exorbitant tossing of money at a very real problem (urban destruction, mass starvation, social collapse, and the looming threat of political disintegration in the major European cities) worked quite well at solving the problem.
Marshall Plan Expenditures between April 3, 1948 and June 30, 1952, according to the Statistics & Reports Division of the Agency for International Development, formed a crucial component of the Truman Doctrine, which was President Truman's attempt to shore up Europe against the 'threat' of Chinese (and later Russian) Communism. A starving, brutalized, ill educated, tragically crippled European population would never make good allies in the continuing war against Marxism that Truman visualized and which later in fact became the 'Cold War'. So, you see, the Marshall Plan, incredibly successful in it's execution and application, was not undertaken out of benevolence, but out of political expediency. Perhaps that is why a similar plan has not been conceived to do for Cleveland, Philly, Detroit, and Montgomery what had been done and worked so well for Paris, Rome, and London.
One example within the United States of this sort of buying off of social unrest that was comparable to Truman's motivation to appease a European population in danger of slipping into intractable rebellion against capitalism, was in fact the War On Poverty itself, undertaken largely in response to the threat of endless race riots, feminist agitation, civil rights agitation, urban rebellions, Black nationalist inspired mass disobedience, and even radical Marxist and Maoist consciousness which increased exponentially among the poor and working class Blacks, Latinos and women of the 1960's and 1970's. The model for this of course had been the far more sweeping, and far more long lasting "New Deal" policies of the Roosevelt administration, attempting to buy off the American working class and to appease the forces agitating throughout the 1930's for open class war against America, Inc.
The War On Poverty, though far less expansive in scope, far less unitary, and far less ambitious in expenditures than either the New Deal or the Marshall Plan, nevertheless led to the spending of billions of dollars (or more accurately the redistribution of those billions) over the period of a few years of actual implementation and two decades of the programs' effects on people's lives. The genius and the ultimate human effectiveness of the Johnson Plan was not so much in its gross expenditure, but in Johnson's far more transformative restructuring of federal government and of social institutions themselves, all of which had a powerful impact on the individual lives of the poor at an immediate, individual level and in long term implication.
Johnson brought the poverty rate from 22 percent to 13 percent - largely through the modification or creation and entrenchment of state bureaucracies such as AFDC (Aid to Families of Dependent Children), whose payments to dependent families such as my own, he drove up to $577 for a family of four (in 1980 dollars). Infant mortality among the impoverished had remained constant from 1950 to 1965, and fell by one-third after 1965 due to Johnson having expanded federal programs to deliver medical and nutritional support to the poor. Medicaid and Medicare altered the fact that 20 percent of the poor had never seen a doctor or dentist, and had never been exposed to the FDA minimum daily nutritional requirements model. When Johnson left office the number had gone from 20 percent to only 8 percent. Poor families consigned to having to live in housing of the rural areas and of the inner cities with no indoor plumbing, no heat, no insulation, and no ventilation, went from 20 percent in 1960 to only 11 percent by 1970.
In 1961, at the end of Eisenhower's presidency, there were 45 so-called "social programs". The number rose to 435 by 1969. Federal expenditure on such programs which delivered meals to school children, clothing and medicine and housing to the poor, and state institutionalization of health, education, and welfare, went from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $25.6 billion by 1968.
What the poor got a taste of you see, a taste only mind you, was the reality I just explained to you regarding the rich: the rich are well fed, clean, healthy, and well dressed. And they sure as hell don't die of gum disease that poverty has allowed to develop into mouth cancer. Did programs which extended these privileges of health, education and welfare 'fail'??
No. Want to know what failed? The United States did, gentle reader. The democratic party, and the spineless university faculties who rolled over for Reaganomics, and the corrupt local politicians who abandoned their urban constituencies, and the gutless women and Blacks who opted for middle class comfort rather than continued social protest did. The corrupt union leadership did. Jimmy Carter did. America Inc. did.
Crucial components of Johnson's War On Poverty were desegregation, a restructuring of the educational system the Voting Rights Act, Affirmative Action, and Fair Housing legislation. The War On Poverty was a tripod: one leg was food, health care, and housing. The second leg was affirmative action to rectify a hundred years of structural economic impoverishment. The third leg was education. Due to the betrayal of the education component of the plan, the short term benefits (to me, for example) did not translate into long term social transformation.
The ruling class overturned democratic liberalism and public education because it was successful, because the G.I. Bill allowed hundreds of thousands of 1st and 2nd generation white ethnics (this means you, you Italians, Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, etc.) who'd been locked out of the mainstream of the institutions and the economy to gain access to education following WWII.
The ruling class (The Trilateral Commission, the pentagon, the corporate sponsors of McEducation ('would you like fries with that business degree?') and the co-opted senators who serve them overturned democratic liberalism because Blacks and women, on the treads of the feminist and civil rights movements were allowed into state universities (into law schools, medical schools, and political science programs, not just agriculture, nursing, and education) in massive numbers from the 60's on, reversing one hundred years of social control by a monied elite, and because affirmative action, which was not a system of preferences as LBJ conceived it but rather a redistribution of social and economic opportunity in such a way as to engineer equality for women and so-called 'minorities', changed the reality of a White, male 12 percent within the population controlling 85 percent of the country's social, intellectual, and economic capital.
Though it was mostly White women who benefited economically as a group from affirmative action, both women and Blacks undeniably benefited socially and intellectually in what Howard Zinn has called the greatest reversal of social capital and the most effective undercutting of social hierarchy and or political elitism in the history of the west. Of course, where social and intellectual equality exist, it cannot be long before economic equality will be achieved as well anyway.
Which is why the Reagan administration began an era (continued throughout the hideous Bush years, with a slight break under Clinton, then roaring right back into gear under President Doofuss Jr.) of relentless, remorseless attacks on unions, on funding for federal enforcement of civil and constitutional rights, on public education, public health, public access, public power, public assembly, and public media.
So yeah. Please don't say that public education 'failed', not around me, as if I were a ghost or invisible, as if my very life had not been spared by it and as if these thoughts inside my head were not actually happening(thoughts which I am able to formulate, organize, and express because I was given the gift of literacy by scores of wonderful, white ethnic public school teachers who swarmed into the country's ghettos in the 60's and 70's to teach in the public schools, allowing me to be able to push a verb effectively against a noun). It was good enough for the monied elite who attended Harvard for a hundred years, so why, pray tell, would it not be just as useful, just as beneficial, and just as empowering for the grandson of a Black, Alabama dirt farmer (my grandfather, Charner Dukes, Jr.) to be allowed to stroll amidst the ivy?
Public education 'failed'?? The War On Poverty worked just fine for me, thanks. I recall the steel jawed bite of that beast easing off me and my family considerably under LBJ.
Dig: the infant mortality rates, death rates from child malnutrition, homeless rates, and illiteracy rates among Black Americans were significantly reduced during the period of 1960-1977. The massive and needless bureaucracy that came along with the incredibly empowering social and educational programs of the 60's did a lot to retard that forward progress, but the progress was nevertheless real. That progress was arrested only by the advent of the brutally backward economics of Reagan (may he rest in pieces). But don't tell me that something that saved me from poverty, illness, illiteracy and death 'failed'.
I'm insulted by the ignorance and the unction of such a claim. This is a new Dark Age in which Americans assess reality not on the basis of historical and material analysis or even by evaluating opposing arguments, but by the consumption of visual imagery, and the regurgitation of jingoistic bytes.
Though I was originally inspired to create a web log ('blog') by my friend and partner in ethnic trangression, Regina Rodriguez, I think I will go on writing this thing simply to contribute to what I hope will be the public record of this Dark Age once the last Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Powell has finally dropped dead and we get our society back.
Olde School.
Just another internet blog that only the Germans will read very closely? (hello, Berlin!) What is "Olde School"? It's a deliberate attempt at memory. It's remembering John Lenon, Arlo Guthrie and his daddy Woody, Paul Robeson, Joe Hill, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Aunt Emma Goldman, James Brown, Robert Kennedy in the last year of his life, Cesar Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Public Enemy, John Belushi, Kofi Natambu, Buckminster Fuller, Maslow, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Stimsonian democracy, Amiri Baraka, Orson Welles, Stella Adler, Jim Starlin (whodat??) Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Joe Louis, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra demanding that Sammy Davis Jr. be allowed to walk into the front door of the Sands alongside them, Pam Grier in "Coffy", The Pentagon Papers, Xam Cartier, Marvin Gaye, Helen Caldicott, the real Martin King (the one who considered renouncing civil disobedience just before he was shot in the neck) and oh, yes...Heisenberg and his incompleteness theorem.
Step off, DMX (mediocre). Step off, Jay-z (no content). Step off, Colin Powell and Condi Rice (Mr. Step and Ms. Fetchit). Step off, Bill Cosby (Uncle Tom). Step off, Laura Bush (Texas hick and neo-con moll). Olde School is in the house. Someday they'll dust off the radioactive debris and uncover this blog and see that somebody was thinking in the dark days of the 'war-shington' oil barony just prior to the advent of the anti-Christ and the tribulation (the anti-Christ being of course Dick Cheney, and the tribulation being all those nasty Soylent Green burgers they will be forcing us to eat once genetic engineering has destroyed the nutritional value of all our natural food sources). Our descendants will dig beneath that radioactive rubble and find blogs that prove that the 'silent majority was not so silent. They will find our words.
Or maybe not.
Waller is a professor, writer, and journalist. He writes for The "Michigan Citizen", a weekly newspaper in Detroit found at www.michigancitizen.com and is a columnist for "Corporate Mofo", and online journal found at www.corporatemofo.com. More of his journalism can be found in the archives of the Miami online bilingual journal of political and cultural affairs, "Progreso Weekly", found at www.progresoweekly.com. He is a regular guest on the Miami radio talk show, "Shock to the System" on WAXY AM 790. WAXY can be found at www.waxy.com
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